The Relational Capacity of a Complex System

Charles Tetteh, MBA, MEng

Health & Safety Leader @ TATA Chemicals | Safety Trainer | HOP Practitioner | MSHA Instructor | Driving Culture…

February 18, 2026

I was recently asked a question by a colleague in the industry that reflected a widely held but deeply limiting understanding of safety management. My colleague asked what I considered the most important part of my job as a safety leader. My answer was simple: creating, nurturing, and understanding relationships.

There was a brief silence. I could tell my response surprised him. He explained that, in his view, my role in safety should focus on ensuring compliance, identifying hazards, delivering training, and building barriers to prevent people from getting hurt. I wasn’t surprised by his perspective. It reflects a widely held but deeply limiting understanding of safety management, one that has done little to meaningfully reduce serious injuries and fatalities across industries.

Pause for a moment and consider the cause of the following incident, one that many industries can relate to:

 A task that had been completed safely for years ended in a serious injury where an employee’s finger was badly lacerated. In the weeks leading up to the incident, a schedule change reduced preparation time, an equipment workaround, adopted in the name of efficiency, had become routine, a new worker was paired with someone unfamiliar with the task, and production pressure was high due to customer demand, creating a sense of urgency to complete the job.

So, the question is, what caused the incident? Was the schedule change, the normalization of the workaround, the pairing of inexperienced workers, or the final action that triggered the injury? Each explanation is plausible. Yet none, on its own, is sufficient.

The reality is, work as we now know is not a linear or simple endeavor; it is complex adaptive endeavor, shaped by multiple interacting influences. From a systems-thinking perspective, the incident did not result from a single broken control, but from the interaction of conditions that each made sense locally at the time. This is a defining feature of complex adaptive systems, where outcomes emerge from relationships and interactions rather than isolated components.

Ivan Pupulidy, PhD and Crista Vesel, MSc (2023) described this system as “made up of human agents that can process and make sense of information and have the capacity to modify their behavior based on knowledge they have and what they learn in the moment”. Unlike machines, humans in this system actively make sense of their environment and adjust accordingly. Workplace safety must therefore be understood within this context of this complexity. From this perspective, organizational performance and adverse events are shaped not by individual elements alone, but by the dynamic interactions among all the parts, processes, technology, environmental pressures, and people. In such a tightly coupled system, small changes in one area can propagate in unpredictable ways. For instance, the schedule change or a normalized workaround isn’t an isolated element; it affects every part of the process. Performance, then, becomes a function of the quality of relationships among system elements. Without nurturing and understanding those relationships, information ceases to flow. And without information, the system cannot be understood or effectively managed. The quality of our relationship from this perspective determines the quality of information we receive from this system.

Much like osmosis relies on the passive movement of water across a semipermeable membrane to maintain balance, information in our organizational complex systems must move freely across permeable boundaries driven by trust and shared understanding. When those boundaries close, often due to weakened, unhealthy relationships (mistrust), the system as described by Brené Brown in her groundbreaking book Strong Ground begins to atrophy. One of the earliest signs of this breakdown is underreporting, which ironically leads to one of the most dangerous outcomes: the organization develops a self-referential view of its own safety performance, mistaking silence for safety.

Returning to the earlier example, the question of fault ultimately misses the point. The schedule change, the workaround, and the. inexperienced pairing were not independent failures; they were signals of a system under pressure, adapting in ways that made sense to the people involved. As Deker (2014, p.134) noted, “systems are not static designs, they are dynamic processes, continually adapting to achieve goals in a changing environment”. What was missing was not another rule, barrier, or procedure, but relational capacity for the ability for information to flow freely, for concerns to be raised, assumptions to be challenged, and changes to be understood in relation to one another. The incident did not occur because people failed to follow the system; it occurred because the system failed to support people and relationships in making sense of and communicating changing conditions freely.

In a system with strong healthy relationships, the schedule adjustment would have triggered dialogue rather than silent compression of preparation time. The workaround would have surfaced as a shared concern to be understood instead of becoming normalized. The pairing of workers would have been recognized as a change requiring additional support and conversation. In this way, relationships function as the connecting tissue of the system, keeping information flowing, feedback loops open, and adaptive capacity intact.

This is the difference between managing safety as the prevention of failure and leading safety as the cultivation of system capacity grounded in relationships.

Source

Brown, B. (2025). Strong ground: The lessons of daring leadership, the tenacity of paradox, and the wisdom of the human spirit. Random House.

Dekker, S. (2014). The field guide to understanding human error (3rd ed.). CRC Press.

Pupulidy, I., & Vesel, C. (2023). Human & organization potential. Dynamic Inquiry LLC.

Charles Tetteh, MBA, MEng

Health & Safety Leader @ TATA Chemicals | Safety Trainer | HOP Practitioner | MSHA Instructor | Driving Culture Change, Training Excellence & Risk Reduction in High-Hazard Industries