The power of a good chat …or would you call it co-production?

July saw the annual Co-production Week with all its articles and musings, and I enjoyed lots of it. Particularly the stories of human beings hanging out with other human beings, trying to change the world, knowing that we’re all in this together. I did find some offerings less inspiring. Sorry and all that.

Most organisations are now on board with ideas and conversations around co-production. The cynic in me would nod towards the pleasantly galvanising effect of the new Care Quality Commission assessment framework, but I’ve certainly had a lot of people keen to have conversations about toolkits, strategies, co-production leads, and where to start in the ‘doing’ of this thing we call co-production. And that’s where I start to get a bit unstuck. 

How I see it is that the key to Elinor Ostrom’s work was that a-ha moment when she named the principle behind the truth that the police need citizens to do their job. She recognised through her research that the job of policing just wasn’t doable without the citizens they are trying to create safe communities for. I don’t recall (and of course I may be wrong, I’m no academic) that she then went on to write lots about the workshops that are needed to make co-production happen; all the focus groups, the strategic planning, the co-production lead etc etc.  What I heard from her writing was a reminder and a pointer to the joy and beauty of humans recognising the need for each other. The celebration that different roles and responsibilities bring and more than a nod to the concept of power.

So am I saying that we should ignore any strategic thinking about co-production? No, of course not. I’m all for a good plan when a plan is called for, but I genuinely think the best way to get our heads around this thing we love to call co-production is to start looking for more opportunities for human beings to chat to each other. About fifteen years ago, I was working for what was then the Department of Health setting a up a programme that was part of the personal budgets team called ‘Having a Voice’. The idea was that it would be great to support ways of citizens working alongside civil servants in the writing and implementing of policy. I remember my first week, meeting with a room of civil servants to explain my programme. There were lots of nods and ‘yes, we like to work with people’ noises and then someone asked for some practical examples of what they might do differently. The Department of Health building that we worked in at that time was Wellington House in London, round the corner from The Old Vic by Waterloo station. Across the road was (and still is) a fabulous community centre and internet café called Living Space. My suggestion was that once a week, instead of going for lunch or coffee in the Wellington House café in the basement of the building, they pop across the road and have a chat with people in Living Space. Tell them what they are working on, ask some questions about what is important to them and their lives and really get a sense of whether they are on the right lines in terms of the work they are doing. The response? Deathly silence and a sense that I had just suggested that they walk naked down Waterloo Road. Eventually someone piped up, ‘oh we already have focus groups’.

Lots of people are asking me ‘where do we start?’ and I find it hard to get beyond, ‘start chatting more to folk’. To try and be a bit more helpful, Bryony Shannon and I recently came up with the idea of the co-production sandwich. It’s nothing new really as many people who have written about co-production have talked about levels of co-production, both in terms of the co-production ladder and the idea of co-production happening at a strategic, day to day and individual level. All we did was to turn those levels into a sandwich – obvious really, but really helps me to think about co-production and how we go about it.

If you want to make a great sandwich, you need to think carefully about your bread – you need a good quality piece of bread to get things going. I’m a sourdough fan myself but I’m not going to tell you what to eat. The bottom layer of bread that you build your sandwich on is the way we think about talk about and write about human beings. It’s our day-to-day conversations with people and their families, how we think about what support planning really means. It’s the work we do to help people get gloriously ordinary lives. Its critical. If you don’t have that solid layer in place, then the rest of the sandwich is not going to work. If it’s not thick enough, if there’s not a solid layer of really good butter, it’s likely to get soggy and fall apart. I could probably take this analogy too far.

Then there is the middle bit, the filling. I don’t eat meat so I’ve got ideas for all sorts of things that make a good sandwich that you might think are pants (barbequed tofu anyone?), but you want something good in the middle there. Something to get your teeth into. The middle bit of co-production is all the day-to-day stuff that we need to do. It’s thinking about who does the work that needs to be done and how they get employed. It’s how people support each other, how we write support plans. Practical stuff that is the oil in the machine. Keep it varied, and if you want to make a good sandwich don’t skimp on the filling – there’s not much you can’t cram in there. Those messy sandwiches where the filling drips down your chin are the best.

And then my observation would be that an open sandwich in itself is a perfectly good thing, but if you do want to put a top layer of bread on, then that layer is the big picture stuff folk like to call strategy. It’s the thinking and planning about policy, about budgets and about having an overall picture about how things work. Some people are really interested in this, some people not so much. Don’t waste people’s time if it’s not their thing. And remember in this bit of the work, it gets easy for the focus to be on the talking with (the co) not the doing (the production).

My observation about where things go wrong? We start with the top layer of bread not the bottom. We want to make sure co-production is happening where we live and work and we think, ‘let’s make sure we start thinking about involving people in our new plan for (insert name of policy document)’. In my experience if we start from this position, we might end up with a great strategic co-production group, maybe with wonderful, committed people who love the strategic conversations and will help you get into some tough conversations with your elected members. Fantastic. You can, however, have a brilliant strategic co-production group and still have social workers having conversations that involve whether or not someone can have an extra £30 a week in a personal budget or whether someone’s direct payment really should be used to go swimming and if that’s actually a need not just a want. If we start with the top layer of bread, we aren’t always paying attention to that bottom layer on which co-production is built……and then you’ll have a horrible sandwich.

I hear a lot of, ‘yes buts’ as well. ‘We’re not ready yet, we have to get our own house in order’ …… ‘we want to write a strategy first’. Get over it. 

So, if you’re someone, anyone looking to make co-production happen where you work, start by taking a look at how everybody who works with you thinks about, talks about and writes about people. Is there evidence of people getting gloriously ordinary lives? Don’t skip this and do it with a forensic attention to detail. Then look at your everyday processes, the stuff that is the engine room of your organisation; the process by which you employ people, how you create support plans with people. Are those day-to-day things happening with, by and alongside people? Then take a look at your strategic stuff and find the people who will be interested in that. When you ask people to work with you on strategy, be prepared to be honest. Talk about budgets, talk about policies. Talk about the stuff that you think you shouldn’t talk to about anybody that feels too embarrassing or too difficult.

Oh, and the strategy for co-production? Chat to more folk.