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Podcast: Building Alignment with Co-Creation
2025 Jan 14
Deconstructing Work

Storylinking is a podcast is hosted by Tom Lietz, a producer, filmmaker, and creative director who works with communities to help them tell their stories. The podcast explores how stories and co-creative processes can drive culture, collaboration, and impact. In its inaugural episodes, the podcast has focused on topics as diverse as building trust, bridging cultural divides, and scaling human creativity with AI. 

In December, Workomics principal Susan Bartlett was delighted to be a guest on the podcast. Susan and Tom discussed how co-creation can be used to break down silos, align teams, and build collective understanding. Here are a few quotes from the discussion:

What’s difficult in a modern corporate environment is not having an idea — it’s getting an idea to implementation, through all the corporate hoops and hurdles. Those hurdles are hard to clean because internal stakeholders don’t have the same mental model of the user challenges, the patient challenges, the customer challenges. What co-creation does is bring so many of those stakeholders around the table to hear first-hand, “Oh, that was not how I thought it would be.”

The act of actually making stuff and committing to something on paper makes a really big difference. As long as it’s just exchanging words in the ether, we can both have extremely different pictures in our heads of what that means. But once we’ve put something down on paper—even if it’s really poorly drawn with Sharpies— we have the same picture in our heads. That creates a different impact when we pull it through, because our understanding is so much more specific and shared than if we had just talked.

In the episode, Susan also talks about:

  • How co-creation can shift the status quo by changing perceptions of risk and introducing different trade-offs.
  • The up-front time investment required for co-creation, and the pay-off it delivers as take output through review and approval processes.
  • The importance of pulling through co-creation outputs to implementation, so that the participants can see how their contributions have had a tangible effect.

You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts. Huge thanks to Tom for inviting Susan to share some of the Workomics philosophy on co-creation and building alignment across organizations. 

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