The cartel that gives it away: Sarah Patterson and the politics of connection

Of all the things a self-respecting change consultant might call her firm, "The Good Cartel" is not the obvious one. Cartels rig markets, fix prices and crush rivals. They are, by any reasonable definition, the bad guys. Which is precisely why Sarah Patterson borrowed the word, and why the joke, once you sit with it, stops being a joke at all.

Patterson, a Melbourne-based strategic designer, has spent years on what she calls a quest to find out what we can learn from cartels and monopolies to more effectively convene and mobilise around big change. Her wager is mischievous but serious: the organisations that have proved most durable at bending whole systems to their will are not governments or NGOs but the very networks we are taught to despise. Strip away the criminality, she argues, and what remains is a masterclass in loyalty, trust and coordinated action, the same machinery, pointed somewhere better. Hence the deliberate flip in the name. A cartel for good.

From policy and architecture to "relational intelligence"

The idea did not arrive out of nowhere. By her own account, Patterson piloted and implemented social policy initiatives with the Australian Government for the better part of a decade before moving into architecture and, eventually, strategic design, a CV that reads as twenty-plus years spanning, in her phrasing, government policy, architecture and design. It is an unusual arc, and it shows in the work. Policy taught her how slow and contested large-scale change really is; architecture taught her to think about the spaces people move through and the structures that hold them. The Good Cartel, which she founded in 2021, is where those two trainings meet.

She frames the venture as a research project as much as a consultancy, an attempt, as she puts it, to hack the concept of "relational intelligence" and use it to create more effective collaborations. The throughline of all of it is a single, blunt thesis she returns to again and again, on her own site, in her talks and across her writing.

"Change isn't just about having a strategy. It's about relationships."

It sounds, at first, like the kind of warm nothing that fills a thousand LinkedIn posts. Patterson's contribution is to take it literally, and to insist on the consequences. If change is relational, then the unit of analysis is not the org chart or the strategy deck but the web of trust between people, and the work of a change-maker is less about authoring plans than about brokering connection. She is, formally, an accredited Partnership Broker, and much of The Good Cartel's stated practice is exactly that: convening collaborations across thorny terrain such as climate resilience, clean energy and social cohesion.

The thinker in the spaces between

For the intellectual scaffolding of all this, Patterson reaches not to a management text but to Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta, whose Sand Talk she quotes as a kind of north star:

"People today will mostly focus on the points of connection, the nodes of interest like stars in the sky. But the real understanding comes in the spaces in between, in the relational forces that connect and move the points."

You can see why it appeals to her. Western strategy is obsessed with the points, the stakeholders, the milestones, the named initiatives, the stars you can plot on a map. Yunkaporta's move is to insist the meaning lives in the dark matter between them, in the forces that connect and move the points. Patterson has built a practice on taking that seriously: treating the relationships, not the actors, as the thing to design for. It is also, quietly, an act of intellectual humility, a settler-Australian consultant grounding a commercial methodology in Indigenous relational thinking, and naming the source rather than laundering it into jargon. (She works, as she notes, on Bunurong Country.)

A monthly room of her own making

If the theory can sound abstract, the practice is stubbornly concrete: a room, a long table, and a Friday. The most tangible expression of Patterson's thesis is The Collective, a monthly co-working community she hosts in Melbourne for purpose-driven people and teams, gathering for the day at rotating venues including, on past occasions, the Abbotsford Convent. It is a modest, almost old-fashioned intervention, show up, work alongside strangers, talk, that follows directly from the belief that connection is the precondition for everything else. The radicalism is in the framing rather than the format.

That framing turns personal in her writing, which is where Patterson is most candid about why any of this matters to her. On her Substack, where she works through the ideas behind The Good Cartel essay by essay, she has written that "in a world where the odds are stacked in favour of division and hate, perhaps the most radical thing we can do is defiantly choose community, love and connection." She is open, too, that the conviction is hard-won: that "community has been a space for me to heal from trauma and pain." The consultant's thesis and the person's autobiography turn out to be the same sentence.

The firebrand in the room

This June she takes the argument to a wider stage, listed among the presenters at The Outlook's TO26 Firebrand, where the programme bills her under a different title from the "Founder" she uses herself, a small slip she would probably enjoy. It is a fitting venue for a thinker whose whole proposition is a provocation: that the people best at moving the world are not always the people we admire, and that the antidote to extractive systems might be to study them closely enough to turn their methods inside out.

Whether "relational intelligence" hardens into a transferable method or remains, for now, one designer's compelling frame is an open question, Patterson's footprint is still largely her own, self-published across a site, a Substack and a monthly room of regulars. But there is a coherence to it that is rare in the change-consulting trade, where the gap between the slogan and the life is usually wide. Patterson has narrowed it to almost nothing. The cartel, in the end, is the point: take the thing that hoards power through relationships, and make it give itself away.