The main contribution of participatory design is that of pulling together staff who have vested interests in improving their own work practices, both within their own immediate work zones and across the several other zones or functional groups upon which they depend.

WCL Co-Design puts state of the art participatory design concepts, tools and skills to work on making sense of all that was learned in Discovery and on creating innovative yet realistic, feasible solutions to the challenges the project poses.

In the 1 to 2 day Co-Design session, the Discovery team works together with our WCL consultants as participating facilitators. We also invite a few additional members join in — perhaps other experts or leaders from other places in the organization who could not participate in the Discoveries, or key people not on the original team whom we met and engaged in the Discovery visits.

Co-Design has four main goals:

1. Synthesize findings from Discovery into a coherent picture of the organizational context of the project’s main goals. This step is about socially constructing an up-to-date, well-formed understanding of large swatches of the organization most relevant to the issues at hand.
2. Gather a and examine a wide range of innovative ideas and resources to build into the transformation.
3. Plan the details of the solutions the team agrees to develop and implement.
4. Designate the task groups responsible for leading the implementation, and work on each part of the designed solutions …
   
   … and set time frames, milestones and evaluation criteria for success…