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Relational thinking is a way of seeing the world that places greater precedence on the relations or connections between entities rather than simply looking at those elements as separate. The main overarching principle in the relational paradigm is a shift in one’s perception from seeing a fixed world, made up of things and their properties, to seeing a world that is primarily made of relations and connectivity.

Going from a system with a low degree of connectivity to one with a high degree of connectivity is not just a quantitative change in the number of connections it is also a qualitative change. It marks a shift from a component based regime, where we need to firstly think about the properties of the elements in the system and their linear interactions - to a relational based regime where we need to first look at how the system is interconnected and the nature of the interdependencies.