Co-design Capabilities & Conditions Framework
PENNY HAGEN
During the Design Rounds, Penny facilitated a participatory activity around her team’s Co-design Capabilities and Conditions Framework workshop. The framework supports a team or organisation in creating a plan for growing capability and the conditions for co-design by bringing an analytical lens to critically and candidly assessing the current conditions. The discursive activity engages with the flexible framework to help teams create a tailored approach and action plan. To support discussion among team members, labelled cards are introduced to engage participants in evaluating their organisational capacity. Four streams help scaffold consideration for: how they work with people, how they innovate, how responsive they are and how the structural conditions support the mission. The 50-something cards, colour-coded to the four streams, offer specific ways into examining an organisation from the perspective of these fundamental questions.
How are whānau (extended family) and other stakeholders involved in the design and delivery of outcomes? How do we apply design and evaluative approaches to identify, iterate and embed responses and the capacities needed to deliver them? How do we manage responsively and work together to build our learning? How do our structures, policies, funding, resourcing and measures enable participatory and whānau-led approaches?
Once the initial deliberation is over, the capacity cards are placed against a five-point rubric that goes from undeveloped, through developing, to leading. Following this, mapping phase is the task to design a capability-building action plan.
These capabilities and conditions sit within a framework that brings a more participatory, collaborative and Indigenous orientation to the process of design thinking than earlier models in this space. The initial discovery stage is described as a moment to frame and engage, the interpretation stage similarly values the relational in its description to explore and connect. However, the overall framework works with the shared observation that an individual learning the process is only one component part. A holistic approach is required to prepare for the kind of cultural and systemic changes necessary to successfully transition into a learning organisation that embodies core co-design principles. The specificity of each card makes blind spots, strengths, gaps, biases and potentials clear. The vulnerable, negotiative act of debating the rank productively exposes different expectations of what is acceptable versus what is desirable.