THE IDEA
The web, not the list
Take a football team. Eleven players, each with individual skills. You could list every player’s speed, stamina, passing accuracy - and still know almost nothing about how the team plays. What makes a team work isn’t the players. It’s the passing patterns, the communication, the trust, the shared understanding of when to press and when to hold. The relationships between the players are the team. The players are just the nodes.
This is true of every system. A company isn’t its people, its products, and its processes - it’s the way those things connect. A neighbourhood isn’t its buildings and residents - it’s the daily interactions, the shared spaces, the informal networks of help and information. A body isn’t its organs - it’s the constant communication between them.
Interconnections are what turn a collection of parts into a system. Remove the parts and replace them with equivalent ones, and the system often carries on. Remove the interconnections, and the system collapses - even if every part is still there. This is why restructuring an organisation by moving people around often changes less than expected: the formal structure is only a fraction of the interconnections that make the place work. The informal ones - who trusts whom, who knows what, who actually talks to whom - are invisible on an org chart but hold the system together.
IN PRACTICE
What the org chart doesn’t show
A school replaces its entire teaching staff over five years through natural turnover. New teachers, same building, same curriculum. But the school feels completely different - the culture has shifted, the unwritten rules have changed, the relationship with parents has a different quality. What changed wasn’t the parts (teachers) but the interconnections (how those teachers relate to each other, to students, and to the community). The old web of relationships dissolved, and a new one grew in its place.
In a rainforest, every species is connected to dozens of others through food, shelter, pollination, decomposition, and competition. Remove one species and the effects ripple outward in ways that are hard to predict - not because that species was so important on its own, but because of everything it was connected to. Ecologists learned this the hard way: you can’t understand a forest by studying trees in isolation. You have to study the forest.
A software platform’s value often has nothing to do with the code. It’s the interconnections - the integrations with other tools, the plugins built by third parties, the community of users who answer each other’s questions. A technically superior competitor can lose to an inferior product simply because the inferior product has richer interconnections. The web of relationships IS the product.
WORKING WITH THIS
Follow the connections
When you want to understand a system, don’t start with the parts. Start with the connections. Ask: who talks to whom? What depends on what? Where does information flow, and where does it get stuck?
Map the relationships, even roughly. Draw the key actors or components as circles, then draw lines between the ones that influence each other. You’ll often discover that the most important connections aren’t the official ones. The person who holds a team together might not be the manager. The thing that keeps a community functioning might not be the institution everyone talks about.
When you want to change a system, think about which connections you’re strengthening, weakening, or creating - not just which parts you’re adding or removing. Hiring a brilliant individual into a team with broken relationships won’t fix the team. Creating a new connection between two groups that never talk might transform both of them. The leverage is usually in the connections, not the components.
THE INSIGHT
The thread, not the bead
You can swap out every part of a system and still have the same system - if the connections stay the same. You can keep every part and destroy the system entirely - by cutting the connections. The relationships are what make it a system. Everything else is just a collection.
RECOGNITION
Knowing it when you see it
You’re looking at an interconnections issue when a team of talented individuals underperforms, or when an average group produces something remarkable. When removing one person or one element changes everything, far more than their individual contribution would suggest. When a reorganisation looks good on paper but feels wrong in practice. When someone says “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” - they’re describing interconnections, whether they realise it or not.