Glossary

To thrive together in this world, everyone must be empowered to live for universal wellbeing: to act, from moment to moment, for the optimisation of personal wellbeing (physical, emotional, mental, social and spiritual) and societal wellbeing (social, political and economic) and planetary wellbeing (other species, soil, air, water).

Thriving can be defined as everyone and everything flourishing together. It makes no sense to think of an individual thriving at the expense of anyone or anything else. A healthy cell lives in a healthy organ, in a healthy body, in a healthy family, in a healthy community, in healthy species, in healthy natural habitats on a healthy planet.

The wellbeing of every human and of every living thing is wholly intertwined and interdependent. It is through every single action – from moment to moment – that we change the world.

“As we move around this world and as we act with kindness, perhaps, or with indifference or with hostility toward the people we meet, we are setting the great spider web atremble. The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the trembling stops or in what far place and time my touch will be felt.” F. Buechner

Organising communities and teams of change leaders – and deepening their capacity to effect systemic change – requires a particular kind of leadership that we call weaving.

Change leaders must learn to weave their own communities and teams – catalysing, activating, facilitating, inspiring, stewarding, curating, nurturing, fostering, and shepherding fellow change leaders in collaborative, systemic impact.

A Change Leader is:
- Aligned: taking the lead in – and fully committed to – creating learning ecosystems that empower every person to live for universal wellbeing
- Collaborative: leading change in an explicitly open and collaborative manner
- Systemic: committed to deepening their capacity to effect enduring ecosystemic change

Change Leaders can represent various stakeholder groups – teachers, school leaders, parents, employers, unions, policy makers, etc

Adopting the vision and values of the Weaving Lab as one’s own and applying it intentionally in professional and personal pursuits to fulfill that vision. An aligned Change Leader prioritises and focuses their (and their teams’) efforts on creating learning ecosystems that empower everyone to live for Universal Wellbeing.

Thinking, planning and taking action to create lasting changes in mindsets and mechanisms.
Making specific changes in a system, but also thinking about the whole system, addressing root causes and long term consequences.
Reading the current system, forecasting and backcasting.

“A system is an interconnected and interdependent series of entities, where decisions and actions in one entity are consequential to other neighbouring entities.” ~ Welbourn, D. et al. (2012) Leadership of whole systems. King’s Fund.

“Systems are composed of multiple components of different types, both tangible and intangible. They include, for example, people, resources and services, as well as relationships, values, and perceptions. Systems exist in an environment, have boundaries, exhibit behaviours, and are made up of both interdependent and connected parts, causes and effects… Social systems are often complex and involve intractable, or ‘wicked’, problems.” ~ from here.

“A complex network or interconnected system.”~ from The Oxford English Dictionary.

We use this word to distinguish between the dominant education system (typically thought of as including a narrow set actors and entities, including teachers, schools, universities, policy makers etc. – operating in a linear fashion – being largely disconnected and slow to change) and a new kind of learning ecosystem (more inclusive, including parents, media, unions, etc. – more complex, connected, dynamic, adaptive and emergent).

A learning ecosystem is a diverse community of actors (in any neighbourhood, network or organisation) who are learning together, intentionally, and through a variety of dynamically evolving learning experiences and environments (including in nature), to achieve a shared purpose. With everyone learning in this way, not only is every individual learning to contribute to the shared purpose, but the whole ecosystem is continuously and consciously evolving for the better.

For the Weaving Lab, we are specifically interested in learning ecosystems that have as their shared purpose everyone learning to live for universal wellbeing.