Working with clients who are getting ready to consult stakeholders on options, I needed to help them see how the co-design journey could work from start to finish. This simple diagram helped a lot.

Whether you call them stakeholders, 'the public', service users, customers... the people who can influence or will be impacted by your project (or programme, or policy, or product...) need to be engaged from start to finish, so you can collectively understand:

the current state - the starting point, the problem.
the desired future - the destination, the solution.
the possible and desirable ways of getting there - options, choices.

And once the decisions have been made and you are on the journey towards that desired future:
4. joining in with implementing, monitoring and adjusting.

If you are only engaging people at 3, you have missed out on getting a really rich understanding of how things are now, and what kind of future is desirable. You should expect challenge about your assumptions and evidence for 1 and 2, even resistance and rejection of all the options you have come up with. Woe betide you if it's only one option!

Making the Path by Walking

This post was first published in my Making the Path by Walking newsletter February 2020. To subscribe, scroll right down.