Nagarjuna, the 2nd-century Buddhist logician, argued that things have no fixed essence — they exist only through their relationships and contrasts. He called this śūnyatā — not 'emptiness' as in nothingness, but the absence of inherent, standalone properties. A hammer isn't intrinsically a hammer; it is a hammer relative to a hand, a nail, an intention. This sounds like abstract metaphysics until you apply it to how people behave in organisations. The person who seems 'resistant to change' in one context is frequently the most adaptive person in another — the resistance isn't a property of them, it's a property of the relationship between their history and this particular demand. When we diagnose someone's behaviour as a fixed trait, we've made a Nagarjunian error: we've mistaken a relational pattern for an essence. The practical correction is blunt — before labelling how someone behaves, describe the specific configuration of conditions that produced it. That shift, from 'they are X' to 'X appears here, under these conditions', doesn't just change how you see people. It reopens the question of which conditions you could actually change.

Who did you last describe using a permanent trait — 'they're just like that' — and what specific conditions were actually present when that behaviour appeared?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhism — Nagarjuna