What Matters?

Readers of Reweaving What Matters keep telling me the book is about mattering. I didn’t set out to write that book. But Bob Stilger saw it and first named it in the foreword:

“Mattering is the practice this book teaches, even when it appears to be about workplaces.”

There’s a difference between belonging and mattering. Belonging says there’s a place for you here. Mattering says the way you do what you do makes a difference here, and this is what it looks like because of you. Most workplaces are working hard on the first. Very few have gotten to the second.

The title holds both. What matters names the threads worth keeping. Mattering names what happens when people know they are one of them. I’ve come to believe you can’t reweave the first without the second.

Why this title

Reweaving What Matters – Practical Tools for Workplace Transformation went through many iterations on its journey to its current title.

A few titles that did not make it through were:

• Hearth, Loom, and the Making of Meaning

• Handmade Change: Lessons in Leadership from the Slow Wisdom of Bread and Cloth (yes, bread - I was going to weave AND bake)

• Beyond the Thread

• Unweaving to Reconnect

• Woven With Purpose: Threads of Human Connection and Meaningful Impact

• CommonUnity: Unraveling to Reconnect, with the subtitle From Disconnection to Deep Community: A Guide to Reweaving Our Social Fabric

• Reweaving Your Leadership: A Field Guide for Rediscovering Purpose, Power and Possibility in a Fractured World

I let go of having bread baking. At one point, I also let go of associating the book with power in a world where I see power being used to usher in dominance and the destruction of systems we live and work in and that our country was founded on.

As for the field guide, I have not let go of that and look forward to crafting the over 50 workbook pages into a field guide once I learn from readers how they interact with them.

So when I was recently asked, What matters? What exactly are people reweaving? I wanted to answer properly.

Everything matters, so nothing does

Look at an ordinary week. The tasks at home and the tasks at work. Our own care, and the care of kids, parents, and extended family. The friendships we know we need as adults and rarely have time to tend. Service, which fills us up. The yard, the garden, the meal that feeds both the belly and the soul.

Then there’s work: the inbox, the meetings, the strategic plan that may or may not match the work that is happening. There’s the question of how to raise wages enough to keep good people while still living our stated values. There’s AI, which we’re told will either save us or end us, and which somehow seems to be adding hours to people’s days instead of freeing them up and offer the efficiencies we sought.

And underneath it all is information. So much information.

When everything is urgent, we lose the ability to tell what’s important. We stop choosing and start reacting.

The crisis beneath the crises

You may have heard the term polycrisis: economic instability, political polarization, climate disruption, runaway technology, and social breakdown, all tangled together. Metacrisis goes one layer deeper. It holds that these aren’t separate problems. They’re symptoms of a shared condition, produced by a global system organized around growth.

For me, the metacrisis comes down to disconnection. We’ve lost our connection to purpose and meaning, to each other, to nature, and to the cultures that once held us. The distance between how we live and how interconnected life truly is has grown wide enough to feel.

That’s heavy and leads to conversations on collapse and hope, which I’ll save for another day. It also points somewhere useful. If the root is disconnection, the work is reconnection, and that work happens one relationship, one team, and one organization at a time.

How do we know what matters?

We don’t find out by making a list. We find out by noticing where things fray.

This is where Unweaving begins. Before you can reweave anything, you must notice what’s actually happening, not what the strategic plan says or what everyone agrees to say in the meeting. When a system is under tension, the threads that give way tell you which ones were carrying the weight.

What I’ve seen, over and over:

Relationships matter. We are biologically wired for connection. Some of us find it at work, some at home, and some in community. The quality of those connections matters most, and moving past the superficial takes time. It usually takes more time than we want to spend, and about as much time as it took for things to become difficult in the first place. It also has not been modeled for most of us how to build those relationships and friendships in healthy, meaningful ways.

At work, what matters is the relationship between the organization and the people it exists to serve. That’s true for businesses, government, and nonprofits alike. Many workplaces have let that relationship go slack. Trust breaks. Joy in the work drains out. Meaning gets replaced by productivity metrics. Years ago, Simon Sinek told us to start with why, and many of us nodded and then went back to the inbox. It is time to hold that work of the why alongside your unweaving.

When everyone answers differently

Ask twenty people what matters and you’ll get twenty answers. Leaders often treat that as a problem to solve: get aligned, land on one answer, move on.

Weaving taught me otherwise.

On a loom, the warp runs lengthwise. In a workplace, it’s the values, policies, and procedures, the structure everything else depends on. The weft crosses through it horizontally: culture, communication, personality. That’s where the color and texture live.

Here’s what non-weavers don’t know. The warp only works under tension. Slack threads can’t hold anything. Pull too tight, and they snap.

Different answers to what matters create tension. Most organizations try to eliminate it. But tension held well is what makes the cloth hold together. It is also the place we learn. We learn what works and what no longer holds value. The work isn’t forcing twenty answers into one. It’s checking whether your warp is strong enough and tensioned well enough to carry all twenty, then discerning what you hold on to.

Back to mattering

This is where the two meanings of the title meet.

What matters gets rewoven by people who know they matter. If a person doesn’t feel seen, they won’t tell you what’s fraying. They won’t offer their thread. They’ll comply, and compliance makes a thin cloth.

So, when readers tell me the book is about mattering, I think they’ve found the hidden premise. You can’t reweave a workplace, or a community, or a country, while treating the people in it as interchangeable parts. Seeing the individual is the reweaving.

Reweaving What Matters is about recentering what’s working and remembering what we need to create the workplaces and the world we actually want to be part of. It begins with a question most of us never stop long enough to answer.

So I’ll ask you: what matters to you? And who around you needs to hear that they do?