Before starting any co-design project, answer these four questions honestly:

1. Where on the participation spectrum does this sit? (consultation → collaboration → lived experience-led)
2. Who holds decision-making power at each stage (design, data collection, interpretation, dissemination) — researchers, service providers, or people with lived experience?
3. What structural barriers (payment, accessibility, time, trust, jargon) might exclude the most marginalised stakeholders, and how will they be addressed before recruitment?
4. What happens to disagreement? If a lived-experience co-researcher disagrees with the academic team's interpretation, whose view prevails?

If you can't answer #4 concretely, the project is not yet authentic co-design — it's consultation dressed up in co-design language.

Progress:

• Step 1: Position the project on the participation spectrum
• Step 2: Map power at every research stage
• Step 3: Identify and remove structural barriers to participation
• Step 4: Build shared-purpose and transparency mechanisms
• Step 5: Embed reciprocity (payment, credit, capacity-building)
• Step 6: Design conflict/disagreement resolution process
• Step 7: Audit against tokenism red flags
• Step 8: Document power-sharing decisions for methodology write-up

Step 1: Position on the participation spectrum

Use Arnstein's ladder / Hart's ladder as a diagnostic, not an aspiration in itself. Name explicitly whether this project is:

• Consultation — stakeholders give feedback on decisions already made
• Collaboration — stakeholders co-develop options alongside researchers
• Lived experience-led — people with lived experience initiate, direct, and control the research

Mismatches between claimed and actual level are the primary source of critique — name the level truthfully rather than defaulting to "co-design" as a label of convenience.

Step 2: Map power at every stage

For each phase — development, design, implementation, interpretation, translation, dissemination — specify:

• Who proposes
• Who decides
• Who can veto

If lived-experience partners are absent from interpretation and dissemination (the stages where findings get shaped into narratives and policy), the co-design is partial at best.

Step 3: Remove structural barriers

Common barriers and countermeasures:

• Financial — pay lived-experience co-researchers at consultant/researcher rates, not token gift cards
• Access — plain-language materials, flexible meeting times/formats, transport/childcare support
• Epistemic — don't require academic literacy (citations, jargon) as the entry price for contributing
• Trust — build in time before formal research begins; go to where people already are rather than expecting them to enter institutional spaces

Step 4: Shared purpose and transparency

• Co-develop the research question/problem statement itself, not just the methods to answer a pre-set question
• Make explicit what is negotiable (methods, framing, dissemination) versus fixed (funder requirements, ethics constraints, timelines) — hidden constraints undermine trust
• Revisit purpose regularly; it can shift as co-researchers' priorities become clearer

Step 5: Reciprocity

• Payment for time and expertise
• Co-authorship or named acknowledgement, by choice
• Capacity-building (research skills, career pathways) as a genuine benefit, not a substitute for payment
• Feedback loops — participants see how their input shaped outputs

Step 6: Disagreement and conflict process

Decide upfront and in writing:

• How disagreements about interpretation of data are resolved
• Whether lived-experience partners have veto power over how their communities/experiences are represented
• An escalation/mediation pathway independent of the lead researcher

Step 7: Tokenism audit

Red flags to check against:

• "Co-design" used only in grant applications/marketing, not reflected in actual process
• Lived-experience partners consulted only after key decisions (question, funding, methods) are locked in
• No payment or below-market payment
• Single token representative expected to speak for an entire diverse group
• No mechanism for challenging researcher interpretations
• Diversity within the "lived experience" category ignored (treating it as homogeneous)

Step 8: Document for methodology

Explicitly write up: participation level claimed, power-sharing mechanisms used, barriers addressed, and limitations/compromises made (e.g., funder timelines that constrained full co-design). Reviewers and readers should be able to audit the authenticity claim.

Example 1: Input: A team wants to "co-design" a homelessness outreach service and plans two focus groups with people who have experienced homelessness to react to a draft service model. Output: This is consultation, not co-design — the model was drafted before involvement, and feedback is one-way. To move toward authentic collaboration: involve people with lived experience in defining the service model's starting problem/goals, pay them for focus group time, run iterative sessions (not one-off), and give them input into the final report's framing and recommendations, not just raw material for it.

Example 2: Input: A child protection research project includes a "family advisory group" that reviews findings after data analysis is complete. Output: This is late-stage tokenism — power was never shared at development, design, or interpretation stages, only at the review stage where changes are hardest to make. Recommend bringing the advisory group in at question formulation, giving them a defined role in interpreting emerging themes (not just checking a finished draft), and clarifying what influence they actually have on final conclusions.