Co-creation in cyberspace

Co-creation in cyberspace

If you don’t feel like reading 2000-some words, just watch my speech at the cyber security unconference The Sphere, June 2nd, 2022 in Helsinki.

When I was eleven years old my dad placed a personal computer in his home office. I spent hours there, discovering a new world, where I could type and print my own stories, create digital art, and play adventure games with names like King’s Quest, Police Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry. You might be able to guess which year that was, based on these games.

It was 1987 – the year in which I learned two seemingly unrelated lessons: I learned what an addiction felt like and what true friendship is. I became addicted to Tetris and hated the feeling of being controlled by something. In a drastic mood, I deleted all of my computer games. Which led me directly back to where I was before I became the only girl in the class with a PC: a mostly ignored nerd. Now I got rid of my addiction AND I learned that the two friends I had before crowds of kids came over to play computer games, were in fact my only real friends. As they missed playing quests on the PC, and as I had not been addicted to those, I decided to get some of them back. Which led to the next learning opportunity…

A boy in sixth grade was trading floppy discs with copied games. He sold me a couple of quests, which I eagerly installed. These floppies must have been contaminated, because suddenly, I found myself staring into the black eyes of a skull, and the PC made a creepy, laughing sound. After trying my go-to solution for technical problems – switching everything off, then turning it back on – I learned that this skull wouldn’t go away, and that I was unable to access any of my precious creations.

Long story short: the virus erased everything on the PC and it needed to be re-installed. After that incident, I religiously saved all documents to floppy discs every week.

The issue at hand: cyber security

… Fast forward 35 years. Kids today don’t know any better than everyone using digital devices online everywhere, all of the time. They own smart phones which are more powerful than our PC in 1987 and they do their homework in the cloud. Although they know what ‘hacking’ means, they are generally not concerned about potential cyber threats out there. And that might be true for many users of digital devices. People can’t function anymore without these devices, but how do they go about their cyber security?

My hypothesis is that most users of the cyber space know that cyber safety is important, but don’t deal with the matter thoroughly or consistently. If that is true, we have a wicked issue to solve! It is my conviction that the best solutions for wicked issues are found in co-creation. That is why I co-founded TheCoCreators and co-authored The 7 Principles of Complete Co-creation. What would a co-creation trajectory look like, in this case?

Moving towards a co-creation assignment

After phrasing the issue and hypotheses, I would send the people involved on some ethnographic research safaris, since it is my experience that nothing provides a deeper insight than personally diving into the end-users’ world. This would yield end-user understanding, which we would summarize in a key insight, and translate to a co-creation assignment. Then we would co-create conceptual solutions, check these with various groups of end-users and other relevant parties, optimize, introduce, and monitor.

So if you are working in cyber security, who are your end-users? … They might be people like me, always on the go, using their devices both privately and for work. Maybe you are developing products and services for technical people within companies. Or you may be working business-to-business, your clients being companies that integrate your products and services within total solutions that they sell to their clients or consumers.

Technical people within companies and business-to-business parties may be your clients, but they are not the end-users. Even though your company may not have any direct dealings with the end-users, they are the reason you exist. After all, without them buying or using your client’s solutions, you wouldn’t be of any relevance.

Recently, I observed a small sample of end-users, that is I visited a few acquaintances in their homes and some clients in their offices.

I learned that people working on PC’s in an office or on laptops provided by their employer seem hardly concerned about cyber safety, because they assume their employer took care of it. However, people using private devices seem to think they may not have done enough to guarantee their family’s cyber safety, yet generally don’t have a clear idea of what to do about this.

My interpretation is that cyber safety is such a daunting topic, so complex and abstract, that people shy away from it, much like students dropping a subject they’re not good at. Translating this understanding into a key insight, we might come up with something like: “I would like to just KNOW that my family members and I are safe in cyberspace anytime, anywhere, doing anything, using any device, without ever having to worry.” Or: “without having to comprehend complex safety products with lots of options.”

A co-creation assignment – given to a multi-disciplinary team of cyberspace experts, business partners, lay end-users (both private people and employees), and possibly some other relevant parties – may sound like this: “How can we create a safe cyber space where the freedom to explore, learn, create, work, and relax is easy to attain for everyone?”

I recommend phrasing co-creation assignments as ‘how-questions’. How-questions are great because they don’t push the co-creation team in a certain direction. They evoke out-of-the-box ideas that can seem undoable at first, but may contain gold nuggets that lead to the optimal solution.

Why co-create?

You may still wonder why co-creation might be relevant to your industry. Why wouldn’t you just create solutions with experts; why involve other parties as well? Doesn’t that just create more hassle? Well, even if it does, it’s worth it, because if you only work with technical experts, you miss crucial perspectives, and you may come up with solutions that aren’t embraced by end-users. Competitors that do work according to the principles of co-creation may come up with better solutions, perceived as more relevant and easier to use. Such competitors are likely to attract the best employees, the best business partners, and the most loyal customers, because co-creative organizations tend to be flourishing organizations, working like magnets.

What I have noticed over the past 25 years, working as a market researcher and cocreator, is an increasing focus on adding long-term value, rather than just making profit, an intensifying call to organizations and governments to be ethical, and a growing thirst among customers and citizens to be involved as equals in decision-making. In general, younger generations – the people born in the year we got our PC and afterwards – seem to intuitively understand this and are building their businesses on principles like sustainability, transparency, equality, inclusivity, and fairness. At the same time, iconic organizations founded by older generations are slowly reinventing themselves in order to stay relevant.

The Paradigm Shift

Our values and the way we work are shifting from dominance to collaboration, from sending to sharing, and from closed to open. We are moving from the “power paradigm” to the “co-creation paradigm”. While we are in the transition phase, we can see both paradigms in action.

We can still be successful following the principles of the power paradigm. In fact, as we speak, we see governments blasting its principles all over the world, taking them to their most extreme manifestation: war. Of course this is scary and sad, but I don’t believe it means we’re going back to the power paradigm. On the contrary. While our world leaders are sending armies to the battle field, in my work I see the push towards the co-creation paradigm getting stronger every day.

Example: German factories

For instance, early this year I helped a conglomerate of German factories work together to create a sustainable value chain. It was tough, because historically, they viewed one another as competitors, and their reflex was to keep their ways of working a secret from each another. Yet eventually, they co-created a legal environment in which they felt safe to open up and build on each other’s expertise, realizing that deep collaboration is the only way forward.

Example: Dutch fashion label

Somewhat later I was involved in re-connecting a Dutch fashion label to young adults. We learned that a growing part of them are making drastic lifestyle choices to help save our planet, such as going vegan, swapping new for used, turning their backs to fast food and fast fashion, not owning things, but renting or sharing instead. It became clear that the only way to stay relevant to this group is by developing a truly sustainable and transparent strategy.

Example: neighborhood

And just last week we had a meeting in a protestant church in my neighborhood with people from all kinds of religions, ethnicities, genders, and professions: neighborhood inhabitants, people from the city government, social organizations, NGO’s… It was harmonious, vibrantly positive, and hopeful – fully dedicated to building a strong local community so that we can help each other through whatever difficulties the world may throw at us.

It is cases like these that make me feel that the more polluted, the more unstable, and the more unfair the world becomes, the more people will become critical of what they buy and why, with whom they do business and how, and the more they will embrace the principles of co-creation to beat our collective challenges. More and more people understand that we can’t solve today’s complex challenges alone, and that co-creation is the most efficient, effective, and fun way to create sustainable value for ourselves and our world.

Barriers against co-creation

At the same time, there are still people and organizations refraining from engaging in co-creation. The top five barriers are: “too expensive”, “takes too much time”, “we don’t have the capacity”, “not everyone is creative”, and “stakeholders have clashing objectives”.

I usually rely on logic to help overcome these barriers. I can build a strong case as to why co-creation is actually more efficient in terms of time and money than other creative processes, how anyone can be creative, how there are always shared objectives overriding the clashing ones, and how just giving it a try will help you shred any barriers you might have. However, in order to just give it a try, you will have to overcome the most powerful barrier of all: fear of the unknown.

As I explained in my Ted-talk in 2019, I know this fear all too well. It used to restrict me, but over the years I have learned that exploring the uncomfortable will lead to new opportunities. So nowadays, when fear of the unknown rears its head, I greet it like an old friend and do exactly what it tells me not to do.

May everyone overcome their fear of the unknown and seek contact with the key players in the value chain of their products and services, bringing them together to co-create a safe, free, easy, and inclusive cyber future!