Co-Design & Co-Innovation Facilitation

Why Co-Design?

Deliver impact through collaboration

This African proverb speaks to the insight that if we seek long-term, sustained impacts in an increasingly dynamic world then, rather than attempting to go it alone, collaborative approaches are far more likely to deliver positive outcomes that have impact.

Albert Einstein is attributed with articulating this wisdom:

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Management guru Peter Drucker stated:

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence — it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”

Both quotes speak to the idea that in a world of accelerating change and dynamic complex adaptive systems, a more sophisticated approach to teamwork, problem-solving and innovation is needed.

Collaborate through Co-Design

Co-design offers the opportunity to…

Bring together multiple disciplines to integrate different knowledge sets and world views.
Bridge communication differences for shared understanding.
Sense-make, reframe, and define challenges as opportunities.
Prototype and test innovations and adaptations.
Accelerate learning and generation of insights.
Build capability and culture for collaboration and innovation.
Strengthen relationships and build networks of like-minded change agents.
Generate buy-in and co-investment for innovative approaches.
Deliver strategic impact for customers, businesses, communities, and the environment.

Co-design is not for the faint-hearted – it requires a commitment to a different way of doing business. Co-design changes the ‘rules of the game’, and may even trigger you to ‘change your game’. Once you commit, your organisation may never be the same again!

But if you are up for the challenge, here are the nine foundations for giving co-design the best chances of success.

1. Leadership commitment

2. Financial resources

3. A realistic timeframe

4. Organisational capacity

5. Diverse, knowledgeable, and experienced participants

6. Clear values, rules of engagement, and out expectations

7. Power sharing

8. Skilled facilitation

9. A well-designed process

Co-design works across a range of organisational contexts – from commercial ventures to not-for-profit agencies, from crown research institutes to local government.

“The rationale is that if you’re pursuing innovation, and you seek to do that by harnessing the insights, the experience, the knowledge and the networks of people from a range of different disciplines or organisations or agencies; and if you’re seeking to bring that disparate group together to identify innovations in a way that is efficient and yet also does justice to the nature of the challenge, then design thinking offers a pathway or a mechanism to do that.”

“I can’t even really put my finger on it but just the way, particularly in that first workshop, where you went from feeling like there was just so much unstructured complexity and somehow miraculously converging on something.”

What we don’t offer is a cookie-cut solution to co-design. Each organisation and each innovation challenge is unique. Our first step is to explore your needs and then ‘co-design your co-design’ – identifying an approach that fits with your culture, values, and innovation challenge.

It is often said that talk is easy … so, as a first step, let’s talk.