Who, how, what, when? Decision-making and Co-Production Collective

How should we make decisions as Co-Production Collective? That’s a pretty big question and one which has become increasingly pressing for us over these past few months. How can we stay true to our core values – human, inclusive, transparent and challenging - when we decide to accept funding from or partner with other organisations? How can we be accountable to all of the Co-Production Collective community? And who should be involved in making which decisions?

How we currently make decisions

Co-Production Collective has been co-produced by an open community since 2017 (when we were known as the UCL Centre for Co-Production in Health Research). Together we’ve co-created a name, strategy, brand, website, training package, pilot programme, and much more through face-to-face sessions, online and offline activities. However, there are also some decisions that the staff team have been trusted to take behind the scenes, guided by our co-created core values (and their earlier version, our Principles we Live By) and our co-creation sessions. For the Collective this is how co-production has generally worked in practice – team members are assigned roles and responsibilities and trusted to deliver on them based on shared understandings of direction, purpose and principles.

We also have an Allies Group who meet a few times a year, made up of representatives from across UCL and our wider co-production community. They bring a variety of experience and insight to act as a sounding board, critical friends, and to facilitate connections from inside the ‘system’ we’re trying to change. We’ll be sharing more about how our Allies Group works in a future blog – watch this space.  

This mixed method approach to decision making – co-creation, the Allies Group and the staff team – has worked well in that we can be reactive and act quickly to make the most of opportunities which come our way.  But we’ve changed a lot since 2017, when this original way of working was developed. We have a much bigger community, with lots of people who’ve joined us in the last year, and we have to make different types of decisions now, including those about funding. The Allies Group itself is also by no means perfect - we have fewer members with lived experience than those who are there in their professional roles.

That means it’s time for a re-think. As a co-production community, it’s vital that our decision-making processes are co-created, transparent, and involve more people. Practically, we’ll still have to take a lot of decisions as a staff team in order to get things done, but the basis for those decisions, their visibility and our accountability to our wider community can be improved.

Where do we go from here?

This is a lot to think about! And it’s a thread that’s going to continue running through our co-creation work over the next few months. We kicked things off with a co-creation session at the end of March on the issue raised at the beginning of this blog, decision-making around funding and partnerships. You can catch up with what happened during that session, including reflections from co-producer Winston, in our recap.

There’s lots more thinking to be done about this and other aspects of our decision-making structures and processes, including the question of who is involved in decision-making. We know it isn’t going to be simple or straightforward, but that’s kind of the point! It’s also why we’re glad to be doing this together with you, as one co-production community. If you have experience or ideas around governance, accountability and decision making within co-production or other ‘non-traditional’ ways of working, then we’d love to hear from you – please get in touch.

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