The Four Disciplines of Weave
Practising coherence in an age of complexity
This essay continues the Weave series on leadership in complexity. My first 4 posts traced the journey from mastery to versatility. This post turns practice into habit: how leaders create coherence every day.
From theory to practice
Every era produces its own leadership language.
The industrial age gave us control.
The information age gave us efficiency.
The age of complexity demands coherence.
Up to this point, Weave has been about seeing the world differently: recognising that the future belongs to those who can integrate and align. Now we turn from seeing to doing.
The four disciplines that follow are not steps in a sequence. They are interwoven threads you return to again and again.
See the Threads: ontological awareness
Work the Loom: systemic design
Find the Pattern: synthesis and sensemaking
Create the Fabric: cultural coherence
Together they form a fabric spiral: awareness informs design, design enables synthesis, synthesis anchors culture, culture deepens awareness. Each loop strengthens the weave.
Discipline One: See the Threads
Ontological awareness
Purpose: perceive the hidden connections that shape reality.
Most leadership defaults to event analysis: what happened and why. Ontological awareness asks a different question: what meanings, beliefs, and structures make this possible at all? It is the move from incidents to the underlying ontology of the system.
Practices
Map perspectives, not just processes: who sees what, and what remains invisible
Ask ontological questions: what assumptions are we treating as facts
Build perceptual range: combine quantitative signal, qualitative story, and contextual history
Signals you are progressing
You can articulate competing truths without forcing premature choice
Root causes shift from people and tools to patterns and contexts
Strategy conversations begin with framing, not fixes
Pitfalls
Confusing analysis with awareness
Treating assumptions as risks to mitigate rather than realities to reframe
Heifetz calls it getting on the balcony. You remain in the dance, but you can see its steps.
Discipline Two: Work the Loom
Systemic design
Purpose: build structures that enable flow, collaboration, and adaptation.
Most organisations try to tame complexity with more rules and dashboards. They tighten the weave until intelligence stops flowing. Systemic design loosens it just enough so that information, trust, and accountability can move.
Principles
Design for transparency, not supervision: make work and decisions visible by default
Design for feedback, not perfection: many short loops beat one long loop
Design for coherence, not conformity: shared context over identical methods
Tools and practices
Interfaces over hierarchies: clear service contracts between teams, not gatekeeping
Rhythms and rituals: cadences for planning, review, and retros that create alignment without centralising control
Adaptive governance: decision rights that shift with context and risk
Signals you are progressing
Decisions are easier to trace and improve
Teams adapt without waiting for permission because the rules of interaction are clear
Post-mortems change systems, not just behaviours
Pitfalls
Cosmetic transparency without consequences
Rituals that become performance rather than learning
Discipline Three: Find the Pattern
Synthesis and sensemaking
Purpose: transform diversity and data into shared understanding and purposeful action.
In complex systems, information multiplies faster than meaning. Leaders drown in metrics while starving for narrative. Sensemaking converts fragments into coherence that people can act on together.
Practices
Collect signals, not noise: define essential indicators and retire vanity metrics
Synthesize, do not summarise: combine disciplines to produce a better model, not a bigger slide
Name the pattern publicly: create a common language that teams can refine
Prototype meaning: test interpretations through small, safe-to-try moves
Signals you are progressing
People repeat shared phrases that encode cause and effect
Experiments increase in quality and learning yield
Conflicts shift from positions to patterns
Pitfalls
Mistaking volume of data for depth of understanding
Private insight that never becomes shared sense
Karl Weick: sensemaking is the ongoing, collective crafting of plausible meaning. It is how humans connect dots that were not designed to align.
Discipline Four: Create the Fabric
Cultural coherence
Purpose: weave purpose, story, and values into a system that endures.
Culture is not the soft stuff. It is the hidden loom that holds every other thread in place. The Weavist treats culture as infrastructure for coherence.
Practices
Anchor in purpose: repeat the why until it becomes design criteria
Curate shared language: define key terms so decisions do not drift
Use rituals as reinforcement: make the values visible in action
Tell coherence stories: circulate short case studies where alignment created outsized results
Signals you are progressing
Teams make consistent trade-offs without escalation
New joiners navigate quickly because context is easy to find
Values show up in calendars and budgets, not just posters
Pitfalls
Culture as campaign or slogan
Values that are aspirational but unactionable
Culture becomes less about control and more about continuity. It is how collective memory turns into collective momentum.
The Weavist cycle
How the disciplines interact
The four disciplines are movements in a continuous spiral.
See the Threads: frame the reality that is shaping behaviour
Work the Loom: design structures that make the right behaviours easy
Find the Pattern: create shared interpretation that guides choices
Create the Fabric: embed the meaning so it persists under pressure
Then repeat. Each loop increases fidelity and resilience. Awareness informs design. Design enables better synthesis. Synthesis strengthens culture. Culture widens awareness.
Practical cadence
Monthly: refresh the framing and retire stale metrics
Fortnightly: run learning reviews that change one interface or rule
Weekly: publish a short pattern note that names what is emerging
Daily: practise a micro-ritual that ties action to purpose
Visual metaphor: the fabric spiral
Do not imagine a pyramid. Picture a spiral of thread coiling upward. Each rotation integrates what you learned last time. From above, it looks like a clear pattern. From within, it feels like growth. This is how coherence scales: not by adding more control, but by adding more connection.
Field checklist: start this quarter
Identify three hidden assumptions shaping your biggest program
Replace one gate with a clear interface and visible service contract
Retire two reports and add one sensemaking note that names a real pattern
Introduce one ritual that makes a stated value tangible every week