11 minutes
What co-design actually changes Inform, consult, involve, co-design. One question separates them, and mislabeling the level costs more trust than telling people plainly what is fixed.
What you’ll be able to do Distinguish informing, consulting, involving and co-designing in a real DSD decision, and write down what is open, what is fixed and why, before the first invitation goes out. Compare the responses to this question and explain your choice: What is the most honest and useful way to set that group up? Document a next step for What co-design actually changes: Take one decision your team is working on now and write two short lists: what is genuinely open, and what is fixed and why. Take both lists to the person who owns the decision before anyone outside the division is invited. Four levels, and the one question that separates them Most divisions already do some version of this work. Public comment periods, advisory councils, listening sessions, surveys, a standing meeting with provider associations and advocacy organizations. All of it is real work, none of it is the same thing, and the differences matter more than the names anyone uses.
One question separates the levels: what can still change because of this conversation? At the first level the division has decided and is telling people. At the second it has framed a question and is asking for reactions to options it chose. At the third, people from outside sit on the working group, but the problem statement and the criteria arrived with the first agenda. At the fourth — co-design — the people most affected help decide what the problem is, what the options are, and what a good result would even look like, and that happens before the division's own preferences have set.
None of these is dishonest by itself. Telling people about a decision that has been made is necessary and often done badly. Consulting on two workable options is legitimate. The damage comes from mislabeling: running the second level and calling it partnership. People who have given their afternoons to something that turned out to be a reaction round do not come back, and the division loses the ability to do the harder work later, when it needs it most.
The same redesign, seen at four levels Inform Consult Involve Co-design
The division decides how the service will be authorized and publishes the change with a clear explanation, usable formats and a named contact for questions.
Open: nothing about the decision. The explanation, the formats, the reading level and the timing of the notice are still worth getting right, and often are not. What people get back: an accurate account of what is changing and when.
The division drafts two workable options and asks people which works better and what each would cost them.
Open: the choice between the two, and details inside them. Not open: the problem statement, the criteria, and whether a third option exists. What people get back: a summary of what was heard and which option was chosen. Done well, this is honest work. Described as partnership, it is not.
People from outside the division sit on the working group for the length of the project and see everything the group sees.
Open: most of the design, if the problem statement and the criteria are still being written. Usually not open: the framing that arrived with the first agenda. What people get back: a place in the room and, if the group is run well, an answer to every point they raise.
The people most affected help set the problem statement, generate options and write the criteria the decision will be judged against, and they are paid for that work.
Open: the framing itself. Not open: legal requirements, the appropriation and any date fixed outside the division — all stated at the start, with the reason for each. What people get back: decision rights that are written down, and a report-back that says what changed.
Three things co-design is often confused with A good listening session A listening session collects experience. It is valuable, it is often the only way a division finds out that a process is failing, and it is not design work. The distinguishing feature is what people are asked to produce: a description of what happened to them, or a judgment about what the division should do next. Asking people to retell a difficult experience for the fourth time, with no decision attached to it, is extraction wearing the clothes of engagement.
A standing advisory council A council that meets quarterly on an agenda the division sets is a durable relationship and a useful early warning. It becomes co-design only when specific decisions reach it while they are still open, with enough time to work on them, and with the council able to change the question rather than only answer it. A council used mainly to review completed work slowly fills with people who have stopped expecting to change anything, which is a loss that takes years to repair.
Hiring staff with lived experience Hiring people with disabilities into policy, program and leadership roles is its own goal and it is overdue in most public organizations. It does not replace co-design. Treating one employee as the division's source of disability perspective is unfair to that employee and wrong as a method: their experience is their own, it is not a sample of the people a decision will reach, and nobody should have to offer their private life to do their job.
Write down what is open before you invite anyone What you can change You control the sentence that says what this engagement can change, and whether it is written before the invitation or discovered by participants in the third session.
What to watch for Do not describe consultation as partnership because partnership sounds better. The people you are inviting have been in these rooms before and will identify the difference faster than you will.
Your next step For your next engagement, write two lists — open, and fixed with the reason each item is fixed — and put the open list in the invitation itself.
I have been on four of these groups. The one I still talk about is the one where they told us on the first day which three things they could not change, and why. We spent the rest of the time on what was actually ours, and something we wrote is in the final version.
Composite community advisor perspective, illustrative A private reflection, for you only and never collected: think of one decision in your work that people outside the division learned about only after it was drafted. Who framed the question? What would a person most affected by it have asked first? Nothing here is recorded, and there is nothing to submit.
Carry this forward The level of partnership is set by what can still change, not by how the meeting feels or what it is called. If the problem statement, the options and the criteria arrived with the agenda, the engagement is consultation.
Co-design gives people outside the division a hand in framing the problem and in writing the criteria a decision will be judged against, not only a chance to react to a draft someone else wrote.
Naming what is fixed is part of respect. Legal requirements, appropriations and effective dates are real. Hiding them behind an impression of openness costs far more than stating them at the start would.
A common starting point sounds like fairness: we ask everyone the same questions, so we are already even. Treating a uniform process as an even process is the Minimization stage of the intercultural development continuum, and movement toward Acceptance and Adaptation shows up as changes to the process itself, not as a better attitude toward it.
A scenario about an advisory group invited after the framework was set, a four-way comparison of what is open at each level of partnership, and a knowledge check on what makes an engagement co-design rather than consultation.
Take one decision your team is working on now and write two short lists: what is genuinely open, and what is fixed and why. Take both lists to the person who owns the decision before anyone outside the division is invited.
Browse and download only. Course notes are not typed or saved on this page.
Reset this lesson
Course overview Next lesson Participation and course completion in this program do not count toward DHS-required training credits unless management, a director, or DHS leadership expressly approves an exception.
