10 lessons I learned about co-design sessions

If you conduct any kind of group session (especially co-design sessions where you need people to be creative) it doesn’t take long before you build up a list of lessons and power tips to help you make them better and better. I’ve just finished a set of co-design sessions as part of a Vodafone project we’re working on at Digital Eskimo. They went really well (thanks for asking), mostly because of 10 lessons that I learned along the way.

Preparing for the session

1. Sending meeting requests is not enough

Most participants will have a different idea in their heads than you about what your session is all about. Or no idea at all. Particularly if it’s an internal co-design session with client staff members participating, your fun-filled interactive session will probably look just like every other meeting request in their inbox, amongst the hundreds of others. If you’re lucky, they’ll actually read the agenda you have lovingly crafted. If you’re really lucky, they’ll even turn up.

Don’t rely on the inbox as the sole means of communication. Pick up the phone and find some questions to ask people in preparation for the session. Recruit colleagues to walk around and prompt participants about whether they’re coming and to generate some interest. And yes, when sending the meeting invitation include a picture of something to pique people’s interest. It could be a photo of some post-its on a wall or storyboard drawings — anything to get them recognise that this isn’t just another meeting.

2. Road-test your workshop first

It’s obviously important to write an outline and/or script of your session and the activities you want to conduct, but it’s always surprising how different a session looks in the flesh as opposed to how it looks on paper. Put simply, this is usability testing for sessions.

Rehearsing each part of it with others helps to catch errors and improve aspects like:

• Sense and clarity – It might be clear to you, but practicing telling instructions to others — and hearing their feedback — will sharpen how you communicate the objective. And if it’s still not clear, it may help you to scrutinise the intent of each activity — whether you need it at all or whether a different activity would be more suitable.
• Timing – An activity you think will only take 10 minutes may actually take longer, due to unforeseen things like materials being handed out, or allowing time for all participants to discuss the topic.
• Materials - Got your post-it notes? Great! Doing a dry-run of an activity will reveal improvements to enhance participants’ enjoyment and increase the quality of the outcome, like making one colour of post-its for one type of response and a different colour for another.

During the session

3. Be clear about the objective

Being absolutely clear to participants about both the activity’s objective (the ‘why’) and the instructions (the ‘how’) frees them up to think creatively about solutions (the ‘what’). People absorb information in different ways, so provide different means of instruction. Write the objective and instructions on a sheet butcher’s paper for everyone to refer to. Provide them with a quick example and model the behaviour you’re after.

4. Establish what’s known before heading into the unknown

Following on from the point above, most people are going to be in a more creative frame of mind if you help them establish the context for the co-design session. If it’s an internal session for an organisation, participants will want to know how it sits in the landscape of their work, their project (and other projects) and they’ll want to know what happens after it’s finished.

If it’s an external co-design session with participants that have no prior knowledge of your project, they’ll need help with getting the right things ‘top of mind’. These are the experiences and skills that you’ll want them to draw from when they go into the unknown territory of new solutions.

5. Some people (think they) are just not creative and that’s OK

Part of a facilitator’s job is to promote a safe environment for ideas to flourish and lead the energy level in the room. But sometimes, all the tricks in the book can’t make some people think that they’re creative. Fortunately, you can call on the power of Tuckman’s Group Development Model and know that generally people will want to be accepted by others in the room and will respond to the positive behaviours modelled by others. In other words, participants will help each other get into a creative mood.

6. Keeping to time does more than keep to time

Another crucial part of a facilitator’s job is to keep the session running on time and to ensure everything gets covered. But this also creates the right amount of pace and energy that Jesse Schell says (in his book The Art of Game Design) ensures that participants don’t get frustrated because the activity ends too early, or bored because the activity is too long. Time limits can be exciting and can promote creativity.

7. It works for magicians: have something up your sleeve

People are funny creatures, and sometimes they just behave differently to what your session agenda may divine to be the right order and flow. Whether there’s more fruitful discussion going on than you anticipated or whether a brainstorming activity limped along and fell flat with only two ideas, it always pays to have a supplemental activity that you can subtly whip out (like an ace of spades out of your sleeve) without your audience realising.

8. Design is an adventure – let your participants choose theirs

One of the aspects I love about co-design is the sense of discovery. You never know what ideas and solutions may come out of a group of people with disparate personalities, skills and experiences. Part of promoting this sense of discovery is allowing participants to be captains of their own destiny, and stage-manage choices along the way that are meaningful for them, just like those old Choose Your Own Adventure books.

One example is to let participants vote on a range of ideas raised with sticky dots as inputs to the next activity. This increases their interest, curiosity, and ownership.

After the session

9. Celebrate, reflect, learn

Was it good for you? Was it good for the participants? What were the victories and challenges? What can we do better next time? It’s so important to debrief with your team afterwards to capture the gold while it’s fresh. One caveat: if you’re conducting a set of sessions where consistent inputs across all sessions are important for interpreting results, it’s important not to mess with the format too much.

And the capturing needn’t be arduous. Sketchnoting the discussion takes no time at all and captures the lessons in a fun way that others can easily learn from too.

10. Turn participants into ambassadors

Wasn’t it a great co-design session? Didn’t we come up with some amazing ideas? Keep the love going after the session by encouraging the participants to spread the word to others. If it’s an internal co-design session for an organisation, see if participants can talk about their experience in their next work-in-progress meeting or write a piece for the intranet. Were there some great sketches and post-it note maps produced? Try to get them published on the intranet, or newsletters, blogs, Flickr, Twitter… anywhere that they can spark interest.