Systems Conveners - Orchestrating Change Across Sectors

We live in an increasingly interconnected world facing deeply complex and entrenched challenges - from climate change to growing inequality. There is a growing recognition that finding solutions requires breaking down silos, building unlikely partnerships, and enabling social learning on a broad scale. 

Enter systems conveners - the bridge-builders who bring together diverse stakeholders, facilitate collaboration across boundaries, and cultivate the learning capability to drive systems change.

Who Are Systems Conveners?

Systems conveners may not have a formal title, but they play a crucial integrative leadership role in sparking and steering change. They see the bigger picture in a complex landscape of people, organizations and moving parts. Spotting opportunities for alignment, they legitimize the rationale for collaboration, gather partners, enable safe spaces for open sharing, and focus energy toward shared goals.

Importantly, systems conveners take a long-term view to grow initiatives iteratively, allowing trust, innovation and momentum for change to build over time. They influence multiple levels, ground efforts locally while working with authorities to adjust policies, programs and resource flows to support the work. 

The Power of Cross-Boundary Partnerships   

While good ideas and pilot projects are abundant, systems conveners recognize that achieving long-term impact requires buy-in and coordinated effort from diverse stakeholders. No single entity can overhaul entrenched issues alone. But collective capacity is unlocked when commerce, community, government and the social sector converge around shared aims.

Systems conveners orchestrate this convergence. They highlight interdependencies that provide intrinsic motivation. They cultivate networks and relationships as the foundation and ongoing nourishment for social initiatives. They enable edge-walking learning, where partners question assumptions, rethink objectives and co-create innovative systems-level solutions.

Orchestrating Transformation Across Domains 

The integrative leadership capabilities of systems conveners lend themselves well to tackling pressing issues across sectors:

• Business: Convening networks for industry self-regulation on issues like ethical sourcing or environmental standards that elude government oversight. Enabling social learning between sectors on challenges like sustainable supply chains.

• Social: Bringing together funders, nonprofits and community partners to enhance coordination, align efforts and develop holistic solutions to social problems.

• Public: Building civic participation and community education for successful implementation of policy reforms. Bridging agencies, experts and locals to incorporate a variety of data and perspectives when designing systems-level initiatives.  

By judiciously involving stakeholders, legitimizing the rationale for collaboration, facilitating boundary-crossing participation and enabling social learning, systems conveners can orchestrate change where typical strategies falter.

Their integrative leadership and change skills will only grow in relevance as the scale of problems requires collective effort. Systems conveners represent an opportunity to partner across divides and re-design systems that better serve both people and planet. 

The time for silo-busting, bridge-building and boundary-crossing is now.

The fusion of Strategic Doing (SD) , Performance Driven Change (PDC) and Design (D) disciplines could play the role of the Operating System (OS).