Mentoring co-design projects in low resource environments

By Emma Blomkamp, with Reema Harrison, Belinda Donald, Nicole Deen, Marina Moreno, Emily Hamilton and Holly Farley. 

“Supporting people to find their best way to do co-design,” is how participants in last year’s Co-Design Practitioners program defined co-design mentoring.

We came up with this definition as we prepared to mentor small teams at a not-for-profit organisation who were working towards putting the voice and rights of people with lived experience at the centre of their efforts. 

This post shares some of our experiences as co-design mentors in 2022, volunteering to support staff in a low resource environment, many of whom were undertaking co-design for the first time. 

Getting clear on our approach, we noted that co-design mentoring is not consulting or subcontracting, therapy or counselling. Rather, it can involve:

－ building skills, knowledge and understanding;

－ facilitating critical reflection;

－ sharing insights and experience; and 

－ offering advice, guidance or feedback.

We also developed core principles to guide our approach to co-design mentoring: 

 － Mutual learning – both sides are always learning; it’s OK not to know.

－ Mentors meet people where they are and take a strengths-based approach.

－ Guide, don’t do or direct! We share possibilities and suggestions rather than directions.

－We establish common understanding and clear expectations, by asking lots of questions, negotiating roles and boundaries, and responding to (changing) objectives.

With this foundation in place, individuals or pairs were then matched with a team at the partner organisation to establish a relationship, set goals and expectations, and agree on a schedule for online mentoring sessions. What this looked like in practice varied greatly, depending on the team’s needs, work plans and availability. One team started meeting fortnightly for half-hour sessions, while another team member had sporadic, individual, one-hour coaching sessions as needed. The volunteer mentors also met once a month for a group supervision session.

Feedback from the mentored teams indicated this was an effective way to support their learning and development, as they applied concepts and methods from introductory training and some self-directed learning to strategic initiatives at their organisation. One of the mentors expressed their surprise at “just how much value my team got from limited engagement”.

Through gathering feedback from the mentored teams and reflecting on our practice, including the challenges we faced, we developed the following recommendations for others interested in co-design mentoring or capability building in similar contexts.

Importance of scoping co-design projects

For a not-for-profit organisation with limited resources, it’s especially important to spend time early on to clearly scope a co-design project. Taking a design-led and outcomes-focused approach can actually help to save time and money overall. 

A valuable benefit for one mentored team was a perspective shift, from output (an initial focus on presumed solution or just getting the project done) to outcomes (the underlying reasons and goals for doing co-design). A possibly surprising success story came from encouraging a team to take time, focus on relationships and understand the ‘problem’ first before rushing into anything. This actually led to them not continuing with the co-design process.

Doing some pre-work to help scope out a project first can ensure relevant parameters are in place. Mentors felt they would be better placed to support a team if they understood the organisational context, especially buy-in and support of the project. Allowing teams enough time in the scoping stage of the process to have honest conversations, and get clear on the realities of what they can realistically do within their resource constraints, could complement broader, contextual research before embarking on co-design.

Setting expectations and goals together

All mentors were encouraged to start with a discovery session, and in hindsight we more clearly saw the value of a structured session upfront around helping the team define what they want/need from coaching. An exploratory session at the beginning to get a sense of what the team knows about co-design, their readiness to apply it, and what they want to focus on could have been helpful. By setting goals together, mentors gained clarity on what the teams wanted to achieve through the mentoring and could check in with these goals.

Supporting organisational learning and change

Like many not-for-profits working on complex issues with limited resources, there was a lot happening in the organisational environment and broader sector, which impacted on the mentoring. There was also limited organisational readiness to take on board the ideas coming from the co-design groups. We wondered in hindsight how we could have had a greater impact at an organisational level.  

There were untapped opportunities to share organisational learnings during and after mentoring sessions. As a group of experienced practitioners exposed to several different teams and projects, we could have synthesised our observations and offered advice on creating the conditions for co-design and making the hard decisions about which projects to prioritise. That would have required relationships with relevant leaders in the organisation and forums to share those learnings. Others setting up capability building initiatives like this might wish to consider how to establish such channels in advance. 

Remaining flexible and open to needs

The mentored teams expressed a lot of appreciation for this partnership, especially our adaptability to meet their changing needs. They told us they appreciated in particular:

“Open conversations that allowed us to be a ‘thinking partner’.”

“Reflective conversations that helped to adapt and understand how to best structure future conversations and present back insights.”

We realised the importance of being flexible and responsive and not to underestimate the value of just being a sounding board. We don’t have to have the answers; sometimes we can just listen and ask more questions! 

One of the unique ways we set up the mentoring also worked well in this context. At our end, we were mainly working full-time and volunteering around other commitments. Within the organisation, many of the staff were part-time and under huge pressure. In some cases, we paired up and had two mentors per team. This really helped to manage availability, as a mentoring session could go ahead if only one mentor was available. Similarly, if only one of their team members was available, we went ahead with a one-on-one session.

In summary, our key reflections when embarking on a co-design capability building journey like this, are to:

• take a step back before moving forward to determine what is feasible, both in terms of the mentoring relationship and in the project; 

• consider approaches to harness organisational learning opportunities when working across multiple teams; 

• facilitate a debrief or offer some other form of reflection opportunity at key moments during and at the end of the process, so that everyone involved can identify relevant learnings.