Preparing a Participative Design Workshop

The Participative Design Workshop is the visible tip of a much larger intervention. Most failures attributed to "the PDW didn't work" are failures of the pre-workshop phase. This guide walks through the eight elements that have to be in place before a PDW can responsibly run.

A PDW is the deliberative core of a redesign: a structured workshop in which the people who do the work redesign the way the work is organised, moving it from a hierarchy of personal responsibility (Design Principle 1) to groups carrying collective responsibility for a whole task (Design Principle 2). The workshop itself runs in days. The preparation that lets it land takes months and is non-negotiable.

What follows is the canonical eight-element preparation phase, drawn from the OST literature and the practitioners who have been running and teaching the method since the 1970s.

1. Educate senior management and unions

Secure formal sanction for the process from both sides, with everything open from the beginning. Senior leaders and union representatives sit through the same DP1 and DP2 briefings the workforce will receive, and agree the redesign is being undertaken in good faith. Without sanction at the top, the workshop's outputs cannot be implemented and the exercise becomes consultative theatre.

2. Establish a formal (or in-principle) legal agreement

Full legal agreement up front is often impossible. Aim for in-principle agreement, with the formal instrument following as the design takes shape. The reliable pattern is a joint working group of union and management representatives, with the relevant industrial-relations bodies engaged from the start so that the eventual change to terms and conditions does not become a separate fight after the workshop.

The wording of that agreement matters. The Emerys are explicit in Participative Design that the agreement needs at its core a clause that relocates responsibility for coordination and control to the level where work is being done — that is, DP2 — and that the wording must be precise enough for any part of the org chart to be checked against it. Do not rely on softer alternatives. Terms like "self-managing teams" have been comprehensively corrupted in practice and are wide open to abuse: organisations adopt the label without the structure and end up with neither.

3. Design a new pay system (pay-for-skills)

DP2 organisations have no hierarchy to progress through, so hierarchical pay progression no longer fits. The replacement is pay-for-skills: people are paid for the range of work the group can collectively cover, and progression is through verified skill acquisition rather than promotion into a supervisory layer. The new system must be designed and pre-agreed; the workshop cannot credibly describe the future state if the pay implications are still open.

4. Agree productivity-gains sharing

PDWs reliably produce productivity gains. How those gains are shared is a structural question, not a goodwill question. Frontline bonuses re-instantiate the competitive incentives the redesign exists to remove and quietly undo the work. The mechanism therefore has to be organisation-wide and equitable, and it has to be agreed before the workshop runs so the facilitators can describe it concretely to participants.

5. Settle what happens to dislocated people

DP2 needs fewer people, and roughly half of supervisory work disappears. This has to be worked out decently and fairly in advance, not negotiated under pressure after the workshop. The patterns that travel well are a fair redundancy program with a six-month try-it-out window, and creative redeployment that puts displaced specialists onto the organisation's accumulated backlog of work it has never had capacity to tackle. The principle is the same in either case: nobody loses their footing as a consequence of the redesign without an honourable path forward.

6. Put sabotage provisions in writing

The agreement has to be explicit about what happens to participants who actively undermine the new design after the workshop. Cases of systematic, deliberate sabotage are well documented in the literature; cases where nothing happened to the saboteurs are equally well documented. Without an upfront provision, opponents have free rein and the investment in the workshop is wasted. The provision does not need to be punitive — it needs to exist.

7. Pre-brief the entire affected workforce

Every member of the workforce affected by the redesign, not just those attending the workshop, receives the same DP1 and DP2 briefings the participants will receive, using the same slides. Nobody comes in cold. The preparation phase is the workforce-level diffusion strategy: it builds the shared conceptual ground the workshop then operates on. Skip it and the workshop feels imposed, even when its content is sound.

This connects to a hard rule from the canonical text: no design can be imposed . Even when circumstances force a minimum-viable run — a single vertical slice in the room rather than the full unit — the slice is instructed to take home the concepts and process so that everybody in the unit completes the six-criteria and skills matrices, and then their draft design so that the unit participatively produces the final design together. What propagates is the method, not a finished structure handed down. Pre-briefing the workforce is what makes that propagation possible at all.

8. Train internal facilitators

The organisation has to learn to run PDWs itself. Continued dependence on external consultants is a failure mode, not a steady state. The pattern that works is to train eight or nine people drawn jointly from management and union nominees, over roughly a week of structured teaching, bring them back two or three days later for supervised practice, and then accompany their first live runs as co-facilitators rather than leads. Internal capability is the asset the preparation phase leaves behind.

Scale and unit-size planning

Alongside the eight elements, organisations large enough to need multiple PDWs have to plan the geography. Group roughly a hundred people per workshop location, sequence the workshops so adjacent parts of the system are not redesigning simultaneously without coordination, and pay attention to unit size: each PDW needs to be big enough and complex enough that participants actually learn to do a design. Groups of seven or eight people are usually too small. For sections too large for a single workshop, the deep-slice methodology provides a way of getting a representative cross-section of the work into the room.

Why this phase is non-negotiable

Skip preparation and the PDW fails in predictable ways. Implementation stalls because no agreement exists about what happens after the workshop. Displaced staff become saboteurs because their futures were never settled. The wider workforce experiences the workshop as imposition because they were not briefed first. Pay-for-skills cannot be implemented because the legal framework was not pre-agreed. The organisation remains permanently dependent on external facilitators because no internal capability was developed.

The preparation phase is also why a PDW is not a quick intervention. Anyone offering a "PDW in a week" is offering something that will not survive contact with the organisation. The workshop is the visible event; the eight elements above are what make it consequential.

Working with unions

A standing observation from practitioners: working with unions makes the preparation easier, not harder. Unions force the preparation phase to be done thoroughly because the concerns they raise — pay, dislocation, sabotage, redundancy — are exactly the concerns the eight elements address. The PDWs that fail most badly are typically the ones with no union, where the preparation gets skipped because nobody inside the organisation insists on it.

The canonical source

The canonical printed reference for the PDW is Fred and Merrelyn Emery's Participative Design for Participative Democracy, first published in 1974 as a slim fourteen-page volume with a shiny gold cover and known in the field ever since as the "little golden book". Merrelyn Emery edited and reissued it in 2022. It remains the single most concise statement of the PDW method: the design principles, the six criteria, the three DP2 variants (basic multiskilled groups, non-multiskilled specialist groups, and overlapping project teams for unstable work), the briefings, the skills matrix and scoring scales, and the workshop sequence — all in one place.

Two of its strongest claims sit underneath the preparation work above. First, the six criteria are now stated as a species-wide characteristic — they have been shown to operate in every country and culture in which they have been used, which is why pay, briefing and design choices that ignore them produce the same patterns of underperformance regardless of context. Second, DP1 is the operationalisation of the master-servant relation; the PDW is the method by which that relation is replaced rather than softened. The eight preparation elements above are the field practice that has crystallised around the method since — the conditions that have to be in place for the workshop the little golden book describes to actually land in an organisation.