The role of weavers and value over time
David Jacobstein
Florencia Guerzovich
Thanks, David. I really appreciate you sharing the piece and making that connection. Your question about evaluations that capture the value of "invisible weavers" is a critical one, and I'd love to know if others have seen more examples.
From my perspective, invisible weavers, much like orchestrators, catalysts, and system conveners, haveĀ many and clear connections within the systems community.
However, what might make this particular type of "invisible " weaverĀ so crucial right now isn't just their ability to connect people or sectors; it's their capacity to do soĀ and navigate uncertainty without being paralyzed by it. Lina Maria, whom I cite in the piece, uses the metaphor of a game in Colombia to describe this "unfrozen" state.
This is the systems intelligence of navigating the messy middle, where:
Uncertainty capacity is key. They don't expect conditions to stabilize but also don't abandon all plans, strategy, or causal thinking.Ā
Conflicting mental models are a given. They don't wait for a single, dominant worldview to emerge. Instead, they recognize the validity in multiple, sometimes competing, perspectives and find pragmatic ways to work across them because being frozen is not an option.
This uncertainty capacity can be learned and supported. I've seen posts from Julia Roig about training for this and Irene Gujit sharing on a recent exercise she's facilitated. However, for many of us around the world, it's a skill honed by doing without a systems thinking manual.Ā
I grew up amidst hyperinflation and a deep economic and governance crisis. My first job in government required me to manage local budgets, international grants, and national currency and country risks ratings fluctuations all at once. My peers and I learned to operate in the face of constant volatility. In fact, many Argentine economists in the 2000s were recruited to Wall Street precisely because they had this unique ability to navigate extreme volatility.
This kind of intelligence isn't about a simple dichotomy between "having a plan" and "no plan " or tacit vs academic knowledge and evidence.Ā It's about knowing when and howĀ to create a budget in both a stable and a local currency because it's helpful, and also being able to adjust on the fly as tax rules change and hyperinflation hitsāthis is a fact of life, whether you have a degree or own the corner shop with few years of formal education and hear what country risk means and why it matters in the media. TheĀ mental model is that there are many mental models, and we need to find a way to live and make it work.Ā
My six-year-old nephew gets that it's not the same to save his tooth fairy money in local or foreign currency to buy what he's saving for (a well evidenced factĀ with causal implications shared and studied from generation to generation). He has a strategy and a plan, and he understands cause-and-effect logic while also working with uncertainty and emergence.
Perhaps that is another provocative point of the piece: for all our talk about uncertainty in global systems thinking circles, are we really valuing the people around the world who have this embedded systems navigation capacity betweenĀ dychotomies?
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Jindra Cekan
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Alan Hudson
Ā
Thanks Flor and Gabriela for sharing your interesting reflections, rich examples from around the world, and useful references, including yourĀ invisible weavers' piece Flor and the 3 Inter-American Foundation pieces Gabriela. And to David, for the earlier reflections - inspired by John Paul Lederach'sĀ pieceĀ - on the importance of emplacement, stitching and critical yeast for social movements.
Your reflections and references led me to reflect some more on the idea (the fact) that billions of people, all around the world - in a huge variety of contexts and ways - have daily experience with navigating uncertainty,Ā and over time building their adaptive capacities to doĀ so, as individuals and as groups and communities. Such is the nature of life. As you note, this richness of experience can sometimes be lost and marginalized in discussions of systems change that can be (but need not be) too far, and unhelpfully, abstracted from the everyday realities of life.
In particular, they reminded me of the blossoming of mutual aid networks, and the greater attention to them, inĀ the face of necessity (survival necessities).
In many cases, such networks of mutual support have continued and gotten more important still in the context of the post-Brexit and post-COVID challenges - economic, political, social, cultural, environmental etc. -Ā that the UK has found itself grappling with.
Personally, I've enjoyed weaving locally (doing what I can to nurture living, learning and loving systems) in contexts that I am happy to call home, through a couple of networks. First, the Action for Happiness network. Second, through a community gardening initiative called Living Vital, that is all about community, inclusion, and relationships. And third, through Sussex Seaside Systems Socials, which is currently in need of some collaborative nurturing.
Oh, and theĀ Weavers' Workshop, with Accountability Lab (and an A4D which I couldn't immediately identify), looks wonderful and a great addition to the landscape of initiatives focused on weavers and weaving. I'm excited to see how that takes shape!Ā
On mutual aid and solidarity in the UK in the context of COVID, here's a couple of references that might be of interest.
Community Responses to the Coronavirus Pandemic: How Mutual Aid Can Help
https://ppr.lse.ac.uk/articles/10.31389/lseppr.21Understanding Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Support During the First COVID-19 Lockdown in the United Kingdom
Mutual Aid During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond
I led the Community Philanthropy initiative at the Inter-American Foundation for the past five years and recently completed a draft distilling key lessons from that experience (soon to be published, I hope).
This piece strongly resonates with my work exploring solidarity-based models across Latin America and the Caribbean. What struck me most was the common thread among āweaversā: they draw on a scaffolding of community practices that generate energy, trust, and collective action. These practicesārooted in generosity, reciprocity, and mutual supportāare often described as forms of community philanthropy.
Below are a few older, but still relevant, blogs that complement the themes in this powerful piece. Thanks so much for sharing it.
Gabriela Boyer
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Alan Hudson
https://medium.com/@jenniferbrandel/hexagon-people-a-theory-of-civic-coherence-51af7c35dd16
I started off reading the piece feeling aĀ bit skeptical; would these two new words/phrases make a difference to my, and others', ability to make sense of things, and to take action, or might it be a case of old wine in new bottles?
[Also, two radio DJs from the north of England whoĀ I love - Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie, on BBC Radio 6 -Ā use the word "interstitial" to refer to pieces of music that come in between and connect other pieces of music. They use it so much, like 3-4 times in a 2 hour show, that it has begun to annoy me!]
But when I actually read the piece, my feelings shifted as the perspective did seem to open up some new possibilities in terms of thinking and acting in ways that prioritize interconnection and interdependence, including through the use of a rubric for assessment and reflection.
https://www.the-interstitium.com/
And I did the interstitialĀ self-assessment.Ā https://q9l71mrh3d5.typeform.com/to/tYKEvBhL?typeform-source=www.the-interstitium.com
Turns out I'm a "Bridge Builder" which I guess is somewhere between a butterflyĀ and an architect :-)Ā
Fun fact: The Neil Theise who "discovered" the human interstitium is the same Neil Theise who wrote the book "notes on complexity"! See "A Buddhist scientist on the murmuration of being".
Hi Flor and others,
Iām intrigued by this conversation - thanks for starting it, David. I used to work with Julia Roig mentioned below (perhaps she is in this group) and have been following her LinkedIn posts about network weaving over the last few years. What I donāt totally understand, though, is how it is different from good leadership? My frame of reference for leadership is the adaptive leadership framework which highlights the need to do all the things that weavers are doing as well: dealing with uncertainty, knowing when to be on the balcony and taking it all in and when to be on the dance floor to engage in the system, bringing the right people together, continuously building capacity in the system to deal with shifts, etc. Is the term weavers newish terminology (or perhaps a new and better metaphor) for concepts that already exist or a new concept altogether?
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Monalisa Salib
Consultant
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Florencia Guerzovich
Thank you, Gabriela and Alan ā I really appreciated your examples (including from the UK!) and Gabriela, Iām looking forward to diving into your report.
Alan, your message made me think about how many of us have a kind of dual weaver personality. One shows up in spaces like this group ā fluent in frameworks, comfortable in the architecture of systems talk and, manytimes, centered on our roles. The other shows up in our local, immediate worlds ā troubleshooting with neighbors, pivoting community projects under stress, mediating in messy real time. Those connect us with a broader set of weavers, tear down barriers. But in groups like this, the gravitational pull is toward the first mode ā and the perspectives of those who aren't frozenĀ when uncertainty gets close to home can slip off the shared radar.Ā
Monalisa, I really appreciate your question ā and yes, in many ways what I describe as āweavingā overlaps with the best of adaptive leadership. And there are many other terms to describe partly overlapping roles -Ā Iāve also used metaphors like catalysts (Bridgspan and others use this one), orchestrators (Skoll and others use it), systems convening (Wenger-Trayners) or bricklayers (grounded in cathedralĀ thinking and political science).Ā At Pact we used āorchestrationā and āadaptive managementā across cycles; in a World Vision evaluation I used ābricklayers.ā In another case, āorchestrationā resonated internally, while āsystems conveningā worked better externally.Ā I suspect those working most closely with any one concept would want to underscore distinctions as much as similarities to Bhavesh's point.Ā
Iām usually guilty of pursuing conceptual precision when functionally useful such as when developing a rubric toĀ monitor the value created by orchestrators in a donor portfolio.Ā
Here, my goal was different.Ā I took an approach consistent with a piece Alan linked hereĀ https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7359525004545249281/ ā leaning into the vernacular, which shifts with audience and purpose.Ā Jen Briselli put it more provocatively than I would.Ā Ā "What matters is whether weāre able to get our hands dirty and speak the local language of the team, the community, or the organization weāre working within. Change emerges through shared sense making, meaningful interactions, and action that evolves with feedback.."
For this article, I chose āweaverā after testing a range of options. Itās a form of leadership ā but I needed a metaphor that could cross not just organizational cultures but languages, and that could help people picture someone they might otherwise overlook. I've been sharing a longer list of metaphors andĀ āWeaverā resonates in Spanish, Portuguese, and beyond ā with my own mother (a loom weaver herself). It also tied back to my starting point: invisibility.
In philanthropy and civic space convenings ā including what many here identify as democracy, rights and governance work ā we often see the same guest lists and hear the same talking points and proposals, even in a moment of change.Ā Ā Ā Many diverse social movement leaders, network heads, and EDs from around the world are invited (and thatās a fight worth continuing, given power asymmetries). But the āinvisible weaversā I write about ā the field coordinator, the mid-level bureaucrat, the "make it work" individual who quietly spans organizational and sector silos ā are rarely in the room.Ā I am making the case to invite the conductors but ALSO the rhythmĀ section of the orchestra ("invisible weavers aren't a new category in your grantee list", but a function that makes existingĀ portfolios work)Ā - and doing so in a way that is respectful, rather than extractive ("don't need another panel about them").Ā
So while āadaptive leadershipā could serve as an umbrella, for my purposes it risked blurring the distinction I most wanted to make inĀ that space in this moment: the need to see, value, and invite those whose work, as Jindra noted, underpins many findings about effectiveness and sustainability, but whose insights too rarely shape the score before itās played, let alone the concert hall's blueprints.Ā
ThanksĀ
FlorĀ
Random thoughts:
- The nature of complexity invites many perspectives on something that is also dynamic and alive.
- So there seems to be a tension in the idea of settling on one name / brand / metaphor / labelling / etc.
- There is also the epistemic diversity that complexity invites...
- There is an interesting polarity here with using one name on one side and always having a new expression for something on the other side.
- And maybe another polarity here with 'old wine in new bottles' on one side andĀ 'new wine in old bottles' on the other side.
Alan, I am surprised the self-assessment did not label you as the 'interstitial'!!!