Co-Creation for Transformation

Note: this is a research excerpt from Roxanne Nicolussi’s “Bigger Thinking for Smaller Enterprises”, published in 2017 and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Visioning provides a process for an organisation to design their ideal future collaboratively. Foresight approaches allow strategy development to be an inclusive process: allowing its users to be authentically involved in the process of creating a shared view of their organisation’s future. Beyond just a comprehensive list of long-range goals, visions should describe the end result of how those goals interact and play out into the future (Iwaniec, Childers, Vanlehn, & Wiek, 2014). This can help groups agree on concrete principles of success — saving time and resources from being used for short-term ad hoc decisions.

Vidal (2004) notes that both divergent and convergent thinking is needed for organisational decision-making processes as the quality of the decisions made is vital to organisational performance excellence. In diverse decision-making groups, members bring divergent perspectives to the group’s problem because of different experiences, values, attitudes, and cognitive approaches (Elsass & Graves, 1997, p. 946). Unilateral decision-making process was ranked the least effective for these kinds of processes. This finding can be attributed to the political nature of unilateral decision-making processes in which the opinions of all members of the organisation are not necessarily integrated in the final decision (Vidal, 2004).