For anyone commissioning or running work with experts by experience.
I recently heard a young adult involved in service design describe what it felt like to be brought into consultation meetings with senior leaders: she called it being asked to ‘put on the show’.
She was referring to the familiar request to share personal stories on demand: talk about the impact of the hardship she had faced, recount private struggles to a room of professionals, or provide emotional resonance for decision-makers.
Involving the people closest to a social issue in designing, delivering, and evaluating services – often described as ‘co-production’ (collaborating as equals with service users) or working with ‘experts by experience’ (people whose authority comes from having lived through the challenge) – is now fairly standard across social services, public bodies, and charities. When done well, it shifts institutional power and leads to services that make a real difference.
And yet, after twenty years in participatory work, I see the same systemic pitfalls recurring. Co-production fails in five predictable ways - here they are, with counter measures you can actually implement.
1. ‘Performers to the stage’
Many of the people with that holy grail of lived experience and the time, motivation, and confidence to speak out are asked to share their stories and ideas over and over again. When commissioners need input on a tight deadline, the easiest option is to call on the people who are already articulate and confident in institutional spaces.
There is an obvious danger in pushing only the most confident people to the front. It places an unexamined emotional burden on a small cohort of repeat contributors. At the same time, it excludes those facing the steepest barriers to participation – people navigating acute distress, caring responsibilities, digital poverty, or institutional distrust. Often, the people we most need to hear from are those who are most excluded from public spaces. Supporting those with less confidence and fewer resources to take part requires deliberate design, rather than just an open invitation.
What might help?
Pay and reimburse people properly: Reimbursing travel expenses is not remuneration. If professionals are being paid to sit in the room, participants should receive a fair fee for their expertise and time.
Provide tailored support and training: Help experts by experience feel ready to take part in project planning, governance, or public speaking, rather than dropping them cold into professional environments.
Respond proactively to access needs: Make spaces as physically, sensorily, and culturally accessible as possible, including asking people in advance what they need in order to participate.
Structure meetings to offer multiple ways of contributing: Boardroom discussions favour fast talkers; use a range of methods to capture insights, including written notes, visual mapping, or one-to-one conversations.
Assess readiness and safeguarding: Consider how you will evaluate a participant’s readiness for a specific public-facing role and what safeguarding boundaries you need in place to protect them.
2. The Trauma Industrial Complex
This phrase comes from the book of the same name by Darren McGarvey, who explores how modern culture capitalises on personal narratives of hardship – often consuming accounts of trauma as a spectacle while leaving underlying inequalities untouched.
Participatory work risks slipping into this dynamic. Panels, research projects, and inquiries often ask people to revisit distressing personal experiences to give moral weight to a report or funding application. The professionals present can unplug from the discussion and go home at the end of the day; the participant may be left carrying the emotional and physiological impact of an activated stress response long after the meeting ends.
In order to prevent exploitation or retraumatising, there needs to be sufficient support in place, alongside high levels of control and choice for those with lived experience.
What might help?
Conduct a harm-reduction assessment during planning: Consider potential harms and how to reduce them before inviting participants to share sensitive material.
Provide direct access or warm signposting to support services: Do not leave participants to manage post-session distress alone; build funded debriefing or independent support into the project.
Ensure transparent, informed consent: Offer clear, comprehensive information ahead of sign-up so people know exactly how their contribution will be used, published, and archived.
Build in explicit choice points: Give participants unambiguous permission to decide how much to share, to withdraw consent, to take breaks, or to say no without having to justify it.
3. The funding game – tokenism and competing for resources
Participatory work can look radical in a funding proposal while lacking the basic infrastructure needed to make it safe and effective. When charities, social enterprises, and public bodies compete for limited resources by demonstrating alignment with funder priorities, there’s a risk of unintentional tokenism.
There is a well-worn game of ‘saying the magic words’ to be in the running for a grant. Participatory work is almost always a useful addition to a bid, but sufficient resourcing isn’t always allocated to support the human infrastructure behind it. Service-user involvement requires dedicated capacity to prepare people for their roles, navigate emerging tensions, and manage logistics. When organisations win funding for co-production without the budget to deliver it ethically, they end up extracting unpaid emotional labour from the very people they are funded to support.
What might help?
Budget realistically for participation: Set aside sufficient resources for participant payments, pastoral care, accessibility requirements, and preparation time.
Work transparently with funders: Share the real operational challenges of participatory work and feedback what is realistically required to deliver it safely.
Be honest about the actual level of participation: Do not label a consultation process ‘co-production’ if participants have no decision-making power over budgets or strategy. Transparency is more helpful than inflated claims.
4. Space to slow down and reflect
Overstretched services operating in survival mode frequently cut the things they consider to be ‘nice to have’ rather than foundational. The danger is dismissing reflective practice – structured time to examine how power dynamics, emotional responses, and systemic pressures are affecting the work – as an optional soft skill.
I know from experience that building in space and time for effective reflection can make all the difference: it allows a team to learn from mistakes, identify early signs of bias and tokenism, prevent staff burnout, and uphold good safeguarding practice. Participatory work is inherently relational and emotionally complex; without regular, well-held reflective space, services can become brittle, defensive, and prone to conflict.
What might help?
Adopt an explicit framework: Use an established reflective practice model to structure sessions rather than leaving them as informal chats.
Protect recurring time: Block out non-negotiable monthly or fortnightly time in the calendar for reflective practice sessions.
Access external facilitation: Bring in skilled external facilitators who sit outside the internal hierarchy to hold space for honest, challenging conversations.
5. Transparency and trust building
Open and transparent communication is essential for building the trust required for meaningful collaboration. Participatory work disrupts traditional professional distances, and when project roles, boundaries, and decision-making powers are left vague, projects can start to unravel.
I have seen projects grind to a halt because the boundaries between professional staff, peer workers, and participants were unclear, leading to confusion, disappointment, and lengthy project delays. When people do not know who holds final decision-making power, or what is expected of them, anxiety spikes. These breakdowns usually occur when strategic decisions are made by people disconnected from the day-to-day project, which in itself is a compelling argument for keeping decision-making as close to lived and frontline experience as possible.
What might help?
Communicate scope and boundaries clearly: Set out the remit of the project and each person’s role, accountabilities, and authority at the very beginning.
Be transparent about capacity: State honestly what level of participation you need, what decisions participants can influence, and what support you can sustain.
Check in regularly throughout: Build in ongoing feedback loops to check understanding, test whether boundaries are working, and resolve any emerging friction or confusion early.
Involving people with lived experience in the decisions that affect their lives is not a decorative tick-box. It is demanding, relational work that requires organisations to share power and sit with uncomfortable truths.
Before you launch your next participatory initiative or sign off your next funding bid, consider discussing with your team: which of these five failure modes represent a risk or challenge for your project, and what structures, boundaries and resources do you need to put in place to address them?
Strategic Consultancy & Facilitation for Co-Produced Work
I work with commissioners, public-sector bodies, and third-sector organisations to design and facilitate participatory work. From establishing trauma-informed frameworks to facilitating multi-stakeholder groups and reflective practice spaces, I help teams share power safely and build participation that leads to lasting systemic change.
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