In a networking meeting a few days ago, I was speaking to someone who was very successful, worked for one of Britain’s top tech companies, and was about to venture out on his own. I am keeping it vague for the usual reasons.
We were having a back-and-forth discussion about the differences between leadership and management, and I’d asked my conversation partner “Who’s a manager you loved working for?”
The response was lightning-fast. “Only ever had one,” they said. “Always listened, never took credit, always wanted fresh ideas. Made me feel a million bucks. He was gone within the year.”
We continued the conversation for a little while, but I made it clear that if they loved that approach as an employee, as a soon-to-be business owner, he got to set the tone for the company. He could write the manifesto, he could hire the right people. And that it’s super daunting – but that’s what running a business is all about. Massive opportunities to do amazing things.
What his favourite manager had done, it sounded like, was build confidence through coproduction.
Why Coproduction is Punk Rock
Coproduction is stuck to every wall of every charity and public sector building. If you work in any funded institution you know it well. It means designing services with the people who use them, not just for them. The person who lives with the problem sits in the room where the solution gets built. I absolutely love it, because it meets my business manifesto – my values, my mission, my way of thinking.
The public sector and charities try to learn a lot from business. But in this case, I think business can learn something from them.
Consultation is not Coproduction
The version most organisations practice, in every sector, is consultation. You build the thing, then you show it to people, then you adjust it slightly based on what they said, then you release the thing you were always going to release anyway.
This is not coproduction. It is coproduction’s polite, useless counterpart.
Real coproduction is uncomfortable. It means inviting people into the process before you know what the answer is. It means the outcome is genuinely uncertain at the start. It means someone in the room might say something that changes everything, and you have to be willing to let it.
Most Organisations Are Not Willing to Let Coproduction Happen.
Organisations keep getting surprised by the same problems.
I have watched the pattern repeat across businesses, charities, housing associations, and NHS trusts, and it is always the same shape.
A leadership team designs something. A strategy, a product, a process, a restructure. They work hard on it. They think carefully about it. And then they present it to the people who will have to live with it, and something goes wrong.
Not because the thinking was bad. Because the thinking was only ever the “higher-ups.”
The sales team knew the product wouldn’t land with that customer segment. The frontline staff knew the process had a gap. The customers knew they would never actually use it the way the designers imagined.
Nobody asked them before the thing was built. So the thing was built wrong.
Here is what coproduction gives you that nothing else does.
A better answer. Not the one the higher-ups arrived at alone, but the one that came out when the people closest to the problem were actually in the room. More specific. More practical. More likely to survive contact with reality.
Buy-in that didn’t need selling. When people shape something, they own it. You don’t have to run a change management programme to get them to adopt it, because they already have. The implementation problem, which quietly kills more good strategies than anything else, largely disappears.
Something you didn’t know you needed. This is the one that surprises people most. A question gets asked that nobody thought to ask. A connection appears between two problems that seemed unrelated. The room produces something the leadership team couldn’t have produced alone, and wouldn’t have found any other way.
And occasionally, it saves you from something expensive. The thing you were about to build that would have been wrong. The product nobody would have bought. The restructure that would have broken the one thing that was actually working. Coproduction finds these things early, when they’re still cheap to fix.
The manager my networking contact described, the one who listened, never took credit, always wanted fresh ideas, and was gone within the year, was practising coproduction without ever calling it that.
He probably didn’t know the word. It was just a better way to get things done.
The public sector has the word. Business has the managers. Somewhere between the two is the company that figures out how to do both at once, and that company will thrive.
