Hexagon People: A Theory of Civic Coherence
Or, Interstitionaries Gonna Interstitate
Some of you may have read my essay about being an Interstitionary. To recap briefly: Interstitionaries are people who operate in the connective tissue of society — between roles, institutions, disciplines, and identities. They’re natural triangulators, cross-pollinators, and weavers of coherence in fragmented times.
Since publishing that piece, I’ve been observing how Interstitionaries show up in the world. And I’ve noticed a particularly powerful sub-type I’ve come to call Hexagon People. These are Interstitionaries who are not only weaving insights and relationships locally, but also across virtual communities, movements, and fields of practice. They operate both “on the ground” and “in the ether,” bridging gaps between the grounded and the floating, the embodied and the digital.
Why Hexagons? The two strongest shapes in nature are the triangle and the hexagon.
Triangle: Structurally stable, distortion-resistant, and foundational.
Hexagon: Highly efficient, space-filling, and resilient. Found in beehives, molecules, the geometric center of spider webs and yes, the shape of the collagen bundles in the “newly discovered” organ system — the fascial interstitium.
Crucially: hexagons are made of triangles. They are distributed coherence.
From Triangulation to Transformation
Many Interstitionaries — whether grounded in place or floating across networks — spend their time triangulating to answer:
What is going on here?
What’s emerging over there?
What might be possible if we connected the two?
They are the ones others turn to for clarity, introductions, and next steps. Their informal labor syncs information, opportunity, and action. Grounded Interstitionaries might be the neighborhood matriarch, the school group organizer, or the grocery clerk who knows everyone’s stories. Floating Interstitionaries might be thought leaders, organizers, or connectors who link distant groups around common goals.
And then there are the Hexagon People — those who move between both worlds, collecting insights and stitching coherence across geography, identity, and sector. They build what I’ve come to see as a kind of civic honeycomb: strong, resilient, distributed, and relational.
A Community of Practice (of Practice)
Over the past year, I’ve had a front-row seat to this phenomenon through an experiment with Christine Lai and Ariel Brooks. Together we launched a community of practice for Interstitionaries. From a pool of more nearly 700 survey respondents who self-identified as Interstitionaries, hundreds joined to:
Meet 1:1 with other Interstitionaries in “Adjacent Possible” meetups
Participate in storytelling sessions to surface shared patterns
Take an Interstitionary self-assessment to better understand how they operate
We sort of became unpaid Interstitionaries of Interstitionaries … a meta-job description if there ever was one.
And we began to notice a curious and elegant pattern emerging — something that felt like a massive opportunity to catalyze more civic coherence.
Stitching the Whole
International peace builder and author John Paul Lederach offers a beautiful framework in his essay, “Why Movements Need to Learn to Fly Like Bees and Thread Like Spiders.” He describes what’s needed in times of social unraveling, which is for small mixed groups he calls “spider groups” — composed of individuals from various communities who travel together and collectively sense-make and spin webs of understanding, connections and where possible, affection.
“What the national level needs most is robust local stitching and finding better ways to address our broken circulatory system. What this moment requires is to take up the spider group challenge and the very practical principle of the accessibility questions: Who do I have access to where I live? And who, if they found a way to travel together around our immediate, divided local landscape, might just create the improbable, surprising conversations that could startle our community into a better web of relationships? It is, after all, the quality of stitching that gathers the whole.”
Lederach identifies three qualities necessary for civic coherence:
Emplacement — People working where they live
Stitching — Circulating and connecting across divides, continuously
Critical Yeast — Small pockets of unusual relationships making a local difference
When you triangulate these — where you are, who you’re with, and what you need to do the work together — you get a strong base: a triangle.
And when more of these triangulators connect, collaborate, and reinforce each other, a hexagon emerges. A unit of distributed coherence and a living system of civic resilience.
Metrics for the Intangible
A funder, manager or director might ask: “This is lovely, but how do we know it’s working? What are the metrics?”
The answer: we measure hexagon formations.
Each time grounded and floating Interstitionaries come together across a place or fields, and their trust and work reinforces each other, a hexagon forms. The shape might be metaphorical — but its impact is real: stronger feedback loops, emergent strategy, faster sensemaking, better care.
Triangles stabilize. Hexagons distribute.
Hexagons are how coherence circulates.
Hexagons can tesselate, and build upon each other in further efficient and strong patterns (like in honeycombs)
Systems reconnect and recognize their interdependence, fostering conditions for healing.
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The Coordination Paradox
And yet, if this all makes so much sense, why isn’t it happening more often?
Because of what John Paul Ledearch points out as the Paradox of Coordination: How do whole collectives achieve common purpose without centralized control?
The people doing this work to reconcile these tensions operate in the margins, in the middle, between meetings and movements. They don’t seek visibility, and often don’t have it or get it. Their labor is slow, steady, relational, and foundational — and therefore frequently overlooked and unpaid.
As Lederach writes about spider webs, it’s the anchor threads — laid first, longest, and most strategically — that allow the hexagonal structure to hold. These threads don’t float in space. They root into real places and people. They are rarely seen, but they make the visible structure possible.
A new report called The Human Heart of Systems Change from CoCreative points this out, too, naming a tension The “Interstitial Work” Paradox. They write,
“Some of the most essential work in systems change — building relationships, creating trust, facilitating connections — is often the hardest to fund. Funders resist funding weaving and coordination roles, viewing them as administrative overhead rather than essential infrastructure. This creates a fundamental disconnect between what’s needed and what’s funded.”
In our current moment of profound internal displacement — when so many feel unrooted, out of place — Hexagon People quietly reweave the web. They do so without fanfare, but with enormous generative power.
As Interstitionaries of Interstitionaries, we’ve learned that:
This approach weaves across differences and identities. Care and coordination is made visible at every level, whether in families, neighborhoods, schools, communities of faith or even in business. The prosocial coordination impulse is agnostic.
This work is immediately impactful. The network starts to organically coordinate and grow. Trust and relationships across differences are tangible, felt and measurable.
This orchestration feels good. It can be done at scale and in coordination.
The Invitation
Hexagon People are not a metaphor. They are already among us.
They are essential infrastructure for democratic resilience, for movement coherence, for community healing.
They are long overdue for recognition — not only with appreciation, but with tangible support and remuneration. In a time when fragmentation threatens to become our norm, they are living systems of stitching.
Let us not just name them. Let us find them, fund them and follow their trails.
It’s not the loudest voice that coordinates a movement or prevents catastrophe. It’s the one that shows up, again and again, quietly tracing the web until belonging and mutual value generation becomes a structure, not just a slogan.
Special thanks to these amazing collaborators and readers: John Paul Lederach, Mara Zepeda, Kenny Andejeski, Ariel Brooks, Christine Lai, Tom Glaisyer
Are you one of these hexagon people? And /or do you have feedback about this draft theory laid out?
Then we’d love to know more about you, and stay in touch with opportunities, should they arise. Fill out this quick questionnaire to share your sparks and stay connected!
Do you want to $upport hexagon people?
I know translating these ideas into action for funders, managers or directors might be too tall of an order in this distracted world, so I’ve taken the liberty to flesh out one approach to finding these folks and force-multiplying their good, essential work.
🧭 OVERALL CRITERIA
This rubric helps assess hexagon people who:
Circulate across geographies, identities, and domains
Stabilize through triangulation (truth-tending)
Stitch fragmented civic life into coherent, place-rooted response
Don’t always hold positional power, but carry immense relational trust
Are often overlooked by traditional pipelines for funding and opportunity
✨ RUBRIC DIMENSIONS
Each category below can be rated Low / Emerging / Strong / Vibrant(Accompanied by qualitative notes, not just checkboxes)
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🛠️ SUPPORT STRATEGIES FOR FUNDERS
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Thanks for reading to the very end! Find us over here if you want to constellate on these ideas.