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, have many and clear connections within the systems community.
However, what might make this particular type of "invisible " weaver so crucial right now isn't just their ability to connect people or sectors; it's their capacity to do so 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.
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.
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. It's about knowing when and how 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 hits—this 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. The mental model is that there are many mental models, and we need to find a way to live and make it work.
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 fact 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 between dychotomies?
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Jindra Cekan
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Alan Hudson
Thanks Flor and Gabriela for sharing your interesting reflections, rich examples from around the world, and useful references, including your invisible weavers' piece Flor and the 3 Inter-American Foundation pieces Gabriela. And to David, for the earlier reflections - inspired by John Paul Lederach's piece - 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, and over time building their adaptive capacities to do 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, in 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. - 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 the 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!
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 “weavers”: they draw on a scaffolding of community practices that generate energy, trust, and collective action. These practices—rooted in generosity, reciprocity, and mutual support—are 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 a 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 who I love - Mark Radcliffe and Stuart Maconie, on BBC Radio 6 - 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 interstitial self-assessment. 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 butterfly and an architect :-)
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,
I’m 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 don’t 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 — I really appreciated your examples (including from the UK!) and Gabriela, I’m 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 — 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 — 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 — and the perspectives of those who aren't frozen when uncertainty gets close to home can slip off the shared radar.
Monalisa, I really appreciate your question — and yes, in many ways what I describe as “weaving” overlaps with the best of adaptive leadership. And there are many other terms to describe partly overlapping roles - I’ve 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 cathedral thinking and political science). At Pact we used “orchestration” and “adaptive management” across cycles; in a World Vision evaluation I used “bricklayers.” In another case, “orchestration” resonated internally, while “systems convening” worked better externally. I suspect those working most closely with any one concept would want to underscore distinctions as much as similarities to Bhavesh's point.
I’m usually guilty of pursuing conceptual precision when functionally useful such as when developing a rubric to monitor the value created by orchestrators in a donor portfolio.
Here, my goal was different. I took an approach consistent with a piece Alan linked here https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7359525004545249281/ — leaning into the vernacular, which shifts with audience and purpose. Jen Briselli put it more provocatively than I would. "What matters is whether we’re able to get our hands dirty and speak the local language of the team, the community, or the organization we’re working within. Change emerges through shared sense making, meaningful interactions, and action that evolves with feedback.."
For this article, I chose “weaver” after testing a range of options. It’s a form of leadership — 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 and “Weaver” resonates in Spanish, Portuguese, and beyond — with my own mother (a loom weaver herself). It also tied back to my starting point: invisibility.
In philanthropy and civic space convenings — including what many here identify as democracy, rights and governance work — we often see the same guest lists and hear the same talking points and proposals, even in a moment of change. Many diverse social movement leaders, network heads, and EDs from around the world are invited (and that’s a fight worth continuing, given power asymmetries). But the “invisible weavers” I write about — the field coordinator, the mid-level bureaucrat, the "make it work" individual who quietly spans organizational and sector silos — are rarely in the room. I am making the case to invite the conductors but ALSO the rhythm section of the orchestra ("invisible weavers aren't a new category in your grantee list", but a function that makes existing portfolios work) - and doing so in a way that is respectful, rather than extractive ("don't need another panel about them").
So while “adaptive leadership” could serve as an umbrella, for my purposes it risked blurring the distinction I most wanted to make in 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 it’s played, let alone the concert hall's blueprints.
Thanks
Flor
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 and 'new wine in old bottles' on the other side.
Alan, I am surprised the self-assessment did not label you as the 'interstitial'!!!
Florencia Guerzovich
Dear all,
I've written a new post on Medium, building on our discussion about "weaving" - which might be relevant for others using alternative metaphors (orchestrator, convener, bridger etc)
I'm working on a paper that begins to address a common question: How do we identify effective weaving in practice? and the related one, And how do we make that placed-based work meaningful for decision-making at portfolio-level?
My analysis of over 100 cases suggests that starting with causal mechanisms is useful. The post identifies a few patterns, specifically diving deeper into one I'm currently labeling "routing."
This list includes so many colleagues with a wealth of practical experience and tacit knowledge that I thought I'd ask for three distinct things:
1. References on "Routing" as a Causal Mechanism
While "routing" relates to distributed leadership and policy transfer, as Tom Aston and David Jacobstein reminded me, I'm unsure if it has been explicitly named as a causal mechanism before.
Do you have any references, papers, or studies on routing or similar concepts that might be helpful in naming/evidencing routing as a mechanism?
2. Examples of "Betweenness" Proxies
On LinkedIn, Tory Taylor commented about an example from USAID's Nigeria HPN portfolio, where "betweenness" was used in M&E as a proxy for sustainability. I've also used proxies to capture coherence and resilience I suspect others might have as well.
Do you have examples of other organizations using measures like local systems "betweenness" (or others similar in spirit) as proxies for sustainability, resilience, or coherence in ways that have also been meaningful for colleagues zooming-out, at portfolio-level?
3. Stories on Remixing MEL for Systems Insights
As many of you shared during the TWP CoP webinar on MEL, we often scaffold existing MEL systems to see and act on these system dynamics, rather than setting up entirely new MEL infrastructure.
I'm especially grateful if anyone would share stories, similar to Tory's, about working around seemingly rigid MEL systems or translating locally relevant insights for portfolio-level decision-makers.
Florencia
Florencia Guerzovich
What a rich discussion!Part of this discussion (Why are we using the term "weaver" anyways?) was also recently reflected in this post I made in response to @Rachel Leeds. (Cue sci-fi music about the unseen connections in the world.)It's a fair question! I did some research and apparently "network weaver" has been around since (at least) 1981 and was coined by (so it is claimed!) June Holley of The Network Weaving Institute as she was doing economic development work in Appalachia in the US. (If anyone else has an idea about the source or a subscription to the OED, please chime in.) So perhaps old wine in old bottles and we're all enjoying tasting it/pairing it at new meals? (Don't you love analogies - especially having to do with wine - and how terms are created, captured, reimagined, and go through sense-making processes in micro-communities like ours?)Even with this context I appreciate Flor's choice to use it within her article:So to me, while an adaptive leader may indeed do this invisible work of weaving and will only be successful if they use these skills, there are Network Weavers who are not in leadership positions and never are recognized for their "interstitionality". (A new term for me that I'm hoping no one asks me to say aloud.)1) The translatability2) The visual nature3) How she emphasized the work as sometimes being invisible and/or less valued - extending the weaving metaphor, the Warp thread on the loom often becomes invisible as the weft creates the pattern. (image)Warmly,Sarah
Alan Hudson
This piece, on naming legibility syndrome, from the recent update by Jennifer and network of interstitionaries, seems particularly relevant.
In it, the folks who are exploring their and others' role as interstitionaries say this:
Who We Are: We are a growing web of people and practices serving the spaces in-between. We work across scales — from families to cities to global networks — moving in ways that are deep, wide, and multidimensional. Part of our role is to flow resources, information and relationships so that living systems can survive, heal, flourish and transform.
It includes this para, which I find very inspiring:
p.170 - Complexity prompts me to consider how I can participate in the world around me, rather than simply cower with my head down. My gestures don't have to be large because all effects are local and one never knows what this butterfly flapping its wings will produce in the larger world. One just has to know that we have opportunities for creating adaptive change in every moment, to cultivate greater interactivity between people, to reinforce homeostatic societal feedback loops, to be courageous in resisting what appear like top-down controls, and to trust that nothing is determined or fixed. Every moment has the random potential to surprise us with new possibilities. However dire the moment, life-saving adaptation might just be around the corner and might even arise from something you yourself have helped to bring forth.
best wishes,
alan
Florencia Guerzovich
Hi Gabriela and Alan,
This really resonates, Gabriela — please do let me know when it goes public (I’ll also write separately about something we’re cooking in Spanish). Some of the “ invisible weavers” I’ve been speaking with are rooted in the community philanthropy ecosystem. They’re constantly navigating that middle space — struggling to prove their value both to local philanthropists and to their volunteers and teams, often shining most in crisis, whether sudden or chronic. And maybe it’s the Argentinean in me, but I think there’s wisdom in our “lo atamos con alambre” instinct — there’s real value in making it work, imperfectly but practically.
Perhaps that’s also a bridge to the different tone and space of the resources Alan shared. Thanks so much for those — I really appreciate the thoughtful links and the way you’ve drawn the connections. I’d come across the interstitium framing before (Sarah E. had mentioned it here too), and I can see both the resonance and the tensions. It captures the flow and texture of those “in-between” spaces. My own lens leans a bit more causal and pragmatic — trying to trace how information, trust, and judgment actually move through systems to keep them resilient and effective.I can imagine (and have sometimes seen) people in that community reject the language of causality or mechanisms — and the router metaphor might not feel comfortable to all.
On the flip side, the interstitionary framings speak powerfully to some, but not to everyone working in those middle spaces including my audiences. As we discussed before, part of it is the jargon, but their self-assessment gives a range of other cues to plausible deeper sources of the naming legibility syndrome they write about There’s a paradox there that others have noted: much of the interstitionary, relational and complexity, language celebrates the in-between, but often from a position that doesn’t fully reflect the range of those doing it daily, under constraint.
I suppose I’m writing for those who live that middle-reality but can’t always rely on affect or abstraction to do the work — people juggling institutional incentives, political risk, and credibility with actors who don’t share the same vocabulary., disposition or positionality in the system. That’s the layer I’m trying to surface — one that feels closer to Latin American traditions of governance, complexity, and systems thinking: pragmatic, political, and probabilistic as well as emergent (for Spanish speakers, there’s a rich body of interdisciplinary work in our universities: [one of many possible starting points]). One that can dialogue with the axiology, and epistemology debates, but doesn't feel compelled to write about it, because there is a risk of losing the point, thread and audience ...
I also found the funder support strategies in those interstitial resources resonate with what I’ve written in Inside Philanthropy and with some of the promising moves by U.S. funders. But here, I’m exploring another middle space — what interstitial actors (who might never use that label) within funding agencies, community foundations, or intermediaries, who might already be doing or could do in practice. We have a lot to learn and surface about those.
Thanks again,
Warmly,
Flor
Beautiful Florencia and such an important discussion especially now.After working in Latin American and the Caribbean with placed-based grantmaking organizations, issue-based funds, and networks of these, I find that your story of weaves connects well with the principles of community philanthropy. The “weavers” described here are community philanthropists in another language. They are the ones who turn fragmentation into fabric by stitching together trust, learning, and action. Recognizing and resourcing this work means moving from funding projects to funding relationships: from counting interventions to strengthening the social muscle that holds communities and systems together. I wrote up with a colleague but still have not published the six lessons of community philanthropy. See if it resonates with your story of weavers.Gaby