I recently read and was inspired by the book Systems Convening: A crucial form of leadership for the 21st century. It’s the most recent scholarship from social learning theorists and practitioners Etienne and Beverly Wenger-Trayner. Exploring the concept of Systems Convening, a form of cross-boundary leadership across landscapes of practice, they are naming a practice that I identify with, and by creating language and theory around it, legitimizing this convening work.
The idea of seeing and encouraging interdependencies by doing this sort of convening work is a form of social learning leadership. As described by Wenger-Trayner, convening is about opening space for new conversations, running joint projects, connecting people, and promoting ideas. They call people who do this work “Systems Conveners.”
I was struck by this passage:
“organizational structures focused on delivery are often maladapted for innovation, which requires new connections across silos. Innovation also requires enough freedom from institutional inertia to leverage these connections and think outside the box. Accustomed to taking risks and working across boundaries, systems conveners often find themselves in a position to straddle this tension between autonomy and organizational accountability.” – p. 24
As I am continuing to work on these ideas of cross-disciplinary exchange as a form of student advocacy, I find myself in this position. Reading this book gives me more language to think and talk about the kind of work I am doing—and “earning legitimacy” for this kind of work is also a feature of Systems Convening.
This roadmap of the areas in which Systems Conveners work is also helpful:
Narrative work – to create an invitational narrative to bring people together across a social landscape.
Legitimacy work – to make legitimate to those in power and involved the importance of such work.
Boundary work – creating and facilitating new social spaces for conversations among people who don’t normally learn or work together.
Identity work – learning and identity are dimensions of each other, so a social learning space necessitates supporting personal transformation.
Agency work – open avenues for people to have their voices heard and perspectives taken.
Power work – dealing with power structures, how can they be challenged and supported?
Narrative work – articulating value creation: have to keep articulating the value of what you’re doing, to different audiences.
These areas of work are also considered from a structural landscape of multiple scales. Thinking through them from the perspective of systems (designed elements, institutions, projects), practices (what people actually do and approaches that have been developed), and relationships (commitments, friendships, labels, ties). Again, this multi-tiered approach mimics the way I engage and am approaching the current project of fostering cross-disciplinary exchange within an institutional setting.
I would like to run some of the projects I have been working on through this framework in a later blog post!
I’ll leave with the excerpt that resonated: