On this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh welcomes Kathy Coffey Solberg, CEO of CommonUnity Consulting and author of the new book “Reweaving What Matters.” Kathy has spent 25 years helping leaders across business, government, and nonprofits see what is really happening before they try to fix it. Her central claim reframes most change work: organizations can see the results they do not like, but rarely the patterns producing them.
The framework grew out of an actual loom. Kathy is a weaver twice over, a community weaver by profession and a fiber weaver by practice. Looking at a loom fully set up, with its threads and heddles, she saw a system, and she has not stopped seeing systems since. She had planned to write only about reweaving, then made a mistake at the loom, had to go back and undo her own work, and recognized that the phase before the rebuild is the one organizations keep skipping. She named it unweaving.
Unweaving has three steps: Notice, Clarify, and Act. Noticing is a hard place to begin, Kathy admitted, because it feels passive when every instinct says to do something. It asks how communication actually moves, whether money is spent in ways that match the mission, and who holds influence that no title reflects. Clarify turns those observations into understanding, following the pattern of what, so what, now what. Act stays small and deliberate: thirty-day experiments that teach something whether or not they succeed. Her example is the standing two-hour meeting where everyone reports out and then leaves, replaced by a fifteen-minute huddle where people ask for what they need.
Underneath it all are what Kathy calls the warp threads, the structural pieces an organization hangs everything else on. Policies written for a world that no longer exists. Hierarchies built decades ago. Positions unchanged in twenty years even though the work around them moved on.
Reweaving becomes possible only once that space is cleared, and it carries three steps of its own: Envision, Structure, and Weave. Envision asks what is possible with the foundation now in place. Structure answers how, on what timeline, and with which positions. Weave is where people, systems, and programs come together to deliver the work. Kathy usually starts at the bottom of an organization, with the staff closest to the clients, because they see what is needed differently than leaders three levels up.
Leaders who react and throw solutions at problems burn trust with the people counting on them, and each new push meets a little more fatigue. Kathy said early readers of her book kept returning to one word: mattering. Belonging tells people they have a place. Mattering sees each person for what only that person brings. Asked what behavior a leader has to show for this work to produce results, she pointed to listening and to naming plainly when something is not working, which she said is often missing because people do not want to look like they might not know everything.
You can learn more about Kathy Coffey Solberg at https://www.kathysolberg.com/ and connect with her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathy-solberg-98897730/.