What Weaving Really Means

In recent years, the word weaving has become increasingly common in the world of systems change.

"We need more weavers."

"I'm a systems weaver."

"We're weaving ecosystems."

It is a beautiful word. It evokes relationship, interconnection and emergence. Yet I often wonder whether we have forgotten what weaving actually means.

Much of what is described as weaving today is, in reality, connecting. It is introducing people, building networks, hosting gatherings, following synchronicities and creating opportunities for collaboration. These are valuable practices. They create movement, conversations and possibility.

But movement is not the same as weaving.

If we are honest, many of these carefully curated networks dissolve as quickly as they emerge. Relationships remain shallow, collaborations fade, communities disperse, and promising initiatives struggle to create lasting impact. There is activity, but very little that truly holds. Ideas circulate, yet they rarely coagulate into structures capable of carrying life over time.

This is not because people lack good intentions. It is because connection alone does not create the conditions for life to endure.

Several years ago, while spending time in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia, I encountered a profoundly different understanding of weaving.

For the Kogi, weaving is not simply a craft. The women weave mochilas, their traditional bags, but every thread carries meaning. The act of weaving connects the visible and invisible worlds. It honours the mountains, the rivers, the ancestors, future generations, the community, the plants, the animals, and every living relationship that sustains life. The weave becomes an expression of cosmology rather than an object of utility.

In many ways, the weave creates the living architecture through which life itself can move. It is the wiring that holds the relationships together.

Perhaps this is why, when you spend time in the Sierra Nevada, there is a feeling that is difficult to describe. The mountains feel alive. The rivers feel alive. The land itself seems to carry a presence. It is not simply because the landscape is beautiful. It is because the relationships between all living beings continue to be tended, generation after generation.

The weave is alive because the relationships are alive.

The men carry another complementary practice through the Poporo. To an outside observer, the Poporo appears to be a simple gourd containing powdered lime made from crushed seashells or limestone. Throughout the day, coca leaves are gently chewed while small amounts of the lime are added using a wooden stick. Over many years, the repeated movement of the stick around the neck of the Poporo slowly builds layer upon layer, leaving a visible record of a lifetime of contemplation, prayer and relationship.

Within Kogi cosmology, however, the Poporo is far more than an object. It is a daily practice of maintaining right relationship—with oneself, with the Earth, with thought, with responsibility and with the unseen world.

If the weaving creates the circuit, the Poporo maintains the current flowing through it.

One without the other is incomplete.

Current without a circuit (the weave) simply disperses. Energy without relationship cannot sustain itself.

Watching this helped me recognise something about our own culture.

The Western world has become exceptionally good at generating current. We produce ideas, innovation, technology, capital, vision, entrepreneurship and movement at extraordinary speed. We celebrate creativity, disruption and scale.

Yet we often attempt to send that current through broken circuits.

We build organisations before cultivating relationships capable of holding them. We create networks without shared stewardship. We pursue collaboration without tending trust. We launch movements before establishing the structures that allow communities to remain coherent over time.

Then we wonder why burnout is everywhere.

Why promising initiatives lose momentum.

Why organisations struggle to remain alive.

Perhaps the problem is not that we lack energy.

Perhaps we have forgotten how to weave.

True weaving is not about connecting more people.

It is about cultivating the relational architecture capable of holding life.

It asks different questions.

Which relationships require tending?

What structures allow trust to deepen over years rather than months?

What rhythms enable communities to remain coherent long after the initial excitement has faded?

How do we create something capable not simply of growing, but of sustaining life?

This work is rarely visible. It unfolds slowly, often unnoticed. It requires patience, presence, continuity and care. Above all, it requires stewardship.

The more time I spend working with founders, executives, artists, practitioners and communities, the more I realise that what we often call leadership is, in fact, the work of tending these relational fields. Organisations flourish when the relationships beneath them are healthy. Communities endure when the weave is continuously maintained. Change becomes regenerative when there is sufficient structure to hold its energy.

This understanding has become central to my own work. Through years of practice in Traditional Chinese Medicine, learning from Indigenous wisdom traditions, and accompanying leaders navigating complexity, I have come to see leadership less as the art of directing systems and more as the practice of stewarding the living relationships from which those systems emerge.

This is the foundation of the Operational Leadership framework. It is an invitation to move beyond managing organisations as mechanical structures and begin reading them as living systems—systems shaped by relationship, rhythm, timing and stewardship.

If these reflections resonate with you, I invite you to explore the Operational Leadership course. Together, we learn not simply how to lead organisations more effectively, but how to cultivate the conditions in which people, teams and communities can genuinely thrive.