Human Relationships in Complex Challenges—What can we design?

ARC25 SIGHTLINES | Anthology of Reflexive Contributors

Relationships that reduce people’s time spent in hospital, relationships that support finding and sustaining employment, relationships that increase cycling safety, and relationships that increase work engagement of teachers. In my research, I have observed many times that public services and social interventions that effectively address complex societal challenges involve carefully shaped human relationships. Such relational interventions are becoming ever more relevant in times of individualisation, disconnect and fragmentation in a “world that’s pulling apart” (Hertz, 2020). What can we learn from the way that these interventions have been designed? And what role do they play when addressing complex societal challenges?

In this article, I show:

• Why positive human relationships matter on an individual and on a societal level
• Why human relationships are often overlooked when developing interventions for complex challenges
• That we cannot design human relationships, but that we can design conditions that enable positive human relationships
• What we can learn from practitioners who embed such conditions in effective public services and social interventions

But let’s start with an explanation of what we mean when we say “relationship.”

What are relationships?

The theme of the 2025 Relating Systems Thinking and Design symposium is relationality in complexity, the phenomenon that our societal systems are inherently complex and that “the relations among a system’s components determine its wholeness and relevance.” Exploring relations is a core part of systems thinking processes and is also gaining popularity in the design field. But what do we mean when we use the term relation? Relations in systemic design are often represented in system maps through lines and arrows that connect nodes. A common relation is the causal relation used in, for example, causal loop diagrams. It shows the causal influence of one variable on another. For example, the variable physical exercise has a positive influence on the variable cardiac health. But there are more than just causal relations that play a role in complex systems. Birger Sevaldson (2022) shows this diversity of relations in the library of systemic relations, which can be used in systems mapping. It includes, for example, hierarchical relations, semantic relations, social relations, flows, and feedback loops.

In this article, I zoom in on the social relations—the relationships between humans. I find human relationships incredibly fascinating, because they are so difficult to grasp and at the same time so important and meaningful to being human. Human relationships are the socially constructed connections and associations between two or more people. I often feel discomfort when we reduce human relationships to a line on a system map, because in no way does a simple line represent the diverse experiences, meaning, richness, surprises, tensions, and emotions involved in human relationships in the way they are described in for example novels, music, poetry and other art forms. At the same time, I feel it is important to develop an understanding of relationships in such a way that we can work with them when designing social interventions.

Why human relationships matter

Positive human relationships matter because:

• They are protective of good health. The longitudinal Harvard Study of Human Development showed that the people who were more socially connected and experienced high-quality relationships were happiest, were physically healthiest, and lived the longest (Waldinger, 2015).
• They promote work engagement—social relations with colleagues and clients are one of the factors that contribute to what makes work meaningful and promote work engagement (Pink, 2009).
• They promote learning—if we reflect on our experiences in settings with trusted relations with others, we learn more and more deeply.
• They are required for a well-functioning democracy — Noreena Hertz outlines how a disconnect from fellow citizens and politics provides a fertile ground for exploitation by politicians at the extremes (Hertz, 2020).
• They promote collective health—from Indigenous ways of knowing, we learn that a healthy community or family with positive relationships has more capacity to care for its members (Gee et al., 2014).
• They promote community resilience in times of crisis (van Oudenhoven, 2025).
• They promote collective learning, creativity and adaptation—webs of human relationships enable groups of people to let knowledge flow and grow and adapt to changing contexts, similar to how connected flocks of birds adapt to their environment (van der Bijl-Brouwer, 2022).
• They promote collaboration when there are differences of view—complexity theory shows how trust and healthy relationships in organisations can support the dialogues that are required to work through complex issues and tensions (Stacey, 2012).

This list is non-exhaustive but shows that there are many benefits of positive human relationships on individual, collective and societal levels. These insights are not new. In Indigenous communities and Eastern philosophies, this has been common knowledge for thousands of years. But Western ways of knowing, based on traditional scientific and neoliberal worldviews, have resulted in a distraction from the importance of human relationships. Traditional science emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries, leading to reductionist and linear thinking at the expense of relational and holistic views; Jean Boulton (2024) provides a clear explanation of the influence of traditional science on our worldview in The Dao of Complexity—Making Sense and Making Waves in Turbulent Times. Neoliberalism is the political ideology that took hold in the 1980s with an emphasis on freedom of the individual and a competitive mindset that placed self-interest above community and the collective good. Noreena Hertz describes the effects of this view in her book The Lonely Century:

“Neoliberalism has made us see ourselves as competitors not collaborators, consumers not citizens, hoarders not sharers, takers not givers, hustlers not helpers, people who are not only too busy to be there for their neighbours, but don’t even know our neighbours’ names” (Hertz, 2020, p.14).

The effects of this disconnect are becoming increasingly clear. Organisations, systems, and societies that focus on individualism have contributed to fragmentation and disconnect with dire consequences for many people and communities: increasing levels of loneliness and resulting negative health issues, a rapid increase of polarisation and crumbling of democracies, declining levels of work engagement, and failing public services, to name just a few.

Designing to connect

What we often see is that when these issues are addressed by organisations, the resulting interventions are based on the same, individualistic view that caused the issue in the first place, thereby omitting the deeper underlying issue of individualisation. Let me give an example.

NExTWORK is a program that addresses youth unemployment in Denmark and was developed by Jennie Winhall and a team at the Rockwool Foundation. It is one of the cases that I describe in the book I’m writing about social interventions that connect people, and that I talked about in my keynote at RSD13 last year. Unemployment is caused by a range of issues, one of them being a lack of positive work-related social relationships. Our social networks play an important role in finding work, in building a work identity, and in engaging in work. However, interventions that are aimed at addressing unemployment tend to have a purely individualistic character. Unemployment is commonly seen as a result of individual shortcomings, including a lack of knowledge about how to apply for jobs and a lack of motivation. Interventions are therefore based on providing training for job applications and on incentives that should motivate people to apply for jobs. However, evidence shows that such programs do not have the intended impact and can even have negative consequences for the long-term unemployed (Konle-Seidl & Eichhorst, 2018). NExTWORK puts the logic that underlies such programs on its head. Instead of focusing on individual shortcomings, it uses the power of human relationships to help youth develop a work identity and find and sustain a job. Youth participate in multiple internship-like work experiences and are connected to each other in peer groups to reflect weekly on these experiences. They are connected to networks of local businesses in matching events to select the internships. Relationships play a role throughout the program in connections to their peers, in the connections to the municipality staff providing the program and in the connections to their colleagues in their work experiences. The details of the way that such relationships are enabled within the program are crucial. For example, youth are trained to play a leading role in the matching events to change the conventional power relations between applicant and employee.

This brief description does not do justice to the richness and details of the program, but what we can start to see is that human relationships play an important role in enabling people to flourish, and that the program has been carefully designed to promote those relationships. Such relational designs are becoming increasing popular in design in public and social sectors. For example, one recommended reading is the book Radical Help by Hillary Cottam (2018), which includes multiple interventions designed for the welfare space that are based on the power of positive human relationships.

NExTWORK is one of many cases that I studied of public services and social interventions that effectively address a complex societal challenge and that have a long-term positive impact on the people involved. Such interventions include programs, services and products developed for challenges as diverse as youth unemployment, road traffic safety, people with chronic health issues, and education. One recurring element in each of these interventions is that they all shape conditions for people to connect to each other. The list at the start of this blog post refers to the impact of the resulting relationships. How these interventions achieve that impact is different in each case. They often connect people based on some kind of matching mechanism, people might receive training to enable them to shape successful relationships, prompts such as cards might be designed to support conversations, environments are designed that promote a positive ambience, and people are given agency to shape their own relationships or design their own relational conditions (see, for example, of the latter approach this excellent work by Audun Formo Hay and colleagues).

What is key is that these interventions are not off-the-shelf solutions, but that they are developed through dedicated design processes and reasoning that is adjusted to the context at hand. Furthermore, they are based on a deep understanding of the experiences of people involved and often on general knowledge of social relationships from various sources, such as academic knowledge or Indigenous knowledge. The NExTWORK case again illustrates this approach (see their report for a detailed description). The program was developed over multiple years, involving various prototypes and co-design with youth and municipality staff, and is based on a deep understanding of the development of work identity.

Why designing for relationships is still rare

While cases like NExTWORK are becoming more common in the design field, they are still rare in public and social sectors and often run up against implementation challenges. One important reason that relationship-based interventions are rare is that many organisations that deal with complex societal challenges are built on the scientific and neoliberal worldviews that neglect the importance of human relationships. This affects both the type of interventions that are generated and the way we are expected to work to design those interventions. I recently wrote a chapter with Marlieke Kieboom for the book Futures in Public Management (Kieboom & van der Bijl-Brouwer, 2025). In this chapter, we argue that relational services need to be designed using a relational design approach, in which we invite different types of people into a design process and carefully shape the relationships with the people involved. But such relational approaches cannot take hold as long as designers and public managers are not aware of the influence of the dominant views in organisations which favour processes of control, measurement and strict goals, and that cannot deal with the emergent nature of a relational approach and relational interventions. To illustrate this point, Marlieke shares her experiences as a public service designer trying to apply a relational design approach to reduce overdose deaths from toxic drugs, and the challenges it raised in a government context.

Beyond relational interventions

Designing with relationships requires more than just a new type of intervention. It requires new ways of working and new paradigms—new ways of seeing problem situations, of recognising the interventions that are required, and of valuing the way in which we design and learn together in such situations. Which relationships do you enable (or disable) through the interventions you create? How would you describe the relationships with the people you design with? What do you do to shape and maintain such relationships? Which dominant views impact the way you work?

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Marlieke Kieboom for providing feedback on an earlier version of this post and to Cheryl May for the invitation to publish the post as an RSD sightline (and for the nudge). I would also like to thank Jennie Winhall and the team at the Rockwool Foundation for sharing the NExTWORK case.