Jim Ferrell is a bestselling author and thought leader whose work explores leadership, culture change, and human connection. As co-founder of the Arbinger Institute, he authored influential books like Leadership and Self-Deception, The Anatomy of Peace, and The Outward Mindset. He now leads Withiii Leadership, focusing on helping people apply relational approaches to leadership and organizational life. With a background in economics, philosophy, and law, he is known for translating complex ideas into clear, transformative models that bridge divides and bring people together.
What’s the big idea?
You and We aims to help you see work and relationships in a whole new way. It details a practical framework, rooted in philosophy, for leading and running organizations. This approach is effective in business but also offers a powerful method for stitching the human family together in the face of our many threats.
Below, Jim shares five key insights from his new book, You and We: A Relational Rethinking of Work, Life, and Leadership. Listen to the audio version—read by Jim himself—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Management of the individual is dead.
For most of modern history, we’ve treated individuals as the core unit of analysis in organizations—as if each person is a dot on a chart, and performance is about optimizing those dots. But here’s the problem with this approach: The idea of a separate individual is a myth, and because it’s a myth, the strategies that mistake it as true generate systematically poor advice.
Every individual you think you are seeing is relation in disguise. When you are seeing another person, you are the one who is doing the seeing. Since you are the one who is seeing, you are not seeing a person or world separate from yourself, but rather seeing your interaction with the world. This inherent relationality of observed reality is the most important scientific discovery of the last century.
When we observe and measure the world, we’re not observing and measuring a world separate from ourselves; we’re observing and measuring our own interaction or relation with the world and the world’s interaction with us. As the great physicist Werner Heisenberg said, “What we observe is not Nature itself, but Nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Everything we see is relation.
Coming back to the dot analogy, the real driver of performance is not in the dots on the org chart. It’s in the space or relation between them. It’s in the connectivity within and between teams and departments. Team-sport coaches know this. Listen to the winning coach after a game and you will often hear them say something like, “We had great connectivity tonight.” What the coach means is that they won not primarily because of individual talent, but because that talent moved and functioned as a fully synchronized whole. The leadership paradigm of the future is the measurement and management of relations.
2. The five levels of relation.
The most important part of any org chart is the space between the names and boxes on the chart. That’s where the action is—where collaboration either lives or dies. This space between people isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a measurable, changeable reality. Collectively, it forms what you might think of as the relational field of your organization. This relational field—the levels of connectivity across your organization—is most predictive of organizational success.
To see and measure this space, we first need a way to differentiate between levels of relation. I introduce five levels of relation:
- Division: People or teams that get in each other’s way are dividing.
- Subtraction: Those who resist or avoid others are subtracting.
- Addition: People or teams just focusing on their own work are adding.
- Multiplication: Those who are collaborating with others are multiplying.
- Compounding: People who care as much about others’ success as their own and integrate their work in deep ways to advance their collective success are compounding.
With these levels of relation in mind, you can map team and organizational connectivity levels and, applying strategic priorities, decide which relational intersections across the system need to be improved. When you can see and track these levels of relation, you can start improving them intentionally and systematically.
3. Thinking in four dimensions.
To improve the connectivity levels in your organization, let me introduce a lens that I call the Four-Dimensional Playing Field.
Every organization is, on the one hand, a collective—a thing, one unit. On the other hand, this collective is made up of many individuals. Both the organization and the individuals that comprise it have outsides (things you can see) and insides (things you can’t see but can sense or feel). On the individual side are people’s behaviors (which you can see) and their attitudes (which you can sense or feel). Regarding the collective, you can see its structures, systems, and processes, but you can only sense or feel its culture or community.
“You build your playing field in such a way as to maximize connectivity.”
These two distinctions—collective vs. individual on the one hand and outsides vs. insides on the other—produce a four-dimensional view of organizations. The two individual dimensions are individual behaviors and attitudes. The two collective dimensions are the group’s structures and culture.
Together, these four dimensions form the playing field of every organization. The realities within them are the levers you can pull to improve connectivity across a system. Elements that are dragging connectivity down can be replaced with features that provide connective lift. You build your playing field in such a way as to maximize connectivity.
4. Understanding connection.
I thought I had understood human connection. However, I had only really understood how to get myself and others to the multiplication level of relation. The highest level, compounding—both as an idea and as a reality—had been beyond me.
We assume that we are separate from others, that the world is divided between I and Other (or between Us and Them). But this is a mistake. Martin Buber shows there is no such thing as a separate-I, but only I-in-relation.
The trouble is that despite being fundamentally connected, we live much of the time as if we were divided from others. We get ourselves stuck within our own heads. We generate our own separations by encountering others through the filters of our thoughts, assumptions, judgments, and concepts, which is just another way of encountering ourselves. When we learn how we do this, we also learn how to undo it.
Getting stuck in our heads keeps us from connecting because connection happens in the space between people rather than in our minds. To connect, we have to learn how to escape the walls of our heads, drop the concepts, assumptions, and goals, and be present with others in the space between us.
5. The importance of difference.
When thinking about integration and unity, we often assume that this means agreement, giving in, complying, or becoming more similar. But this is incorrect. As an analogy, consider water. If two hydrogen atoms combine with a single oxygen atom, something completely beyond the capabilities of hydrogen or oxygen alone comes into being: water.
This is an example of the law of progress. Whether talking about matter, life, or thought, vertical development arises from a three-part process:
- First, differences need to compress together.
- Then, if those differences open themselves to each other, they can overcome their apparent divides and converge.
- Out of this convergence of differences emerges something entirely new.
For this transformation to happen, the elements need to retain their differences. Hydrogen atoms need to remain hydrogen, and oxygen atoms need to remain oxygen, for water to appear. Progress requires that we value and hold to our differences.
If we stay only with our own kind, or only with our own thoughts, we will remain exactly as we already are. Progress requires connection with difference. Compress, converge, emerge. That is the arc of vertical progress.
“Learning to connect with difference is the path of growth.”
One way to incline oneself in the direction of this growth is to always be looking for what I call “the next we.” Maybe I hang out with or listen to people who are like me, but what about people who are unlike me? Or who dislike me? How about those who oppose me? Or even those who might hate me?
Without realizing it, we draw lines in our minds that keep us cut off from others. Those who are currently outside whatever line you have drawn hold the key to your growth and transformation. The thing we need to progress—difference—lies on the other side of that line.
Learning to connect with difference is the path of growth. And that’s true not only of you, but also of your company and your community. The lines we draw feel are merely the places where differences meet. Your company and your community need people who are willing and able to bridge those divides. Only then will you be able to make water.
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