tangled thread theory

10 Aug, 2026

In a room in my house lies a very large bag.

Inside that bag, there is a lot of red wool.

This wool had an earlier career, pinned intricately in Chiharu Shiota's Threads of Life exhibition. Now, it's been roughly bundled together in a bag to be given away. Travelling, as things often do, through weak ties: friends of friends. Ending up with me, to be used by festival I co-organise, Hundred Heads.

The festival took place last month. The red thread was an unexpected late arrival, but quickly tangled itself into decorative and narrative elements. I wrapped and knotted and crocheted with this chenille-like, faintly iridescent, tactile wonder.

Making new creations meant untangling the inherited heap. And it was during one of these untangling sessions that I experienced the realisation of what I gesture at here: tangled thread theory.

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In certain spaces it's more and more common to hear the term weaving. It's a trendy frame for cross-org collaborations. People and organisations are no longer just facilitators or convenors -- they're weavers. Just a sample:

• Farming the Future advertised for a "Participatory Funding Lead & Network Weaver" role earlier this year.
• Dark Matter Labs - who in other ways deeply recognise complexity - talk of "Weaving the threads" of desirable life-ennobling economies.
• A Pattern Book for Regenerative Design is structured with the metaphor of weaving and what the different patterns created by different weaves can symbolise.
• At the European Food Systems Science Network (FoSSNet) conference in July, I heard the metaphor deployed when championing the benefits of building a food systems science network.
• Meanwhile Bioregional Weaving Labs aim to "build capacity and catalyse multi-stakeholder partnerships, mobilising at least 100.000 changemakers per bioregion".

What is weaving meant to be about? Aptly named to claim their authority on the matter, The Weaving Lab say:

Weaving is the practice of connecting people, projects and places in coherent, synergistic and purposeful ways.

And their homepage quotes someone who says that weaving is "much more than networking", an "orchestration of initiatives, strategies and tactics towards our shared vision".

How many parts marketing, how many parts genuine innovation in theories or practices?

I think weaving is appealing because it both activates a romantic vision of non-digital craft and making; and by definition preserves a sense of multiple parts being combined into a greater whole while still maintaining a distinct identity of their own. And it has found currency in a time when convening and networking have come up the agenda: perhaps "networking" is now so ubiquitous, there's a need to differentiate from the mainstream.

Weaving! What a breath of fresh air, a crafty realness compared to the cold machine-ness of networks. Weaving! Bringing together different threads into a whole, into a tapestry or a piece that has a greater beauty and coherence. Weaving! Making something stronger, as disparate things come into relationship. Weaving! Not "coordinating" or "networking". Not "synthesising". Not "integrating".

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I sink my hands into the bag and tug on a thread at random. Sometimes they come quite easily, and the chosen thread turns out short, already cut in the process of exhibition assembly or dismantling. Sometimes they are looooooooooooong... and disappear off into the thicket of other threads. It's bewildering and impossible to get a sense of the whole.

I pull at the latest longer strand till it is taut in my hand. I tug again to get a sense of the opportunity to work with it. I pull and can feel it sliding out, as though through some temporarily aligned tunnel, coming away, coming out, until... a snag. Then the nearest threads snarl together and are tugged up towards me too.

Now the subtler work begins: quite literally following the thread as it twists and turns, trying to isolate where it's anchored, and where's the tangle-point. It turns out these can be local to where the thread emerges, or elsewhere, deep in another clump-centre within the great heap.

The approach I adopt is isolating some smaller clump and working at a few threads at once, pulling them apart, seeing what gives, trying to understand how they are tangled together. Sometimes there's a knot that is fairly easy to identify. Sometimes the same thread is snagged on itself and the self-loops are straightforward if slow and frustrating to resolve. Sometimes it's too unwieldy to lift up and rotate several kilos of the thread in its totality, I just don't have the right access to reach where the current thread is getting caught, so I try another.

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Did we ever stop to think about what "weaving" presupposes? And what is lost if we naively adopt this frame?

Because it isn't just a metaphor, or trendy title for a relationship-building job or initiative. As with all frames, it organises what we are primed to see or screen out.

I cannot simply start weaving. The threads before me are already tangled. There is no setting up of neat skeins on a loom; I have visible ends and strands I can start to tug, and maybe work them loose. If I manage to weave anything at all, it will be a small patch, vanishing against the bulk of the pile. Or woven through an existing tangle, complicating what's already knotted there. Or totally cut away from where I found it, a neat weave in separate, controlled conditions, not interacting with the real original mess at all.

Essentially, the metaphor of weaving presupposes a world of inert and free materials to be woven together in a set structure. However sculptural and varied the weaving pattern gets, isn't it fundamentally about two sets of threads - the warp and the weft - getting interlaced at right angles to one another? These characteristics: freely available sets of threads, at right angles, on a flat plane, via human machinery, are totally at odds with awareness of the messiness and dynamism of complex or VUCA systems. It's an ironic mismatch.

So that's my provocation. We don't need (more) weaving. We need tangle literacy. We need untanglers and retanglers. We need tangle tracers, tangle dancers.

Rather than presupposing an unwoven state: learn about the existing tangles. Learn if and how you want to intervene. Appreciate existing initiatives and interactions. To start: observe and interact.

It feels like we are in this moment of wanting more coordination and networking, but the rush for this might be tangling things up in perverse, confusing and unintended ways. Making more busy-work. And if we think of relationship work as tangling not weaving, perhaps we retain more humility and perspective of how we fit in to larger wholes.^{1 2}

Sinking my hands, heart and mind into a massive bag of tangled wool got me curious about how we are being served by one metaphor versus another.

If you're already working with tangles, why talk in the simplistic terms of weaving?

And if you've only been thinking in terms of weaving: what are you missing? Maybe your warps and wefts are snagged up elsewhere, and that's a source of some of your frustrations.