Co-design is what happens behind the curtain
My last Google search of ‘co-design’ turned up a whopping 14,470,000,000 results. I see the language of co-design littered through strategic and operational plans, policy documents, royal commission statements and promises. I see it used inaccurately to describe consultation and ashamedly – to request the free labour of people with lived experience.
My point is simple – co-design is not what you perform in a small number of projects or alongside consultants. It is what you do behind the curtain.
In re-reading Edgar S. Cahn’s superb No More Throwaway People: The Co-Production Imperative, I’m reminded of the need to step away from performance and into the quiet, slow and often painful work of changing ourselves, our organisations and banal business processes. This is essential work if co-design is to go beyond a buzzword and deliver on its potential as a social movement.
Introduction
In this article, I explore several aspects of getting beyond performance:
- Co-define priorities
- Resource co-design
- Change yourself, first
- Evolve decision-making
- Share lived experience relationally
- Commit to implementation
- Co-monitor and evaluate
Co-define priorities
If co-design means asking people with lived experience to help you achieve your strategic and operational priorities – you have started in the wrong place. Co-design is about what matters to people with lived experience and what matters to professionals – it is a negotiation, not a pre-determination. As Cahn shares:
“All too often, the participation sought by the professional is circumscribed by what the professional wants or needs. That… disregards, dismisses or disallows the much richer, seemingly irrelevant contribution which the beneficiary could have made to create the kind of world in which both would choose to live.” (p.31)
If you set out to co-design, you must be willing to hear that people with lived experience do not need more products, programs or services, and they may not even need you.
Resource co-design
As professionals, we get paid for our expertise. So too, should people with lived experience. Historically people with lived experience have not been compensated when they help organisations to deliver or improve their services. If we’re serious about elevating lived experience, we can’t expect free participation.
Co-design is not free labour and is not an add-on to an otherwise full workload for professionals.
We need to account for people’s time and out-of-pocket expenses, as well as emotional labour. As Cahn notes: “Co-Production… insists that labor be elevated, that the capacity of the laborer be acknowledged, and that the contribution be valued. That will not occur unless the world of community and family in which that contribution will be made is first elevated to one of parity with the world of money and market in which professionals live.” (p.31)
To do Co-design, we need resources to:
- Pay people with lived experience (for their time, and any out of pocket costs)
- Pay for skilled facilitation where we don’t already have it (or where we are unable to play the role of neutral facilitator)
- Pay for venues, hospitality and materials (both for sessions, and prototyping)
- Resource the outputs (e.g. a policy, service, program. If we have no resource for the output (or avenue for getting it), we should question the value of designing something in the first place.
Change yourself, first
People with lived experience do not need to change to partner in co-design. It is professionals, organisations and systems who must change our mindsets and methods.
People with less power shouldn’t have to make themselves heard; people with more power must create more safety, generosity and hospitality.
We must work together in ways that are liberating and dignified - based in a commitment to partner with, not parent others. Here are some ways that you can be part of this movement.
- develop and practise the mindsets for co-design and design justice
- create meaningful roles for people with lived experience within systems change, design, delivery and evaluation (here is one example, from TACSI)
- talk positively about people with lived experience, focusing on strengths and what they can contribute - including referring to people with lived experience as people, rather than labels that replicate power differences such as ‘users’, ‘clients’ or ‘beneficiaries.’
Photo by Joshua Lanzarini on Unsplash
Evolve decision-making
To change how decisions are made, we need to redefine who the ‘right’ people are to make decisions and better tap into the contributions that people with lived experience can make – your lived experience and mine. Making that a reality requires significant shifts in how we decide, listen and work.
Enable people with lived experience to be a part of your decision-making, don’t add more advisory groups.
It also requires shifts in our organisational decision-making and governance approaches - and no, that doesn't mean adding another advisory group with little to no meaningful power or authority.
Share lived experience relationally
While sharing stories of people with lived experience can build empathy, it can also be stigmatising, performative, tokenistic and uncomfortable. Lived experience shared poorly can include keynote presentations where someone with lived experience shares a highly polished talk, or where an influential person without lived experience shares a sad story about a person or community that overemphasises disadvantage and creates further shame and stigma.
Meaningful stories tend to be shared intimately (e.g. over shared meals or cups of tea, in pairs) and by relatable people who tend not to have polish or ‘fancy’.
We get comfortable in telling our stories and sharing personal information over time, once we know we trust each other’s capacity for generous listening. That level of comfort probably won’t happen during the first co-design gathering; that’s okay, we cannot rush trust and comfort - they come overtime, not overnight.
Commit to implementation
I've written before that people rarely need new ideas, rather space and support to nurture the questions they have and put in place the ideas that have existed, un-implemented or poorly implemented. While it sounds obvious – ideas only begin creating value once they are implemented. They are unhelpful as shiny documents or carefully crafted conceptualisations.
Practitioners and sponsors beware, the principles of co-design tend to get a little wobbly in this phase, as despite significant investment in co-design, the voices of co-designers can be edited out as implementors and project managers take over.
A long-term commitment to co-design requires recognition of the evidence generated through the co-design process and respect for the contribution and care of co-designers. It also requires dedication to innovation, to trying something different and creating new evidence about what works through learning through doing. In addition, a commitment to implementation requires us to:
- Avoid becoming stuck in continuous discovery and idea generation
- Avoid becoming stuck in planning paralysis, planning for implementation not doing it
- Avoid resourcing design only, missing resourcing implementation too
Co-monitor and evaluate
If you are only measuring things that matter to your organisation, you are not doing co-design. Similarly, if your monitoring and evaluation does not involve people with lived experience reporting directly on their experience and leading evaluation activities - co-design has died. What is measured and how must be co-decided with co-designers.
Therefore, a commitment to co-design involves:
- Co-determining what to focus on, alongside people with lived experience
- Changing ourselves first, as individual and organisations (in particular, our mindsets and decision-making processes)
- Resourcing co-design, including the labor of people with lived experience and the outputs of co-design
- Building trust to enable the meaningful sharing of lived experience
- Avoiding planning paralysis and perpetual discovery - getting to implantation
- Defining what is to be measured and measuring it, with people
What would you add? What is the work to be done behind the curtain in your experience?
To learn more about co-design:
Watch a recent presentation at Social Design Sydney, Sharing power in co-design
Read my book, Beyond Sticky Notes: Doing Co-design for Real
Read this post, on creating the systemic conditions for co-design
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