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Design with Precision

Putting It All Together

In this module, we jump into the how of co-design. First, we share a basic structure to support your co-design process. Then, we discuss methods, tools, and exercises, and how you can adapt the resources out there to serve your objectives. Lastly, we provide our own general rules of thumb for facilitating good co-design.

FROM BACKGROUND TO ON-THE-GROUND

There’s an arc to co-design, a general flow informed by both design thinking and community engagement. After you have identified your co-design lens, and you’ve made some decisions around who is involved, this arc will give structure to the how of co-design. The stages in this process may not all need to happen in a single co-design touchpoint—or involve all co-design stakeholders, for that matter—but this structure should underpin the process and help define which methods and tools you use, and when.

Stage 1: Providing Context
Participants may have a connection to the issue that brings them together, but they will have varying experiences of it, and different types of expertise within it. The first step in bringing them together should be getting collaborators on the same page. Where did this project come from? What work has been done before—by you and by other stakeholders? What forces are providing the momentum that is driving the project? Why now? These are all important questions to clarify at the start of a co-design touchpoint. Providing context on the origin of the project and the backgrounds of stakeholders in the room helps people understand each other and move toward a shared set of expectations for their work together. When setting the stage, remember: the person or people presenting or sharing information matters. For a contentious issue, consider asking for several points of view, or hiring a neutral facilitator to help lead an initial discussion. Asking specific stakeholders to present can go a long way to serve lenses like Building Buy-In, Exchanging Skills, and Distributing Power by centering attention on certain stakeholders.
Stage 2: Identifying and Prioritizing Challenges and Opportunities
In providing context, you’ll likely have addressed some of the key challenges, but now is the time to dive deep: in this stage, you should look at how the problem manifests for different stakeholders, unpack its root causes and contributing factors. Start prioritizing the challenges to address as a group through co-design with the constraints you have (time, budget, partners, etc). These constraints will provide some boundaries for brainstorming opportunities to addressing your top challenges. Opportunities should be specific qualities, trends, or possible partnerships that show promise, but they aren’t yet prescribing a specific answer to a problem. For example, an opportunity might be “administrators who speak directly to court users tend to create fairer rules”; whereas a solution might be “assign administrators to staff a court hotline for one hour each week.” Encourage participants to speak to how they live and work in the day-to-day, and how challenges and possible opportunities resonate with their own experience.
Stage 3: Defining Solutions and Planning for Forward Work
With challenges and opportunities identified and prioritized, it’s time to get into the specifics of how possible solutions might work. There are many design tools focused on ideation. It can be useful to begin with “blue-sky” ideation to get past old approaches to the problem, then move toward brainstorming ideas that are more feasible based on the time and budget at hand. Empower stakeholders to call out designs that do not favor them—especially those that put the heaviest burden on intended beneficiaries and operational actors. Avoid the common traps of “people will just want to do it because it’s good for them” (which often indicates a superficial engagement with the challenges at hand), and “all we need to do is educate the end-user” (which generally stems from an incomplete product or service idea). If you see these positions surface, encourage participants to dig deeper into the problems or be more ambitious in their solutions. As specific ideas begin to solidify, consider another round of prioritization. Then start getting concrete about roles and planning moving forward, draft timelines, exchange numbers and set up email groups.

Avoid the common traps of “people will just want to do it because it’s good for them” (which often indicates a superficial engagement with the challenges at hand), and “all we need to do is educate the end-user” (which generally stems from an incomplete product or service idea).

Stage 4: Designing, Testing and Revising
No matter how many perspectives you have in the room, there is only so much you can plan for without actually beginning the work of designing, testing, and revising. Many organizations have a process for creating new programs, which can generally be modified to fit the needs of co-design; but a typical human-centered design process can add more opportunity to test, prototype, and iterate a new idea before fully committing to it as conceived. As you begin fleshing out details to co-design ideas, leave room to test components of them. This could include something low-fidelity early on, like testing a simple sketch of your initiative with other stakeholders and eventual users, and something high-fidelity, like running a small pilot to test effectiveness and how all the moving pieces work together. As you learn more about what works and needs improvement, leave room to change direction and incorporate what you learn as you scale up.

Co-design doesn’t generate a finished product in a single touchpoint—so be ruthless in getting the answers you need, and be honest about how far you think is reasonable to get in one gathering. This reality often necessitates you save a good chunk of time in the touchpoint itself to plan the rest of the forward work.

Lens: Enabling Future Collaboration

PROVIDING CONTEXT

  • Ask participants to share information about their working process, not just outcomes or challenges.

CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES

  • Encourage people to share challenges and opportunities related to ways of working or collaborating with others.
  • Prompt participants to prioritize opportunities that require simpler collaboration across stakeholder groups.

SOLUTIONS & PLANNING

  • Emphasize workplanning across stakeholder groups, including establishing norms and expectations around communicating, the next meeting times and locations, and point-people for different teams.
  • Consider prompting an easy deliverable several days after a touchpoint to encourage groups to practice collaborating.

Lens: Organizing a Community

PROVIDING CONTEXT

  • Consider giving more time for people to describe their interests, background and work.
  • Make this session as interactive as possible: Participants should be building relationships and getting to know one another rather than speaking to a room one at a time.

CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES

  • Compose small groups ahead of time to intentionally support new relationships.
  • Provide more structure to prompts to encourage participants to think about challenges to their working together and opportunities enabled by their collaboration.
  • Provide ample break time and other opportunities for people to connect outside of specific activities.

SOLUTIONS & PLANNING

  • Encourage participants to share contact information, as well as other events they’re hosting or attending.
  • Ask key participants to author refections about the co-design experience that you can share with the full group.

Lens: Building Buy-In

PROVIDING CONTEXT

  • Use context setting as a moment for key stakeholders to present to the room. 
  • Bring them into the co-design planning process and invite input into how this section can be structured to be most effective.

CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES

  • Be explicit about the challenges and opportunities that you heard in participant pre-engagement, pointing to priorities that are coming from stakeholders already.
  • Consider asking certain stakeholders to facilitate particular discussions or activities.

SOLUTIONS & PLANNING

  • Include multiple opportunities for the group to prioritize emerging solutions.
  • Encourage key stakeholders to take on roles in the forward workplanning. Structure your ongoing role to be more supportive or consultative.
  • As you and they are able, include stakeholders in post-touchpoint synthesis sessions

Lens: Exchanging Skills

PROVIDING CONTEXT

  • Be clear about the importance of certain skills in the longevity of an initiative.
  • Consider ways to identify or for participants to self-identify into skill categories, and share their experience in pairs or small groups across skillsets.

CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES

  • As you brainstorm, consider one or more moments to identify challenges emerging from skill gaps, and opportunities made possible by diffusion of knowledge or stakeholders learning new skills.
  • Highlight the importance of a certain skillset or stakeholder perspective at the beginning of  opportunity ideation.

SOLUTIONS & PLANNING

  • Ensure emerging solutions leave enough ramp-up time for sufficient skills training. Depending on the skill, it will take some time for participants to learn and feel comfortable performing it.
  • Plan for more frequent gatherings or exchanges focused less on co-design and more on training.

Lens: Distributing Decisionmaking

PROVIDING CONTEXT

  • In scenarios where decisionmaking is highly concentrated, this stage is very important for building understanding and trust across stakeholders.
  • Consider sharing details about how decisions are weighed and made, stories or examples of more adaptive or distributed processes, and introductions that allow nontraditional decisionmakers to shine.

CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES

  • Consider focusing challenge and opportunity conversations to give concreteness to why centralized decisionmaking is a challenge, and what sort of decisions could be made by other stakeholders.

SOLUTIONS & PLANNING

  • Depending on the participants, getting into the specific decisionmaking protocol can be helpful. 
  • Emphasize both the process for weighing and making decisions and the triggers or scenarios that prompt them.
  • Consider planning for prototyping and piloting that allow participants to begin sharing responsibility in a way that feels lower-stakes and adaptable.

HOW TO THINK ABOUT METHODS

As you start getting more specific about execution, you’ll begin worrying about how exactly you’re going to ask a room full of attendees to think of new ideas together. If you find yourself searching for methods, you’ll likely be wading neck-deep in things that feel almost useful: many organizations are good at generalizing their methods, tools, and exercises and packaging them up into something ostensibly anyone can pick up and use. But as anyone who has tried to employ others’ methods knows, finding them is the easy part; adapting them to fit your context is more difficult.

As anyone who has tried to employ others’ methods knows, finding them is the easy part; adapting them to fit your context is more difficult.

Before we explore what libraries to visit or what tools are out there, the first step in finding and deciding which ones to use is agreeing on what “methods” are in the first place. Let’s start with a distinction:

Methods refer to the way we use our tools.
An ax is a tool; the way we swing it to chop a log is a method. A method then is a set of procedures or systems to help us accomplish something. And the truth is, we are all methods experts—we each have a library full of tools that we use methodically toward our goals, personally (he uses online movie reviews to pick what to stream) and professionally (she does qualitative interviews as part of a monitoring effort). Every tool has a set of outcomes it can accomplish depending on how we use it—and a whole lot more that it can’t. Any useful tool out there will require some degree of customization to fit your methods. And as you refocus your methods to enable co-design, you’ll find a different degree of customization is required. For example, if you are working with a range of stakeholders to set success benchmarks, and many participants don’t have experience in monitoring and evaluation, you will likely need to annotate your MEL framework, describe the importance of each component, reduce jargon, and even diagram out visually how one section connects to the next.
Methods are also subtle acts of diplomacy.
They are the means of orchestrating an often diverse group of stakeholders to negotiate and design together. Tools can be used to set expectations (i.e. filling in a matrix to prioritize topics to focus on), to ask for things (i.e. developing a project plan to carry forward group ideas), and to raise and resolve differences in perspective (i.e. illustrating a storyboard to show how intended beneficiaries might and might not be able to access a service). Methods scaffold discussion about topics that are hard to surface otherwise, direct moments of consensus building, and provide a platform for traditionally marginalized perspectives to influence outputs.
Methods are paced and interconnected activities,
not isolated moments that play out in a vacuum. They should be fit together, so outputs for one exercise become the inputs for another. Behind any good method there is robust thinking about the larger project, the specific people in the room, and your objectives for bringing them all together in the first place.

HOW TO FIND AND ADAPT YOUR TOOLS

Though some people sell them as such, methods are not magic. But delivering methods can be a lot like delivering magic. Both demand backstage elements to make them possible, they are explained and sequenced for an audience, and they deliberately (and engagingly!) direct the audience’s attention. As you look through these collections, think of them as generic instructions that you’ll have to adapt to your own style as a producer and facilitator.

A few of our favorite compilations include:

  • Liberating Structures: A set of facilitation methods that emphasize making all participants feel empowered to contribute. Many of the tools here are designed to emphasize storytelling, discussion, and group collaboration across differences. 

  • OGP Participation and Co-Creation Toolkit: Drafted specifically for cities and countries developing Open Government plans, this collection is full of rich case studies and examples of different protocols for collaboration beyond a single workshop—with recommendations focused on building relationships, getting good representation, and sharing data and decisions. Compared to many design toolkits, this one is focused on longer-term process.

  • Development, Impact and You: A kit of more typical design tools, such as personas, swot analysis, and experience mapping, with excellent supporting documentation guiding viewers through the rationale for selecting one over the other, and recommendations for how to use them. Developed by a consortium of foundations, this collection is oriented toward projects in the public sector or focused on international development.

  • Service Design Tools: A set of research, ideation, and prototyping tools specifically focused on the design and evaluation of new initiatives. The site guides practitioners to the tools that are most applicable to specific project phases, and provides tutorials for how to apply them based on the sorts of stakeholders they’re working with, or the underlying objective they’re trying to achieve. The site is a living library hosted by an interdisciplinary Service Design academy at Politecnico di Milano.

  • Your own team’s project templates. With minimal revision, some of the best tools for project design and implementation planning are the ones you use every day, like project timeline programs or task managers for example. These can be easier to adapt, and in a format that will translate back into your own organization’s process.

As you begin picking tools, you’ll need to start adapting them to fit your methods and your context. Here is some guidance for how to do that.

  1. Define what you hope to achieve by using the tool, then list the inputs you’ll need and outputs you expect to come from it. By creating user personas, do you want participants to focus on seeing and understanding the similarities and differences among possible users, or should they focus on illuminating the lived-experience of different pain points? If you plan to define an audience next, you might prefer the former; if you’re moving to brainstorming opportunities, you might focus on the latter.

  2. Make it accessible. You’ll have a lot of people and perspectives in the room—be sure the tool is understandable (better yet, intuitive) for these folks by using plain language and adding formatting or graphic elements that make the ultimate goal of your method clear.

  3. Be generous, and plan accordingly. Think through the amount of time you expect an activity will take, and add 25%. It can help to pull in a coworker and ask them to do part of the exercise. Be sure to factor in time for the discussion you want to happen, and any prep work group members may need to share back to a full plenary.

  4. Have a documentation plan. Even the most generative exercises can fail you if you have no plan for capturing their outputs. This can range from hiring or appointing note-takers, to asking participants to all write something and turn it in at the end of an exercise. The level of detail can vary as needed—be careful not to overcommit on documenting relatively minor exercises in favor of capturing more when groups are making key decisions.

  5. Have a back-up plan. It’s hard to predict all of the dynamics and comfort levels of a group in advance, or to plan perfectly for running over your time. Determine ahead of time which aspects are flexible, and which outputs you’ll need no matter what.

PULLING IT OFF

Good facilitation is critical for most co-design touchpoints, whether they be single workshops or longer, multi-event arcs. Facilitation training for staff or recruiting an external team can be a worthwhile investment for an organization embracing the benefits of co-design. At Reboot, we structure our facilitation by developing a Facilitation Agenda, and grounding our execution of it in Workshop Design & Facilitation Principles. The Facilitation Agenda lays out in great detail, activity after activity, how each flows to the next, the time required, and the important logistical or interpersonal dynamics we should bear in mind. Despite the detail, these documents provide a scaffolding rather than a word-for-word script—workshops will never unfold quite how you expect, so it's good to be both prepared and flexible.

Meanwhile, Reboot's Workshop Design & Facilitation Principles represent our own approach to planning and delivering a co-design workshop. If the Facilitation Agenda is the scaffolding, these principles are the foundation, reminding organizers and participants alike of productive ways to work across difference.

For every workshop, you need to know in advance what is flexible and what must be accomplished. This is not as intuitive as it can seem, and should be made explicit among facilitators to enable them to adapt in real-time to the inevitable curveballs of a workshop. In this way, facilitating co-design can be a bit different from facilitating other kinds of multi-stakeholder gatherings: you have to drive toward answers, often with force, aware of sensitivities, and taking a more active role pushing participants toward the decisions that must be made together.

Next up:

Module 5: From Ideas to Implementation