Co-creation, control and small ways of slowing down

“There is wisdom in slowing down because that shift in motion might allow us to notice a different path hiding in the obviousness of the familiar.”
Dr Bayo Akomolafe

We are all subject to control in some form. It can be a friend of safety and productivity and an antidote to chaos. But it can also get in the way – either because there is too much, and that dictates the pace and outputs, or because there is too little, which can limit our agency, purpose and creativity.

We’ve noticed it’s counter-cultural to slow down and create different spaces – where control of outputs moves aside for the group to discover well-crafted and co-created solutions over time.

Yet nothing we are sharing here would have been possible if we’d started with or pre-defined outcomes. This was easy to say and hard to do. It is reassuring for everyone when there is a focus on a fixed point and a sense of motion towards it, and it is not comfortable to push back against “getting what we always got”. It felt at times like we weren’t doing work.

Yet work doesn’t stop when you are in relationship and collaboration with others. If the spaces are held well - prioritising equity, trust, and reflection - the work can take on new forms that are both unexpected and purposeful.

Agency is a key element in co-production and co-creation. To reference another of Myron’s Maxims, people own what they help create. The “co-” terms have become buzzwords that can sadly be used to imply inclusion of those with less control, to a process or product they had very little influence over. In our experience co-creation is messy, emergent, loop-y and needs to be held well. It starts with an intention rather than an end in mind and requires trust and a lot of time.

Co-production requires everyone involved to acknowledge the power they have, to commit to releasing their control over outcomes, and instead commit to the process.

It’s hard, but worth it. Co-production creates things you couldn’t have anticipated when you set out, such as our weekly Stewardship Group sessions. Whilst looking elsewhere for answers we created something we really valued, so we asked: (how) can more people access this kind of relational space?

The HCT co-lab grew out of this enquiry, rather than being designed to meet a fixed brief. It ran alongside other questions about who leaders were and what they needed, and many conversations with our communities including at our event Structures of Togetherness. Along the way the concept of a co-lab emerged, as did a lot of learning about trust and governance in co-design (another Maxim: the process you use to get to the future is the future you get), as opposed to commissioning.

This means that the HCT co-lab is both a valuable experience and place of learning (a laboratory, if you like) and one of a number of possible experiments on the theme of individuals’ capacity to work collectively. 

Similarly we see our experience of HCT as just that: our experience. There’s no ‘one size fits all’: every group co-creates these spaces differently, shaped by their own context, members and needs, and every iteration is the product of that group.

We tried not to control the idea of replicability: not to see our version as the prototype, rolling it out as ‘the answer’ for all. Rather, we hoped to create conditions where people have a glimpse of relational spaces, and seek ways to create and experiment with them, to iterate and regenerate in a multitude of ways because they want to. It’s more than a hunch: we know Barnwood Trust’s Stewardship Circles laid the ground for our HCT experience, so we trust that HCT has seeded something - we just won’t know what until we look back from where we arrive next.