Co-producing Digital: some reflections and more questions
Lately, I’ve been reflecting on my learning around digital product development. As someone who has spent her career learning about service and system innovation — in the public and social impact sectors — I felt digital was a gap in my knowledge. I wanted to understand the ‘how’ of product development and I wanted to apply some critical thinking to this process, specifically through a co-production and participation lens.
It’s been a busy time. I’ve been gathering practical insights in terms of understanding how things are done and intentionally taking a step back every now and then to question why things are done in this way and is this the best we can do. I’m sharing a few key reflections below in response to questions I have heard from the CAST team and questions that have emerged for me along the way too. These are not based on any academic papers — but based on my subjective learning in previous roles.
1. Where we seem to be: How do we start thinking about co-production? Should we always do it?
I’ve been asked several questions about how you know when to do co-production work and how to get started with it. The starting point, for me, is knowing what the relevant questions to ask are — and an awareness of who needs to have a seat on the table to shape those questions. These are some questions that I have found helpful as go/no go indicators for doing co-production:
a) Opportunity: What context are you working with?
- If the context is fixed, this usually means a limited appetite to explore people’s participation and co-production will not be a good fit. For example, a funder has made it explicitly clear that they are not interested in participatory approaches, is looking for a solution in a short turnaround that does not allow much scope to work with people or has made it clear they want a simple solution to a technical problem which doesn’t require much input from people.
- If the context is open to emergence, this usually means there is some scope for a journey where we start with some form of participation but this could potentially go deeper towards co-production. This has happened when I’ve worked with teams who have not applied any form of participatory practice in their contexts and do not know what the outcomes might be. But they are interested in exploring and learning what this way of working means for their contexts. And once they start using participatory practices, they might be interested in going ‘deeper’ and understanding what co-production means for their work.
- If the context is exploratory, this means there is potential to start the journey with co-production — sharing power, having an equal voice and acting as equal partners with people intentionally from the start. For example, a funder makes it explicitly clear that they want co-production to be applied to explore and experiment with new ideas or approaches. And/or they might be looking to gather new learning and evidence in different contexts.
b) Risk: what is the level of risk involved for people and do you have the budget, skills and resources to respond confidently to these risks? If the risk is high and you do not have the resources, then there might be a risk of doing more harm than good. So co-production might not be a good fit for this kind of work either.
c) Maturity: what is your level of maturity when it comes to the skills, learning and self-awareness required to do this kind of work? There’s a possibility the work will involve uncertainty and will be ambiguous — so practitioners need to ensure they are experientially aware of this and can respond to it appropriately, especially from a relational perspective.
2. Sense making through learning and evidence: Aren’t we already doing it through service design and user-centred design? What’s the difference?
I’ve heard several questions trying to unpick what distinguishes co-production in order to understand what its potential application in the digital world could mean. And there are healthy conversations happening to better understand participation, user research, codesign, human centred design and co-production. Go to Medium — type these words in — and you’ll find plenty of learning and insights.
Personally, to me, co-production is about power. If the conversations about what role people have in your digital project aren’t touching on the topics of power, governance and accountability at the highest level, it’s not co-production.
Based on my observation of what’s happening in the UK context, the application of co-production in the digital world seems small given the scale of digital solutions being explored. I could well be wrong here given I’m new to the digital community! But if others agree with this — then that’s exciting too. The point I want to make here is that there seems to be an opportunity to understand in a much more nuanced way what the current learning and evidence suggests about the co-production approaches that could be applied and explored in diverse digital contexts. It seems to suggest that the scope to develop the learning and evidence around co-producing digital is massive. NB I have yet to come across a sophisticated archive of learning and evidence on this. If the reader knows any helpful and extensive sources on this, please leave links below.
If we can gather, make sense and contextualise this learning and evidence, then my central question would be: What do digital participation and co-production models look like for different contexts? How might we adopt and adapt existing models like the Ladder of Participation or the Lundy model? Can they be adapted for digital product development processes? Or does the digital community need to co-create a digital co-production model(s) which incorporates current practices, considers diverse contexts and the needs of different population groups? And, if we had digital models, then how can we create the digital participation infrastructure to support these ways of working to make it easier, safer and quicker for people to be involved in digital development processes?
That’s a lot of questions. That’s also a massive opportunity to learn and push the next frontier of participatory, co-productive and collaborative ways of working in the digital community. Personally, like a geek, this excites me.
3. Do current practices for developing digital products need to be raised?
This question is italicised because I’m asking this question to the wider digital community and digital peers. Are current standards of practice for involving people in product development processes serving vulnerable people and communities on the margins well? There is work happening — digital has a rich heritage in being user-centred. But how well do we understand the intersection of safe, inclusive, equitable, trauma informed and culturally appropriate practice for developing digital products and services? And what does this mean for creating universal products for sensitive local contexts?
I am asking this question because two particular areas have been playing on my mind when developing digital products and services: current digital roles and the speed of delivery. I feel this requires deeper thought (perhaps others agree or disagree) but these observations are based on where I am in my digital journey so far.
On current digital roles, I have been wondering what training is given to those involved in digital product development processes on engaging with vulnerable people and marginalised communities? What value is given to this part of a digital professional’s roles? If we’re working to respond to social issues with vulnerable groups — what principles underpin our work? What is missing from mainstream practice here? And do we understand the implications of tone, body language, clear communication and framing when working with these groups?
I recently read Josh Harsant’s Co-production: A Critique* — where one of the key criticisms of co-production from a professional’s perspective is the ‘increased interpersonal conflict’, ‘independence and credibility questioned’ and ‘reputational damage’ that can emerge from applying co-production. To what extent has the digital community explored this for current digital roles? What would happen if people with lived experiences were trained and involved as product owners? What would happen if people gathered and translated insights about their peers? This point around translation is mentioned in Design Justice too because it’s a very important stage in the product (or design) process — ‘How do we frame the “problem”?’ — which subsequently helps to define the scope (see the Design Scoping and Framing section in the third chapter). For me there is also a question of who gets to define the scope? If someone can point me to nuanced evidence where this has been done in different digital contexts — then I will hold my hands up and I will happily back down.
On the speed of delivery, the question that comes to mind — what’s the rush when working with vulnerable groups? And what is coming at the cost of this rushing? There seems to be a tension between competitive edge (defined by our current economic paradigm) and working with people at a pace that works for people. Do sprints have to be two weeks? Who gets to define this? Who should be defining this? How much have we really explored this?
In conclusion, my journey with CAST started with exploring an initial set of questions. I was curious and I have learned a great deal in relation to this learning agenda! Along the way, new questions have emerged for me as someone who is not digitally well-versed but has done change and innovation work in real world settings. Perhaps I am late to this party and asking questions that have already been asked. I honestly do not know. But this is where I am at with my digital co-production journey — and, subjectively, it seems to me there is still some distance to travel.
Please note I will be leaving the fabulous team at CAST at the end of March and looking for new opportunities. If you’re curious about similar kinds of questions, know of any working opportunities focussed on the questions above or simply want to connect with me — please get in touch on LinkedIn.
- You might need to connect with Josh Harsant on LinkedIn to see the Co-production: A Critique paper.
By Rajwinder K. Cheema
