Most leaders have experienced it: a team challenge that keeps coming back. You address it, things improve, and then a few weeks later the same friction resurfaces. You try a different approach with the same individual. Still, the pattern persists.
In this session, Joe Han of Peak Praxis introduced Relationship Systems Intelligence (RSI), a framework that helps leaders stop treating recurring team problems as individual issues and start seeing them for what they often are: signals from the larger system. Joined by co-host Aimee Viniard-Weideman, also of Peak Praxis, the two guided attendees through an interactive mapping exercise and three practical interventions any leader can apply right away.
Joe Han is an executive team coach, outdoor guide, and founder of Peak Praxis, where he works with leadership teams through coaching and nature-based experiences. His focus is helping leaders step back from the immediate issue in front of them to see the larger patterns shaping their team or organization.
Aimee Viniard-Weideman is the founder of Daybreak Transition Partners, a leadership practice supporting leaders and leadership teams navigating complex systems and changing environments. She joined as Joe’s co-host for this session.
Why the Same Problems Keep Coming Back
Joe opened by naming a pattern most leaders recognize: when challenges persist despite real effort, attention tends to drift toward the individual. Who is struggling? Who needs to change? Who is the problem? It feels productive, but it often isn’t, because the underlying drivers are broader than any one person.
RSI offers a different way of seeing. Rather than treating leadership challenges as isolated behaviors, it frames them as patterns in a larger, interconnected system shaped by conditions, relationships, and often-invisible dynamics. The framework was developed by Marita Fridjhon and Faith Fuller, co-founders of CRR Global, and it’s the foundation Joe and Aimee have been learning and practicing through their training there.
Joe used a simple illustration. If someone on your team keeps missing deadlines:
• An IQ lens asks whether they understand the work.
• An EQ lens explores what might be happening emotionally.
• An RSI lens asks what conditions in the system are making it hard for that person to succeed, such as role confusion, competing priorities, unspoken expectations, or lack of clarity.
The behavior is the same. The diagnosis changes completely, and so does the intervention.
— Joe Han, Peak Praxis
The Hidden Network: Trees, Fungi, and Your Team
To make this tangible, Joe and Aimee shared a short video about the Wood Wide Web, the underground fungal network that connects trees in a forest, allowing them to share nutrients, send warnings, and support struggling seedlings. Scientists once assumed that what was visible above ground was the whole story. The real system was invisible.
Joe’s point was direct: organizations work the same way. In any team, there are unseen connections shaping how people respond to each other and to the environment around them. Patterns of trust, tension, loyalty, and silence may not be immediately visible, but they are very much active. Leadership that only attends to what’s visible above the surface will keep solving the wrong problem.
A Practical Exercise: Mapping Your Relationship System
Joe and Aimee walked attendees through a live mapping exercise drawn from the CRR Global methodology. The goal: make the invisible system visible.
Here’s how it works. Grab a pen and paper and select a real, current team, ideally four to eight people, one where you have an actual role rather than a distant view.
• Draw a large circle to represent the system as a whole.
• Add a triangle for yourself inside the circle.
• Add a triangle for each other person, using names or initials.
• Connect people with lines: a dashed line for a weak connection, a single line for a steady connection, a double line for a strong connection, and two slashes for conflict.
Aimee shared her own map in real time, a cross-functional leadership team working on an initiative with no clear hierarchy. What the map surfaced right away: everyone was clustered around the edges of the circle, not pulled into the center. She hadn’t planned it that way. It just appeared as she drew.
From there, Joe guided the group through three layers of inquiry:
What do you see? The visible behavior and patterns on the page.
What’s beneath the surface? Context that might explain those patterns, including pre-existing relationships, history between people, and prior tension.
What conditions are shaping everyone? The broader forces at play, including departmental pressures, different timelines, and competing priorities.
Aimee’s reflection on that last question was one of the session’s most useful moments. She realized the people who seemed to be causing friction, pushing for decisions too quickly or relitigating already-answered questions, weren’t acting out of nowhere. They were acting from their departments. They were wearing their department hats, not their shared leadership team hats. The “problem” looked individual. The root was systemic.
A pattern worth watching in your own team
If the dynamics on your leadership team include avoidance, delayed decision-making, or repeated friction, those same patterns are likely showing up at the department level too. Teams don’t exist in isolation. What happens at the top gets replicated below.
Three Systemic Interventions: Pruning, Feeding, and Watering
Once patterns become visible, the next question is what to do. Joe walked through three nature-inspired interventions designed to shape conditions around a team rather than control the people in it.
Pruning
The intentional removal of what no longer serves the system. Not punishment, not harshness: clarity. Leaders often try to grow teams by adding things without removing friction first. Sometimes growth requires subtraction. Pruning creates space for focus, trust, and the right work to emerge.
Feeding
Every system is shaped by what it’s consistently given: attention, incentives, conversations, and resources. Feed a system urgency and it becomes reactive. Feed it fear and it becomes defensive. Feed it clarity and purpose and it becomes aligned. Systems don’t change because people change. They change because the environment does.
Watering
Change through consistency, not intensity. A powerful offsite or reset conversation matters, but it doesn’t sustain change on its own. Watering means building regular rhythms: check-ins, alignment conversations, rituals, feedback loops. A single storm doesn’t grow a forest. Steady rain over time does.
Redrawing the System You Want
Joe closed the hands-on portion of the session by asking attendees to redraw their systems, not as they are, but as they’d like them to be. Same circle, same people, but with the connections and dynamics they’re working toward.
Aimee’s redrawn map added something her original didn’t have: the departments. Once she named departmental influence explicitly, the picture shifted. She pulled the team closer together, visualized more equal standing among members, and let conflict become something fluid rather than something fixed. Instead of locking conflict onto a specific person or pairing, she imagined it as something that could come up and pass, rather than something that defines how every meeting starts.
The act of drawing itself, she noted, had already started to change her interactions with the real team. Getting the system out of her head and onto paper created enough distance to see new things and approach conversations differently.
— Joe Han, Peak Praxis
Key Takeaways
• When a team challenge persists despite real effort, the cause is likely systemic, not individual. RSI helps leaders widen the lens.
• Relationship maps make invisible patterns visible. Drawing your team as a system reveals information that conversations alone often don’t surface.
• Department identity, loyalty, and pre-existing relationships all shape how people show up on cross-functional or leadership teams.
• Systemic leadership doesn’t eliminate accountability. It changes the levers you pull and the problems you’re actually solving.
• Pruning, feeding, and watering are ongoing practices, not one-time events. Consistency is what makes them work.
If you want to try the mapping exercise yourself, grab a pen and paper and start with a team that’s currently on your mind. Even a rough sketch on the back of a napkin can surface patterns you haven’t been able to name yet. And if you’d like to go deeper with Joe and Aimee, you can connect with Joe or Aimee on LinkedIn.
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