There’s a famous New Yorker cover called the View of the World from 9th Avenue. It shows a couple of blocks of Manhattan in exquisite detail, but as we look further into the distance, the world becomes increasingly fuzzy and abstract.

The illustration is a commentary on how New Yorkers view themselves as the centre of the universe, but it *also* captures a psychological phenomenon called Construal Level Theory, or CLT. In its most simple form, CLT says that our brains, as a sort of shortcut, remove most of the details from our mental images for anything that feels distant or remote.

Remoteness can be a function of geographic distance, but it can equally be something that is happening a long time from now (vs. imminently), to some unknown individual (vs. to you or someone you know personally), or hypothetically (vs. certainly). Typically, all these dimensions go together. So, if something is geographically distant, then it also feels somehow more hypothetical, more impersonal, further into the future. And we maintain an abstract, light-on-detail construal of that idea, until such a time as it feels closer, more immediate, more certain, or more personal. Only then does our mental model become much more concrete and detailed.

CLT explains why stakeholdering is so hard

CLT has important implications for stakeholdering and change management in organizations. Imagine you are trying to get buy-in for an initiative. Step one: gather your stakeholders and fire up PowerPoint. By its nature, a slide deck is an abstract representation of your initiative, so it will automatically make your initiative feel far away, impersonal, hypothetical.

No matter how many concrete details you share, CLT suggests that people will not keep those details in their mental model of your initiative. Instead, stakeholders will retain a few key features — whichever ones feel the most relevant to them personally. It’s not that they don’t care about those details. (Often they will have very! strong! views!) It’s that those details are just not currently in their understanding of what you just presented. It’s like a kind of detail blindness.

CLT further tells us that in this high-level state, people tend to be more optimistic — underestimating future difficulties* — and more open to being swayed by others. CLT grimly predicts what will happen next: in the early meetings, everyone has a somewhat different, somewhat vague, overly-rosy picture of the project. Buy-in achieved!

But buy-in for what?

Some weeks or months later, you come back to the same stakeholders, this time sharing an imminent eventuality, rather than a distant possibility. Now, the details that were peripheral are very salient, and near-term worst-case thinking replaces long-term optimism. Buy-in dissipates.

It doesn’t matter that the details are not new and you shared them before. What matters is that your stakeholders now have a completely different mental model of the initiative — one that is much more concrete and detailed. It feels like you are back at square one, because you are — needing to re-enroll people in a whole new, far more detailed conception of the project.

Co-creation is a tool to shift stakeholders’ construal level

Co-creation can be a bit of a buzzword. Sometimes people use “co-creation” to mean seeking feedback from a group of customers (we might call that a focus group). Sometimes people use “co-creation” to mean engaging many customers to contribute ideas for a new thing (we might call that crowdsourcing).

When we use “co-creation”, we mean something very specific: engaging customers and internal stakeholders so that they are working with low-level, concrete construals, rather than high-level abstract ones. That is, bringing groups together to collaborate on something that feels concrete, immediate, personal, inevitable.

Staying high-level and abstract is a good way to get superficial buy-in. People aren’t thinking about the nitty-gritty details, so they more readily agree. But usually those same stakeholders realize they care (very much!) about the details as the go-live draws near. By staying high-level, you are only deferring hard conversations until you are further down the path and it’s more frustrating and more expensive to make changes.

For us, co-creation is a way to help everyone get to a lower-level construal sooner, so you can create more lasting alignment and buy-in. There is a natural human tendency towards abstraction. Especially in a team setting, it’s a very pro-social instinct: we build stronger social relationships when we focus on the generalities where we agree rather than the specifics where we don’t. However, when an organization sets out to build something new, it becomes counterproductive. Staying abstract prevents us from making the trade-offs that are inevitable as a project moves from something theoretical in the far future, to something real happening in the here-and-now.

In our co-creation work, we have found three ways to help participants stay engaged with the concrete details, so that we can achieve lasting buy-in on both the high-level initiative and the detailed trade-offs that will make it work in reality.

1. Shrink personal distance

Social distance is an important driver of construal level. When something affects you or someone you know, you are more likely to attend to the details. That shapes who we invite to the session. Bringing customers to the table helps an organization think about the details that will matter to users, rather than focusing on the back-of-house implementation details that might otherwise be top-of-mind. Bringing cross-functional stakeholders together helps surface important details from across the organization, which are unlikely to be uncovered by a more abstract slide presentation.

But removing social distance isn’t just about getting people into the same room — it’s also about how you structure time together. If a session feels overly formal and didactic, social distance stays high. The best co-creation sessions create a new social context where every individual feels like they belong and have equal standing to contribute. Practically, we achieve that through things like informal dress code (no suits!), round tables, and social time together over meals. We also dedicate meaningful time to introductions, and use warm-up games that help people get acquainted on a more personal level.

2. Facilitate for concrete details

Psychologists who do empirical research into CLT have uncovered a variety of conditions that prime people to develop either lower- or higher-level construals.

• Words promote more abstract thinking, while pictures facilitate lower-level construals.
• Familiarity promotes a lower construal level while something that feels new will seem more abstract and distant.
• You can see and hear things that are quite far away, but can only touch things in arm’s reach, so tangibility promotes more detailed conceptions.
• Sellers tend to have more abstract conceptions than buyers, so priming people with an end-user’s mindset will help them think more concretely.

All of these effects are subtle, but we carefully structure our co-creation facilitation to take advantage of these priming effects and help participants think more concretely about details. We introduce well-known ‘analogues,’ so people have a familiar reference point. Our biomedical communicators bring a lot of images and visuals into the session, and make quick sketches throughout discussions to make ideas more concrete. We use markers and chart paper to turn a conversation about a website into something people can touch.

CLT research strongly suggests that co-creation will be more effective in person, and that is our experience. However, even within a virtual setting, there are ways to help people be more concrete. We have shipped participants markers and notebooks and incorporated them into activities, to help bring tangible elements to a zoom call. Whether virtual or in-person, we ask customers to share their stories to help everyone adopt that perspective. We frame questions in user-centered terms, and use first-person language. (“I’m the patient and I’ve just landed on this website. What will I want to click first?”).

3. Co-create the right things

Because co-creation is an approach that is designed to get people thinking about the details, it will be most effective when you apply it to the right level of problem-solving. Co-creation is not great for answering “why” questions, figuring out what is desirable, or making decisions about big-picture trends. That kind of work benefits from more abstract thinking. To the extent we want to touch on some of these higher-level questions in a co-creation session, we will group them at the start or the end, so we can have a clear transition from abstract to concrete.

Co-creation is most valuable when we already know what we are creating and why, and it’s time to figure out how we will build it. What features will turn an average website into an excellent one? And what trade-offs will result in the best output? When people are thinking more abstractly, they tend to focus on one feature at the expense of all the others. (“Just give me whatever car will be the fastest”). When we get participants thinking about details in a co-creation setting, they get better at thinking about how those different features interact, and are better at weighing the relative value of competing attributes. (“All the fastest cars are the most expensive and don’t have the trunk space I need.”)

By shrinking personal distance, priming details, and focusing on the right things, co-creation makes important details salient long before they become barriers.

Co-creation is a powerful tool because it upends the normal way we share information inside an organization. We bring people together and provide thoughtful facilitation to help stakeholders think more concretely about important details they would otherwise struggle to conceptualize. Those details really matter — for implementation and for customers. By surfacing them while we are early in the development process, we have more options, and making changes is relatively painless.

Perhaps most importantly, the buy-in you build through co-creation is deeper and more lasting. Stakeholders who participated in co-creation leave the session feeling like the initiative is much more imminent. They see your initiative in the same vivid detail you do, rather than just a vague outline, somewhere out there in the indeterminate distance. And that, ultimately, translates into a shared motivation and sense of urgency, so you can work together to turn co-creation outputs into a reality.