Transcript for
Co-design: Disrupting business as usual – part one

Narrator [00:00:02] Welcome to the Emerging Minds podcast.

Lydia Trowse [00:00:07] Welcome to the first episode in this two-part series on co-design. My name is Lydia Trowse and as the Child and Family Partnership Coordinator here at Emerging Minds, it is my job to ensure the voices of people with lived experience are authentically included in our resources. One of the ways we can do this is through co-design, a process which ensures all critical stakeholders from professional experts to end users are respected and supported to share their expertise as equal partners in a project. This series focuses on a paper co-designed and developed for Emerging Minds by Jason Tyndale, a child and family partner. Jackie Amos, a psychiatrist, Rhys Price-Robertson, a researcher, and me. It examines the ways we supported Jaisen as the person with lived experience to contribute authentically and equally in the conceptualisation, design and development of the resource. I’d like to welcome Jason, Jackie and Rhys to part one of this series. In this episode, we will be focusing on the practical tips we have learnt are vital to the design process. Welcome, everyone.

Jason Tyndale [00:01:22] Thanks, Lydia.

Jackie Amos [00:01:23] Good to be here.

Lydia Trowse [00:01:25] Jason, could you get us started by telling us why you said yes to being involved in this project?

Jason Tyndale [00:01:32] Yeah, sure. My experiences with Emerging Minds have been quite positive in the past. And when I was approached to do co-design, I felt like it was a great opportunity to use my knowledge and experience as a child and family partner to put something into action that would hopefully have some really positive outcomes.

Lydia Trowse [00:01:57] Thanks, Jason. Jackie, and what about you? Why did you say yes?

Jackie Amos [00:02:00] I think a little bit similar to Jason in that I’d had some really good experiences with Emerging Minds previously. I think the second thing was that I had in the time leading up to the podcast, had become aware that in the kind of academic literature and the psychiatric literature that I was reading, there was a voice missing. There were voices of researchers, voices of clinicians, and then there were lots of measurement tools. But what none of that told me was what the experience of the person receiving care was and whether in fact, the care was actually making people feel better. And that missing voice got me very interested in the idea of kind of why. So the idea that I could be involved in having a conversation where hopefully no voices were missing really caught my attention.

Lydia Trowse [00:02:55] Thanks, Jackie. And Rhys, what about you? What made you want to be involved in this project?

Rhys Price-Robertson [00:03:01] Probably something similar to what Jackie was just saying about the missing voice, I think, back to some years ago, so when I first started doing research or first started writing resources like the one that we produced, I would often do that, just kind of like by myself. I’d be looking at literature, you know, and I’d be summarising studies that had been done or something. And I think gradually I grew kind of maybe disenchanted with that and really wanted to include people themselves, other people’s voices in the work that I was doing. I think doing qualitative research and then kind of ethnographic research were like steps in that direction. But then the idea of co-design was not just like me being the boss of the research and talking to other people and then sort of writing about what they say. But it’s actually like, OK, a much more integrated inclusion of other people’s voices, something that was really attractive to me.

Lydia Trowse [00:03:56] Thanks, Rhys.

Jackie Amos [00:03:56] Can I add something?

Lydia Trowse [00:03:58] Please.

Jackie Amos [00:04:00] The other thing that I was just thinking about was that one of my journeys in my professional life was to stop thinking about myself as an expert, because in medical training, you’re taught to be an expert and started to think about the idea of people holding expertise. So I thought, well, I have some expertise that I’ve got from my book learning and from actually talking to people. I’ve learnt so much from talking to the people that I care for, but I don’t have expertise in another person’s particular situation. And so this seemed like a really lovely opportunity to bring different sets of expertise together.

Lydia Trowse [00:04:44] Thanks, Jackie. I think that’s a really important point and talking about sort of practical tips for doing co-design, one of the things we deliberately did was wait until we had all the authors together acknowledging that they all had equal expertise to contribute to this project. So we had everyone together before we started framing the project or doing any work on it at all. Jason, could you talk a bit about why it was important that we had everyone together before we started any planning?

Jason Tyndale [00:05:16] I think the main part of having everyone together would be that it’s tokenistic to introduce someone at a later date to a project, particularly if they’ve got lived experience. If you’re introducing everyone together and starting the project off together, everyone’s on equal footing and everyone has an opportunity to have their voice. So, yeah, I think that was really important in regards to everyone being together at the same time, plus it gave us an opportunity to see how we would work together.

Lydia Trowse [00:05:54] Thanks, Jason. Jackie or Rhys, did you want to add anything to that?

Rhys Price-Robertson [00:05:59] I was just remembering when we started this project, Lydia, and I think you first proposed the idea to me, then it was a funny kind of process at the start because we kind of didn’t want to say too much or pre-empt too much before the other people got involved, like, okay, well, maybe we can do it on this topic, you know, looking at children and family with complex needs. And maybe it’d be good to have a practitioner and someone with lived experience, but like, we kind of didn’t want to go any further than that. That was an interesting project. I, in my mind, was kind of like, maybe running away with ideas or planning ideas or something, many of which didn’t eventuate. And maybe I can talk about that later, because that’s an interesting part of the process. But, yeah, it was interesting to try to really kind of put the brakes on and say, OK, let’s just do a minimal amount of ideas or planning before everyone gets included.

Lydia Trowse [00:06:48] Yeah, it’s definitely a strange thing to do when you’re used to being as well-prepared as you possibly can be. And in this situation, we had a reasonably vague, flexible idea about what we wanted to do. And then it was finding people who wanted to do it with us and trusting the process.

Rhys Price-Robertson [00:07:08] Yeah.

Lydia Trowse [00:07:10] So Rhys, you were saying that you had some initial ideas about how the paper might go and how it might look and the content of that paper that didn’t necessarily come to fruition. So can you talk a bit about that?

Rhys Price-Robertson [00:07:22] Yeah, sure, I guess even though I just before I said that I wanted to do something different, I wanted to include other voices in the process in ways that I hadn’t. I guess, you know, old habits die pretty hard and I’d been doing research for quite a long time and got in the habit of just like, coming up with a plan or getting an idea of what I need to write and looking at the literature and then just like, planning stuff, you know, and then just kind of making that happen and having to produce papers quickly. And I started to do that in this process. So, you know, I was thinking about, OK, we’ve done a few papers on working with children and families, so let’s do another one and we’ll include the lived experience voice and a practitioner voice and that’d be really good. And maybe we’ll break it up into a different topic, so bite-sized kind of bits under different headings. And I actually started to kind of like map out those headings. What they might be it might be stuff like, you know, engaging with families. What’s that like? And we can get the lived experience perspective there, or like, you know, working with families where there’s resistance within the family or where there’s conflict within the family or something like this. And, you know, they’re all really important issues. They’re certainly things that could be explored, but the expectations I had around what the paper would be like were very different to how it ended up being.

Lydia Trowse [00:08:34] Thanks, Rhys. Jason, can you tell us a bit about how the process works from the start when we first got together?

Jason Tyndale [00:08:42] I was a bit nervous, a bit intimidated by the fact that I was going to be working with two professionals in their fields, so there was a bit of nerves involved, but we all came together in Adelaide and we came into a room and at a, I believe  it was a chocolate cafe. So that was pretty impressive. And it was, it was good because it wasn’t a corporate sort of environment. It was a really relaxed environment where we could just chill out and just do what we had to do. And I got to meet everyone, I’d previously spoken to Rhys at an Emerging Minds project that I’ve been working on beforehand. And then I met Jackie and I was really nervous to meet Jackie because I have not had good experiences with clinicians in the past. So I was a little bit intimidated and worried. But when I met Jackie, she was so laid back and cool and really nice and I felt very comfortable. And we sat next to each other, which sort of like, closed any gaps that I felt was, you know what I mean? It’s kind of hard to explain, but I just felt very comfortable with Jackie and she very quickly made me feel like my voice would be heard and Rhys also, but Jackie made me feel like she would listen, just the way she spoke and how she presented was really nice and I felt really comfortable with that. So, yeah, after that, we basically got to starting our discussions about around what we were going to do and what the project was going to look like, which was really interesting because we really had no idea where it was going to go. I think and that was the fun part, was the mystery of how it would eventuate and how things would come to be.

Lydia Trowse [00:10:39] Thanks, Jason. Jackie, did you have some reflections on that initial process and how it worked for us?

Jackie Amos [00:10:46] Definitely. Um, I took the tram that morning to the cafe and just responding to Jason, I think I spent the whole tram journey nervous, particularly about meeting Jason. I knew how I could relate to Rhys, he was a researcher, I’ve done a PhD, this is kind of a world that I kind of had navigated for some years. I knew how Emerging Minds were, so I thought, well, I know how I’m going to relate to Lydia. But I think we had some anxiety, Jason, because we were stepping out of traditional roles that are often quite closely protected and we were stepping into a process where we both had to be really different. And so I was similarly relieved when I came into the café and the atmosphere was relaxed and I saw Jason sitting there. Jason’s a person, you know, I’m a person, this is okay, we can meet as people. And so I think that that relaxed atmosphere and that that kind of ability to sit somewhere comfortable and non-corporate and non-clinical was really important in Jason and I being able to find that place of comfort together quite quickly. And I was really nervous about perhaps as a clinician, my voice being far too loud. So I did what I do when I’m nervous and just put that all out on the table. And it sounds like that was helpful, being transparent about my fear about that was really helpful for us, um, Jason and I to get over that initial hurdle. And my strongest memory was that we had set aside a little bit of time to introduce ourselves and that actually became half a morning and became really, really important in the process. So making that time for personal and professional introductions, um, so that we met as people seem to be very, very important in the practical process.

Rhys Price-Robertson [00:13:00] Mhm. And can I add that it felt like going through the process, working together, saying that. Yeah, like you said that initial morning and I feel like, maybe to use kind of psychotherapeutic terms is something we’re doing kind of contracting. We were doing kind of like, working out like, how are we going to how are we going to do this, how we’re going to relate to each other in this space. You know, who should talk first? And how should we make sure that one voice doesn’t dominate or some voices don’t dominate? And it was through that very process that time we talk and we did have time. You know, we’d been talking about the space was nice and it was nice, but we also had time, we had two days. You know, you don’t often get two days just to kind of, just to be and just to go through this process, and it was by taking that time that actually the topic of the paper started to emerge and it was like, a kind of parallel process. We’re going through something and we’re wondering, you know, OK, who who holds the power in this situation or whose voice might dominate and how can we sort of work against that in this situation and make sure one voice doesn’t dominate? And we realised that those topics that we were struggling with as we’re meeting each other, as we’re working out how to relate to each other, are the very topics that they cut across so much practice, you know, not just practice in health and welfare services. I mean, they cut across practice and life. You know, it was issues of power, issues of suffering, issues of inclusion. So what I really loved was, was how when we when we had the time, when we allowed the time and we came with the kind of effort and a willingness to negotiate and work together and maybe challenged traditional ways of doing things, then these really interesting, I would think, kind of almost universal topics started to emerge.

Lydia Trowse [00:14:47] Jackie, did you want to offer a reflection?

Jackie Amos [00:14:48] Oh, the thing that I just picked up on that I wanted to somehow underline is that we had that non-clinical space, we had time and we had permission from the organisation who had chosen to bring us together. We had permission to just let the process create something. We didn’t have external kind of constraints. And I think that that allowed this process to be very free and very creative and perhaps would be something of an ideal if people are embarking on co-design, it’s it’s that whole thing of how do you actually make the physical space, how do you make the time space and how do you make the conceptual space so that something can genuinely emerge? And I think we had the really good fortune to be supported in that.

Lydia Trowse [00:15:46] Just carrying on from that thought, Jackie, or anyone else who’d like to jump in. I think that you’re right, that we did really have the ideal situation where we were well-resourced and we had time and we had creative freedom. There’s probably many people out there and organisations that would have a lot more constraints put on them if they wanted to do a similar co-designed project. Did we have any tips or tricks for people who might want to do co-design but who might have more constraints on on their work due to the nature of their organisation or funding agreements and so on?

Jason Tyndale [00:16:22] I think it’s really important that the person with lived experience is remunerated in some respects, just because when you’re working with professionals, you’re also a professional expert in your field. And I think it’s important that you’re given the opportunity to be remunerated for your time and for your experience. That’s something that I really like about Emerging Minds, is that you treat all of your lived experience or child and family partners with that respect, which comes with, you know, just showing people that we are worth, you know, we have value and that our experiences and our lives mean something. And I find that’s really important.

Lydia Trowse [00:17:09] Thanks, Jason. That is a super important point. Do we have any other tips for organisations who might have more constraints put on them? So obviously remuneration is something that we’re encouraging organisations to strive to be able to provide. But can co-design be done in an environment where you’ve got more constraints?

Rhys Price-Robertson [00:17:30] I’m thinking about organisations building in processes that allow for the emergence of unplanned things. So we’re talking about, you know, I was talking about how I had a specific idea and plan, how this would proceed and often an organisation to reward that kind of like that, like, early planning and that locking things in early. And, yes, we’re going to have it done by this date and so on. And of course, you need to meet deadlines and you need to have basic plans about how things are going to proceed and people need to get things done. But also, like part of the reason why this was such an interesting project is like we’re saying, because we allowed for this emergence and things come up that you couldn’t plan. So I think it’s something about in, if it’s organisations say, producing resources that are going to be co-designed, it’s about having various maybe points along the way where the direction can be changed, where people can pivot and they can say, you know, we had this original idea of doing that. Well, what’s emerged with our co-design team or our co-design person in what’s happening here is that we’re going to go in this slightly different direction.

Jackie Amos [00:18:35] I think the thing that I was thinking about was that if there are immovable constraints, then I think a co-design process could benefit from those constraints being absolutely upfront from the very beginning so that it’s really transparent. And everybody in the co-design process knows that these are things we can do, these are things we can’t do, and these are timeframes we can and can’t have, which might, you know, change how much emergence can happen or how much the creative process can kick in. But at least it wouldn’t be a nasty surprise. And I think if co-design is going to happen at all, everyone needs to know exactly what ground they’re standing on. Because the other thing I think we had that was super ideal was having you, Lydia. You were helping us all to kind of balance the voices and make sure that Jason’s voice was heard. And I think having that formally protected, given the traditional kind of balances of power, that was another really important practical part of this that made it work, facilitated the process. And again, that might not be something that every organisation could support, but then they would know any organisation would then need to think about how they really do make sure that particularly the lived experience voice is not a tokenistic voice.

Lydia Trowse [00:20:12] And how was it for you, Jason? What what was some of the practical things that maybe helped to you to be involved in an authentic, genuine way?

Jason Tyndale [00:20:25] Having you there was great, Lydia, because you’re supporting me as a person, if I had any concerns, I knew that I could go to you and say, you know, maybe I’m feeling uncomfortable or I’m not feeling like this is going right or I’m not feeling like I’m being hurt. I knew I could go to you and say anything that I needed to say and that you would be able to support me in that. And I think that’s really quite important that you have the support that you need when you’re going into a project like this, because it’s such a big undertaking. And I think like, from what, for example, I’ve got a bad memory because of my medications and things, and I knew that I could bounce things off you, Lydia, and like, run things by you and get things done later on in the project that were maybe a little bit confronting or difficult for me to try to put into words, being able to be there in Adelaide with everyone rather than sort of like, doing it over, say, Skype or Zoom or whatever, was also really helpful because I could be in that space with Rhys and Jackie and I could- you get a feel when you’re in a space with someone, you get a feel for what the emotions are like in the room, if there’s any tension, if there’s any discomfort, you can feel it. Whereas if you’re on a Zoom or something like that or just over like, voice, you can’t really get a feel for what’s happening. So I think the practical part of being together, being able to be supported and also having the time again to do that was really important, the time factor was- we had those two days, so that was great. But the rest of the project obviously took quite a little bit to put together with the paper and everything. But we had time up our sleeve and it wasn’t, there was no real pressure. We had deadlines, but there was no real pressure to you know, you’ve got to have it done right now. And so I felt that very comfortable in that approach as well.

Lydia Trowse [00:22:40] Well said. Thanks, Jason. Rhys, you touched on before that we went through sort of an initial getting to know each other phase of the project, and from that it was a parallel process. We came up with these five questions, which the paper was based around. Um, would you be able to talk a little bit to those?

Rhys Price-Robertson [00:23:02] Yeah. So as I said, we had this process where we’re working out how to relate to each other and how to create this paper together. And these questions were arising for us. So I started, I think what happened is, is maybe I started to in my maybe classic kind of research type fashion, I started to take notes on on the board, we had a board or something or paper. So I had to take notes on paper, and they start to cluster around the conversation we’re having, they were kind of clustering around these questions and we ended up framing these questions. The first one was, where should we focus? And I guess as we were talking about that, we realised like, how important this question is, this one of focus of where do you put your attention? You know, how important that is for practitioners as well. And that’s what we talked about in the paper. Like, where do you focus? Do you focus on individuals, do you focus on their brains, do you focus on their faulty cognitions?  Do you focus on family systems or parent child dyads or social systems? You know, there’s so many ways you can look at the world and so many different areas you can focus on, and I think they’re like, really important questions, fundamental questions for practitioners to be bringing to the work. And in our case, it might be like, we were strongly advocating for a kind of, I guess, a focus not just on individuals, but a focus on you know, families and how families interact. And so that was the first one. Where should you focus? The next one that came up was, who holds the power? And as we’ve been touching on this, this was an important question for the three of us, because there are disparities, pre-existing disparities in power. You know, we’ve got Jason, who has lived experience of accessing services, and that can very easily be, put people in a kind of disempowered position. And on the other hand, we’ve got Jackie, who’s a, who’s a psychiatrist, which is like, one of the most powerful roles you can have in our health system. And we’ve got me as a researcher, which kind of has its own power, you know, the power to share your ideas of how to frame things, the power to define things. So this was a question that came up for us, and it’s a it’s a super important question in services, because those those same disparities exactly like what Jackie and Jason have been talking about, they both came with fears because they’ve both been interacting with the system from different angles for many years. And they know the power relationships that are there and they know the problems that can cause. And so that question, who holds the power, is one we explored in our in our paper, and, you know, Jackie, I think in particular wrote really well about how, you know, the onus is really on people who do have a lot of power to challenge that and to, you know, Jackie, at one point about like, genuinely cooperative dialogues as an example of how you might be kind of balancing out the power just just at a micro level in a kind of interaction. Genuinely listening to people could be as simple as that or having a, having a dialogue, finding out about people. The next question we had was, who gets to speak? And that’s that’s already been touched on by Jason and Jackie when they’re talking, like you, like, when should we speak? And Jackie was saying she was worried about, you know, speaking too much and and, you know, I was worried about that, too. I’m used to sitting around a table in professional settings and having my voice heard and feeling free to speak. And I guess I have to realise and as Jackie I think was realising, this is an embodiment of an expression of certain types of privilege, you know, and it’s good to challenge that, who gets to speak. And it’s good for practitioners to challenge as well. Who gets to speak in this particular situation, you know, are the children’s voices being heard in this family or what about the partner and so on. So the next one was, what should we share? And that I think it became obvious to us that for there to be any kind of reciprocity between the three of us or any kind of a sense of equality, then we’d have to challenge the kind of norms that we normally have around like, who shares? Normally, it would be, well the person with lived experience shared so much about their life and really that that sharing can be can be really helpful in certain circumstances and in other circumstances it can be really harmful. And maybe, you know, Jason, you might have something to say about that after this. And practitioners, they have more choice around what they can share. And maybe it’s difficult for some to share, but they can, they can make choices. And researchers, I think we get actively discouraged from from sharing personal things. This is idea in many quarters that research should be objective and quantifiable. And, you know, if you share, it kind of devalues your research. And the final question that framed our paper is, who is allowed to struggle? And this was, I guess, just recognising our shared humanity. And that we couldn’t, you know, if we’re sitting there and expecting or in some way expecting Jason to be, you know, talking about his life and struggles he’s gone through, what’s it going to be like if we don’t also share, you know, struggles that we’ve been through? And I think, you know, it was, it was a very levelling kind of experience in some ways. Well it seemed like that to me, for us all to be able to share struggles, struggles we had in our lives and we’d all have struggles, had struggles, just as so many people have. And so that was, ‘who’s allowed to struggle’ seems like an important question that practitioners can take, can ask ask about themselves. Am I allowed to struggle in this role? What would it be like for me to share my struggles with people? So they’re the questions that framed our paper. I wonder if anyone, if Jackie or Jason have things to add or say in response to what I’ve just said.

Jason Tyndale [00:28:13] I think that the way we worked on the questions came out really well, because they flow very well and it covered so much of the discussions that we were having. The discussions were so powerful and just being able to break things down into bite-sized chunks and focusing on those especially, you know, who holds the power and who gets to speak, those were are quite important to me, because as Rhys was saying, you know, you’ve got Rhys, he’s a researcher, and Jackie who’s a psychiatrist. So those two roles are quite powerful in and of themselves. And for someone with a lived experience to actually come into that space, and it’s very intimidating and to be able to be seen and heard as an equal voice just made me feel like I had purpose.

Lydia Trowse [00:29:08] Thank you, Jason.

Jackie Amos [00:29:10] Something I was thinking about both as Rhys was talking and as you were talking, Jason, is that for the clinician, often we’re coming into a space with, you know, training in certain types of therapy, certain techniques or lists of things that mean that certain medications might work or not work. And that idea of where do we focus, suddenly took on some new meaning for me in this conversation, which is that if we focus on our techniques and our knowledge base and our prescription pads or medications or those technical aspects of the work, then we can’t hear the voice of the other because we are imposing a whole lot of structures on the conversation and it suddenly dawned on me that something I do but hadn’t thought about quite so clearly is if we focus on the relationship, then the moments where our technical understanding is going to be useful will become clear and they can emerge out of the conversation, which is again another parallel with how our co-design process work. If we’d come in with a clear plan and all stuck to it, we wouldn’t have found these questions, and as a clinician, if I come in with a clear plan about what I think is going to be good for you, Jason, then I’m not going to hear your voice and I’m not going to find the bits of my knowledge that are relevant to you through us having that creative conversation.

Lydia Trowse [00:30:44] Thanks, Jackie. One of the things we did in the ‘who gets to speak’ section, Jason, was that we got some of your kids involved because we were conscious that we were missing the children’s voice in the writing of this paper. Could you talk a bit about that for us?

Jason Tyndale [00:31:03] Yeah, having involving the children was interesting. They get very excited whenever I say I’m doing a project for Emerging Minds, they get excited. I think they get excited to me but I think they can also see it as an opportunity to get Krispy Kremes when I come back from Adelaide. But they really liked the fact that I said to them, look, I’m doing this project and we’d like to have your voice as well. And when I told them, you know, that they would be remunerated, they were very happy with that as well because their voices are also valued. And so they were quite happy to sit dow and we went through pretty much the same process that we do with our group here going through that process. So we sat down as a family and we went through some of the questions and some of the things, you know, we just discussed them and asked how they felt about certain things. I think the way it works when we have a family conversation like that is that they feel very valued, that their voices are important. I think from their perspective, I would imagine, well, I don’t know. I can’t really say because that’s that’s actually speaking for them, isn’t it? So, but they do enjoy it. And I did find like, when I told them that the paper had been published that’s had quite some views and things and they were really excited for that. And they said, oh, well, we hope that lots of people read it. So there is that follow-on from that, that the kids were really excited about the project.

Lydia Trowse [00:32:40] Thanks, Jason. Jason, I was wondering if you had any reflections on if we were to do this process again, if you think there’s anything we might do differently or anything that we could improve on. And the other thing to ask you was if you had any practical tips for others who might wanting to be embarking on co-design.

Jason Tyndale [00:33:00] Everything went really well. I can’t think of anything that I would personally want to see change. I was supported, the venue was great, but, you know, that whole relaxed venue that was important. It was a really positive experience for me. Tips, I would say, make sure you get your lived experience person in as soon as possible. Don’t leave it and have them as an afterthought or tokenistic sort of representation because that’s just doesn’t work.

Lydia Trowse [00:33:33] Thanks, Jason. I think I just wanted to add to that that often as professionals, we feel like we want to have a bit of an idea what we’re talking about before we chat to people with lived experience and engage with them. Maybe we don’t want to look silly and we want to look like the experts. But in fact, if we acknowledge our starting point and start with people with that experience early, we grow on the journey together and get a better outcome in the end so it can take a bit of bravery for everyone, I think.

Jason Tyndale [00:34:01] Absolutely.

Lydia Trowse [00:34:03] Jackie.

Jackie Amos [00:34:04] I don’t think I have much to add. I’m a bit like Jason. The process worked really well for me. You’ve also both mentioned the thing I was thinking about, which is not totally practical, is that it requires courage, requires personal courage to put aside your usual role, to put aside how you might normally interact and to, to kind of genuinely meet with the other people. And that requires a bit of vulnerability, a bit of openness, a bit of kind of maybe accessing anxiety that I would perhaps sometimes keep fairly quiet and listen to that in order to step into a different conversation. So if you’re going to do co-design, bring your courage with you and your vulnerability and your humanity.

Lydia Trowse [00:34:56] Thank you, Jackie. Rhys.

Rhys Price-Robertson [00:34:59] I share Jason and Jackie’s feelings that this was a really excellent process. And I and I second what you’re saying there, Jackie, about the courage and vulnerability, I like that. A couple of things I thought about, and they’re pretty subtle things. So, I mean, I don’t want this to sound too critical, but I feel like, you know, we had a lot of energy at the start and we got a lot of things done. And then just because of how things were, it felt like this project took quite a while, it dragged on a little bit beyond where it needed to, I think, just in terms of time. And I think there’s a, there’s a balance to be struck there between allowing for emergence and allowing for things to come up and the time that things take. Another thing is approval processes. So, you know, obviously there’s two organisations involved. I was at the Australian Institute of Family Studies and we had Emerging Minds and, you know, their approval processes of when a paper gets done and various people look at it and approve it and so on, and they’re really important, obviously, but I think we ran into maybe a couple of times where it felt like there were people who maybe perhaps hadn’t been on the journey with us, so maybe had different ideas about how a paper should be and it required some kind of like, shepherding through that kind of process. So I guess maybe a tip I’d have if I had one around this would be that for that to be sort of thought about and talked about and built into the process from the start. Like, OK, we’re doing something different here, this is, we’re doing something where there’s going to be kind of an emergent process occurring and the paper might not be exactly how you planned, and there has to be a kind of scope, maybe an understanding from people within organisations that, like, sometimes different products are going to come out.

Lydia Trowse [00:36:45] Thank you, Jason, Jackie and Rhys for sharing those tips and insights, you’ve highlighted the role that remuneration, support, trust, courage, creativity and avoiding tokenism play in the co-design process. Stay tuned for part two of this series where we will be reflecting on some of the lessons we learnt whilst undertaking this co-design process.

Narrator [00:37:11] Visit our website at www.emergingminds.com.au to access a range of resources to assist your practice. Brought to you by the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health, led by Emerging Minds. The National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.