Have you heard of the IKEA effect?

It’s when we perceive greater value in a thing because we built it ourselves. A 2011 study found that people are willing to pay 63% more for furniture they built themselves. But the IKEA effect can apply to a Swedish bookcase, a sandwich or a team’s structure—we are more likely to think it’s special if we have put effort into creating it.

This is one small data point in a sea of evidence that the best way to create change is to co-create it. Today, instead of telling you how to do that, I’m going to show you how NOT to do it, with a tale of one of the many epic fails on my path to Radiant Change. Enjoy!

[Below is an excerpt from the book I’m currently writing, and I’m eager to hear your thoughts. Kindly hit reply and let me know how this aligns with your experience. You may find yourself in the acknowledgements. 💛

Want to read the full chapter? Scroll down for details about this month’s Book-in-Progress Club.]

“People support what they help create.”

—Margaret Wheatley

TRUTH #8: CHANGE IS INCLUSIVE

What Not to Do: My Intranet Debacle

When we look back over our careers to date, how many opportunities to co-create change have we missed? I tried to go it alone so many times—always with good intentions, on projects I believed were mine to own, problems I thought were mine to solve—and I can see all too clearly how caught I was in the three reactive traps of Appeasing, Controlling and Knowing (Truth #5).

Here’s one such moment, which still—ughhhh—-makes me cringe:

For context, it was my first people and culture role. I had negotiated a transition from consulting for clients to focusing on the company’s talent operations. We were undergoing a lot of change—the US team still reeling from being acquired by a Canadian holding company, and now US, Canada and UK teams being merged into a new agency with global aspirations. The executive team tasked me with finding a way to connect these new colleagues across geographies, and I was eager to deliver, to prove myself, to please.

So it was with great enthusiasm—which has always been a hallmark of mine, for better or worse—that I proclaimed that what our far-flung team needed was a single source of truth, a way to access and share information across time and distance, a virtual space for connection and collaboration.

We needed an intranet.

I got the green light from leadership and got to work, diligently researching intranet platforms, testing and rating them with vetted criteria and detailed rubrics. I found one that checked all the boxes and worked with the vendor team to build it out to my specifications. I held a contest among our global team to name the thing, which is the only instance of co-creation I can be sure of—though I hope I engaged some colleagues in the testing phase, I can’t be sure.

And then, finally, it was ready: The Nest went live.

The first day, our numbers were great. Everyone checked out the new platform and some of them even filled out their profiles with career highlights and fun facts, as requested. My bosses cheered my success. I felt victorious—and validated—for about 36 hours.

And then, crickets. Our usage numbers fell off a cliff, and I spent several weeks in the trough of disillusionment, wondering where I’d gone wrong.

I can now see that my project was doomed from the start, and at this point in the book I hope you can too. For starters, my to me mindset meant I was mostly thinking about my own success or failure, though the hero role I was playing convinced me otherwise. I had no real vision for change and I knew nothing of systems thinking, so I raced to apply a surface-level “silver bullet” solution to a complex cultural challenge. I had connected with our team members, but focused more on technical and logistical needs, not their emotional experience. So when they naturally resisted a new technology (and the broader, deeper change of a newly integrating team), I saw it as failure. More specifically, I saw it as my failure.

Ultimately, The Nest functioned as a repository for process documents and a conduit for sharing case studies and celebrating wins. I think it also served as a symbol of how we were growing (and growing up) as a business. But it did not in any way achieve the culture shift I was after. For me, its greatest value was as a lesson in the strategic importance of co-creation.

If I had started co-creating from the very beginning, I’m fairly certain we wouldn’t have needed an intranet at all.

[End of excerpt.]

In Practice: September is for Co-Creation

This month in the RadiantChange.co community of practice, we’ll be sharing our strategies for:

• Stepping into AND sharing our power
• Deciding how to decide on the decisions that matter most
• Communicating decisions so that people will support them—even if they aren’t getting their way
• Co-Creation as a process, including divergent and convergent thinking
• Co-Creation as a practice in all areas of our leadership

See you at the next Book-in-Progress Club?

Our first book-in-progress club was a success! Thank you to the leaders who shared their feedback on Chapter 7 and their deep wisdom on last month’s truth, Change is Fractal.

This month, we’re talking co-creation and I’d love to have your perspective in the mix. If you’d like to read Chapter 8 in full and join us on Friday, September 18 from 2-3 p.m. Eastern time, reply to this message and let me know. I’ll hook you up.

More Co-Creation Inspiration

I loved Jon Alexander’s TED talk at the TED Democracy Philadelphia this summer. Want more than this 10 minutes of good news? Check out the podcast he co-hosts on How to Save Democracy.

I’m following Bayer’s organizational transformation to a model they call Dynamic Shared Ownership with great interest.

​MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence “explores how people and computers can be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any person, group, or computer has ever done before.” Check out their recent article, “Generative AI could boost creativity, but only for some workers.”​

And finally—whether you join us on the 18th, send me your own experiences via email, or reply to let me know what resonated with you—thank you for co-creating this book with me.

Onward together.

Kristen Lisanti
​Radiant Change​
​How Change (Really) Works