Background: Change leaders (faculty, administrators, and/or external stakeholders) need to develop "relational expertise", recognizing the perspectives of others, to enable emergent, systemic change. We describe how change leaders of a grant-funded instructional change initiative developed relational expertise by analyzing faculty relationships and social subgroups to identify "who" was involved in discussions about teaching and learning and "what" specific topics were discussed. Results: Faculty discussions focused on daily classroom needs. Faculty who were in different departments or schools were mostly disconnected from each other, and faculty within these units often had subdivisions among them. Conclusions: Faculty lacked opportunities to discuss education, specifically, systems-level perspectives. The change leaders created organizational structures to catalyze communities, including an action research fellowship program, to support faculty in education discussions.