WEAVE

An ongoing series on material systems, labour, and design.

Women’s Systems

W— Work

A factory is recognised by its walls.
A workshop by its machines.
A production network spread across homesteads is usually recognised as nothing at all.

The common explanation is paperwork: if there are no forms, no ledgers, no contracts, then there must be no organisation. The conclusion is tidy, and wrong. What is missing is documentation, not coordination.

During visits to several weaving groups, some already destabilised by inconsistent market access, the work was not described in abstract language. It was demonstrated in mechanisms.

One morning, Lucy, the group leader, called repeatedly. When I returned the call, she was direct: transport had failed, and she feared missing the deadline. Some members were in the fields, and final bundling had tightened the schedule. Most of the bags were complete. The constraint was movement, not production.

That distinction matters. Output existed. Logistics had broken.

Within the group, roles are defined. One person tracks fibre stock. Material is distributed according to speed, availability, and design complexity. Quantities are agreed in advance and adjusted as work progresses. Errors are corrected collectively before the next stage. Quality is checked continuously, not only at the end. Pace is regulated through reputation rather than instruction.

Practice, memory, and accountability function as management infrastructure. “If one woman delays, her name carries that delay.” Social infrastructure substitutes for physical infrastructure. What is often called “informal” is more accurately distributed.

Scheduling reveals the structural difference most clearly. Industrial production follows calendar time. Weaving follows seasonal time. Industry uses shifts; weaving follows daylight. Factories depend on supervisors; the group depends on standing within the community. Deadlines hinge on transport availability. Payment follows completed batches rather than payroll cycles.

Production is synchronised to environment, not clock.

Risk management is deliberate. Rain delays drying, so work is staged accordingly. School terms and planting seasons alter labour availability. Harvest reduces output. Fibre shortages are redistributed between households. Variability is anticipated and managed rather than treated as failure.

Consistency does not emerge from rigid enforcement. It emerges from coordination.

Many brands demand uniformity without stabilising the system that produces it. Pressure is applied at the end of the chain rather than shared across it. When demand fluctuates, production absorbs the shock.

A different position is possible: design adapts to the system.

That requires steady orders, realistic lead times, and shared risk mitigation. It requires understanding production before prescribing it. The goal is not to formalise what already functions, but to translate it without stripping away its intelligence.

Informality is not the absence of structure. It is a structure without walls.

The question is not whether they are organised. The question is why we struggle to recognise the organisation when it does not resemble our own.

Expanded in this week’s WEAVE: Women’s Systems.
plentypowerhq.com/weave

E — Eye

LESO as Workwear

When visiting makers and weaving groups, what strikes you first is not the fibre. It is the colour.

Scarlet wrapped at the waist. Indigo against red earth. Acid yellow catching the morning light. The workshop is rarely neutral. It is chromatic, layered, alive.

Most women tie a leso, also called a kanga, around their waists. A rectangular cotton cloth, printed in bold pattern, bordered by the pindo, centred by the mji, and often carrying a Swahili proverb. It moves seamlessly between garment and tool. It wipes hands. Cushions loads. Wraps babies. Protects skirts from dye and dust. It marks modesty. It signals mood.

It is workwear.

Not in the industrial sense, not steel-capped, not flame-retardant, not branded with reflective tape. By strict definition, workwear is engineered clothing designed for durability, safety, and resistance to harsh environments. It protects the body from machinery, chemicals, weather, and abrasion.

The leso does something different.

It protects continuity.

It allows labour to coexist with care. It absorbs sweat and dye. It adapts to bending, sitting, and carrying. It can be tightened when lifting fibre, loosened when nursing a child. It is a foundation disguised as cloth.

Western categories separate “workwear” from “everyday clothing.” In many rural and peri-urban Kenyan contexts, that distinction collapses. The same cloth that attends a funeral may later cushion a basket base. The same proverb that whispers defiance may sit at a woman’s hip while she calculates quantities of sisal for an order.

The leso is not specialised. It is integrated.

And that is the point.

Industrial systems design clothing for tasks. Distributed craft systems design clothing for life. Work is not isolated from family, weather, community, or language. The environment is colour-rich because life is not compartmentalised.

If we claim to support enterprise, we must see what enables it.

If we speak of skills, production, and enterprise, we must also see what holds the day together. Before the fibre is split. Before the basket is tensioned. Before the shipment leaves.

The eye teaches discipline.

Colour here is not decoration. It is an assertion. It is visible in dust and rain. It is the refusal of invisibility in labour that is often dismissed as “informal.”

Perhaps the real question is not whether the leso qualifies as workwear by industrial definition.

Perhaps the question is whether our definitions are too narrow.

Because when you look carefully, truly look, you realise:

The cloth is not ornamental.
It is part of the system that makes work possible.

A — Archive

Book: Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

By Jake Knapp

As a trainer and facilitator, this book’s approach to defining the problem before building alignments is necessary for the weaving systems

What differs is tempo

Sprint compresses decision-making into five days. Women’s production stretches decision-making across seasons. Both are structured. One is accelerated. The other is adaptive.

V — Voice

Influencer influencing Influence

Every so often, influence reveals itself in its rawest form.

In January 2026, IShowSpeed, Darren Jason Watkins Jr., arrived in Kenya as part of his “Speed Does Africa” tour. I knew nothing about it. My ten-year-old niece did. When I mispronounced his name, she corrected me with the confidence of someone who understands the present better than I do.

Within hours, I was watching too.

He ate githeri. He walked through markets. He fed giraffes. He shouted. He ran. He reacted. He treated what we consider ordinary as spectacle.

And millions watched.

This is the mechanics of influence: not expertise, not policy, not long essays. Attention. Amplified at scale.

What interested me was not celebrity tourism. It was reframing. He encountered what we classify as mundane, street food, traffic, and everyday humour, and by responding with unfiltered enthusiasm, he repositioned it as an event. The audience followed his emotional cues.

Energy became narrative.

There is something unsettling in that. A country does not change because it changes. It changes because someone with a camera declares it changed.

But there is also something instructive.

For a brief moment, Kenyans watched themselves being watched and approved. The response was pride. Pride in food. Pride in language. Pride in the absurd choreography of daily life. Pride in systems we often criticise without pause.

The question is not whether tourism numbers rose. That is measurable.

The more interesting question is psychological: what happens when a generation sees its “normal” treated as remarkable?

Influence is not just outward-facing. It loops back.

My niece did not care about economic indicators. She cared that Kenya was “lit.” That matters. Cultural confidence precedes economic confidence. Attention precedes capital.

We often position ourselves as recipients of influence, waiting for validation from fashion houses, foreign media, and development institutions. Yet here was a 21-year-old streamer demonstrating a simpler mechanism: show up loudly, react honestly, broadcast relentlessly.

He did not manufacture Kenya. He encountered it.

Perhaps the lesson is this: we do not lack substance. We lack amplification discipline.

If we can narrate fibre, craft, infrastructure, food, humour, our everyday systems, with equal clarity and scale, we influence the influence.

Not by imitation.

By intention.

Influence is not volume. It is direction.

If we can narrate fibre with the same velocity as spectacle, the system shifts. The voice that carries furthest is rarely the quietest. But it is rarely the most complex either.

Sometimes it is just the one willing to look at the ordinary and declare it worth watching.

E — Echo

Why do we call this informal?