Weaving and scaling: two forces of nature combined
A long time ago I was sitting at a long dinner table. At the head was the director of a children’s theatre. The subject was religion. She recalled a young girl in her class who’s parents were fanatically atheistic. Upon being asked about god, the girl presented the most wonderful way of bridging her parents world and that of religion. She said that ‘once upon a time there was a big bang which divided the universe into a thousand pieces. Ever since that moment god has been trying to put the pieces together again.’
Essentially weaving and regenerative work is about ‘putting the pieces back together again.’ We live in a fractured world where we have become alienated from nature, our community and even ourselves. In this fractured world weaving is about mending those connections. It goes far beyond the practice of networking, which tends to be more transactional and two directional.
Seeing things as whole and bringing them together is healing. I have heard weavers describe it as an act of love. Many see it as spiritual. So how do we bring weaving into a world that has been stripped of its spiritual context? The world of business for example? The world of business adheres to the mantra of growth, so at first I considered weaving in clear contradiction with scaling. But then I had to face up to the contradiction in my own thinking. I guess I had to weave a little harder.
The smallest ecosystem
The smallest man-made ecosystem was created by David Latimer who placed a miniature garden in a glass bottle. Sealing it only to open it 12 years later to ad a small drop of water. To this day the ecosystem survives for 60 years. What can we learn this experiment?
If we take Latimers vase and we consider this one single element to be perfectly balanced, we can create a thousand vases that are equally balanced. This is how you might understand scaling in the classic way. If a single class should break it has little consequence for the other vases, yet some value is lost from the whole. What would happen if a single vase would break but it’s elements would be absorbed by the other vases? In this case the value of the total system would remain the same, the loss of a single element has no consequence. This is where weaving comes in.
Weaving and scaling in nature
One could compare scaling to fractals in nature. Fractals are natures way of conserving creative energy, they are based on uniformity. Reproduction follows a clear and defined pattern. All flowers on a bush have the same number of leaves, leaves have the same shape and together the leaves form the same shape.
However, at the same time nature knows many different bushes who have distinctly shaped leaves and flowers. Diversity is enhanced by the process of evolution. Evolution is irregular and unpredictable yet beautifully balanced in a larger timeframe and at scale. Evolution is not lineair but complex. So is the collaboration between species and elements in the system, which is constantly ‘emerging and evolving.’
Weaving, like evolution, is about emerging and evolving complex systems. It creates the right preconditions for value to go around.
Balance within and between
What sets weaving apart from scaling is that it is more about the space in between elements and not so much about multiplying the elements themselves. It is about connecting the smaller elements in a system to each other and to the wider context. Both are important because when applied in a mutually reinforcing and balanced way, like in nature, it creates the conditions for abundance.
The reality we live in is however far from balanced. Our home environment could be seen as an ecosystem, the city we live in, the organization we work at, a farm, a country. Very few of these ecosystems is truly balanced. Just look at our house and the amount of input and waste required to keep us alive. But, contrary to the reality of the vase, we are constantly moving between ecosystems that are woven together. The downside of that is that we have come to trust upon the wider system to correct for all of these internal imbalances.
The multiple crisis we are facing clearly demonstrate that this type of trust is blind trust. But we dont have to go back to the drawing board. In fact capitalism is a great example of an interconnected system at scale, accept that neither the elements or the whole is balanced.
Bear with me, but if we see our extractive model of production as a type of decay, the problem is that it has for a long time lacked any form of counterbalance. Because in nature decay and growth are one. Growth only exists to replace what has become obsolete.
What does this mean for generative practitioners
As a society at large but especially as a regenerative movement, we have a collective responsibility to create balance in all the ecosystems in which we interact, because each of them ads or reduces the balance of the whole. For this we need both weaving and scaling. We need to both replicate our successes as well as to tie them strongly together and to the institutions that they will eventually replace.
Predictability and emergence, uniformity and diversity, , weaving and scaling. They are all two sides of the same coin and there’s a moment in time for both in our current social transformation. Although considering that in the last 100 years of industrial production, there was a clear supremacy of the first, expect there to be a marked shift towards the second.
There is a lot we can learn from nature, but it also matters who we consider our teacher. In western though a lot of our thinking has been influence by the notion ‘survival of the fittest’, which by the way does not do justice to the overall body of work of Charles Darwin. But none the less it is demonstrative of a more lineair way of thinking. The same type of thinking that feels more comfortable with scaling and predictability. This type of thinking alone leads to separation. On the other side of the teacher spectrum we find indigenous thought which I believe is more geared towards weaving and integration. So when we talk about creating balance in the world around us it also matters that we practice diversity in our own thinking and in our relations.
Creating balance also means creating counter-balance and bringing the undervalued or excluded forward; think of native and other culturally marginalized peoples, women, rivers, future generations, youth, informal economies, soil, inspiration and happiness. We can only truely do that if we are willing to evolve into new directions and connect deeply with the people and ecosystems we meet rather than being focussed on lineair growth. But as I have pointed out, we also need scale to match the size of the challenges we face.
If you like this article, also read my prvious one ‘Is weaving the new scaling?’
