Workshop I — Findings from Data

By this point the project holds interviews, assessments, occupancy data, culture findings, resolved contradictions and an aligned demand position — distributed across documents and heads. Workshop I forges them into one account the co-creation group collectively holds. Its function is epistemic: everyone who will shape the concept must work from the same evidence, having had the chance to interrogate it. Concepts built on partially shared evidence fracture at the first disagreement, because the disagreement is really about facts nobody reconciled.

• At the opening of Develop, as the mandatory entry gate to the workshop sequence
• When new participants join at Develop (architects, designers) and must absorb the evidence before contributing
• Whenever the co-creation group shows signs of working from different facts

• The full co-creation group: leadership team delegates, project team, community group representatives, architect and design team, change lead
• Strategist presenting and facilitating
• Deliberately the first session where designers and evidence meet — the architect who absorbs the diagnosis designs differently from the one who receives a brief

• The consolidated evidence base: aligned demand position, activity and rhythm model, culture findings, sentiment map, presence logic, demand clusters, supply gap structure
• Resolved Targeted Insights and the residual-uncertainty register
• The selected scenario and its assumption set

1. Structure the evidence as a narrative with tension, not a data recital: how this organisation works, where reported and observed diverge and why, what the culture enables and resists, what demand the future must serve.
2. Present triangulated findings as triangulations — showing how reported, observed and interpreted evidence reconciled builds trust in the method itself.
3. Invite structured challenge: allocate explicit time for participants to contest findings, and route each challenge to its evidence rather than to debate.
4. Distinguish clearly between findings (evidenced), interpretations (argued) and assumptions (registered) — participants must know which epistemic category they are handling.
5. Test comprehension actively: have sub-groups articulate the implications of key findings for the concept; misreadings surface immediately.
6. Close with the shared account confirmed and the residual uncertainties acknowledged — the group proceeds knowing what is known and what is not.

• Designers reaching for solutions mid-evidence — capture, park, redirect; the sequence exists for a reason
• Challenges that are actually interest positions dressed as data scepticism
• Silent non-acceptance: participants who stop arguing without being convinced — they will relitigate in Workshop III
• Evidence overload: fifty findings ensure none are held; the account must be ruthlessly curated
• New participants deferring to the room instead of absorbing the evidence

• Confirmed shared evidence account
• Challenge log with resolutions
• Comprehension-tested implication notes per key finding
• Acknowledged residual-uncertainty list carried into design

The shared account is the epistemic foundation for Workshops II–IV: criteria are derived from it, options tested against it, the concept justified by it. The challenge log prevents relitigation. The implication notes give the design team their first structured bridge from evidence to design response.

Curating fifty findings into the twelve that matter is editorial judgement about strategic consequence. Facilitating challenge without letting the session become a re-audit, and detecting silent non-acceptance behind polite nodding, are craft skills no agenda template supplies.

• Presenting a data recital instead of a curated account — comprehensiveness kills comprehension
• Defending findings emotionally instead of routing challenges to evidence
• Blurring findings, interpretations and assumptions into one undifferentiated 'the data says'
• Excluding the design team to 'save their time', then briefing them second-hand
• Declaring alignment because the session ended on schedule

At a 2,800-person insurer, Workshop I allocated forty minutes to structured challenge. The operations director contested the focus-demand finding for his division; the facilitator routed to the evidence — his division's own Dynamics and occupancy data, triangulated. He conceded in the room. In Workshop III, when a colleague attempted to reopen the same point, the operations director closed it himself. The challenge slot had converted the evidence's most likely opponent into its enforcer.