For years, I worked with complexity in organisational contexts - helping leaders make sense of uncertainty, emergence, and change. Creating frameworks. Teaching complexity thinking.
Then life itself became the more demanding teacher.
Through grief, joy, transition, and profound reorientation, I began to see complexity not as a problem to hold at arm’s length with the right framework, but as a living field to walk with. Something to attune to. Something to remember how to navigate.
That shift is where Waycraft grows from.
What I am currently exploring is finding ways towards Aliveness. In our work, our organisations, and our communities. Aliveness as something real we can use as an organising principle and orienting direction. A signal or frequency a system emits when it's actually living. Christopher Alexander heard it in buildings and created a pattern language to design for it. I look for it in organisations, in people standing at thresholds, in the structures we build to hold our work. The question shaping my own vector of exploration now: how do we create the conditions for more aliveness? What are the ways that will get us there?
Words are spells
Words are spells, and so I am playing with new words. Words that can reshape our relationship with how we move through life.
Tim Ingold, also a word magician, speaks of Humaning (verb), not Human (noun). Humaning is moving. Life unfolds in movement: in finding ways to be in relationship, to heal, to navigate change, and to meaningful work. And movement unfolds along paths, some old and well-worn, others made as we walk. Some paths are straight, others meander, pivot or spiral.
So here are a few new terms I am playing with …
Wayweaving: Weaving with ways past, present and future. Sometimes finding, sometimes making, sometimes shaping, sometimes showing.
Waying: a verb, a rhythm, a practice of staying in relationship with the unknown. Waying is the way.
Waycraft: the container for all the ways we weave with ways … the craft of “walking-with” the unknown.
Why “Craft”?
The word craft comes from Old English cræft: meaning not just skill, but strength, power, even virtue.
It’s a word that speaks to something lived and relational, shaped by devotion, practice, and contact with life.
Unlike strategy or doctrine, craft resists abstraction.
It’s not a method for controlling complexity or designing perfect paths.
The “craft” here is subtler. It lives in the wrist, in the pause, in the space between sensing and stepping. It’s the kind of craft that comes from being in relationship: with uncertainty, with timing, with place, and with life.
Waycraft is not a formula.
It’s not about finding the way or claiming a way.
It’s about tending our capacity for wayweaving and waying: in plural, emergent, ancient, and alive ways.
It is a liminal practice. Always in the in-between.
Weaving together wisdom from the ancients, the mystics and emerging science.
It holds polarities such as masculine and feminine, individual and collective, and person and system.
It’s about learning how to walk, feel, and respond in real time… with awareness, with others, and with the more-than-human world.
Some aspects of Waycraft feel like archaeology:
Unearthing wisdom buried under modernity. Listening to the songs our ancestors knew how to hear and honouring the relational intelligence of the ancient paths.
Others feel like scouting:
Finding ways into and through new frontiers where no compass helps. Where we are guided by attention, attunement, and resonance. Like infant fish orienting to the sound of a coral reef, we, too, have subtle senses we can employ for Waycraft.
We tune. We sense. We remember. We weave.
A constellation of practices and frameworks.
I work with a constellation of practices and frameworks that support this kind of movement. Some of these are …
COOL: Courage, Openness, Observing, and Lightness - as a posture for the unknown.
STAR: Sense, Tune In, Awareness, and Respond - as a rhythm of attunement.
And the WaysFinder - a scaffold and compass for orienting when no map will do.
But Waycraft is more than any of these.
It is not a model to teach. It is a stance, a song, and a way of relating.
It is something we do, and something that shapes us over time.
This Substack is my hearth for sharing what I’m learning.
Sometimes through frameworks and concepts.
Sometimes through story, image, or poetry.
I’m not here to define the way.
I’m here to share what I’m finding as I walk it.
Welcome to Waycraft. Let’s way together.
Note: If you’re enjoying Waycraft, one of the best ways to support it is by recommending it to your readers or friends. Quiet resonance grows stronger when shared.
Your opening line so captures the essence of what makes this third stage of life so interesting. As you so aptly write -- we are living in a time when our inherited ways no longer serve. So good!
This is deeply meaningful and thoughtful wordsmithing. I look forward to learning more about your frameworks and the art of waycrafting as a path forward.