The standard co-creation failure isn't a lack of ideas — it's a room full of experts generating solutions that died three years ago for reasons nobody mentioned. On the Sourcing Pricebook, our workshop format had a rule I've kept ever since: open with the walls.
The format
Ninety minutes with subject-matter experts. The first act is unglamorous: here are the restrictions, here's what has been tried, here's why it hasn't been solved. As my own workshop notes put it — "important to give the knowledge of restrictions, and how it hasn't been solved today. Don't run into a wall." Only then: "let the creativity kick in" — problems, expected outcomes, potential solutions, from their perspective.
Why constraints first
- Respect. Experts disengage the moment a workshop treats their decade of context as an obstacle to blue-sky thinking. Constraints-first says: your reality is the brief.
- Yield. Ideas born inside real boundaries are shippable ideas; the discussion moves from "wouldn't it be nice" to "here's how we'd get around that."
- Trust compounds. The same SMEs came back — weekly syncs, demand portal, acceptance testing — because the first workshop didn't waste their time.
The trade
You lose some wild cards — a few genuinely novel directions never surface when the walls are visible. I take that trade in enterprise work, where the wild card usually exists in a slide deck from 2019 and the real innovation is making something adoptable. Save the blue sky for the problems that have none.