Three good, loose workshops are not a co-design process. They are three workshops.
A crucible is not a surface where contributions are laid out: it is a vessel where different materials are melted together at high temperature. If your workshop was settled with sticky notes and a vote, it was not co-design.
You design the workshops the night before, from memory.
And you arrive in the room having spent on layout the energy you needed to read it. The mechanical eats up what only a person can do.
Every session went well and the final proposal looked nothing like what was said.
It is participation-washing in good faith: three events that are held and documented, without anything from the first feeding into the second.
The workshop was at half past six in a venue with no lift.
Most exclusions in a process are not ideological: they are logistical. And no ill will is needed for them to happen.
The three sessions are designed in order and chained, checking in each one who is left out by time, format, language or place.
The tool opens by asking what has changed in the territory since the last session: who you have talked to, what you have heard, who ought to be moved. The AI structures what you know; the territory corrects what you thought you knew.
If the challenge is fuzzy, it helps you formulate it before designing anything. And if you have not situated or socialised, it warns you: the best cards on a non-existent base produce frustration.
They are designed in order, and you must be able to state what each one produces that feeds into the next. If you could swap their order and nothing changed, there is no chain.
By format, by time, by language or by place. Inclusion and conviviality are not an add-on to the session design: they are part of the design.
Three complete cards (objective, step-by-step dynamic, materials, duration, participants), with the chain between them made explicit.
Bring the real tensions to light before anyone proposes anything.
Expand responses to the named tensions, with a double sustainability filter.
Converge on two or three proposals, with who sustains them and what they need.
The chain is the tool: what Catalyse produces feeds into Deploy, and what Deploy produces feeds into Synthesise. If you could swap their order and nothing changed, there is no chain.
The three chained cards, with the step-by-step dynamic and the inclusion check for each. It is object A4 of the course. On the home page only the first is shown.
These sessions presuppose a situated territory and activated actors. If that is not the case it says so, however much you insist.
What passes from one session to the next has to be made explicit. Three workshops that do not chain produce a pretty report and no traceability.
The cards do not read the room, nor know when to abandon a dynamic that is not working, nor notice that the person who has been silent for forty minutes has the important thing to say. They are your starting point.
The method frees up mechanical time so that you arrive in the room with a clear head, not so that you arrive with a script to follow.
Start today · €19 → See the other tools