Ben Satchwell argues that review rounds create judges, not champions. Sending a near-final capability framework for comment builds critique, not ownership. Co-design brings influential practitioners into the room early, at key moments: framing the problem, shaping the structure, and testing reality. Shared authorship fuels advocacy, accelerating adoption more than perfection.
Most capability frameworks go through a review round. The team drafts the framework, then sends it to a group of stakeholders for comment. The feedback comes back, some of it is incorporated, and the framework is finalised. Everyone has been “consulted”, the box is ticked, and the organisation assumes the people who reviewed it will now champion it. They won’t. Reviewers don’t become advocates. Co-designers do.
You have cast your stakeholders as judges, and judges don’t own the verdict
The difference is not pedantic. A review round invites people to critique a finished thing. You hand them something already built and ask what is wrong with it. The posture that creates is critical by design, because the only contribution available is to find faults. You have cast your stakeholders as judges, and judges don’t own the verdict, they grade it.
Ownership for advocacy
Co-design invites people to build the thing with you. They are in the room when the hard choices are made, they see why one capability was framed this way rather than another, and they leave having shaped something rather than scored it. That sense of authorship is what turns a stakeholder into an advocate. People defend what they helped create.
This holds whether you are building a capability framework, a competency framework or a skills taxonomy. The construct doesn’t change the human dynamic: involvement during creation builds ownership, while consultation after the fact builds critics.
This is not a new insight, though learning and development keeps relearning it. The classic study is Coch and French’s 1948 work in a textile factory, still cited as the foundation of what we know about resistance to change. They found that the groups who participated in planning a change adapted to it quickly and with little resistance, while the groups who simply had it explained to them resisted hard. Participation wasn’t a nicety. It was the variable that decided whether the change took.
Involvement, not endless consultation
Here is the trap, though. “Involve people” can curdle into endless consultation, and that is its own failure mode. If co-design means dragging the whole organisation through every decision, you will spend a year in workshops, produce a framework designed by committee, and exhaust the goodwill you were trying to build. The goal is not exhaustive consultation. It is involvement at the few moments that actually matter.
The three moments that matter
So which moments matter? In my experience, three.
- Framing of the problem
Before any capability is drafted, the people who will live with the framework should help define what it is for and what good would look like. Get this wrong and no amount of later consultation rescues it. - The shape of the structure
How capabilities are grouped, how many levels there are, what language is used. These are the decisions people feel most viscerally, because they touch how individuals will be described and assessed. - The test against reality
A small group pressure-testing whether the framework describes the actual work, before it is locked.
Notice that none of those is a mass review of a finished draft. They are upstream, while the framework is still soft enough to be shaped. Involving people at those points is co-design. Sending them a near-final document is review dressed up as participation, and people can tell the difference. Nothing breeds cynicism faster than being asked for input on a decision that has visibly already been made.
Who makes a difference
There is a practical point about who, too. The people you most need as advocates are not always the most senior. They are the ones with informal influence, the managers and practitioners others actually listen to. Get a handful of those into the design at the moments that matter, and they become the channel through which the rest of the organisation hears about the framework. They will explain it to peers in language no project team could write, and they will defend it in rooms you are not in.
This does mean giving up some control. A co-designed framework will not be exactly the one you would have written alone. It will carry compromises you can see and would rather avoid. Make that trade anyway. A slightly less elegant framework that fifty people feel they built will out-adopt a perfect one that landed in everyone’s inbox as a finished fact.
So stop running review rounds and calling it engagement. Decide the few moments where involvement genuinely shapes the outcome, and put real people in the room then. Reviewers will tell you what is wrong with your framework. Co-designers will go and make it work.
Ben Satchwell is Head of Capabilities at Acorn PLMS
