Principles of Co-Creation

There are many ways to get work done. Over the last 25 years, much of the work InnovationLabs has focused on consisted of designing and facilitating collaborative co-creation - convening groups of people in specialized environments and facilitating them through a series of activities in which they create something together - accomplishing weeks or months of work in a few days.

These engagements have been with different types of organizations, from different industries, for different sized groups of participants, and focused on accomplishing a wide range of different objectives. Even though we have viewed each engagement as unique, and created a customized set of experiences to accomplish each objective, there are some underlying principles we call upon to help guide our thinking.

What follows are a couple of the principles we have codified that form the foundation of the practice of designing and facilitating collaborative co-creation.

Event Design Patterns

Event design is complex. Even though the accompanying model shows seven discrete activity patterns, in practice these are rarely taken linearly but are built up in parallel. As one gains more clarity it will affect another. Logistics affect assignments. The process of building activities can reframe the objective.

Considerable time is spent defining the objective, or orienting to the objective. It’s best to know in detail what the event should accomplish. This allows a better chance that the event will actually achieve its objectives, and paradoxically it can free the group to expand beyond or change the objective mid-stream during the event if it makes sense.

As the objective becomes clearer, it’s easy to begin assembling the event based on past experiences with similar objectives. There’s nothing wrong with this practice, but impatience should be tempered by spending considerable time exploring the objective and understanding it from many different perspectives. This helps the designer figure out the parts that the objective can be divided into as well as ways to shake up assumptions and attachments to particular solutions. There is no point holding a collaborative design event if the participants are allowed to only come together to design and invent what they already know. New, complex challenges are unlikely to yield value to old solutions. Throughout the process there are logistics to consider: venue, participants, work to be done in advance, meals, lodging, transportation, information management during the event, modalities of displaying and sharing ideas, technology and so on.

Frame the Event

As the objectives emerge it’s appropriate to ask several questions that have large implications on the design of the event.

How complex is the challenge? Highly complex challenges usually require a wider number of stakeholders but also a greater diversity of backgrounds, knowledge and approach to thinking. Increased complexity demands increased breadth of knowledge and depth of knowledge among the participants. This means that work must be done in advance so that participants from different disciplines can have meaningful conversations given their differing lexicons. This also influences the way assignments are written and the types of activities that are undertaken.

How unique is the challenge? Has the organization been there, done that? Or has another organization in the same industry addressed this challenge? How about organizations in other industries? Or is the challenge very unique—perhaps it has never been solved before. Like complexity, uniqueness requires a broader participant base to bring in a variety of expertise and experience. But even more so, it requires participants who can approach challenges with the beginner’s mind, who can hold preconceptions at bay and who like to play with ideas without attaching their egos to them. Very unique challenges can only be addressed through metaphors, which require an ability to play.

How self-organized should the event be? Facilitators tend to design either events that place themselves in the front of the room as moderators or they craft highly detailed designs (or both). But we are entering an era where more and more work is being done in a self-organized manner among large groups of people and it’s worth considering this approach in the design.

 

Designing collaborative experiences is a privilege we don't take lightly. Clients trust us to develop a process that is engaging, fun, and highly productive. To do that requires a solid foundation of core principles that can be applied across diverse situations and solution sets. As mentioned above these are just a couple of the principles we use when designing collaborative co-creation.

In your experience, do you have principles you apply when designing collaboration? Are there some that you find particularly poignant and helpful?

I'm interested in your feedback!

Michael Kaufman - mkaufman at innovationlabs dot com

Sources:

1. Bryan Coffman has spent a significant amount of time over the years codifying, documenting, and illustrating the work we do. The drawings and text above are just a couple pages from the hundreds (if not 1000s) of pages in his journals.