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<aside> ⚠️ TL;DR Recruiting badly harms the environment for co-designers and misses opportunities to increase the diversity of people and perspectives. If we aren’t diverse in our teams, we aren’t diverse in our thoughts or ideas.

Take recruitment seriously, as co-design can succeed or fail based on who you recruit (or fail to recruit) to your co-design team.

****If you have a resource to contribute, please get in touch.

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Part of delivering on our duty of care to co-designers is carefully selecting professionals to work alongside people with lived experience. This is a cultural shift, as we’ve often thought about who professionals want in the room, not who people with lived experience are comfortable with, who they want to learn with and from.

Here are some patterns to avoid when recruiting co-designers:

• Accepting stand-ins. No one – not even professionals with lived experience, carers, parents or lived experience workers – can stand in for people with firsthand lived or living experience.
• Recruiting solely from advisory groups and committees. We must give participation opportunities to people who have not had many of them previously.
• Only recruiting people who you like, and who like your service. You won’t improve access if you only hear from your biggest fans.
• Failing to recruit at least several influencers. It’s often not enough to select people who are excited about co-design. You must also find people who can make or influence significant changes outside the room.
• Failing to consider diversity. If you’re inviting people with lived experience from a particular group (e.g. LGBTQIA+ people, Indigenous people), don’t have them as the only people in the room. Also recruit professionals and provocateurs from the group you’re working with, to increase safety, relatedness and understanding.
• Recruiting people who are highly resistant and vocal. The co-design team is not a place for poorly behaved individuals to improve their behaviour, especially if it will harm other people in the co-design team. If you must, engage them in broader co-design activities.

People aren’t hard to reach; often, the problem is that our recruitment approaches are unimaginative and unwelcoming.

If we fail to recruit diverse co-designers, people who are not part of a dominant culture or have an alternative perspective will often feel isolated and unwelcome during co-design. By contrast, when others in a group are also diverse in their identity and views, people often feel more able to speak up and safer to stay included over time.

What next? Read Part One: Widen inclusion

www.BeyondStickyNotes.com

Share your practice tips with the hashtag #CareFulCoDesign and tag @kellyanagram