Where do we go from here?

There’s a real possibility that I, and maybe we, will go home from here.

There’s the literal sense, I return home, I return to what I know, to doing what I always do, because it’s not so bad in  my world.  There’s rest and recuperation to be found at home, sometimes.   And safety, if we’re lucky.

And there’s a more metaphorical sense, I return to an intellectual home, with familiar processes and practices that have fuelled my personal and professional achievements thus far.

But co-production isn’t central to that professional world.

So how do I decide to go somewhere else other than “home”?  Or, how do I bring what I’ve learnt about co-production into my “home”?

If I decide to go somewhere else, then there have got to be “pull” factors, something that makes the new place more appealing than the home I know, because there aren’t many “push” factors that mean home’s not a comfortable place to be and making me want to move on.  What is it about co-production that makes my research and practice better?  Well, the people I work with would be interesting, and often fun, certainly different!  And maybe the impact of what I do would be increased because others and other perspectives were involved in it.  But also, my personal contribution might not be as delineated and clear, so how would I get the recognition that I’ve contributed?  Moving to co-production might also make the place where I work brighter, more interesting, more stimulating.  Will I still feel at home there?  Will it be a safe place?

Dr Alice Owen

Programme Leader – MSc Sustainability (Environmental Consultancy & Project Management)

Lecturer in Business,  Sustainability and Stakeholder Engagement

Sustainability Research Institute

School of Earth and Environment

University of Leeds

Leeds LS2 9JT

a.m.owen@leeds.ac.uk

15 July 2015

Co-Production of a Beginning

What’s co-production research trying to do?

I’ve been thinking about this question, prompted by a really interesting conversation with the project team in Leeds yesterday. For the first time I crystallised in my own mind three quite different types of impact from co-production research.

What we seem to talk about most is finding ways of doing co-production as a means to generating new knowledge, after all, what’s what production implies. And that new knowledge has a purpose. We want ne knowledge so that we can identify new designs, solutions.

Underpinning this is the idea that by involving others, more than the usual suspects, in generating new insights, we will get better design. Solutions which have the engagement and input from people who have a stake in the solution will be more effective solutions, right? This is why co-production makes such great sense to people working in service delivery.   Getting away from the idea that services are done “to” one group of people, by another group of people, is really important.

But I realised that my own “use” for co-production, my aspiration for what co-production can achieve, isn’t quite that focussed on outputs or solutions. Rather, I’m interested in getting access to different view points, and then finding ways to giving voice to those viewpoints, almost as an end in itself. Almost, but not quite, as I do hope that by giving voice to different world views we can innovate our way out of some of the predicaments we are in, I just don’t have a fixed view on what form that innovation might take..

One colleague built on this by saying that co-production also provided the means to valorise the views and opinion of minority or unheard voices. I’m not 100% sure what valorise means, but recognising, acknowledging and weighing new viewpoints all seem to me to be good things to do.

Dr Alice Owen

Lecturer in Business,  Sustainability and Stakeholder Engagement

Leeds City Lab – Co-production of a Beginning – Professor Irena Bauman

In this post Irena Bauman, Professor of Sustainable Urbanism at the University of Sheffield, discusses initial challenges to the creation of a co-produced project with regards to the logistics of sharing work, things getting personal and ownership of ideas.

 

Learning from Line Dancing

The word Co-production consistently conjures up an image that carries with it a surge of sheer joy and of warm feelings: the sheer joy is a response to the power of a coordinated effort, and the warm feelings arise from the realisation that this coordinated effort cuts across all differences of gender, age, ethnicity, body shapes, personal skills and stories. It also cuts across many dance forms: pop, swing, rock and roll, disco, Latin rhythm, blues and jazz, waltz, polka and swing and is hosted in a great range of venues: dance bars, social clubs, dance clubs and ballrooms. (have a peep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYyWCbRqPxA )

At the beginning of choreographing a line dance there is always an intention to co-produce but rules have to be agreed one by one and the ability to contribute to the co-production (the steps, the turns, the rhythm) has to be acquired by each participant.

So it is with every process of co-production: even when the rules are already known and even when we have signed up to the process, each and every group has to go through a collective learning stage to establish the ground rules, and each and every individual has to reflect on what needs to change in their own mode of operation, and what it is that they can bring to the collective table, before they can make a good contribution and productive co-working can begin.

It is in this context that I paid some attention to the collective and individual behaviours and to the individual contributions made to co-production of the beginning of our small research project testing the potential for a CityLab in Leeds. They are presented conceptually as potential Red Lights to co-production and I offer reasons why it is worth fighting to make them go Green.

Co-Production Red Light 1 : 80% of work is done by 20% of the partners.

Co production started when writing the bid.

It was a typical process of 20% of the partners doing 80 % of the work. This is a key issue for all co-production and often the reason for initiatives failing.

Nevertheless the benefits of different institutions and cultures (University, Council, Third Sector, SMEs) working together became instantly evident and very exciting: the exponential breadth of knowledge made available by pooling resources, the ability of academics to write quickly and within a theoretical framework, the capacity of the council to make things happen (when the will is there) through activating their extensive network of departments and initiatives , and the agility and the practical knowledge of the Third Sector and SME’s that have specialist knowledge, grass roots grounding and are entrepreneurial, skilled project managers and free to be creative. On paper we should make a fantastically able team.

Co-Production Red Light 2: Personal agendas.

It is difficult for personal agendas not to encroach on the process of co-production. Some of this creates unpleasant logistic problem such as coping with partners flying around the world and communicating in sound bites, (with difficult to decipher spelling mistakes) at various times of the night as well as out of sequence as they have not read the e-ma trail properly. The reason it is worth tolerating this is that they are keen to stay in the conversation and tend to make good points.

But personal agendas can also disrupt the principle of co-production. We already had an example of one partner taking the opportunity of a co-production workshop to promote the services of their company. Personal agendas need to be accommodated rather than banned as all of us are driven by our own personal agendas and often it is a positive drive. But the personal should be kept to the ‘social networking’ part of the co-production process. This is something that maybe should be agreed from the outset.

Co-production Red Light 3: Ownership of collective ideas.

The issue of IP crops up as soon as a research project starts: in- equality of effort creates inequality of ownership; hierarchy of command is embedded in the project; money flows in a certain way and the accountability rests with one partner only. How does all of this sit with the ambitions of co-production? How can equal ownership of ideas be secured?

It is worth co-producing the answer to these gritty problem so that we can give co-production a chance – the line dancing belongs to all dancers whether perfectly synchronised or not- so we don’t have to go for the perfection but we do need to aim at the principle.

Leeds City Lab – Co-production of a Beginning – Dr Alice Owen

In the first post by a participant from the Leeds City Lab Dr Alice Owen, Lecturer in business sustainability and stakeholder engagement at Leeds University, discusses the challenges of beginning a co-produced project in terms of the issues concerning work/life balance that project work raises and wider concerns with sustainability.

This post is a response to the following provocation from Leeds City Lab:

“Provocation #1: Co-Production of a Beginning: We’d like to invite our Leeds City Lab Partners to respond to this first provocation by reflecting on what it’s been like to be invited to this particular project. For example, you could think about what opportunities and challenges are already becoming apparent and any concerns and anxieties you have at this stage. You can also use this as an opportunity to unload any ‘baggage’ you may have from previous experiences of co-production”

Fridays…

The challenges to how I do things, how I contribute start with the very first email. Quite rightly, the project leaders need to have an outline structure, a shape of activities with some key milestones put in the diary.

Four out of the five key dates that we co-producers need to lock in, are Fridays.

Fridays are the day when I live other bits my life. I take my son to school and support his primary school orchestra, after school I take him swimming, and I have my own swimming training, during the day I get bits of life and bills on track, I tend to the garden, or the allotment. If the weather’s foul I tend to other interests, knitting or quilting. Sure, I could do all these things at weekends, but I’ve deliberately chosen, after 25 years in the workplace, to try and reduce the dominance of paid employment in my life and make space for all these other things as activities which support me, and my family, and sometimes my community, to flourish.

I could also get childcare “cover” for these Fridays, but this is not the point. I want to do these other things with my time, I don’t want to manage them away so that I can work more.

This is mainly for personal benefit, but there is a wider benefit, or potential contribution to sustainability…the exploration of alternative macro-economic models and the growth imperative has highlighted that we could all do with working (formally ) a bit less and sharing the labour around a bit more, making non-financial contributions to our society.

So already, co-production is asking me to operate in a new way, a way where my personal and professional lives are blurred. And I’m not sure how I feel about that. Actually, I do know how I feel about it right now…I feel resentful of the ask, guilty that I’m not responding enthusiastically, wondering if I come up short already. A bit more reflection required, me thinks, to reframe this “problem” and think about how I can contribute, and if I can contribute.