If you have read this far, there is a reasonable chance you are the kind of person who sees what relational density and diversity actually do. You have watched a response emerge from a group that nobody could have specified in advance. You have seen something form at the interface between people and organisations that would never have formed inside any of them. You know what it feels like to be in a room where the friction is doing the work rather than getting in the way of it.
If that is you, you also know what it costs.
Most of the work is sitting in uncertainty longer than is comfortable. Holding a hunch past the point where holding it looks foolish. Trusting that what is forming will form, even when nothing in the system around you confirms anything is happening. The funder wants a theory of change. The board wants milestones. Colleagues want clarity. You are the one in the room who knows that giving them what they want, at this stage, will collapse the thing before it has finished forming. So you hold. And you keep holding. The holding is the work.
This is harder than any individual can hold alone. Not because the people who do it are weak. Because the conditions for holding have been thinned almost everywhere. The translator pays the cost in their own body. The system that should be carrying part of that cost is mostly doing the opposite. The only thing that makes this sustainable across years is being held by other people who have done the same work, who recognise the holding when they see it, who can take the weight for a stretch when yours is at its limit.
That is what relational diversity and density actually do. They are the conditions under which a small number of people can hold something open long enough for what is forming to form.
The work you are doing is the work. It is not a failure of clarity or an absence of strategy. It is the response to a problem the curatorial mode cannot solve. The hunch you are holding is not unprofessional. It is the only honest stance available to anyone who has been close enough to a real problem to know that the answer is not in the document or the framework.
Hold a little longer. Find the others who are holding. The soil for the response is being constituted by you and them, even when no part of the machinery around you can see it.
Two slides from Alex Komoroske’s slime-mould deck name something of this from the strategy side, worth holding on to:
People doing grounded, strong strategic work will look kooky, different, or maybe even self-indulgent. But that work is extremely important, and you should celebrate it.
Bad strategies and good strategies will look superficially similar. It will take years before the difference is clear. Good strategic work often looks wasteful or indulgent in the moment. Even in retrospect the strength of the strategy will be hard to prove.
— Alex Komoroske, slime-mould deck
Originally written for LinkedIn on 14 May 2026. View original →