For reasons lost to the unfathomable workings of my subconscious I came back from a run today with this idea that structures of change are like the warp and weft of a cloth. Literally it conveys the process of weaving threads to create a cloth; metaphorically the idea of underlying structure. Which led me to contemplate my strengths in weaving a framework or structure through which to help make sense of things (you’ll find them all – over two dozen – in blogs and reports on this website).

I’ve always found great flexibility in structure; it not only gives me a way of approaching a given situation, it gives me the freedom to depart from it. As someone once said to me, inviting me to present at their partnership meeting: ‘just extemporise, Ian’ ( had to look it up at the time). Turns out I can only really do this effectively when I have a structure to catch me should I lose my way and need to regroup. I dislike the opposite, to be honest – that idea that there is simply no process, structure or way of understanding what’s going on is to me like jumping out of a plane and free falling and then looking around to see if I actually have a parachute strapped to my back or not. It’s not a situation I’m particularly comfortable in. 

So here I am figuring out how to make sense of the world and creating structures and frameworks to help me do that. Weaving ideas together to create my own cloths, something new. Frameworks that might help me, and others, on their own change journey. That helps people to address their own challenges and opportunities? To extend the metaphor beyond all reasonable grounds this is perhaps akin to the tailor cutting the cloth to create a bespoke item of clothing. 

And so this image that popped into my head while pounding local streets earlier was of me as a tailor; weaving the cloth then cutting it to suit the situation, the client, the need. Not being the person wearing the new clothes, but working alongside them, fitting the garment so they can look and be their best, can create the change they want to see. 

Nostalgia hits when I suddenly remember my Nan’s stories of her Dad, himself a tailor in London’s East End in the 1920s, taking the brave step to go it alone and start up his own business (only to be tragically killed when Nan was a child by the first recorded hit-and-run incident on a dual carriageway). And here I am, in my own kind of way, embracing and embodying the same ideas and concepts of weaving and creating; not cloth and clothes but ideas and change instead.  

Funny how, in some small way, I’m embodying those same characteristics and approaches only in a different century and a different context. Feeling connected to my heritage and legacy while attempting to create one of my own, to add my own small contribution into a world that I think desperately needs new ways of weaving ideas together to create new insights that might just fit the challenges we face.