Culture of learning and organizational change

A process of co-creation requires essentially a constant development of a learning cultures  central for service performance governance and management. Each stakeholder involved – the public professionals, the civil society organizations, the users and clients, the for-profit enterprises and all other actors – have to be open to learning. This may imply open being to experimenting and ready to learn by doing, by reflective dialogues with others where actors by seek to establish common ground and language,  by using user lived experiences and open data as new evidence even being open for reorganizing their practices. Sustaining the right approach (to services and learning) and communicative abilities among all stakeholders was found to be a key factor in co-creative culture. (You can find more reflections about this in research on Human Learning Systems, for example Lowe et al , 2020). Joined up and facilitated reflections and sensemaking in dialogues were fruitful strategies to agree on the needed improvements and strengthen service culture.

The pilot with Personal Assistance in the Jönköping municipality (Sweden) exemplifies advanced attempts towards achieving a culture of learning and organizational chnage. A particularly important factor was the use of reflective sessions to explore and challenge thinking though dialogue. These sessions engendered an open, respectful atmosphere and enabled front-line managers to act as change agents and leaders.

This success underlines the need for practice based learning to upskill professionals through experimentation, adaptation and learning (Sabel et al, 2017).

Most of the emphasis in the pilots was on up-skilling workers in their existing jobs but new professional roles also emerged directly from the pilots. For example, individuals trained as “welfare community managers” were confirmed to be efficient in facilitating processes of co-creation. Some pilots involved volunteers who may themselves be service users (or former ones). In the UK, peer mentors brought lived experience of receiving the services while in Sweden semi-retired practitioners acted as critical friends.One participant in a hackathon in Estonia assertively challenged service providers to create paid roles in their organisations for people with lived experience of disability to advice on services.

These actual and putative variations on paid and unpaid work with and for services seem to and embody the blurring of user/professional roles and possible hybrid forms in ways that go right to the heart of co-creation.

The main policy implication with regard to professionals is a need to reverse the underestimation of their roles, tasks and responsibilities in co-creation. There is no single change guaranteed to advance co-creation but possibilities include: new approaches to staff training; enhancing and extending reflective practice; and greater emphasis on lived experience for professionals themselves or others as part of their teams. For organisations, a significant message is a need to recognise that co-creation at the grass root level is important but not necessarily sufficient. A possible goal could be more permeable organisational boundaries allowing improved knowledge flows.