What did you think I meant?
I’m struck by how often we use common terms and fail to take the time to align on their meaning. What they mean to us, how they apply to the work at hand, and how they fit into the bigger picture. This is especially detrimental as new endeavors start. However, much like planting a tree, if you haven’t discussed these previously, take the time today to revisit and confirm alignment — it’s never too late to start! Level up — together!!
Two terms that are especially important to focus on are “agile” and “co-creation.” They are commonly used, commonly misunderstood, and commonly misused. This results in endeavors that go poorly, frustrated people, and “bad press” for ideas that can (and should) be powerful!
Agile
Starting with agile, once the domain of software geeks, it is now a term used broadly across domains. But as noted in the tweet below, the history of the term and thinking that went along with the term are overlooked.
Referring to just the manifesto, we’ll find that there’s quite a bit of jargon (and approaches) that won’t make sense outside of software development. In addition to asking the question: “What do you mean by agile?” it can be helpful to dig a bit deeper and consider how it applies to the needs of your team and organization. A very helpful approach I like to take is to introduce my team to Modern Agile. Modern Agile provides four principles that I use to guide discussions — aiming for understanding and alignment. The principles are:
1. Make People Awesome
2. Deliver Value Continuously
3. Make Safety a Prerequisite
4. Experiment and Learn Rapidly
These lead to great discussions. The language is approachable. The ideas are relatable. And in groups discussions, questions that tend to come up include:
· How can we make people awesome?
· Who are these people?
· Yes, delivering value sounds great, but what do you mean by value?
· Safety? You mean physical? Psychological?
· What’s an experiment?
· How can we run experiments?
· What things do we want to learn about?
· How are these principles interconnected?
Finding answers to these questions establishes a foundation for learning together. From this foundation, we can define how we all see the larger discovery and delivery loops fitting together. This collaborative approach can then be augmented by the Open Practice Library and the Mobius Loop. We can discuss and determine the practices we need to use, why we use them and how they fit into our bigger picture. And recognizing the importance of context and learning together — it may also lead to a different place!
Co-Creation
This provides a nice lead-in to discussing co-creation. There’s significant appeal to the idea of bringing everyone together, providing opportunities for “voices to be heard”, and building something together. But co-creation is more. Co-creation is hard. And done poorly, can be detrimental to an endeavor as your participants check out of the process, limiting their impact and reducing buy-in.
Building the Co-Creative Enterprise, provides a great place to start as it introduces 4 key principles to guide co-creational processes:
1. Co-creation produces value for all participants
2. Focus on the experiences of all participants
3. Participants directly interact with one another
4. Participants have access to platforms that enable interactions and sharing of experiences
Much like the approach when introducing Modern Agile to the team, these principles provide an opportunity for the team to define and align on what co-creation means to them. With these principles, we can embark on answering critical questions together:
· Who are our participants?
· What is value?
· What motivates the participants?
· Do the participants have the means to engage and create value?
· What are the motivations for the participants?
· What experiences best empower and enable participants to engage and create value?
· How can we support and empower participants to directly engage?
· How do manage our own egos and motivations to make room for others to interact and create?
This engagement in defining “how” to work together is often overlooked. As noted in Co-creation for Impact: Tackle wicked multistakeholder problems,: “….stakeholders share responsibility for the problem and together develop a process for solving it….” Key in this quote is the sharing of responsibility — co-creation is empowering!
The paper Our futures: by the people, for the people looks at a larger scale form of co-creation called participatory futures. They offer further ways to engage collaborators including experiential engagement and art, noting that these approaches “contrast to conventional public engagement techniques, such as surveys and town hall meetings, which regularly fail to enthuse people to participate and can be seen as tokenistic rather than leading to real change.” Your participants in co-creation are invited because they can bring value and help to find solutions, don’t patronize them, don’t confine them, and don’t waste their time. Participants can quickly see “tokenistic” approaches and check-out of the process.
Wrapping Up
When starting a project, product, initiative or building a new team, take some time at the outset and get aligned on key ideas. I’ve highlighted two critically important topics to discuss: agile and co-creation. While the initial discussions may be complicated or get in the way of “immediate progress”, these are investments that pay-off. Take some time, figure out the how. Empower. Engage. The key is to start. Open the discussions, try to learn together. Don’t worry if it’s not perfect initially. You will need to iterate. You will need to revisit. Give yourself a chance to incorporate learnings. Give yourself permission to not worry about being perfect. And make sure that everyone understands the approach and also feels this way.
