Tim has also prepared a video on

co-creation for us, and I'd like you to

check that out now.
>> I'm Tim Ogleby.
I'm the co-author of Design for Growth and
a CEO of Pure Insight and Innovation
Strategy Consultancy.
my absolute favorite tool of design
thinking is the tool of co-creation.
And co-creation is a life-changing skill
for me.
Once I've learned how to do it, I just use
it all the time,
because it lets me identify a future
possibility and fake it in some low
fidelity.
So that the people I want to participate
in that can, can interact with it.
And give me their reaction in a very
honest and, and direct way.
I often distill
design thinking into empathize, visualize,
co-create, and iterate.
And where journey mapping helps you
empathize.
Right?
visualizing the, the new concepts.
Then create this possibility to co-create
with users.
Now, in an analytic sense, we think.
Well, let's just, you know, do a survey
of, of 1,000
people in a random sample, and see what
they say about it.
But the truth is, if we're trying to
create an alternative future that does
exist, that
none of our, our research subjects has
seen,
they simply can't answer a survey about
that future.
They just don't know.
Right?
So, if I had in 1983 gone up to a coffee
drinker and said, with a survey, how often
would you have been likely to pay, would
you
be likely to pay $4 for an espresso coffee
drink.
Right?
You would hear people say, you know, not
very often, right?
And yet, Howard Schultz at Starbucks
created an experience by which, their,
80% of their customers visit a Starbucks
18 times a month, right?
I don't believe that they would have got
an 80% response on that survey.
Because people simply didn't know what he

really had in
mind in terms of the experience, he was
going to create.
Right, we often call this inability to
survey people
about the future the say do ratio.
Right the say do ratio is low.
They say there going to do one thing, and
in,
and then in a future world they do
something else.
And the truth is we're simply not that
self knowledgeable about how we'll behave
in the future.
However, actions speak louder than words
so I'm going to share with you
a mechanism that I love called co-creation
that is dead simple to do.
And that will absolutely
save waste and help you find a better
solution quicker.
Again, to me this is simply the single
most powerful tool of design thinking.
Some of the principles of co-creation are,
we're going
to envision the future through
visualization, right, so not words.
We want to get out of words as, as quickly
as
we can, because language is a different
place from, from, experience.
Two, we want to go to the user and meet
them in their context,
and so if we're going to offer a
new hospitality service, a hotel for
frequent business travelers.
the best place to do that is in a hotel,
right.
Where they're in their context and they
can really think about it, and try it on.
we want to present the user with stimulus.
Right, some, some, something new that,
that triggers that
this is somehow different and stimulates a
reaction from them.
And against
your best instinct we want to leave it
incomplete.
Right?
We want to have enough stimulus to, to
gesture them in to
a new world or a new way that things might
be.
but leave gaps in between so it can see
how they would fill those gaps.
So that they can actually co-author what
the experience might be.
Alright?
A perfect question in a, in a co-creation
session is

when the person says well, how would this

next thing happen.
Right,
I see this part and I see this part, how
would the next thing happen?
And, and the perfect answer is to say what
makes sense to you?
Right now, we're co-creating.
So I'll give you some examples.
simplest co-creation looks like a, like
this poster here.
It's a concept from a consulting company
that
does a lot of post merger integration
services, which
is to say when, when one large company
acquires
a medium or small company they need to
integrate
those two companies.
my client has been doing this kind of work
for years and wanted to generate a new
experience.
Typically what they would do is they
create a 50 page PowerPoint deck, go to
their best client and say here's how we
want to do it in the future.
Right.
Instead they created a simple poster like
this one piece of stimulus.
They went to the clients' offices.
the, the client who led this conversation
was a senior partner
in the firm, and I coached the partner on
how to do a co-creation session.
I did not go with him, right?
And so he went to his client and he said,
he
had basically a two minute preamble for
this poster to say,
hey we're thinking about re-envisioning
the way we do post merge
integration with you here's some of the
elements we're thinking about.
And he put these elements up on the board,
and after his two minute opening statement
was very quiet.
he called
me after the meeting.
And, he said, it was amazing.
We set aside an hour for this
conversation.
my client cleared his decks after that, to
create another half an hour.
we marked all over it.
He said, at the end, this is the best
meeting I've had this month.
when can we meet and continue the
conversation at, at the next level of
fidelity.

Right, so there's a, a customer, a user, a

B to B context user.
Who said oh I like
co-authoring the solution with you give me
more.
Now you can imagine the benefits, right?
Instead of fussing over a 50 page
PowerPoint deck which takes 50 hours you
look at that graphic and you think that
couldn't have been you know, 50 minutes.
to produce that, right?
And the amount of information that the
client got from that co-creation session
was fantastic.
He knew exactly how to create the next
level of fidelity at, for the next
meeting.
Right?
Here's another version of a, of a poster.
in this case we're working on a, a fleet
telematics service, right?
A sensor that would go into a fleet
vehicle.
That would report real time the driving
behavior,
and the goal of the project, the concept,
was to give feedback to drivers in real
time such that they made safer driving
decisions.
And would reduce the cost of operating
that fleet by
the decisions that drivers were making
based on real time feedback.
Alright, so in this particular co-creation
poster,
we imagined that there would be several
potential
benefits, but we did not know what
the company operations manager would value
the most.
And so, we laid out all of these as
potential benefits, and we asked the
office manager hey do
you believe it would give you which of
these
things do you, do you believe it would
generate real
benefits for your business.
And so they looked at this poster and they
went and put green
sticky dots on the ones that they really
thought would, would be worth
real money to them you know, yellow dots
on the things that they
thought were, you know, nice to have but
wouldn't be material in their world.
And one of the things that happened on, on
this particular poster
is they identified something in the middle
here right which was which

we hadn't even seen, which was driver

retention.
Alright.
So a couple of our respondents noted that
there
was a benefit to them that had a material
cost.
Which was driver recruiting, training and
retention that they could monetize.
Right?
They could put a dollar value with that.
And so that to me is a classic example of
we provide the stimulus and accidentally
it was incomplete, right.
But by listening during the co-creation
sessions we heard people, we, they were
able to co-author, the users were
able to co-author the offering with us to
create a more complete offering.
A classic example of, of co-creation that
works really, really well is a card sort.
And so in this image you'll see a s-, a
set of
preprinted cards that are potential
features
of an offering that we've envisioned.
And we don't know which ones will users
really
value, especially our target users.
Right?
We're not divine, devising a solution for
everybody in the world.
We're picking a, a solution for a specific
segment of the market.
Let's go see those people, and let's find
out what choices they would make.
Now it looks like it's in language, right?
Because the cards are pre-printed, but
it's also gestural.
We, it's printed in a large size, very
often
people will, will stand up and move things
around.
You get to see their, their body
expressions and
energy, all right, as they make decisions.
Is this nice to have?
Is this, you know, distraction and get rid
of it, etc.
And, a common way to manage a co-creation
session
is two people from the research team and
one user.
Right, so it's not a focus group.
We're not putting five or six users
together.
Is a single user in a co-creation session
so that we get
rid of any social biases, alright, or any
social signaling, any leadership,

behavior follower behavior, it's down to

one person.
And why we have two is there's a
moderator, right, so
the lead researcher is there, asking
follow up questions, answering questions,
organizing.
The second person on the research team is
taking copious notes and
especially notes about, not only what's
said, but about what's not said.
Right?
The, the confused look on the face, the,
the moving back.
Which is a you know, I'm not liking
it, the, the moving forward, the energy
coming up.
Right these are very, very important clues
in co-creation.
All right, so the couple of ways to do
the, the card sort.
Very often in a card sort you want to have
some blank cards.
for example the the driver retention.
Right?
We needed, we should've had cards.
And and they want to said oh, driver
retention.
And they can write that in, and now you're
really getting participation, right?
That's back to the principle of leaving it
incomplete, we now find
that they're, they're completing it for
you, and they're authoring along side you.
in some cases you'll see we've done a card
sort here, this is a project we did with
AARP.
focused on creating financial planning
habits in younger people.
And in this case, we wanted to get that
emotional
feedback, and so we did it in a facility
that had
a camera in front and behind.
And so on the left, you see the camera
that's in front, and what we're getting
there is.
The facial reaction, confusion, delight,
right things that aren't
said but that clearly show up on the face.
And what you're getting from behind is an
image of,
of the actual choices that the, that the
respondent is making.
Alright, another very clever co-creation
session that I, I've seen done was at
a, at a hotel.
It was a, it was a new service
for frequent business travelers, and so we
went

to a hotel property, we got permission

from
the property, we recruited target frequent
business travelers.
So we had them come into a room, it wasn't
their room but it
was a, it was a room that we had
configured in a certain way.
And we gave them sticky notes of a smiley
face, a question mark face, and a frowny
face.
And we said, come into the room as you
would
when you come into your own room and enter
it,
and we'll just ask you to place these
notes wherever
at, at the things that you notice in the
room, right?
And then, there's no more talking after
that, the person takes eight minutes and,
and
walks into the room, occupies it the way
they normally do, and places notes down,
right?
That type of stimulus, the room of course
is stimulus, 3D.
Right?
It really exists.
And the, the notes are little 2D stimulus,
and it gets the
user out of language and out of explaining
himself in a rational way.
And what was very interesting is, there
were times
when they would place down a, a frowny
face.
And then they would take it back later.
As they walked through and debriefed it,
they would
say, oh, I don't know what that was for.
It was something else, right?
The researcher knows, even though he
doesn't know why.
There's some reason,
right, that he placed that there.
And that's a clue for us to understand
what
the unmet needs are of a certain user,
right?
So that's a case where the researcher's
able to record what's
done, and signaled through behavior but,
but not backed up by words.
And of course, we believe actions speak
louder than words, when we're doing
co-creation.
Right?
another example is that a very classic one
is a story board.

And so,
here's that example of a service for AARP
that exists in a series of a story panels.
And in this case, we bring people in,
who might, who, who might resonate with
that story.
and they would walk through the panels
and, and respond to it.
this is an incomplete example, because in
truth there was
this story board on one side, and the
other on another.
And we, we told them the two, the two
scenarios.
And then we watched
which one they wanted to talk about.
Right, so another principle of co-creation
is to provide alternatives.
Right, if I come up to you and I say I've
designed this watch myself.
What do you think about it?
Right is that a co-creation session?
And I think well the stimulus there is
there's only one choice.
It looks pretty finished and I'm wearing
it.
Right.
So the social contract
is, I don't know this person that well.
I feel obligated to say, it looks great on
you.
All right.
That's not the feedback you need.
If instead I hold up two sketches of
watches
and say, hey, I'm thinking about making a
watch.
I sketch one like this and one like this.
would love your opinion about them.
Right?
Now I'm giving a real choice.
I've lowered the fidelity, so that I
don't, I don't seem invested.
I'm wearing
a different watch, so it doesn't seem so
personal.
And I've given him a choice right?
Ideally two or three, all right three
would be
better, but it depends on, on the time
horizon.
Right?
So that's another key principle, is to
really offer valid choices, right?
Finally, you might have co-creation of
stimulus that, that looks more finished.
These, this is still 2D, but this is about
a, about a, a
retail experience, so a person can really
visualize themselves in that, in that

world, right?
We have the ability to, to look at an
image,
and because of our imaginative brains,
just step right into it.
And start to, to react, alright.
another version is a project we did
for Hewlett-Packard that used Manga
cartoons to
invite people into, to a story and
to engage them through facial expression,
right?
The minimum amount of words, the maximum
amount
of expressiveness to invite them into the
story, right?
And then another example from, from HP, I
don't know if you can see
it so well but it's a very nice finished
environment that, that HP created.
But what they're doing is simply having
people fill out speech bubbles.
Alright, so down here in, in the left side
of the screen, you can see these, these,
this
customer and HP executive are discussing
something and filling
out the speech bubbles in in a cartoon, in
effect.
Alright.
So these are the principles of
co-creation.
First of all don't build something real
until you've built something fake, right?
You have to do co-creation in low fidelity
first.
It's just much more affordable.
When you do that, you're going to go to
them, two on one, right?
Two researchers, one subject.
you're going to provide them some
stimulus.
To react to, right, as opposed to making a
pitch.
It's, it's a no selling zone, right.
It's a, it's a learning zone.
You would love that they're, they're
communicating 80% of
the time or more, is a great co-creation
session.
you're going to present it to them
incomplete,
and you're going to debrief with your
research associate
right after the meeting, because some of
the
richness of what was signaled is going to
disappear.
And then finally, we're going to refine
and iterate, right?

The, the, the stimulus when we went

back to the Telematics fleet management
company.
The next piece of stimulus had driver
retention as
one of the, as one of the pieces, right?
To see if that resonated with more, with
more users, right?
Ultimately, co-creation is the scrappiest
way to get quick feedback
on your concept, and see how people are
really feeling.
And again, this isn't about generating
a right answer according to quantitative
math,
this is about your team looking at a user
and reading their energy.
If they, even if they can't tell you why
they love it, you see
why they're saying, you know, why their
body language is saying they need that.
And this is what we need to design toward,
right, is the energy of, of our target
user in the ways that they can't
necessarily articulate
in words, but they're showing us with
their actions.