Snakes & Ladders: Convenors and Engagement Theatre
Snakes & Ladders: Convenors and Engagement Theatre
The convenor is a curious specimen in Canada's public sector: the intermediary increasingly asked to move priorities from the policy chamber to the front lines, a serpentine path resembling a game of snakes and ladders, where the board is mostly snakes. I have watched many convenors stumble on the same two things: engaging the people a service is meant for, and making sure those people know the service exists. Both are usually handled off the side of the desk, without proper budget, consideration, or implementation support. Both can quietly sink the very solutions convenors were funded to deliver.
In a current Wiseblood project, I am exploring how engagement actually operates, from mandate down to the tools used. A few archetypal problems keep surfacing.
1. The Spotlight
Convenors often come into view as part of a government's commitment to change a system. This brings increased funding, new mandates, greater stakes, and greater scrutiny, usually within a political window and an election-cycle timeline. All this while, needs are many, communities, partners, and end-users are increasingly heterogeneous, and the organization is adding capacity, capabilities, and relationships at once.
2. Engagement Theatre and Churn
The term "engagement" is used everywhere in the system, and it means everything and nothing at once. Many teams can no longer define it. Is it capital E engagement, with a practice, a lead, and a structure? Is it lowercase "e," a set of tasks for collaborating with peers? Who owns the relationship, and to what end? Often, people are engaging all over the place, but what they hear never manifests into change, a real reputational risk for a convenor. Without a plan, a path, and discipline, engagement becomes theatre, and the work just another example of organizational churn we can't afford when our systems are in decline, and our communities are in need.
3. Lack of Expertise, Discipline & Practice
What strikes me is how critical engagement is for the convenor, yet how often it falls to people inside the organization who lack formal training in it. I don't think this is a conscious failing. It's part of the learning that comes with a new mandate and new funding. Government and Crown corporations have been slow to adopt service- and community-centered design for many reasons: unfamiliarity with the process, concerns about the resources it requires, and, let's be honest, sometimes people don't want to engage because it might change what they plan to deliver. God forbid we let end-users define the use case!
4. The Field Is Unwieldy
I will also admit the field of engagement and design is labyrinthine: toolkits, models, ridiculous rituals, sophisticated mapping processes, and burdensome co-creation workshops that even I can't see myself participating in, let alone leading. It's hard to know where to begin, and how to judge success.
What a convenor needs most cannot be procured. The sponsorship of employers, the knowledge of practitioners, the standing that comes from having listened. Engagement is the only mechanism that supplies any of it, which is why treating it as a courtesy is a category error.
The cruel reality is that when convenors fail to build meaningful relationships, facilitate collaborative service and program design, and communicate new services well, who loses? I think we, the public, do.
Poor engagement in design leads to garbage-in, garbage-out: mediocre updates instead of system change, or a public-sector cousin of Cory Doctorow's "enshittification," where an analog service gets a frustrating digital upgrade we are all forced to live with.
Failed communication means services don't reach the people they were built for. Uptake stalls, systems atrophy, funders grow concerned, and the dreaded funding review arrives to pull the organization's new pedestal out from underneath it.
We need funders who value the true timelines of organizational change, relationship-building, and community-centered design, and stronger convenors who can drive the system changes our communities need.
Facilitating engagement is my favorite part of the job. I get to learn from so many incredible people, whether their expertise comes from professional practice or lived experience, and I have come to believe the old saying, "listen to the client long enough, and they will write the copy for you," is not only true but profound. But my greatest worry is that the engagement doesn't actually succeed in shifting the power structures and decision-making capacity of our communities.
I have long thought the system lacks an entity that can help ensure the success of the convenors and the convened, helping subject matter experts engage, co-design, and deliver good work in a good way for the good of our society.
I suppose that is our hope at Wiseblood. But too often we arrive late, locked in a lane that limits our influence on engagement and service design, and are simply asked to brand the solution, a task my late father would have called "lipstick on a hog."
If you work in or alongside a convening organization, I'd love to hear what you think convenors need to do this work well, and how we can better support them.
