Co-creation is a bitch

The complexity and uncertainty in the world of business today has made co-creation a invaluable part of projects that aim to design something new and good. Co-creation appears to be the new norm, dismissing small groups or even individuals designing things for others as old, undemocratic and ineffective. But every designer knows that design by committee never leads to good design. Co-creation certainly is essential in complex projects, but for it to add value means walking a thin line between the wisdom of the crowd and the craftsmanship of the designer. It might seem like a simple concept, but it requires steering clear of the pitfalls of brainstorming on one side and the tunnel vision of the designer on the other.

The roots of co-creation

Co-creation itself is a wide term that can mean a lot of things. The term got popular around 2000 in the marketing world. Around that time companies like Nike started offering customers influence on the product. There was no longer one shoe for all, but you could customize your shoe to fit your needs. Co-creation was defined as

“The joint creation of value by the company and the customer; allowing the customer to co-construct the service experience to suit their context.”
— Prahalad and Ramaswamy

at the time. The focus was on customization of the product, resulting in tools to create your own shoe color scheme and design your own interface for a digital product by moving blocks around and changing colors. This is a superficial version of co-creation, a first step towards including the customer. Customers have no real impact on the design of a product or service, just on the superficial elements like color and position. Especially in my field, digital services, when I talk to users I find that nobody uses these customization options that are still in digital products today. Mass customization is just the illusion of influence and that is great for marketing, but not so great for designing digital services that aim to provide a compelling user experience.

Co-creation today

By now co-creation has a totally different meaning. User experience is the main selling point of services and products today. And although the user doesn’t know what he wants until he sees it, you cannot design a distinctive user experience without talking to the user.

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
— Sam Walton

And although there is only one boss: the user, you have to include all stakeholders. Because without the business and the IT aligned around the user, you cannot find the needed balance between desirability, viability and feasibility.

Projects have to work in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment. This means you will need as much problem solving power as you can muster up to design a good solution that users will actually use. Co-creation can increase your chances of success because it will help you with 3 essential things:

1. Input. Consulting the stakeholders will give you valuable input on the nature of the problem you are solving: obstacles, jobs to be done, conditions etc.
2. Validation. Consulting the stakeholders will give you the necessary feedback on the direction that you have chosen: you can test if you are on the right track or you are missing something.
3. Engagement. When you are going to roll-out your solution you need ambassadors, early adaptors that will start using your product and will seduce others to do so as well. By involving people right from the beginning, they are engaged and will exude enthusiasm that will infect others. This engagement will also work before launch: by getting better input and validation assessments.

Organizing co-creation is tricky

It’s not like you can just put a bunch of people in a room with a problem and start co-creating away. Without a vision, a direction, co-creation is not very effective. You also don’t want to go brainstorming solutions, because by now we know most brainstorming sessions are useless. You have to be very precise about who you consult for what, because everybody has their own area of expertise. You want to free people from their silo, but you have to respect individual expertise.

Google Ventures Sprint Method

You want to tap into people’s brainpower and stimulate engagement and creativity but you don’t want to succumb to the all the known pitfalls. This is why Jake Knapp and his colleagues from Google Ventures devised the Sprint method. In their book they analyze all the bumps in the road of co-creation of solutions and provide a precise method on how to smooth them all out. They designed a 5 day co-creation method that tells you almost down to the minute what you should do with who and for how long. It’s a pretty tight schedule with precisely described activities that is based on their experiences in fine-tuning their method. The promise of their approach is that if you follow it down to the letter all the pitfalls of co-creation can be avoided and you will make optimal use of the creativity of the participants. Their main points are:

• Start with the question. Co-create everything including the questions that need answering. Everybody needs to be on the same page and engaged and if you start co-creation with the big question(s) you can delve deep into the questions so you can find a big hairy one that motivates and inspires.
• Avoid groupthink and other pitfalls of brainstorming by not presenting and judging ideas verbally. They propose drawing your ideas and voting with sticker dots.
• Draw to think, communicate and test your ideas. Drawing is the most effective tool for this, but a lot of people fear it. In their book they propose a couple of ways to get over your fear of drawing.
• Lead with questions. Frame all issues and problems as positive questions. Creativity is led by questions. If someone puts up a problem, reframe is in a “How can we…?” question and you take away the emotion, look at the core of the problem and keep an open, positive mindset.
• Everybody gets a vote, but not all votes are equal. To avoid getting into endless discussions, someone has to make the final decision. We have to face the fact that not all people have the same skills, information, experience and background. And although all insights and input can be valuable, the decider has to decide.

Work alone together

Central to their vision is “work alone together’: the best ideas come from individuals working alone and not from brainstorming sessions, but you want to benefit from the expertise and creativity of others. The trick for effective co-creation is finding the balance. The preciseness of the Sprint method is a good indication of how difficult it is to find this balance.

Learning is crucial, concretizing is fundamental

Testing your ideas with your stakeholders is absolutely essential. The whole point of Eric Ries’ seminal book The Lean Startup is to get to validation of the assumptions in your plan as fast and efficient as possible. It’s all about learning. When you start out to solve a new type of problem, a wicked problem, it’s important to realize that you’ll have to learn. The environment is so complex and uncertain that relying on what you think you know is dangerous. Perfect execution of a plan based on the wrong assumptions is a common road to failure. Involving the users and other stakeholders, co-creation, is all about learning. By far the best way to learn is to make something, concretize your idea, put it out there and measure if it works. Making things concrete as soon as possible sets the stage for effective co-creation. It turns abstract ideas into concrete solutions and allows everybody to join in the discussion.

“I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster and leaves less room for lies.”
— Le Corbusier

So for co-creation is absolutely necessary that:

• you have a compelling vision
• you make things concrete as fast as possible
• you communicate through concrete things
• you work in small iterations
• you accept that innovating means learning for everybody
• you work alone together
• you repay input from stakeholders with concrete improvements
• you are willing to pivot based on learnings

This way you can effectively walk the co-creation tight rope.