The Collaborative Design methodology

Dealing effectively with change is the greatest strategic challenge business leaders face today*. Whether you’re working on strategy, brand, culture or customer experience, you’re driving change – shifting how people think, act and work. But that won’t happen without their buy-in, and the ability to work together across functions.

*Only 35 % of transformations hit their targets (BCG, 2024)

In most organisations, strategy, culture and brand operate in silos, led by different functions, each with their own consultants.

Collaborative Design brings strategy, culture and brand together.

When leaders align them, their businesses become more effective, authentic and impactful.

This starts a virtuous cycle: happier, more effective people create better customer experiences, which drive loyalty and growth. Growth enables reinvestment in innovation and people, which attracts talent and deepens engagement. And so the cycle repeats.

The Business Propeller

Strategy, culture and brand can propel your business forward. If you want to fly, you need to move all three. To be effective, strategy needs to build on culture, not ignore it. To attract and retain talent, words must match the lived experience – aligning brand and culture leads to authenticity. When your brand brings your strategy to life, you get impact.

The Impact in Numbers

A commodity lighting business grow from €2m to €100m revenue. Their product sales went up by 300% in three months
An electromechanical engineering firm has grown 20% year-on-year for four years in a row, with job applications up 75%
An iconic global brand increased internal engagement from 47 to 96%

The impact in numbers

The five core principles of
Collaborative Design

1 —

There’s science behind it, it’s called the IKEA effect. Ownership makes rollouts easier and adoption faster. 'Jams' are fast interactive session that open to everyone and allow you to tap into the veins of your business fast.

What Jams can do
We ran 5 Jams with 100 people to create a WFH policy with an investment bank in just two weeks. In another project, an engineer wrote a poem during a jam. One line from the poem became the brand promise of this €1bn business. We've ran Jams for new joiners, gaining insights into the competitors they joined from, and many, many other uses.

2 —

Most leaders treat change like a project plan – neat, logical, controlled. But real change isn’t linear. It’s an expedition. To reach your destination, you’ll need to navigate operational, cultural, psychological – even political – terrain. In Collaborative Design, the journey itself becomes the transformation. You arrive not just with results, but with a team already living the change

Expedition learning
"[Having gone through this process,] my advice ever since has been: Don't start a global team and spend too much time talking around how this global team should work. You can get together, solve x number of problems, and then you build the relationships. You make it happen whilst you get to know each other, building the trust and the strong relationships that you need. When you're done, you're going to continue to work.”

SVP Global Brand

3 —

Change must start at the top – but when all key decisions are made upfront, blind spots surface too late to fix, or at great cost. We build cross-functional teams at all levels, with involvement tailored to role, responsibility, and reach. Bringing people in early helps uncover practical challenges before they escalate. It also taps into hidden expertise, builds trust, and boosts motivation — laying the foundation for change that sticks.

When the problem isn’t the problem
We worked on a customer experience pilot to improve an underperforming app. What the cross-functional project team uncovered was that the real issue wasn’t the app itself – it was how different departments were specifying changes. By bringing those departments together, the team redesigned how they worked across silos. The result wasn’t just a better app, but a new way of working – a blueprint that was eventually rolled out across a very large organisation.

“People understood the different needs of departments. It’s been a game changer.”

HR Director

4 —

There’s enormous creative potential within your people — Collaborative Design helps bring it out. When internal teams take part in shaping change, it creates momentum. Motivation increases because the work starts to matter to them. Instead of questioning the value of the project, they begin to see where it’s going – and how it’s relevant to them. This is how inside and outside become aligned, and that’s how the biggest impact is achieved.

Co-creation in action
We assembled a team of nine people (only four of them designers) to co-create the direction for a new brand over two days. The team worked hands-on: analysing competitors, setting creative benchmarks, cutting things out, sketching ideas, writing and refining. By the end, we had three strong directions that helped shape the final brand. This work created ownership and understanding far beyond the design team. It also built momentum at a time when there was still a lot of doubt and resistance in the wider organisation. The brand launch that followed went better than expected – not just because of the quality of the design, but because people were ready for it.

“I’ve learned so much during this process. I have a completely new understanding of what branding is and what it can do for us.”

VP Business Development and Solutions

5 —

Collaborative Design is a “done with, not done to” approach that creates genuine understanding and buy-in. Research shows most people are motivated to do well. They want to understand where things are going and enjoy working collaboratively, but rarely get the chance. The structures, language, and spaces needed for meaningful participation are often missing. Collaborative Design provides that framework. When people are included early, change becomes something they help create. When they feel it’s done to them, they resist – and that’s why 70% of change projects fail.

Collaboration removes resistance
“We were sceptical at first. But when I read the output, it just made sense. I thought, ‘Yes – this is us.’ It reflected who we are so clearly, there was nothing to push back against. And when I heard how it had been done – through collaboration – I thought: of course. That’s why there was no resistance.”

Product Owner

Proven across industries and scales

We’ve developed and refined the Collaborative Design Methodology over more than 15 years – supporting brand, strategy, culture and transformation work in organisations from 80 to 11,000 people, with revenues from $100m to $16bn. It’s been particularly helpful in complex business environments, with participants from 31 countries, and headquarters in the UK, Europe, the US, and Asia.

We also share tools, exercises, and playbooks with leaders and consultants who want to use the methodology in their own organisations or with their own clients. If you are interested, sign up to be notified of upcoming masterclasses or get in touch directly.

The tools we use

We have developed a set of proprietary tools to ensure that everyone gets maximum value out of what we do and that the teams reach their goals as quickly as they can.

The Change Journey Map is a comprehensive scoping tool for complex projects involving multiple stakeholders.
GW+Co Jams are short online sessions for qualitative research and fast input from your people.
The GW+Co Business Compass combines core strategic and cultural elements in one simple framework that is accessible and easy to understand.
Used well, facilitation is a tool for clarity, alignment and faster progress. We guide the conversation, so your team can focus on the subject matter.