The Value Web

About Us

The Value Web traces its origins to 2005, when the World Economic Forum invited Matt and Gail Taylor to help transform the experience of its Annual Meeting in Davos. In response, they gathered a diverse team of Knowledge Workers—facilitators, designers, systems thinkers, and process architects—to support a bold experiment in how global leaders could work together more wisely. This network became the seed of what would later evolve into The Value Web.

What began as a one-time collaboration soon became a sustained partnership, and ultimately, a global organisation. Over the years, we have not only worked with the World Economic Forum but also with civil society, international organizations, foundations, academic institutions, and governments to co-create solutions to complex, systemic challenges—always with a focus on the common good.

At the core of our work are the Ten Design Assumptions developed by Matt and Gail Taylor. These assumptions describe the unprecedented complexity of the world we inhabit and the urgent need for new ways of thinking, working, and deciding—together. They remind us that while humanity faces existential risks, we also hold the collective capacity for breakthrough, not just breakdown. These assumptions are more relevant today than ever before, and they continue to ground our practice, our partnerships, and our purpose.

We believe these design assumptions demand not just better decisions, but a transformation of how decisions are made. That is why The Value Web exists not as a service provider any longer, but as a neutral home—a platform that welcomes practitioners from across collaborative process design methodologies. We are united by a shared commitment to learning, advocating, and assembling around the practice of process activism.

Today, through our three streams—Academy, Advocacy, and Assembly—we cultivate a global field of practice. We invite individuals and organizations to learn, connect, and experiment together—deepening our collective capacity to navigate complexity, grow shared wisdom, and co-create more life-affirming systems.

1. One
   Humanity is creating change and increasing complexity at a rate significantly greater than our ability to understand and respond appropriately.
2. Two
   Humanity is increasingly creating — by intended and unintended actions — the social and physical conditions that are becoming the primary environment within which our mental and physical evolution are taking place. This is the Anthropocene Age, in which it is human activity that shapes the planetary environment.
3. Three
   Humanity is in the midst of World War III. This is the culmination of a hundred-year global civil war to control resources that, if used at scale and at this rate, will far exceed the Earth's ability to replace them and will accelerate our march to environmental and social collapse.
4. Four
   Humanity has almost no practice acting as a whole on a vast, global scale. We focus on the most immediate parts of the planetary system. We attempt to fix isolated, localized problems. But even the local solutions to these problems create unknowable, unpredictable, uncontrollable, and suddenly emergent results of extreme magnitude.
5. Five
   Humanity's condition and identified problems-in-focus are not beyond our accumulated knowledge and capacities. As individuals, most humans are resilient, honest, productive, and friendly. We have the capacity to work together intelligently, creatively, and effectively. As a species, however, we are acting in a way that can only be described as clinically insane.
6. Six
   People without position and power, most animals that are not intimate pets, and the planet itself are treated as commodities to be exploited. The monetary system that supports this exploitation does not evaluate and account for life, only things and transactions. We know the price of everything, but the things we value most are not measurable in these currencies.
7. Seven
   Tens of thousands of years of human history are full of achievements and failures. We have a rich history. But we do not remember it, know it, or employ it to inform our present and to systematically design our future.
8. Eight
   The ability to develop and use technology, one of the singular aspects of being human, will not save us. It is becoming a force in itself that knows no master and lacks educated, self-aware, competent users who function in a time frame of centuries rather than business quarter to business quarter. At best, our perspective is that of a few years. The result? The system of technology and users functions poorly without proper feedback.
9. Nine
   Philosophy, religion, science, and politics are weapons of influence and power rather than serving as guides to life and the creation, maintenance, and growth of a viable society with healthy communities and people.
10. Ten
    Humanity has spent millennia defining success as the absence of failure, acting as if health were the absence of disease, wealth the absence of poverty, freedom the absence of tyranny, love the absence of hate, life the absence of death. And now, with more abundance than can be measured, we are clinging to old rules, habits, grudges, fears, and myths. Our best possible futures are lost in a cloud of uninformed, distorted arguments mixed with compulsive consumption and a false model of what is true prosperity. We find it all too easy to imagine dystopian futures and nearly impossible to share dreams worth building together. We are failing at success.

Facilitator, teacher, technologist, community builder—whatever your path, if you’re drawn to collaboration and collective learning, there’s a place for you here.