"I prefer radio to television. The pictures are better." Anon Over recent years, it has become increasingly common for the word "co-creation" to be used to describe a deliberate act of collaboration within and/or between organizations. This might involve, for example, collaboration between members of a business and its customers or other stakeholders; between designers and end-users; between multiple web-based contributors to an open-source resource such as Wikipedia; or between managers and staff within an organization.
In this last regard, the term is now firmly established in the language of the "employee engagement" movement. But I believe that using it in this way not only devalues the word but, more importantly, obscures a critical aspect of organizational dynamics that is implicit within it. In particular, using the term to describe structured approaches to participative management, joint decision-making and collaborative working risks missing the point that all meanings and outcomes are necessarily co-created. And this insight is fundamental to an understanding of how organizations work, how change happens and how leaders need to act as a result.
The issue
As suggested by the quotation at the opening to this post, co-creation takes place spontaneously. It happens as people perceive, interpret and evaluate things in the natural give-and-take of organizational life; through the conversations that they have with themselves (i.e. thinking) and those that they have with others. Importantly, this doesn't just happen where the formal position is arrived at through participation and involvement. It applies just as surely in a 'command and control' regime.
In effect,formally adopted "designs" (such as strategies, structures, systems, processes, procedures, visions, values statements and so on) invite people to think and act in particular ways. Some of these 'invitations' carry the full weight of command, of course; others overtly offer some scope for discretion. Either way, these will have no effect on outcomes until they have 'passed through' the ongoing sense-making and use-making processes that constitute everyday organizational life.
These formal elements of organization (which are themselves 'crystallized' outputs from previous sense making) inevitably influence the ways in which people make sense of things and decide how to act going forward. However,people need to make sense of these requirements and 'functionalize' them continuously, as they construct the future together in the midst of today's encounters. Since this can only happen in the moment of local interaction, it brings into play a whole raft of hidden, messy and informal dynamics of organization. And these often have a much more powerful influence on the outcomes that emerge than do those aspects of organization that have been formally designed.
It is here, therefore, that outcomes are co-created, as people perceive, interpret, evaluate and act upon (or not) the idealized designs, in the light of everything else that's going on for them at that time, in that place and in those circumstances .
The self-organizing dynamics of conversation hold the possibility that novel outcomes will emerge from these ongoing acts of co-creation; as people come to see things differently and escape from established patterns of thinking and acting. However, as people continue to make sense of things and take action together, these same dynamics give rise to generalized tendencies for them to think and act in particular ways. So this in-the-moment sense making will also be influenced, imperceptibly, by the 'imprints' of sense making that has gone on before. And these taken-for-granted assumptions will tend to channel ongoing sense making down established pathways - for better or worse.
So what?
In short, co-creation is not something that happens if managers choose to act in a particular way and not if they don’t. It occurs continuously and spontaneously, as a natural dynamic of the socially complex nature of all organizations.
Understanding this is critical, if managers are to escape from the flawed assumptions about how organizations work that dominate mainstream thinking. Doing so will allow them to focus instead on the very essence of organization - the everyday process of conversational interaction. It is here that value is continuously created and destroyed. And it is here that managers would be better advised to direct their attention.
Comments