Types of Convening

There are many types of convening, and reasons to convene. Here are a number of them, described below:

Consultation: to obtain feedback from stakeholders, such as consulting communities for their input. This is a more traditional form of convening.

Capital “C” Consultation: to fulfill specific legal requirements for governments, eg. Government of Canada consulting particular groups of people. This is difficult to do effectively.

Coordination: the organization of different elements and activities so as to work together effectively, such as coordinating a summit on a particular topic eg. climate change.

Collaboration: working together to produce or create something, such as collaboration on a white paper.

Collective Impact: a structured approach to bring people across sectors and organizations together to achieve lasting social change. Read more about Collective Impact here:

Collective Impact

Co-Design: to facilitate users and stakeholders to think and act together like designers to understand complex problems, discover new insights, design and prototype solutions. For example, lab participants might choose a set of principles by which to design prototypes, such as 'solutions will be easy to use and fit into employee's existing workflows'.

Co-Production: to facilitate users, providers and stakeholders to think and work together to prototype and then produce or implement solutions at scale.

Co-Creation: to facilitate users and stakeholders to work together to design, prototype and produce or implement solutions at scale; such as the joint collaborative work to create a list of social enterprises in Ontario.

Source: Flower, Muoio. Gather, The Art & Science of Effective Convening, 2013. https://assets.rockefellerfoundation.org/app/uploads/20130626174021/Gather-The-Art-and-Science-of-Effective-Conveing.pdf

Sometimes, more often than we would like, people convene for the sake of convening. A good challenge for you is to work with your lab team to ask yourselves two key questions:

1. Why Convene?

Ideally, you will be able to identify at least 3 objectives to convene. Hint: these will likely involve any of the “C’s” above. Perhaps you want to build on momentum to create a network of individuals to work together on a particular issue, such as the climate crisis. Or maybe you are bringing together some ‘unusual suspects’ to create net-new intervention ideas on a particular challenge, such as reducing isolation for seniors.

2. Who to Convene?

Next, you’ll need to identify who to convene, ie. specific stakeholders or groups of people to bring together. What are you hoping people will learn from each other? What perspectives need to be brought into the room? Who is missing from the conversation?

For more information on Why and Who to Convene visit the "Stakeholders" section here:

Stakeholders