The Weavers System has its own website :
The site covers the Weavers System and supports talks and webinars.
What it is, how it works, and what it can do.
What the Weavers is
The Weavers is, at heart, a document attached to an AI prompt. When you ask an AI assistant a question, the Weavers travels with it — and brings an additional level of knowledge and wisdom into the conversation.
Where does that wisdom come from? From people. When the Weavers is used by an expert team, their experience, judgement, and hard-won lessons are encapsulated in the document — and from that moment, everything they know is available to the AI assistant, in every conversation it joins. The AI brings speed and breadth; the Weavers brings the depth of human experience. Together they produce something neither can produce alone.
The three documents
The subject areas can be wide, and the Weavers is built as a small family of documents:
- The Weavers Main document — focused on Strategy and Governance, particularly the strategy and governance of substantial change.
- ARIA — covering Innovation, Building, Delivery, Execution and Education: how things are made, taught, and brought into the world.
- Ethics and Culture — covering values, culture, and the questions of what a change is ultimately for.
Each can be used alone. In combination, they address a much wider range of subjects — a strategy question, for instance, nearly always turns out to have innovation questions and cultural questions inside it.
The two levels
Level 1 — knowledge and wisdom. This was the Weavers’ original use, and it is the simplest to picture: the AI assistant draws on the encapsulated experience of experts as it works. Ask it to review a plan, and it reviews the plan with that accumulated wisdom at its side — the lessons of what has worked, what has failed, and why.
Level 2 — a different viewpoint. This is where the Weavers becomes something genuinely unusual. AI assistants normally answer from the standard framing — the established, documented view of a subject. Level 2 enables the AI to step outside that framing: to raise the questions that aren’t normally asked, to propose inversions (what if the accepted view has things exactly backwards?), and to offer viewpoints from beyond the standard frame. We call this working Above the Line — reaching the new insights that sit beyond what conventional analysis normally covers.
The Level 2 workings have been added into the Weavers document itself, so there is a choice in every piece of work: operate at Level 1, at Level 2, or in combination. Each option gives the work a different emphasis — deep grounding, fresh perspective, or both at once.
What it can do
Used this way, the Weavers has already supported a substantial body of work. It can:
- Review major national strategies — including analyses of UK health service plans and national data platforms.
- Review the strategy of a town or an organisation — including a full regeneration strategy for Southport and a strategy for its visual arts community.
- Undertake reviews across a wide range of areas — education, apprenticeships, community organisations, technology adoption, and more.
- Propose alternative options for consideration — the choices that sit outside the standard set, surfaced so that decision-makers can weigh them.
And there is one further capability: the Weavers can aid the building of new systems using the same approach. A team wanting to capture its own knowledge and wisdom — in its own field, for its own use — can build a Weavers-style system of its own, in a fraction of the time the original took to create. The method is proven; the path is now much shorter.
The one rule. Everything the Weavers produces is offered the same way: as questions and options for investigation — never as validation. It does not tell you your plan is right. It shows you the questions your plan hasn’t asked, and the options you haven’t seen — and leaves the judgement where it belongs: with the people who know the subject and carry the responsibility.
This is one of three guides to the Weavers. Its internal structure is described in The Weavers Structure (the three-layer model), and its full story — what it is, and how it came to be — in the report prepared for the BCS Leadership Team. Examples of its work, on the NHS, on organisational learning, and on Southport, are available in the Reports section.
Southport Innovation Centre 