The Difference Between Designing Projects and Designing Practice

A week or so ago I came across a post about the Event Canvas, a methodology for designing meaningful engagement experiences. The central argument was one I found myself agreeing with immediately: thoughtful facilitation requires more than an agenda. It requires us to think carefully about the experience we are creating. Who is entering the room? What are they bringing with them? What are they being asked to invest? What should they reasonably expect in return? These are thoughtful questions, and they represent an important shift away from seeing participation as a series of activities and towards recognising it as something people live through.

As I was reading, though, I realised my attention had drifted somewhere else. It wasn’t because I disagreed with the approach. In fact, I think experience design has much to offer anyone working in community engagement, organisational development or systems change. But I found myself thinking less about the experience itself and more about everything that exists beyond it. The workshop became almost incidental. What interested me was not what happened in the room, but what happened because the room existed in the first place.

That distinction has been sitting quietly underneath Community Powered Responses since I founded it, although I don’t think I have articulated it this clearly before.

Communities don’t experience our methodologies. They experience the consequences of our methodologies.

People don’t experience a stakeholder map. They experience whether they were invited into decisions that mattered. They don’t experience a facilitation technique. They experience whether someone listened. They don’t experience a beautifully designed workshop. They experience whether anything changed afterwards. Months or years later, very few people remember how a consultation was designed. They remember whether the housing became more affordable, whether the service became more accessible, whether the disaster response recognised their knowledge, whether they felt safer, whether they trusted the organisation more than they did before, or whether they were asked to tell their story once again without seeing any meaningful change. That has gradually changed how I think about participation.

Early in my career, I was fascinated by facilitation. Like many practitioners, I wanted to become better at creating spaces where people could think together, learn together and make decisions together. I learned methods, activities and approaches. Over time, my attention shifted from individual workshops to participation processes. I became interested in who was invited, who wasn’t, how decisions were made before engagement even began, and how organisations responded once communities had spoken. Looking back, I can see that I was slowly widening the frame. What I thought was an interest in facilitation was becoming an interest in power.

Community work doesn’t begin when people enter a room, and it doesn’t end when they leave it.

Every conversation sits inside a much longer history. Communities arrive carrying experiences of government, organisations and institutions that stretch back years, sometimes generations. They bring trust, scepticism, grief, resilience, frustration, hope and knowledge built through living with issues long after projects have ended. Organisations arrive carrying their own histories as well. Funding agreements. Political pressures. Organisational cultures. Risk appetites. Existing relationships. Assumptions about what constitutes evidence and who should be making decisions. All of that is present before anyone says a word. When those worlds meet, something moves.

Sometimes that movement is obvious. A policy changes. Funding is redirected. A service is redesigned. More often it is subtle. A relationship deepens. An assumption is challenged. A community member decides they are willing to participate again. A practitioner carries a different question into the next project. A manager becomes more willing to share decision-making. Trust grows a little stronger. Or weaker. Those movements continue long after the workshop has ended. That, I think, is where designing projects and designing practice begin to diverge.

Designing projects is concerned with creating effective interventions. It asks how we can bring people together, generate ideas, build consensus or solve problems. Those questions matter, and they should be asked well. But designing practice asks something different. It asks how our interventions become part of the ongoing relationship between communities, organisations and power. It asks what consequences we are setting in motion, who will experience those consequences, and who will continue living with them long after we have packed away the whiteboards and written the final report.

This is why Community Powered Responses has never really been about workshops, despite the number of workshops I facilitate. It has never really been about frameworks, despite how many frameworks I build. The workshops, the reflection cards, the organisational strategies, the assessment tools and the coaching all exist for the same reason. They are attempts to strengthen the conditions in which decisions are made, because decisions shape communities far more than workshops ever will.

People sometimes ask why I spend so much time working with practitioners and organisations if my work is centred on communities. The answer is quite simple. Practitioners and organisations sit upstream of countless decisions that shape people’s lives. They decide whose knowledge informs a policy, who receives funding, how programs are designed, what risks are considered acceptable, whose evidence is believed and whose participation is treated as essential rather than optional. Supporting organisations to become more reflective is not the destination. It is one way of creating the conditions for communities to experience institutions that are more accountable, more responsive and more willing to share power.

Perhaps this is also why I have become increasingly interested in reflection. Not as a professional development exercise or an evaluation technique, but as a practice of accountability. Reflection creates space to ask questions that project management rarely asks. What changed because we did this work? What remained unchanged? What assumptions did we carry into this process? What assumptions did communities challenge? Where did power move? Where did it remain firmly in place? What consequences are already unfolding that we cannot yet see?

Those questions cannot be answered at the end of a workshop because they are not questions about workshops. They are questions about what our work leaves behind.

For me, that is the difference between designing projects and designing practice. Projects have timelines, budgets and deliverables. Practice lives on in relationships, in institutions, in communities and in the countless decisions that follow. Long after a project has been completed, its consequences continue moving through people’s lives, often in ways we will never witness. If community participation is to mean anything at all, surely it is those consequences that deserve our greatest attention.

The ideas in this article are at the heart of everything we do at Community Powered Responses. Through workshops, organisational development, coaching and the Power to Praxis learning community, we work with practitioners, teams and organisations who want to move beyond participation as a process and towards participation as a practice of accountability. If you're interested in exploring these ideas together, you can find our upcoming workshops, practice circles and events below.

Explore upcoming workshops and events.

I made a conscious decision to keep Power to Praxis open access. The people I most want to reach aren’t always the people with organisational budgets or professional development funding, and I don’t want cost to become another barrier to these conversations. If you’re in a position to support this work financially, becoming a paid subscriber is one of the most meaningful ways you can do that. Your subscription helps me dedicate time to researching, writing and developing practical resources, while ensuring that every article remains free for anyone who wants to read it.

Support open access by becoming a paid subscriber.