Why we say “co-design”

The word does a lot of work, and I want to be careful with it. Co-design is not a softening. It is not the polite version of consulting, or a way of saying we held a workshop before we wrote the plan. If that is what it has come to mean elsewhere, I understand the suspicion.

What I mean by it is this: the people who will live with the outcome are the people whose hands shape it. Not at the end, to react. At the beginning, and the middle, and the end. The document is theirs before it is anyone else's.

I came to this the hard way. Early in my career I wrote strategies that were, by most measures, good. They were clear. They were evidenced. They named the right problems. And they sat, unread, on the shelves of people who were too busy to own something they had not built. I would watch a year go by and the document would still be closed. It was not a failure of the document. It was a failure of authorship.

The question is not who writes it. It is who carries it.

Strategy is not a deliverable. It is a commitment, held inside a group of people, about what matters and what they will do when the day is difficult. A document can describe that commitment. It cannot create it. The commitment is created in the conversation. In the argument about what to put in, what to leave out, what to call the thing, who gets to say no.

When I write the strategy for you, I take all of those conversations away. I have them, quietly, in my own head, and I give you back the answer. The answer is often correct. It is also weightless. You did not earn it. When the day gets difficult, you put it down.

If they can describe it in their own language, you have a strategy. If they cannot, you have a report.

So we co-design. That means my role changes. I am not the expert with the answer. I am the person who holds the shape of the conversation so that your answer can emerge. I ask questions you have not been asked. I notice when the group is avoiding the real thing. I make sure the quiet person in the corner gets to finish her sentence. I keep the room honest when it wants to be comfortable.

This is harder than writing the strategy yourself. It is slower. It looks, from the outside, less impressive. There is no heroic consultant with a thick report. There is a group of people, a bit tired, holding something they built together.

But here is what happens afterwards. They do the thing. They keep doing it when it is difficult. They tell each other about it, in their own words, because the words are theirs. When something unexpected comes along (and it always does), they can adjust, because they understand not only what the plan says but why it says it. They were there when the why was decided.

A small test.

If you want to know whether a strategy was co-designed, ask the people it belongs to (not the leader, the people) to describe it without the document in front of them. If they can, in their own language, including the hard trade-offs, you have a strategy. If they cannot, you have a report.

That is the difference. And it is, for us, the whole point.

Paul Steele