DESIGNING BEYOND THE WORKSHOP
Great—you’ve designed a thoughtful co-design touchpoint. But once everyone has left, motivated and energized, and you’re left with a trove of early-stage ideas—you’ll have some hard work ahead of you. You’ll need to start making sense of workshop outputs, follow-up with stakeholders, and move forward a design process that enables you to make decisions that live up to the inputs and intentions of stakeholders. Depending on your project and lens, you may even be planning another co-design touchpoint, in the form of another workshop or working session.
Regardless of whether you have future workshops on the books, the steps that immediately follow are some of the most critical in delivering an effective outcome. Here we focus on some of the more common activities.
MAKING SENSE OF THE OUTPUTS
Most of the co-design outputs will be loosely-formed ideas that will need some degree of fleshing out to stand up. Synthesizing what you have heard over the course of co-design into forward steps takes practice—and an awareness of your own predispositions. It can be tempting to bucket stakeholder perspectives into existing theories about the problem, rather than channel diverse experience to define the problem in new, more actionable ways. But this won’t be the only challenge: some stakeholder outputs from co-design will be more resolved than others, so making sense of outputs will also involve identifying and differentiating between early- and late-stage ideas, and treating them accordingly.
Synthesizing what you have heard over the course of co-design into forward steps takes practice—and an awareness of your own predispositions.
Tips for making sense of co-design outputs:
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Before you begin, and constantly throughout a workshop, write down assumptions you are making about the problem and the ways to address it. As you begin to process co-design outputs, challenge yourself to look for different interpretations.
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In planning your co-design touchpoint, include activities that encourage participants to upvote and prioritize ideas, or even help identify which are more directive and which are more illustrative. Group exercises to situate ideas along two axes (impact x feasibility or impact x timeframe required) can help prioritization. Setting up group votes can illustrate preference and capture difference of opinion.
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Ask participants explicitly which ideas are malleable, which are preferences that could use further research (in which case, what are the open questions?), and what aspects of early-stage ideas are the most essential.
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Capture your impressions, then circulate to participants after the workshop for comment. Soliciting feedback after you have time to synthesize co-design outputs can provide another check-point to test your understanding, but beware sending findings that are too long or too full of jargon for participants to meaningfully respond. Providing specific prompts for reviewers can also help deepen feedback.
DECISIONS AFTER CO-DESIGN
Depending on the length and frequency of your co-design touchpoint, there will likely be many formative decisions that must be made after participants have left. Clarifying participant preferences during co-design will help, as will giving yourself ample time to synthesize and corroborate key findings. In Module 2, we discussed the common barriers many co-design projects face during implementation. Planning through your co-design lens will help head off some of these specific issues—many of which will depend on the decisions made after a co-design touchpoint. But no matter your lens, the realities of implementation mean ideas will change as the rubber meets the road—so how can you ensure the intention of participant ideas survives the evolution of implementation?
Tips for making decisions after co-design:
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Think through your design process from inception to implementation, and flag the decisions that are likely to need to happen before, during, and between co-design moments. Be clear with participants from the start about which decisions are open to being shared and which are likely impossible to open up to a wider group. While ceding decisionmaking responsibility is a prerequisite to co-design, there are likely some limits defined by organizational culture, leadership expectations, and the practicalities of implementation. Understanding and communicating these limits helps set expectations among participants, and identify decisions that will require their input.
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During your co-design session, identify key future decisions, and discuss a protocol for making them. While you may not be able to anticipate all the emerging decisions a team will have to make about the design of an initiative, there are others that are predictable: designing and prototyping timelines, scale and location for a pilot, preliminary success metrics, for example. For key decisions that should be shared among stakeholders, determine a protocol for getting feedback. Get specific about roles and responsibilities in the workshop. A protocol could include creating polls, surveys or other co-design touchpoints—or a set of decision criteria that you commit to assessing options against. The depth of feedback required will likely vary depending on your co-design lens.
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Discuss thorny issues, together in co-design. As you move participants from ideation and design into the nuts and bolts of operationalization, make special note of the thorny issues that emerge during conversation but are too complex to resolve immediately. Take time to prioritize among these, and discuss the most prickly explicitly as a group. This can both help generate ideas to mitigate or address these challenges, and—importantly—manage risk and expectations, by creating a shared understanding of the challenges that still lie ahead.
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Include implementers early on in co-design. There are many reasons for including operational experts in co-design, one of which is that they are uniquely-suited to anticipating the ways ideas will change during implementation. With input from these stakeholders, you will be better able to identify and put to participants possible implementation decisions.
CLOSING AND OPENING THE FEEDBACK LOOP
“Closing the feedback loop” refers to a step in the feedback process that is often neglected: communicating the outcomes of participant feedback back to stakeholders. In co-design, closing the loop is a valuable opportunity to check your impressions against those of other participants. As discussed earlier, it can also provide another moment to prioritize next steps with stakeholders, and remind responsible parties of the commitments they made in a workshop. Just as importantly, this is an important moment to “open the feedback loop” again. Reporting back to stakeholders can maintain the momentum created by a productive workshop. As new questions emerge, these energized stakeholders can provide further feedback, circulate queries or prototypes among their networks, and take forward certain responsibilities outside of your domain.
“Closing the feedback loop” refers to a step in the feedback process that is often neglected: communicating the outcomes of participant feedback back to stakeholders.
Tips for closing and opening the feedback loop:
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Provide something for participants to react to, and ask for specific feedback. Follow the same principles around clear, jargon-free language and accessibility that you used during the workshop.
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Represent clearly which decisions were determined by participants—and, where applicable, significant difference in opinion—which were resolved by you, and your rationale for those choices.
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Consider the timing, and potential impact of further feedback. The longer you wait to share back outcomes, the more time you will have to show progress—but the less momentum you will maintain from co-design. Depending on the remaining activities in your design process, you may have more or less opportunity to incorporate further stakeholder feedback. Consider your constraints and prioritize the most impactful elements to share back; don’t ask for feedback on everything.
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Depending on your co-design lens, consider other kinds of follow-up activities besides communicating outcomes.
Buy-In
Lens: Enabling Future Collaboration
MAKING DECISIONS
- Use smaller decisions for groups to practice working together, then reflect on what worked well and what to improve.
- Clearly document decisionmaking rationale so collaborators can follow the same logic.
FOLLOW-UP ACTIVITIES
- Work together to produce documentation or other workshop outputs.
- As needed, provide resources for collaboration and communication (i.e. platform subscriptions)
Lens: Organizing a Community
MAKING DECISIONS
- Determine a quorum for key decisions. Which need more voices to weigh in and which can be made with a smaller group?
- Use regular meetings to combine community-building moments with decisionmaking.
FOLLOW-UP ACTIVITIES
- Organize social events (happy hours, potlucks, field trips) that emphasize relationship building over specific co-design outcomes.
- Be a matchmaker. Proactively connect stakeholders to each other or others within your own organizational network.
Lens: Building Buy-In
MAKING DECISIONS
- Categorize decisions into which are most important for each stakeholder group.
- Clearly communicate your rationale if you have to change plans or deviate from a decision that has been made.
FOLLOW-UP ACTIVITIES
- Get more frequent inputs on findings memos and other co-design outputs.
- Provide a meta-level of notetaking. Include your rationale for decisions, and properly attribute people’s and stakeholder groups’ ideas.
Lens: Exchanging Skills
MAKING DECISIONS
- With this lens, you may need to make fewer collective decisions with stakeholders after co-design.
- Ensure decisions you make independently don’t change the kinds of skills stakeholders are learning.
FOLLOW-UP ACTIVITIES
- Plan for touchpoints that aren’t necessarily co-design, but are focused on skill-building.
- Create opportunities during prototyping or piloting for participants to practice the skills they have been building.
Lens: Distributing Decisionmaking
MAKING DECISIONS
- Make it as easy as you can for stakeholders to share decisions: call out decisions that need to be made, make sure the right people are involved, etc.
- Coach participants to adhere to good documentation and communication norms.
FOLLOW-UP ACTIVITIES
- Plan for contingencies if the process is progressing with tension (i.e. seek out a mediator, or schedule check-points with the facilitators).
- Help groups practice a low-stakes, distributed task.
- Proactively revisit thorny issues tabled during co-design.
LOOKING OUT, LOOKING IN
Just as the co-design process doesn’t end for stakeholders after a touchpoint, you may also need to continually advocate internally, and be proactive about making your own organization a place where co-design can thrive. Some of this work may involve aligning internally at the start of a process, and being clear about you will need and why. You may also become well versed in integrating co-design into processes that already exist, making room bit by bit to do more involved activities. Co-design touchpoints can spark a lot of momentum among partners and stakeholders, as well as among your colleagues and coworkers. Harness that enthusiasm by speaking explicitly about the process: call out the aspects that worked well and why, and document these internal reflections.
Be proactive about making your own organization a place where co-design can thrive.
Tips for advocating for co-design internally:
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Understand your colleagues and partners—and what they really care about. Identify their concerns with co-design, and align your arguments with their priorities. Lean in to the different lenses of co-design, and imagine how these might resonate differently with colleagues you will need to engage.
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Develop strong messages that will resonate with your colleagues, and emphasize outcomes of your process or others over talking up methods. Don’t rush to re-label a revised process “co-design,” especially if your organization is generally slow to shift. This can sometimes create friction within teams or organizations that are unfamiliar with the approaches. Instead, stake out space within an existing process to fold in co-design activities, and build a case through example.
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Prepare a clear, concrete ask. Consider what you need from a colleague in order to introduce co-design within your organization. Is it human or financial resources to plan for and execute co-design activities? Permission to open up specific decisionmaking processes to other stakeholders? Their active participation in co-design? Make the early steps as clear as possible.
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Consider embedding co-design within existing processes. Co-design principles and methods can often be integrated even within rigid environments—especially where phases and outputs may be fixed, but the methods themselves are flexible. In many ways, doing co-design doesn’t require a radical restructuring of a full process, but more an exchange of methods. Transform the same dry, annual partner roundtable discussion into an active co-design exercise, for example. Done right, this can prove more effective in surfacing challenges and opportunities, without needing to get approval of senior decisionmakers.
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Document well. As you are able to fold co-design into your projects, be sure to document both the process and its outputs. As the co-designed projects mature, consider collecting input from stakeholders, partners and colleagues about their experience, and follow-up with implementers and beneficiaries to examine outcomes. These data will be crucial tools for you to improve your own process, and advocate for new projects in the future.
WHEN CO-DESIGN ENDS…
It’s hard to know when to say co-design is done. On the one hand, design is iterative—we like to say a “final” design is one that hasn’t been tested enough. There are important details that can only be surfaced by taking action, so it can’t all be meticulously planned and flawlessly executed ahead of time. Expect imperfection, and give yourself time to improve. On the other hand, organizations (and most co-design advocates!) are constrained by project cycles. Projects ebb and flow around grant deadlines and final reports. Many business models depend on being able to “complete” projects, report on them, define new opportunities, and repeat.
Design is iterative—we like to say a “final” design is one that hasn’t been tested enough.
It’s useful to recognize the tension here—that we are both pressured to complete projects, but constrained by what we can know without trying. It should be in the front of practitioners’ minds as they ask people to commit their time and energy to a process that is constrained by these organizational realities. In the short-term, be cautious about over-promising. Treat stakeholder energy and input as a finite and valuable resource. Be strategic about looking for opportunities for co-design, and seizing the ones that have a higher potential for impact. In the long-term, build more and more time into your project budgets for feedback—especially after implementation. As you design the mechanics and the governance of co-designed programs, consider baking in formal roles for stakeholders after you depart. And work more and more upstream, creating space for a wider set of perspectives at earlier and more formative moments: move from co-designing products to co-designing initiatives, co-designing program areas to co-designing organizational strategy.
Ultimately, because many of us plan and organize our own work through “projects”—discrete initiatives with roles and deadlines and launch dates—we tend to think of co-design as a process within and contained by them. Co-design is a means to an end, a way of working together toward a common goal. And that implies an end. At this stage, if you’ve thrown all your smarts and grit and good methods into it, and if some luck has been on your side, that effective and sustainable product, initiative, or strategy you set out to create should now be in your sights.
At the same time, we should think of co-design as a constant, as a kind of relationship among stakeholders and service providers. In which case, rather than asking when it should conclude as we would a project process, we ask: how do we keep this going? How do we maintain this? What should we collaborate on now? What’s next?