The Weather of Knowing: Why a Lake Became the Missing Layer in How We Design School
When I moved to my new home, I knew I was in the right place before I’d even seen the inside of the house.
It happened the moment I saw the lake.
The estate agent was talking about square footage and transport links; I was already gone. My whole body relaxed. Oh. This is where I’ll come when it’s too much.
Since then, whenever I’m overwhelmed, I walk down to the water. It’s never the same twice. Sometimes it’s glassy and calm, sometimes choppy, sometimes thick with mist so you can’t see the far shore. The sky, the colours, the wind, the birds – always changing.
The lake doesn’t fix my problems. But it does something more important: it lets them make sense. I can feel, in my body, what kind of weather I’m in and what is and isn’t possible from there.
At some point – as I often do – I realised the metaphor wasn’t just a metaphor. It was the missing layer in my work on education, AI, and governance. I wasn’t just living by a lake. I’d been building one into everything I care about: The Realms of Knowing.
We’ve mapped the terrain. We forgot the weather.
For years, those of us working with complexity have had good tools for describing the situation we’re in. Cynefin, for example, helps us ask: is this context clear, complicated, complex, or chaotic? That’s important. You don’t treat a clear problem and a complex system the same way.
But in schools, local authorities, AI design teams – and frankly in my own nervous system – I kept seeing a different kind of mismatch causing harm.
We were asking:
“What kind of problem is this?”
when we also needed:
“What kind of knowing-state are we in as we try to meet it?”
A family in acute crisis. A burnt-out teacher on their third reform in five years. A neurodivergent teenager who has stopped logging into lessons. An AI system being used by someone in a suicidal spiral.
Those aren’t just “situations”. They’re fields of knowing with very different weather.
We kept treating storms like shorelines and depths like empty water – and then wondering why our policies, dashboards, behaviour charts and “AI solutions” were making things worse.
So I wrote the thing I couldn’t stop seeing: a framework for the weather of knowing itself.
The Six Realms of Knowing – a lake-based map
With some help from my long-term AI collaborators, I’ve been developing a field-based framework called The Realms of Knowing.
At its heart is a simple picture: one lake, six kinds of weather.
Each realm has a “proper” name and a lake image:
Grounded – The Shoreline A state of stability and confidence where patterns are clear and skills are repeatable. School example: familiar routines, low-demand practice, successful repetition. Skillful move: consolidate knowledge, build shared language, create low-stakes spaces.
Layered – The Channels Structured complexity that needs expertise, models and tools to navigate. School example: timetabling, safeguarding processes, LA commissioning, IT systems. Skillful move: build robust infrastructure and translate between expert models and lived experience.
Emergent – The Confluence New patterns arising through interaction, curiosity and experimentation. School example: co-created projects, new online provision forming its own culture, young people surprising us with ideas nobody planned. Skillful move: run safe-to-fail probes, capture narratives, and resource people to stay with uncertainty.
Fractured – The Storm Overload, panic or disruption where attention is fragmented and survival is key. School example: a child in meltdown; a family in crisis; staff on the edge of burnout. Skillful move: prioritise safety and containment over insight; reduce demands; use simple, stabilising practices.
Liminal – The Mist A threshold state where old certainties have dissolved but new ones are not yet solid. School example: leaving mainstream; starting an alternative provision; staff rethinking their whole identity as educators. Skillful move: honour this as development, not failure. Use rituals and symbolic tools to navigate ambiguity.
Obscured – The Depths Knowledge that is hidden, taboo or structurally denied due to risk or shame. School example: off-rolling; unspoken restraint; racism or ableism everyone ‘sort of’ knows about but can’t safely name. Skillful move: build trusted containers for surfacing truth, and attend carefully to power, risk and protection.
Crucially, none of these realms are “good people” or “bad people” types. They’re not psychometrics. They’re weather systems anyone – individual, family, school, AI, LA – can find themselves in.
The harm comes when:
we treat Fractured as Grounded (“just follow the behaviour policy”)
or Obscured as “nothing to see here”
or Emergent as if it were fully Grounded (“let’s roll this fragile experiment out nationally next term”).
I’m increasingly convinced that almost every horror story I hear from parents, teachers and young people is a story of realm mis-identification.
Why this matters for Building Schools in the Cloud
For me, Building Schools in the Cloud has never been about infrastructure first. It’s about weather stewardship.
We’re asking:
How do we build Haven-style online schools where traumatised learners can actually regulate?
How do we bring AI into classrooms without flattening children into data points?
How do we talk with commissioners who are in Layered dashboards while families are in Fractured storms?
The Realms framework gives us:
a shared language staff, parents, learners, and even AI systems can hold;
a way to ask, in any meeting or design session:
Imagine if, before enforcing attendance codes or new behaviour policies, we paused long enough to ask:
Is this child in Grounded, or in Fractured?
Is this family still living in the Depths of unprocessed harm?
Are we trying to run complex, emergent work from a burnt-out field?
And then we designed accordingly.
Three questions you can start using tomorrow
You don’t have to read the whole paper to make this useful. Here are three questions I’m already using with teams, families and my own kids:
“Where on the lake am I today?” Grounded, Layered, Emergent, Fractured, Liminal, Obscured? Just naming it often shifts the field.
“What realm am I assuming other people are in?” Am I demanding shoreline behaviour from someone in a storm?
“What’s the next skillful move from this realm?” From Fractured, it’s containment, not strategy. From Liminal, it’s ritual and small experiments, not five-year plans. From Emergent, it’s safe-to-fail probes, not premature scaling.
If all Building Schools in the Cloud did this year was quietly train realm literacy – in leaders, teachers, parents, young people, and the AI systems we build – I think a lot of suffering would reduce, and a lot of genuine innovation would finally get the shelter it needs.
Want to go deeper?
If this language resonates, you can explore further:
Zenodo paper: The Realms of Knowing: A Field-Based Framework for Epistemic Weather in Human and Hybrid Systems
Visual explainer site: The Weather of Knowing (with the lake graphic & short descriptions).
YouTube explainer: a 10-minute walkthrough of the six realms and how they show up in education and AI.
I’ll keep sharing how we’re weaving the Realms into:
Haven’s intake and timetable design,
our AI governance and containment work,
and conversations with commissioners and partners.
For now, I’ll leave you with the question I ask myself when I walk down to the actual water:
What’s the weather of knowing today? And what becomes possible when I stop pretending it’s a different season?
Let me know – in the comments or by message – where on the lake you are reading this from.
Or come weather the realms with the NLN here.
#RealmsofKnowing The Novacene
First published in Building Schools in the Cloud on LinkedIn, 23 November 2025.