Professional skills

Co-creation implies redesign of the relationship between professionals and service beneficiaries.

From a practice perspective, asset-based approaches normally involve ways of working that differ from ‘business as usual’ for organisations and front-line staff. The CoSIE pilots draw attention to the contribution of professionals. This is important because it has been somewhat underdeveloped in much thinking about co-creation (Osborne and Strokosch 2013; Hannon, 2019). Several CoSIE pilots focused specifically on professionals’ ‘mind-sets’ and the need to influence and change them, notably Sweden, Finland, the UK and the Netherlands. Bespoke coaching sessions with elements of action learning demonstrably increased service practitioners’ capacity to deploy new tools and skill-sets. This was a partial but not complete recipe for change. As noted in the implementation evaluation, challenges for service organisations and their employees were both structural (high workloads, fragmented teams, rapid staff turnover) and cultural (morale, professional ethics, openness to learning).

The pilots that worked directly on professional ‘mind-sets’ bring insights into the kind of skills service staff need to develop to ensure a more pro-active and open minded attitude toward the contribution of the beneficiaries in making decisions about their services.

Seeing a person as a whole rather than as a collection of problems is especially important but surprisingly hard to do, given the tendency of many services to work in silos.

A municipal employee who took a lead in the Dutch (Houten) pilot observed that, “despite all my good intentions, I discovered that in the end I was fulfilling our agenda not the agenda of the citizens. In fact, I did not even know what their agenda was! I missed the broader perspective and the person as a whole”.

Taking co-creation seriously often involves discarding cherished assumptions. Ideas have to be unlearned as well as learned. Actions that were once thought essential may have to cease.

As one individual in a pilot ‘catalyst’ role in Valencia, Spain reported, when people at a distance from the labour market were asked what they wanted from entrepreneurial training they said they did not want entrepreneurial training, there was already plenty of it around already and it did not help them. As a result of hearing this, “our preconceived ideas came tumbling down around our ears”.

The largely successful learning sessions for service staff in the UK and Swedish pilots were delivered by external specialists. With regard to the up-skilling of public-facing professionals, CoSIE co-created a much more radical initiative in the ‘encountering training’ designed by young people themselves for Finnish youth services. This challenged standard practice and reversed accepted roles in that the intended targets of the service make a substantial contribution to the training of professional staff. It has been extremely successful and taken up beyond the city of Turku where it was initiated and developed.