The Circle of Appropriation

Creating co-ownership through a middle ground in co-creation

The ‘circle of appropriation’ is a model that you can use in finding your way to a solution/agreement with someone else/other people.

I find the model helpful, and a couple of colleagues have asked me about it and told me that they also find it helpful, so I thought I’d write it up to share it more widely. Make things open, it makes things better.

[Side note: I don’t know where the name ‘circle of appropriation’ comes from. My search skills failed to find anything revealing on the web. I first heard it at work.]

This is how the model works:

• First, describe the problem that needs to be solved.
• Second, propose a solution that isn’t fully fleshed out yet or maybe even has some big pieces missing. Your partial solution is an incomplete picture, an incomplete shape. It might look like this:

• Third, invite the other stakeholders/contributors to complete the solution / picture / shape. They’ll likely complete it using some combination of interpretation, prediction, imputation, and creation.

The idea is that, in seeing your partial solution, the other contributors fill in the missing piece(s) and thereby complete the picture / shape. In doing so, they are the first people who can declare “it’s a circle,” and in making that delaration they take (co-)ownership of the solution. They have ‘appropriated’ it.

The circle of appropriation is a powerful technique, because it strikes a middle ground in co-creation.

On the one hand, people often don’t like being presented with a completely blank canvas: it’s hard to bootstrap a design from scratch, and it’s helpful if someone starts the work / prepares the ground.

Furthermore, full co-creation from nothing is rare. Are you truly entering the dialogue with the other people with a completely open mind about the solution? Putting forward a blank piece of paper can be a pretence that hides that you already have a solution — or at least a part of a solution — in mind.

One the other hand, people often don’t like being presented with a 100% complete/final solution that they didn’t come up with themselves. That approach leaves no room for input and is closer to ‘take it or leave it’ rather than co-creation.

The ‘circle of appropriation’ is a tool to find a middle position between those two opposing extremes.

In this approach, you present something that is more thought out and closer to a solution than a half-baked idea in an early, first draft.
(Side note: sharing early first drafts can be powerful in creating a culture of openness and experimentation, as Giles brilliantly describes here).

But in presenting your partial solution, you leave enough space for genuine input. It’s important not to present something that is too finished. You have to come to the table with a truly incomplete solution: resist the urge to fill in all the blanks ahead of time, give yourself permission to not know what a complete solution looks like. Let go of there being a single ‘right’ solution. Instead, you can be vulnerable and say “I don’t know”. Maybe the final answer you arrive at together won’t be a circle after all, and you have to be ok with that. You might have had a circle in mind to begin with, but you have to be ready to let go of that.

Letting go of the end solution can be uncomfortable territory for some people. Some people see themselves as being good at problem solving. They might enjoy coming up with solutions to complex problems and they might like the recognition which is encapsulated in people coming to them for advice or giving them hard problems to solve. Some people get used to being asked questions from senior management about issues that have been escalated to them, and they been conditioned me into providing decisive, “I’ve got this” answers that spell out exactly how a problem can best be solved.

However, when you present your partial solution in this model, the goal is to less about solving the problem in a particular way (a circle) and, it’s more about establishing co-ownership of the solution.

As such, I’ve seen the technique mis-used. This is not a tool to get people to ‘buy in’ to a solution (a circle) that you have already decided upon or which has already been specified by some ‘higher authority’. People can sense it when consultation is not genuine and they are being sold or manipulated into something that’s already a done deal.

If you present something that is 90% complete, then it’s so close to a circle that it can’t really be anything else. At best, you’re wasting your time and their time in going through the pretence of consultation/co-creation, and you’ll likely create resentment, which is the exact opposite of the intended effect.

• What do you think of the ‘circle of appropriation’?
• Is it a technique you use or have seen used?