How Co-Creation Builds the Change Capability Your Organisation Actually Needs

This article covers:

• Why design sessions, not PowerPoints, build genuine change capability
• How to select a design team that strengthens your programme rather than rubber-stamps it
• What happens when you take the plan back to leadership and the design doesn’t match their expectations

The first article in this series explored the Engage phase at the heart of Oliver Wight’s change management approach: why change starts with leaders, not processes, and why the Point of Commitment matters more than any strategy document.

This article picks up where Engage leaves off. The leadership team has committed. The vision is set. Now what?

Enable is where commitment becomes capability. It’s where a carefully selected group of people learn best practice, co-create the future way of operating, and emerge as the change agents who will carry it to the wider organisation. It’s also where change programmes tend to stall for a reason leaders rarely anticipate: the design team discovers implications that weren’t visible from 50,000 feet.

Start by building the team, not the design

The natural instinct is to jump straight into process design. Resist it. The first task in Enable is forming the right team and getting everyone to the same starting point.

This begins with education, but not education in the traditional sense. It’s about inspiring the people who will carry this change forward. They need to understand what best practice looks like, but more importantly, they need to believe in it.

I run a simple exercise in some of my workshops: I describe an insect – with a body, a wing case, six legs, two antennae, two big eyes – and ask everyone to draw it. When they hold up their drawings, they’re all different. The point isn’t artistic skill. It’s that 10 people hearing the same brief will interpret it in 10 different ways. If you don’t align understanding before you start designing, you’ll end up with 10 different versions of the future.

This is why face-to-face, in-person design sessions matter. You need the space, during a drinks break, for instance, for someone to say: “I don’t understand how this applies to my function.” And for that to become a conversation rather than a slide they nod through. Interactive sessions allow people to explore the details, challenge assumptions, and support each other, even practically, helping a colleague articulate a message or draft a communication. You can’t do that effectively through a pre-recorded webinar.

Who should be in the room? The project leader and sponsor, certainly. Beyond that, think cross-functionally. You want people who will own the change in their part of the organisation. You want your future stars, the people others look to for cues on whether something is worth taking seriously. And you want at least one constructive challenger: someone who will stress-test the design, surface the uncomfortable questions, and identify where the plan falls apart before it meets the real world. That person can be difficult to have in the room. They’re also indispensable. Remember: if the names given are easily released from their day job, they tend to be the wrong names.

Co-create the future, don’t copy a template

With the team formed and aligned on what best practice looks like, the real work begins. Co-creation is exactly what it sounds like: the design team works together to build the future way of operating for their organisation. Not importing someone else’s template, but translating best practice into something that works in their specific context.

This means thinking about everything: processes, behaviours, reward structures, leadership accountabilities, Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed (RACI) frameworks, and technology. It also means confronting an honest question: can we move directly from where we are now to where we want to be, or do we need a transition? Some organisations can make the leap. Many need a stepping stone, or two.

What leaders often don’t anticipate is the emotional impact on the design team itself. These people are going through the change continuously. While the leadership team experienced Engage at 50,000 feet, the design team is working at ground level, discovering implications that weren’t visible from altitude. There are changed accountabilities, different reporting lines, and new ways of working that affect people’s daily experience. The co-creation phase, quite frankly, blows people’s minds.

And they don’t all process it at the same speed. Some embrace the future immediately. Others need time to reconcile what they’re designing with what they know. Don’t expect the change’s impact to be linear. Managing this team through what might be called the “value of disappointment” – the gap between initial excitement and the hard reality of what change requires – is one of the most important and underestimated leadership tasks in the entire programme.

Take it back to leadership and tell them the truth

Enable concludes with Validate: presenting the design and implementation roadmap back to the leadership team. This is the moment where the design team says: “You gave us this scope. Here’s what we’ve found. Here are the design decisions we’ve made. Here’s what the implementation looks like.”

The presentation should cover the “from–to–transition” for each area of the business, an initial starting point, and clear milestones, where you want to be after six months, and where you want to be after 12. It should be specific enough for leadership to make real decisions, yet not so general as to avoid scrutiny.

This is also a critical checkpoint. Has the design stayed true to the vision established in Engage? What needs executive sign-off? What might require revisiting commitments that leaders made at the Point of Commitment?

This last question is the awkward one. Sometimes the design team discovers that delivering on the vision requires something leadership didn’t anticipate: a structural change, a budget reallocation, or a shift in accountability that touches someone’s territory. If leadership is genuinely committed to Engage, these conversations are productive. If commitment were performative, this is where the programme starts to unravel.

Through all of this, you’re still communicating with the wider organisation. This is vital. Whether it’s a newsletter showing the cross-functional team spending time together, or updates on progress. Essentially, it’s a signal that this initiative is real and deliberate, not another corporate exercise that will quietly disappear. That communication builds credibility that you’ll need when it’s time to roll out.

The bridge to ownership

Enable is where the programme either builds the capability to succeed or reveals that the organisation isn’t ready. A design team that has co-created the future way of working – not been told what it is, but helped shape it – becomes your most powerful asset. These are the people who will stand in front of their colleagues and say: “I know this works because I helped design it. I’ve already been through the difficult questions.”

That credibility is worth more than any consultant’s recommendation. It’s the foundation of the Embed phase covered in the final article in this series, where the design reaches the wider organisation and meets the ultimate test: whether people adopt it not because they’ve been told to, but because they understand why it matters.

Enable lives or dies on team selection and leadership honesty. Get those wrong, and no amount of workshop facilitation will save you. Get them right, however, and you’ve built something consultants can’t sell you: a team that owns the change because they made it.