Why Consulting Young People is Not Enough
(and 10 things you can do to uncover genuine, actionable, deep insight and truly empower them)
There’s been a lots of discussion in the mainstream media recently about ‘lived experience’, and that’s interesting - because it’s actually not a new idea; but suddenly it’s become a bit zeitgeisty.
Whether your purpose is working with children and young people to bring their voice and influence to power; or you’re a brand which serves children and Gen Z’s interests and needs; engaging with the lived experiences of your audiences, clients or customer can unlock deep insight, powering your services, products and marketing so they have much greater reach, and stronger engagement.
Accessing the deep insight of someone’s lived experience isn’t easy. It takes effort and integrity; and you can’t do it quickly.
I’ve been working in the field of uncovering deep insight for about twenty years now – usually working with children and young people whose voices have been routinely shut down and disregarded – and I want to tell you something:
Understanding a cohort’s lived experience doesn’t come from asking them what they think
Someone’s opinion, even if they have had direct experience of something, is not their lived experience
Even if you have excellent intentions, and are genuinely wanting to know how to shape services more effectively; or to make communications campaigns more resonant and meaningful for audiences; asking people what they think will get you almost nowhere, and possibly somewhere even less helpful than where you started.
I’m going to tell you why, and then I’m going to tell you what you can do about it.
Most people, any people, when asked what they think, will tell you what they think you want to hear; or will try to help you by saying something even if they don’t really have an answer; they might say something based on the kind of day they are having; or they might say something that they’ve heard someone else say. They might be trying to signal (to you, or to someone else in the focus group) that they are clever, or that they care, or that they are trying to help, or that they have good intentions. They might not want to tell you something, but feel they have to give some sort of reply; so they might say whatever they can think of, or just tell a quick lie. If you only ask them that one time, they may need time to consider, and may not able to give you an immediate response; or they might be worried or tired or hungry, and struggle to focus on what you’re asking.
For children and young people, if they are being consulted by someone who has the perceived power to make decisions about them, or take away access to something they treasure, this effect is amplified - and coloured by the ramifications of giving the ‘wrong’ answer.
Malcom Gladwell gives a brilliant talk about this. In particular he notes the ‘perils of introspection problem’: that the very act of directly asking someone what they think changes what they think - and often causes them to gravitate towards something they don’t actually believe to be true. If you’re aware of the phenomenon of anchoring and cognitive bias, you’ll know that the physical space and the service asking the questions will create the first anchor; and in a group situation the first person to answer a question will create a subsequent anchor around which that group will then gravitate.
Expertise is a slippery thing; and we know that people have multiple intelligences and many ways of knowing - for example somatic markers: “gut feelings” and “heart intelligence”. If you ask people to use language to describe something they have lived through, you’ve shut down many of their potential forms of communication and knowledge, in favour of words.
For many people this is not their best way to communicate; children, teenagers and young adults may be especially disadvantaged.
So if consulting young people about their opinions won’t help, what will?
I’m convinced that it’s deep insight, gathered through the wisdom of crowds, using creative coproduction methods.
I’ll break it down.
Deep Insight
Insight strategist Sam Knowles defines insight as, ‘profound and deep understanding of a person, a thing, a situation, or an issue that we can use to help us advance.’ Deep insight is the DNA that powers a useful idea.
An unrecognised fundamental human truth; a new way of viewing the world that causes us to re-examine existing conventions and challenge the status quo; a penetrating observation about human behaviour that results in seeing [people] from a fresh perspective; [or] a discovery about the underlying motivations that drive people’s actions.
Deep insight isn’t an opinion, and it’s not an empirical fact either. You know when you’ve found deep insight, because it makes the hair on the arms of everyone in the room stand on end. It’s the moment when, in a group of people, everyone suddenly sees something about themselves and what they’ve experienced with crystal clarity. With that comes the experience of being seen – being acknowledged.
Profoundly grounding, it’s a tiny moment of residing in that special self-actualisation bit at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It’s like rocket fuel for service design, product design, communication design because it speaks to a fundamental truth that had probably been ignored before - which is why the service or product or campaign may not be working at its best.
So, you’re going to need deep insight – a strategic vision for the thing that the young people know needs to be solved, or where some movement needs to happen. Without that, you’re tinkering at the edges, consulting about what would make your strategic vision more palatable, or pretty, or cost-effective.
If you’re looking for deep insight, you’re going to need a wise crowd with lived experience of the product, service, or theme you’re working on.
Wise Crowds
A wise crowd is a small but representative sample of the entire population with the lived experiences you’re working with.
If you want to find out about young people’s experiences of being in care and what they want from foster parents, you’ll need to assemble a crowd of people of different ages, genders, experiences of entering care, lengths of time in care, positive and negative experiences, and young people who have left care, and are still in care.
If you want to get deep insight about young people’s experiences of loneliness and how young people can support each other, you need to gather a bunch of young people with lived experiences of loneliness owing to multiple external and internal factors, different ages, different genders, different abilities, different body types, different ethnicities or religions or worldviews. That way, you will find out what the core, deep truth is of loneliness, and what it means for young people.
And the exciting thing is, even if you believe you already know a lot about this stuff, you’re going to find out something new, something meaningful, perhaps even profound:
“I was excited by what I might hear from this group, but had no idea what to expect. Over the next few hours, they talked me through the insights they’d drawn from their own experiences of loneliness, and the creative process that had helped them turn these insights into a simple but powerful campaign concept. I learned as much that afternoon about youth loneliness, and about the often overlooked wisdom of young people, as I had done in the previous three years.”
Jim Cook, Head of Coop Foundation, 2019
Having convened your wise crowd, and having committed to mining for deep insight rather than consulting with the crowd; the next challenge is – well, how?
I’d like you to consider creative coproduction, especially if your crowd is mainly comprised of children, teenagers or young adults.
Creative Coproduction
Coproduction is the participatory process by which a group of people work collaboratively to design services, products, user experiences or communications. It’s currently most prevalently used in the social care, health, and academic research sectors, but is becoming increasingly important for non-profit and commercial organisations.
It’s a very specific way of working on goals which are shared between groups of people who all have a stake in powerful outcomes; an ‘innovation that overturns the conventional passive relationship between the ‘users’ of services and those who serve them.’ (Slay and Stephens, 2010)
Co-production can be used with people of all ages; at Effervescent we specialise in creative coproduction with children and young people aged 7-25.
Why creative coproduction?
“There’s a bit of a communication gap between children and adults. Depending on age and stage of development, children simply don’t have the language skills of adults. They may feel something, but in many cases, they either can’t express it to an adult or don’t have a trusted adult to express it to.”
Children’s and teenagers’ domains of knowledge are every bit as sophisticated as adults’, but they are different, and not always accessed most successfully through words – written or spoken. Play, and creative practices, are useful, non-linear ways to access a group’s ‘unknown knowns’ – the deep insight that resides within the group, but that no one person would be able, at the beginning of a coproduction process, to articulate. The very process of creative coproduction gradually unearths truths which the group gradually record, recognise, and hone into useful deep insight in response to the brief.
What’s more, rather than someone in charge recording the raw material and then removing it from the group to be fitted to their own purposes; coproduction supports the wise crowd to work, over time, to turn that deep insight into a powerful service, campaign, or product, and then to use their knowledge and immersion in the communities it is to serve, to broker it: lending it additional reach, engagement, and authenticity.
Ten Steps
So, I promised you ten steps you can take to uncover what children, young people, and communities with specific experiences know about your service, product, or brand without consulting. Here they are:
1. Be ambitious. Start by setting a brief for the work which has genuine, real world value. People will commit huge amounts of their time, energy, and courage to something if they perceive that it will make a genuine, positive difference.
2. Be intrinsically worthwhile. Don’t bribe people to take part with extrinsic tokens – you’ll only attract people who are focused on doing what’s necessary to get your gift vouchers. People will take part in a challenging project if it acknowledges their experiences, is supportive and values them, and treasures their involvement because of who they are and what they uniquely bring.
3. Treat the group as you would like to be treated. Think about the spaces you work in, the materials you provide, the whole experience you are giving. Give people an experience which honours their expertise and time.
4. Assemble a wise crowd. Think about the entire population of people for whom your enquiry is pertinent and important. Honour the expertise and knowledge of young people by assembling a group with a diversity of views, and variety of backgrounds, but with a lived experience in common. Whoever you have in the room will build a truth for that group – so make sure they’re representative.
5. Create a space where the ‘solution’ has not been presupposed. I personally refuse to work in ‘youth work settings’ because the walls are covered in graffiti and posters about chlamydia: all of that stuff creates visual anchors and presuppositions. Find a neutral, inspiring space with lots of natural light, breakout spaces where all sorts of creative stuff can happen, and with blank walls where ideas and images can be gradually built into a mood/strategy board.
6. Build the team. Build the whole team as an interdependent group with shared goals, shared conduct guidelines, and shared responsibility to make decisions and to complete the tasks. People are much more likely to adhere to the project, and stay fully engaged, if they get to make choices all the way to the end and feel a sense of genuine ownership and accomplishment.
7. Build the individuals. Construct an environment of psychological safety and creative freedom by intentionally building the self-esteem, self-worth, courage, and spontaneity of each individual: people do their best work when they are not scared of whether the outcome will be good enough. When you praise people’s work or ideas, be specific and own your praise – people with low self-esteem get into the habit of ignoring general praise and don’t believe it, so make it honest.
8. Resource the group appropriately. If you’re going to do a piece of service design work, or brand campaign, resource the project exactly as you would for a group of really inspiring professional consultants: allocate money, assets, and time to them. In our case, we work with world-class, brilliant strategists and creatives who are agile enough to work out of artform/speciality and so don’t impose presuppositions about the outcomes on the young people. We work with young people over intensive blocks of time – up to two weeks for the initial intensive set up; and then in short bursts by videoconference, group chats, and in person for the entire lifetime of the piece of work. If you don’t resource it properly, you are setting it up to fail; not least because you won’t be able to honour young people’s vision and they won’t be proud of the work they have done, so they won’t be ambassadors for it or for your brand/organisations.
9. Build your group’s critical thinking skills and reflection skills. This work is much more purpose-oriented than traditional youth work, play work, or consultation; because the group will do all the critical thinking alongside you. They are entirely capable of that, but you have to scaffold that learning through the process of cumulative creative experimentation and desk-based research. Provide multiple activities across multiple intelligence domains; generate many ideas and reflect on them without appraising them against the brief until idea generation finishes.
10. Trust. Trust that there is sufficient expertise, creativity, and empathy in the room for this process to succeed. If you don’t trust it, you’ll get the overriding urge to take over, do what you’ve done before, and waste the opportunity whilst making your group feel disempowered, used, or useless. Set it up to succeed, and it will succeed.
You can succeed at this. But if you’re excited but nervous, and it’s hard to know how to start, send me an email and we will schedule a free 30 minute consultation. As a charity, we exist to help make coproduction with teenagers and children achievable for ethical brands. Sometimes just a friendly ear to help you work through it, is all you need.
If you’re looking for more than that, I offer:
· A one/two day training event in coproduction for you and your team
· Mentoring and programme consultancy to support you through your own creative coproduction project
· A creative coproduction project, where we will work through the entire project, from brief-shaping to launch, with your team and with young people
Reach out, and let’s chat.