In the age of information, businesses know more about customers than ever. With all of the knowledge we have about our customers, how can we use it to our advantage?

These large pools of data may not mean anything to most, but the right creative perspective and mindset can extract previously unseen insights and turn them to actionable strategies. Co-creation facilitators provide just that perspective and mindset.

What Is a Co-Creation Facilitator?

A co-creation facilitator is someone that is brought into a project to guide and spark a fresh creative perspective.

It is not uncommon for someone with this job to work in a variety of different fields because, no matter the industry, creativity and innovative thinking are key talents needed to tackle today’s complex business landscape.

A co-creation facilitator is someone that is brought into a project to guide and spark a fresh creative perspective.

Generally, many of the people that work in business are more right-brained, which means they turn to logical frameworks before artistic ones. The infusion of left-brained thinking into a project can help create the perfect logo or an effective customer incentive program that incorporates key design principles.

How Can a Co-Creation Facilitator Help My Business?

A creative worldview is something that often seems foreign to those that don’t naturally gravitate toward creative fields. Having a person that thinks in this way in the office can benefit your business and help you reach new heights you may have not thought were possible.

1. Define and Develop Your Brand

Your business’s brand is extremely important, especially early on in its life. People want to know what they can expect from you and that conversation begins before words are ever spoken or read.

If you think of some of the biggest companies in the world, you probably know what kind of message they are trying to send to their audience. They build a common experience throughout their various products, marketing materials, customer interactions, and everything in between. The ones that do it best are able to evoke emotions and get their messaging to stick in their customers’ heads seamlessly without even trying. These emotions and messages become the core of what it means and feels like to interact with that business.

Hiring a co-creation facilitator when your business is still young can help develop the exact type of brand, product or experience you are looking for.

2. Collect Additional Research

Co-creation facilitators can make it easier on a business to get more up-to-date data and complete more market research. Because of the creative nature of their approach, these methods may be entirely different than what you’ve done in the past.

Using these more imaginative sources and techniques, you may learn something about your customer base that you never realized before. This helps you reach a wider and more specific audience at the same time.

3. Create an Online Presence

After you have developed your brand, you need to let everyone know what it is. Co-creation facilitators can help you with creating a user-focused website and perfect online persona that you want for your business.

There are a lot of businesses in the world, but you have to be prepared to tell everyone exactly how your business stands out amongst the competition.

4. Create More Effective Offline Marketing Strategies

Because of the creative nature of this job, many facilitators are able to connect with others in a more thoughtful and innovative way. This means that co-creation facilitators are going to be able to engage offline audiences as well.

Although a lot of focus right now is on the online audience, there are still many ways that you can engage people in person.

Co-creation facilitation will help your business find ways to connect what you do, what you stand for, and what your audience wants in new strategies.

5. Encourage Other Employees to Think Outside the Box

Arguably the most valuable aspect of hiring a co-creation facilitator is the effect they tend to have on others in the business. This could be other consultants, management, or the marketing agency.

By infusing a creative spirit into the workplace, other people that work for you already may become more inspired to think creatively and approach problems from a design focused perspective. This can be helpful for you long after the project is completed because it allows for deeper innovation in future projects.

By infusing a creative spirit into the workplace, other people that work for you already may become more inspired to think creatively and approach problems from a design focused perspective.

6. Change and Revise When Needed

Although every project will tend to have some type of end goal, a co-creation facilitator can sometimes see a different goal in mind.

One of the things to consider before hiring a co-creation facilitator is how flexible you can be with specifics and the data you have. Due to the creative nature of the work, you might find that you won’t always get exactly what you had in mind.

That’s actually a good thing! Remember the reason that you bring in a co-creation facilitator in the first place is to get a fresh, creative perspective on the challenges your business is facing.

Start the Search Today

There are plenty of creative minds out there ready to work with you. The tricky part is finding the right one to fit your business’ unique needs and culture.

If you’d like to get some more insight into the creative side of work, please check out our services page to find out more about what we can do for you.

Are you ready to get started? We offer a free consultation session where we can talk about what we can bring to your business.

The post Need To Work Together? 6 Ways A Co-Creation Facilitator Will Improve Your Project appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my workshop recipe series where I’ll be sharing methods for facilitating successful workshops. I’ll break down the essentials of a Design Sprint, Innovation Workshop, Leadership Retreats, Executive Summits, and more. Check out the others here.

Today, many companies have a need for significant digital transformation — whether it’s a long-standing institution looking to revamp legacy products or to create an entirely new digital experience. For companies struggling through digital transformation, some are finding success in co-creation practices.

Co-creation is not a cure-all, but it is a powerful tool that will supplement a solid innovation strategy. The problems that companies face right now often require that diverse business units and organizations work together to deliver the most viable solutions.

A lesson from The Beatles

I’ve always been a fan of how John Lennon and Paul McCartney collaborated so effectively as musicians. Paul may have had the beginning of an idea that inspired John who further inspired Paul and so on. It’s remarkable how out of all the times they got together they never walked away without a song.

In business, we often talk about collaboration and how critical is for our teams to succeed. It’s important, but it’s also challenging to foster the trust and understanding required for collaboration. (Additionally, the difficulty increases with the number of participants.) This is why facilitation and collaboration methods such as Design Thinking, Thinking Wrong, and Game Storming have become so popular.

Co-creation is critical to including everyone’s thoughts, visions, and ideas while ensuring that we can develop mutual value…The key is that the outcome is jointly created and mutually valuable.

Most business problems require that multiple departments and divisions work together effectively. Additionally, we may have to connect internal and external teams. This means we can’t rely only on team-based collaboration techniques: we must explore methods suited to heterogeneous groups. That’s where co-creation comes in.

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Co-creation gathers everyone’s thoughts, visions, and ideas; it also ensures that we can develop mutual value. It can include anyone in a company’s ecosystem — customers, other companies, experts, communities, and even internal teams that don’t normally create together. The key is that the outcome is jointly created and mutually valuable.

3 Powerful Elements of Co-Creation:

1. Requisite Diversity

Co-creation allows us to accommodate the diversity required to succeed in today’s complex environments. It accommodates everyone’s perspectives and backgrounds and ensures that you surface assumptions and make informed decisions based on all the criteria.

2. Advocacy

Co-creation also allows for true buy-in across this diverse set of stakeholders. Through the process, everyone understands the tradeoffs and why decisions where made. Therefore, when the co-creation sessions are over, the entire stakeholder group will be true believers who will advocate for the plan with their constituents.

3. Mutual Value

When we focus on a solution that is mutually beneficial to all the parties involved, it’s not about negotiation. Co-creation means we are amplifying and distributing value as equitability as possible. A common misconception is to view this as democratic and therefore problematic because not everyone has the context to make the proper decisions.

This is not a surrogate for understanding viability, considering logistics, and determining the likelihood for success. Instead, this work is about creating alignment and understanding across a team, building trust, growing capacity to make decisions together, and fully supporting the decisions made.

Once teams build their capacity to make sticky decisions, they can more effectively execute on their decisions. This means faster learnings which allows them to iterate much more quickly. Even when they make a poor decision, they own it together and learn quickly because they are executing more quickly.

When I encounter teams that are struggling to get the results they need, I explore if co-creation tools can help them get where they need to go.

If you think co-creation might help your team or project, I suggest you start with a simple method — called the “9 Whys” — for exploring and illuminating your shared purpose.

Using 9 Whys for Co-Creation Sessions

9 Whys is a technique from Liberating Structures, which is a menu of 33 activities or “microstructures” that you can use in meetings or workshops. This particular activity can help you quickly reveal a compelling purpose and move forward with clarity.

Method Steps

1. Craft an opening question using the template “What do you do when working on ____” or something custom.
2. Break the group into pairs.
3. Each pair selects one person to be the interviewer.
4. First, the interviewer asks the opening question.
5. Next, the interviewer seeks a deeper answer by repeating versions of the question: “Why is that important to you?” 5 min
6. After 5 minutes, switch roles and repeat the previous step.
7. Each pair shares the experience and insights with another pair in a foursome. 5 min
8. Invite the whole group to reflect by asking, “How do our purposes influence the next steps we take?” 5 min

If you are interested in learning more about co-creation or would like to chat about how it may benefit your organization or project, please let us know. We’ve seen these tools breathe fresh air into countless projects.

The post Co-Creation is a Powerful Tool for Digital Transformation appeared first on Voltage Control.