The two extremes of a co-design workshop
How we ended up with two entirely different outcomes despite having the same concept for a customer co-design workshop
In a recent project at frontìra, a Budapest-based strategic design consultancy, we decided to learn more about payment digitalisation by organising two co-design workshops in two cities with potential customers. We had a pre-planned, jam-packed agenda that was exactly the same for the two workshops. To learn more about co-design, our object, and what and why exactly we did during the workshops, read the first part of this article.
One agenda, two locations, two workshops, two totally different sets of people
Although we had the exact same plans for the two occasions, we ended up having two workshops with entirely different feelings and atmospheres. The differences boil down to four aspects that build on top of each other, cascading into two fully divergent workshop experiences.
1. Human factor
A lot depends on the “people material” which, at the end of the day, influences how creativity is manifested throughout the workshops. On the human factor, we mean participants’ personality, and how they approach new things, other people, etc. Surprisingly, the first set of participants (in Group A) consisted of mostly creative, open minded individuals, while in the second group (Group B) some participants had a negative attitude not only towards our client, but more generally regarding everyday life -, going as far as to say, some seemed to have burnout.This personality aspect sets a prospective direction for the workshop even before participants step into the room.
2. Group dynamics
How individuals approached different topics was shaped also by their co-participants, especially during prototyping and establishing a concept. Group Dynamics can have an enormous effect on the outcomes of the workshops, and we observed this phenomenon in both groups but with different effects. While in Group A opinion leaders encouraged active participation and creative thinking, louder and extroverted individuals in Group B discouraged others to speak up and sometimes went as far as trolling and sabotaging the work. One way to break this is to include individual activities as well, such as the ideation tool Crazy Six. It allows individuals who would otherwise cooperatively participate in the work to step up and elaborate on their thoughts.
3. Engagement with tasks
We observed quite a big contrast between the two workshops regarding participants’ engagement and their attitude towards the activities and the topic. Even though it varied between participants, in general, Group A was motivated to immerse themselves in the topic, built concepts above our expectations, and gave an overall positive feedback. Group B, on the other hand, did not always follow our instructions and was not interested in solving the problem. The harsh contrast in the level of engagement was clear at the end of the workshop as well: while the first group enthusiastically thanked us for the exercises and asked questions about how we will use the output of the workshop, the second group seemed more eager to leave on time.
4. Attitude towards facilitators
By attitude, we mean participant’s mindset towards the facilitators. While some participants from Group A came to thank us for the opportunity to learn new tools, some from the second group even challenged facilitator’s roles by asking questions about where the profit from the participants’ ideas would go. This behaviour represented how cooperation diminishes through disengagement, bad group dynamics and unmotivated individuals.
What the hell was happening?
The harsh contrast between what we saw in the case of the two groups reminds us, first and foremost, why it is so important not to rely only on one example, one case, one interview, one focus group, one workshop when you are gauging your target group or testing a concept.
While the two groups started with the same problem and then completely diverged into the two extremes, interestingly, the two groups came to fairly similar conclusions. They rather quickly zeroed in on the same kind of issues, and often their ideas reflected the same underlying insights about the situation.
Still, you can put any amount of preparation into a workshop, the quality of what you see at the end ultimately hinges upon what sort of people you are working with. Some less cooperative participants dragging down the Human Factor, and your workshop can quickly snowball into a difficult situation through poor group dynamics and decreased engagement to an overall unhelpful attitude.
The conclusion?
You should never underestimate the importance of good screening before co-design workshops.
Of course, two groups and 14 participants is not enough to draw any firm demographic conclusions. However, it is possible that the differences between the capital, Budapest, and a larger countryside city, Szeged, play an important role in what we experienced. It suggests that in designing, preparing and delivering your co-design workshop, you need to account for potential demographic and cultural differences as well.
There are many takeaways from the contrast of these two workshops, but here are three things that might be good food for thought:
- The screening criteria usually focuses on ‘hard factors’ (demography, habits, etc), but what if it can also be used to control for ‘soft factors’ (creativity, openness, etc)? This was something we discussed quite a lot and couldn’t really agree on. Was it helpful that we saw a completely different attitude in Group B which provides interesting insights about how futile and uncooperative people can be when it comes to our given topic? Or, co-design workshops should be more about actionable insights from cooperative people (that really help us develop solutions) instead of interesting insights about uncooperative people (that can be acquired through less resource-intensive interviews as well)? Using a survey question to gauge creativity is something we would be strongly against in case of a job application for example, but when you have only two hours to get the most out of a group, can you take this risk? Is it filtering people who we intend to create solutions for, or is it just optimising the use of precious 2x2 hours so that we can get the most helpful and open people into our workshop room? Let us know what you think!
- Does explaining the purpose of each exercise help to increase cooperation? The tasks at a co-design workshop might seem strange and unusual at first sight for outsiders. “Why are we standing here punching in the air and shouting?” “Why do we have to use Lego?” “How does figuring out the signs on the Story Cubes help?” Facilitators should increase trust and assure participants that they are not just wasting their time — for example, by explaining that, however strange they seem, these tools have a purpose and a rationale. Even scientific research shows that providing a reason for a request might increase cooperation: a study in the 1970s showed that when approaching people in the copy machine queue, using the word “because” and giving a reason significantly increased the likelihood that someone would let us cut in line. So, simply just adding a reason why we do a given task might improve cooperation — but it also adds time, breaks the flow and might send the wrong message (“we want you to be more innovative now”).
- We are unsure how much we succeeded in orienting participants to plan for themselves. The point of a co-design workshop is that people bring in their pain points and emotions, so the solutions are developed with their own experiences in mind. However, the task here (with the imagined paperless world) quickly shifted the focus to older and less digitally active people. While we selected participants to cover a wider age range, throughout the 2x2 hours it still felt as if they were planning for someone else instead of themselves. Next time, we would try and get people to bring in not only their own views but also their own personal life to end up with solutions that truly reflect the participants’ hopes and needs.
If you have any questions, drop us a line!
Did you have any similar experiences during workshops? How did you manage? How do you think facilitators can prepare for or even prevent these negative spirals? In fact, is it always bad to have such uncooperative workshop participants or that is actually the way to represent the whole range of potential customers?
Acknowledgements
Co-authored by Gyöngyi Fekete (Product Designer) and Krisztián Komándi (Consultant) from frontìra, a strategic innovation studio where we work together with companies internationally to innovate their services and products for their customers to stay on top of their games.
Thanks to our colleague László Ruszty for co-facilitating the workshops and contributing to this article.
