Systems Change for Tech & Society Leaders

I've organized the course around my framework for seeing, shifting, and stewarding complex sociotechnical systems: WEAVER.

 

A WEAVER is someone who …

“turns discrete threads into coherent patterns”
“makes two things one”
“combines into a whole”
“goes by twisting and turning.”

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WEAVER offers both a diagnostic lens and a process for change, moving leaders away from prediction and control and toward stewardship, learning, and adaptive capacity.

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W - Widen the Lens
E — Examine the Frames
A -- Align Directional Futures
V -- Visualize the Actor Network
E -- Enact New Interactions

R -- Reinforce Relational Infrastructure

 

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W — Widen Your Lens.

In the course, we start by surfacing how your system is currently being seen. By yourself, and others in your system.

This step makes visible the assumptions that shape what feels normal, obvious, or inevitable—especially linear cause-and-effect thinking that masks complexity.

 

E — Examine the Frames
Frames and narratives do not merely describe systems—they actively shape them. This step identifies the dominant stories, metaphors, and problem definitions guiding action, and asks whose interests they serve.

Reframing can realign interests, redistribute power, and open new solution spaces by changing how actors orient to the system. But you can't reframe them if you don't first examine them!

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A -- Align Directional Futures

Rather than fixed end-states or rigid targets, WEAVER emphasizes directional futures—shared orientations that guide decisions under uncertainty.

Leaders articulate what the future should look and feel like, then work backward to identify plausible pathways.

This supports strategy that is adaptive, multi-horizon, and resilient rather than brittle to change.

The key shift here is from trying to forecast the future toward directional alignment of disparate actors.

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V -- Visualize the Actor Network

Systems are networks of human and non-human actors: people, institutions, technologies, data, laws, metrics, and norms.

This step maps relationships, dependencies, incentives, and power—explicitly accounting for how past decisions continue to shape present behavior.

Power is understood as structural, dynamic, and embedded in routines, defaults, and infrastructures—not just formal authority. But in order to identify how power flows through your system -- and identify openings to shift it -- we have to first visualize the network!

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E -- Enact New Interactions

Systems change when patterns of interaction change. This step focuses on redesigning routines, information flows, incentives, feedback loops, and constraints that reproduce existing outcomes.

Rather than “fixing tools" or "changing people," leaders learn to change the conditions in which they operate —introducing friction where speed distorts, creating productive tension, disrupting and re-patterning feedback loops, and adjusting governing and enabling constraints.

The key shift here is from changing components → toward focusing on conditions and dynamics, and re-patterning behavior.

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R -- Reinforce Relational Infrastructure

​Relational infrastructure is the the capacity of a system to evolve through trust, feedback, and shared meaning — sustaining diverse, adaptive relationships across people, technologies, and institutions so that coherence emerges from within rather than being imposed from above.

Success is defined not by outputs alone, but by whether the system can adapt, host diversity, and self-correct.

Relational infrastructure is what allows systems to evolve without constant crisis or control.

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What WEAVER Makes Possible

WEAVER moves leaders from intervention to stewardship—helping them cut through hype, confront power, work with uncertainty, and design strategies that reshape systems by reshaping relationships.

It is not a checklist or a linear plan, but a way of weaving discrete threads—people, technology, narratives, and incentives—into coherent, adaptive patterns over time.

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*The Playbook associated with this framework and course includes a 5 page Bibliography. I can’t include all of those citations here, but I would be remiss not to credit a number of thinkers who have influenced my ideas, and by extension, the development of WEAVER, including Dave Snowden, Nora Bateson, Mike Ananny, danah boyd, Jens Beckert, Ruha Benjamin, John Cheney-Lippold, Indy Johar, Kees Dorst, Bruno Latour, Alicia Juarrero, Vaughn Tan, adrienne maree brown, Clayton Williams, Patrick Hoverstadt, and Lucy Loh.