06 Oct Effective Knowledge Mobilisation Using Co-Creation
Over the last few years, I’ve been involved in countless conversations about co-creation. Researchers talk about it. Funders ask for it. Knowledge mobilisation professionals advocate for it.
Yet despite its growing popularity, I believe one of the biggest misconceptions about co-creation still exists. Many people think co-creation is about asking people what they want and delivering it. The problem with doing this, is that, when co-creation becomes a process of collecting opinions, preferences and ideas, it often misses its greatest value entirely.
The real value of co-creation is in the insight it uncovers. When the right expertise is ‘in the room’ alongside people with lived experience and those closest to the challenge, it can make the difference between creating a piece of communication that people simply ‘like’ and creating something that genuinely changes understanding, influences behaviour or leads to real-world impact.
The Problem with Opinions
When we bring together patients, public contributors, practitioners, researchers or policymakers, it’s easy to fall into the trap of asking:
“What would you like to see?”
“What do you think of this?”
“Which option do you prefer?”
While these questions have their place, they rarely tell us what actually drives behaviour.
People are experts in their own experiences, but, they are not always experts in identifying the root causes of problems or designing solutions.
The value of co-creation isn’t that participants design the answer. The value is that they help us understand the reality of the problem. They reveal frustrations, barriers, motivations, pressures, workarounds and unmet needs that you may never see from the outside. Those insights are often where meaningful change begins.
Co-Creation Without Interpretation Isn’t Enough
Gathering insight is only half of the process, the other half is knowing what to do with it. This is where many outputs don’t reach their full potential to achieve real-world impact.
A workshop might generate pages of notes and dozens of valuable observations, but unless someone within the team knows how to identify the signals within the noise, those insights can easily become lost.
The role of a communications specialist isn’t simply to capture what people say, it’s to understand what those insights mean.
- To identify the small but significant details that influence behaviour.
- To spot the hidden barriers.
- To recognise opportunities that others might overlook.
- To translate insight into action.
Because insight alone doesn’t create impact, applying insight does. We start with the change you want to create. Before running a workshop, organising stakeholder engagement activities or planning communications, there is a more important question to answer first:
What change are we actually trying to achieve?
Because once we understand the desired change, we can begin to ask better questions.
- Who needs to act on this information?
- Who will be most receptive?
- Who has the power to influence others?
- What barriers currently exist?
- What competing priorities are they facing?
- What would make change easier?
- Do they need education first?
- Do they need confidence?
- Do they need practical tools?
Without understanding the objective, co-creation risks becoming an activity rather than a strategy. I believe one question matters more than almost any other:
What would make this easier for people to do? Because evidence alone rarely changes behaviour, people are busy, systems are complex, resources are limited, time is scarce. Most implementation challenges are not caused by a lack of evidence, they’re caused by the practical realities of everyday life.
The purpose of co-creation is to help us understand those realities and not to validate assumptions, but to challenge them.
A Simple Framework for Effective Co-Creation
Before beginning any co-creation activity, I encourage teams to ask:
✓ What change are we trying to achieve?
✓ Who needs to change behaviour?
✓ What currently stops that change from happening?
✓ What would make change easier?
✓ Who holds the insights we need?
✓ Who has the expertise to interpret those insights?
✓ What is realistic within our available time, budget and resources?
If we can answer these questions, co-creation becomes far more purposeful and will lead to more effective knowledge mobilisation. People don’t adopt evidence because they receive more information, they adopt evidence when it feels relevant, achievable, trustworthy and useful within their reality and this is why co-creation matters.
Not because it gives everyone a vote on the final output, but because it helps us understand the environments, motivations and barriers that shape behaviour in the real world. When done well, co-creation helps bridge the gap between evidence and action and that’s where meaningful impact happens.