The False Comfort of Co-Design: Why Organisations Must Earn the Right to Co-Design

Across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, co-design has become the catch-cry of collaboration. It appears in tenders, strategies and community planning documents, signalling openness, inclusion and partnership. Yet as Dr Robyn Cochrane reminded us during the recent Engagement Institute webinar Exploring Meaningful and Impactful Co-Design Approaches, co-design isn’t a step in a process — it’s a power-sharing commitment.

That distinction matters. Because while many organisations say they’re co-designing, few are truly ready to do it.

When Co-Design Becomes a Comfort Blanket

Co-design is appealing precisely because it sounds progressive. It reassures leaders that their engagement is modern and inclusive. Yet behind the language, many initiatives remain traditional consultations — a polished form of asking, not sharing.

This “false comfort” shows up when decisions are already made before community sessions begin, when engagement teams lack the authority to share power, or when project parameters are fixed before participants even enter the room. The result is a mismatch between promise and practice — one of the quickest ways to erode community trust.

Readiness Before Rhetoric

True co-design begins with organisational readiness — having the systems, leadership mindset and resourcing to back collaboration with action.

Our upcoming Thought Leadership Paper, Elevating Engagement Maturity: Strategies and Practical Tips for Organisations (launching late October 2025), identifies five pillars that support mature practice: policy, people, practice, culture and performance. Without these foundations, even the best-intentioned initiatives risk collapsing under the weight of expectation.

As webinar panellist Lyndal Mackintosh observed, “Co-design is messy — it demands time, trust and humility.” Maturity sometimes means choosing not to co-design yet, and instead focusing first on internal alignment, decision-making clarity and staff capability.

Lessons from the Field

Winners of the 2024 Core Values Awards illustrate what readiness looks like in practice.

In Western Australia, the City of Cockburn’s “Refining Engagement” initiative built an internal culture of collaboration before inviting community participation. Staff training, clearer governance, and a shared organisational definition of engagement created the foundations for genuine co-creation.

Across the Tasman, the Marlborough Sounds Future Access Study (New Zealand) brought residents, technical experts and government agencies together to co-develop transport options for an environmentally sensitive region. The result was a precedent for region-wide engagement that balanced social, environmental and economic needs — proof that well-prepared organisations can share decision power effectively.

Together, these examples remind us that authentic co-design isn’t about the method itself, but the mindset: readiness, respect and shared accountability.

Policy Momentum and Advocacy

Readiness also connects to system-level change. In the September 2025 Advocacy Update, the Engagement Institute outlined five policy calls to action — including the need to embed engagement professionals as technical experts on advisory groups and to link engagement requirements to public-sector funding lines.

Embedding engagement capability within governance structures creates the conditions where co-design can succeed — not as a project add-on, but as part of how decisions are made.

Earning the Right to Co-Design

The organisations that will define the next decade of engagement aren’t those rushing to adopt new labels — they’re the ones doing the internal work. They’re aligning executive support with community trust. They’re training leaders to sit in uncertainty. They’re funding engagement as strategy, not as communications.

Co-design isn’t a comfort blanket for engagement fatigue; it’s a challenge to our professional maturity. To share power credibly, we must first build the structures that make sharing possible.

Only then do we earn the right to call it co-design.

Further Reading

• Exploring Meaningful and Impactful Co-Design Approaches (Webinar, 2025)

• Elevating Engagement Maturity: Strategies and Practical Tips for Organisations (2025)

• Advocacy Update – September 2025

• Core Values Awards 2024 Showcase Booklet

• OECD – Global Trends in Government Innovation 2024: Fostering Human-Centred Public Services