By Amy Evans, AICP

For over a decade in my planning career, I have supported collaborative teams working across criminal legal, human services, and health systems. For most of those years, I’ve thought of the work as simply staffing or participating in steering committees, coalitions, and project teams – each with members from different agencies nested in a committee/board structure – to tackle a specific problem. Successes usually felt like the result of intense detail management and lots of communication, all doused in serendipity. More recently, I’ve begun to see that the victories – especially the most impactful ones – often emerged from the relationships that grew between people within and across systems.

A 2021 book by David Ehrlichman called Impact Networks has helped bring this new view into focus. Ehrlichman notes that people have organized themselves into creative, adaptable social networks for pretty much all of human history. And while networks have many benefits, a downside is that they’re rarely able to work organically toward a common goal. Ehrlichman’s premise is that “While networks are not inherently strategic, they can be designed to be strategic.” Most of the rest of Impact Networks, his term for a strategic network, breaks down how to recognize and cultivate networks, what leadership looks like in a network setting, and any number of tips, tools, and tricks that people can use to convene and lead from any position.

In reading this book, I’ve come to realize that I often sit in the role of what Ehrlichman calls a network weaver, someone who directly connects with network participants and links them with one another, fostering relationships across the network. June Holley, in the Network Weaver Handbook, goes further and defines a weaver’s purpose as “helping people identify their interests and challenges, connecting people strategically where there’s potential for mutual benefit, and serving as a catalyst.”

It’s a safe bet that Holley’s network weaver role feels familiar to most planners. What seemed like serendipity to me, in hindsight, is simply what happens when disconnected people come together around a common pain point and a network begins to self-organize. At the same time, planners may feel lost or ineffective in the decentralized nature of a network, particularly planners who lead within their own organization and/or those experienced in highly structured planning processes. If that description fits you, take comfort. Networks can be led from any point, regardless of someone’s position in their own organization or within the network’s infrastructure. This network characteristic also makes the activity of network weaving especially impactful in communities that tend to collect adjectives like underserved and disadvantaged. In this context, an impact network can be deeply empowering as well as sustainable, as weavers intentionally knit together relationships that facilitate community members in growing and revealing their own opportunities together.

More information, including many tools highlighted in the book, are available at no charge. This article is a follow-up to Leading Change Through Systems Thinking in APA PA’s May newsletter.