The decision to change may already be made. How the change will work day to day is often still open, and that’s the part to hand to the people who will live with it. Rules a team writes for itself tend to get followed without reminders.

A tool that supports it

Co-Design Engagement is a way of acting, and there’s more than one method behind it. A solid one is “Fair Process,” described by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne in Harvard Business Review.

Fair Process rests on three principles, and people remember them as the 3 E’s. The first E is Engagement, which means asking people for their input on decisions that affect them, and letting them challenge the ideas on the table. The second is Explanation: telling everyone why the final decision came out the way it did. The third is Expectation clarity, or stating the new rules once the decision is made, so people know what’s expected of them.

This Practice lives mostly in the first E. The other two finish the job, because people who gave input want to hear what happened to it.

When to use it

Use it before the details of a change are announced, when the change will alter how a team works every day. You need a real open question, something you haven’t decided yet.

Skip it for points that are already settled. Asking for input on a closed decision costs trust. Say plainly what’s fixed and what’s open, and people will put their energy into the open part.

How to use it

  1. Split the change in two: what’s decided, and what the team can still shape.
  2. Bring the reason for the change and one open question to a meeting the team already has.
  3. Write down their answers where everyone can see them, in their words.
  4. Decide, then explain what you used and what you left out. Using an answer that’s different from the one you had in mind is the hard part.
  5. State the new rules and who does what.

Example

An agency is moving its client reports from monthly to weekly in November.

The usual way “Starting in November, client reports go out every Friday. Here’s the template.”
The Practice “Starting in November, client reports go weekly, because two clients told us a month is too long to wait. The day and the format are still open. What would a weekly report need so it takes you twenty minutes to write?”

The reports still go weekly. In the second version, the people who write them choose the format, and the template that comes out of the meeting is one they’ll use.

Phrases you can use

  • “This part is decided. This part is open, and I want your help with it.”
  • “What would make this work for you on a normal Tuesday?”
  • “What would you need to see before you’d trust the new way?”
  • “Let’s write the rules together, right here.”
  • “Here’s what I took from your ideas, and here’s what I left out and why.”
  • For a leader, when someone does it: “You let the team design that part. What did they come up with that you wouldn’t have?”

How to know it worked

After the change goes live, listen for who explains the rules to a new person. If it’s someone from the team, using words from that meeting, the design is theirs. Over time, people start bringing their own open questions when a change is announced.

In a Skill Deck Track on Change Management, a person can choose this Practice, and the meetings they already have show when they use it.

skilldeck.ai