Convening for Collaborative Intelligence

Conference Board of Canada — Bold Ideas for Canada

Context & Challenge
Canada faces a widening gap between the scale of its long-term economic and social challenges and the capacity of existing policy processes to generate legitimate, coordinated action. While ideas abound, decision-makers lack mechanisms that can surface bold, evidence-relevant citizen judgment—not just opinion—at speed, and in a way that can scale nationally.

What We Did
Synthetikos was selected by The Conference Board of Canada to design and lead facilitation of the Bold Ideas for Canada citizen engagement series as part of the launch of the Centre for Canadian Growth and Prosperity. Two pilot citizen engagement events were convened in Toronto in partnership with Shad Canada to test a repeatable deliberative format combining fireside dialogue, 25/10 crowdsourcing, and Open Space refinement. The pilots intentionally treated the events as both idea-generation forums and live experiments to validate facilitation design, tone-setting, data capture, and participant experience ahead of a planned national Listening Tour.

What Was Different
The design optimized for judgment quality over participation volume, using peer evaluation and self-organizing discussion to rapidly surface and stress-test ideas. More than the wording of the “Big Question,” the credibility and framing of the invited speakers proved to be the strongest determinant of the ambition, scope, and substance of ideas generated—a critical insight for scaling.

Impact & Learning
Across two distinct cohorts of Shad alumni, the pilots generated high-energy participation, actionable ideas, and strong signals of legitimacy and optimism, while demonstrating the robustness of the format under real-world constraints. The work validated that small, well-designed deliberative forums can reliably produce policy-relevant insight and provides a tested blueprint for scaling citizen engagement nationally through the Centre for Canadian Growth and Prosperity’s Listening Tour and Digital Town Hall.