The COSMOS Models

An overview and description of all the models featured within COSMOS to provide context and applicability.

• Analytical Model
• Change Model
• Co-Creation of Service Model
• Intervention Theory Model
• Moral Ordering Model
• User Journey Model

Analytical Model

About the Analytical Model

The Analytical Model is designed as a probe on the initial service model to identify the specific actors who, at various stages in the development of the initiative, have undertaken one or more of these change agency roles. It asks the question "Who are they?". This is explored in the Analytical Model:

All of the social innovations involve the engagement of organisational structures and processes which span policy making, the configuration and management of service resources and front line delivery. Further, in some contexts there can be tensions and even conflict of interest and value along this chain. One dimension of co-creativity is concerned with how power and participation is distributed along this axis.

 

 

Change Model

The Change Model adopts a cybernetic stance, that is to say it is about how things are guided, how changes are made, distinguishing different sorts of orders of change.

We start with the simple and obvious feedback process of the first order (Vision: Plan: Execute and Measure)
We have all had the experience, in retrospect, of looking at a change that has taken place and realising that we have:

• Started doing things that previously we though impossible and have stopped doing things we previously thought were absolutely mandatory and unavoidable.
• Realised that things we regarded as millstones and impediments turned out to be opportunities while things that we valued have been discarded.
• We are measuring and attaching value to things we did not even realise existed never mind have a value, and, finally,
• Our learning has involved forgetting!

This is all evidence that a shift has taken place from first order thinking to second order thinking which puts our original first order loop into a second order loop. This involves sense-making, that is to say, a process of re-examining and reconceptualising our ways of framing and understanding our world. One sign that this is happening is that “languaging” take place: new terms are adopted to reflect new distinctions and categorisations.

Transitions from first to second and from second back to first order work often need to be facilitated and enabled. This can take the form of the exposure of paradox and contradiction, threats and challenges. When these are orchestrated deliberately and with purpose, we identify third order interventions which are attempts to stimulate and nurture appropriate transitions between first and second order work.

Such interventions can elicit a zero-order response. This is emotional rather than rational in nature and represents the fight or fly response to threat. We represent it as a shift to the right-hand side of our model where there is a spectrum of responses from this to what we call the “fourth order” which is the seemingly spontaneous emergence of positive and fruitful commitments to transformational initiatives as a group response to situations.

Co-Creation of Service Model

This model is designed to encourage its users to put their local initiative into a wider structural and infrastructural context and to consider the ongoing relationships between the activities they have undertaken and this relevant external considerations.

The Co-Creation of Service Model emerged from a consideration several Social Innovations and is an attempt, on the one hand, to identify the core internal elements that are common to all the various approaches of them and, on the other, to make certain key external elements and factors which, are relevant to any service environment, explicit if it is to be sustainable. It represents an attempt to present and interrelate a number of terms and categories to provide the basis for a common language and framing of the service innovations activities.

The service process model below is included in this model as a set of Structural Relationships and Occasions. Each pilot can populate some or all of these processes with the identities of actual participants. For example, as we have seen, in some cases, Policy has represented an external input to which the pilot has had to respond whereas in others, policy was generated internally.

The service life-cycle processes are distributed over, and supported by, a service definition and development platform and a service delivery platform. For example, a social hackathon represents such a definition and development platform. The nature of the delivery platform for any service or service set defined in a hackathon is one of the outputs of the co-creation process. In the another case, the business development support facility has been both service definition and development as well as the delivery platform.

The reason for introducing these concepts is to encourage discussion about reusable infrastructure which is able to support and sustain successive initiative in co-creative service development which is an important element of sustainability through growth and diversification. Having identified an abstract, generic model of co-creation and of service, we have created the opportunity for shared resources between co-creation initiatives and services. Thus, below the platform we have a space in which to locate infrastructural capacities to support deliberation, design, communications, the means of access to different sorts of services and service components and for the processes of qualification, scheduling and evaluation. The precise shape and nature of these resources will vary from pilot to pilot but there are some universal elements that are common requirements in many classes of wellbeing and developmental services. Many of these are concerned with the support of information management and communication, such as publication channels, registration services by which new actors and resources which join the service environment can be given identifiers and locators, catalogue publication and management and recording and profiling tools. The description so far has covered the right-hand part of the model above. This represents elements that are considered to be within the co-creative ethos of a pilot’s actions. The left-hand side of the model represents relevant external elements that are part of the initiation of such a process or have some ongoing impact on it.

 

 

Intervention Theory Model

The Intervention Theory Model is an attempt to create a representation of the multi-dimensional complexity of human wellbeing because this is the “space” in which social investments and innovations are taking place.

The model presents three perspectives or projections of wellbeing:

• A structural one which distinguishes between the internal and the external and between the different sorts or areas of wellbeing.
• The range of intentions or purposes of an intervention or service where a care plan may consist of a number of these at the same time or in sequence.
• A process and learning perspective.

We will examine each of these as follows:

Consider four major sub-domains or perspectives of human wellbeing. These are:

• Physiological wellbeing,
• Mental and psychological wellbeing,
• Wellbeing associated with faculties and capabilities, and
• Socio-economic wellbeing.

Each of these contain many facets which interact with each other and there are strong couplings between the four domains. These interdependencies can create catastrophic cascades of positive feedback, self-maintaining loops and deadlocks as well as sustainable coping and development. All of these are affected by, and interact with, external elements of the physical environment and the socio-cultural environment which also interact in complex ways.

Fortunately, for most of us, for most of our lives, we have only one major problem, challenge or crisis at a time. A specific remedial intervention, perhaps with some rehabilitative components, is a sufficient and appropriate response to what will be experienced as an episode of care in which a problem gets fixed. Integration, from both the providing and receiving perspectives, are usually achievable through the planning and standardisation of pathways and protocols of a single service which can be specified with sufficient flexibility to respond to the levels of variation and uncertainty experienced in most cases of simple episodic care.

 

 

Moral Ordering Model

The Moral Ordering Model distinguishes between the contexts and occasions (or stages in the lifecycle of a social innovation) including:

• When the Ethos of a Social Innovation is defined/reflected on and the associated activity initiated/reviewed?
• The Management which plans, monitors and reports and the process of doing of the pilot activity of delivery and the experiences of stakeholders in relation to the new innovative process. (the discussions about planning, measuring, accounting, evaluating a pilot)
• Discussions about Feelings and Experiences of a social innovation from the perspective of the activity but also the context of social innovation
• The Moral Ordering Model then positions the Governing process as the contexts and occasions when the three activities in the relationships between the processes are examined and evaluated.

 

User Journey Model

Social innovation processes are implied in the instigation, deployment and fruition of a service and can be seen as a combination of processes and as the interactions between roles and responsibilities. This is represented as follows:

Along the bottom of this model we see the Service Journey and immediately above this, the set of roles that a member of the public or a community could play in relation to the service. The remaining boxes represent the roles involved in instigating, designing, delivering and evaluating the service. In this modelling projection, the processes that are involved are conversational in nature; they involve the production of sets of information referred to by the red legends.
This model has been developed to augment the conventional user journey approach to encompass the concept of co-creation. The experience of “Touch Points” is no longer simply one of the evaluation of encounter and operation but one of participation and influence. Thus:

1. Were you involved in the instigation of this service? If so, was this as an activist-driven, part of a political process or a civic one? What were the occasions? How do you evaluate the experience? If you did not, how much are you aware to the parties who did instigate the service?
2. Were you involved in the definition and design of the service? The identification of the intended benefits and targeted priorities and beneficiaries? The way the service was targeted and communicated?
3. How did you find out about the service and the possibilities to participate, influence (?) and to make use of it?
4. What was your experience of the accessibility of the service and your rights to make use of it?
5. How was the experience of using/participating in the service? Has the experience changed in any ways?
6. What is your participation and experience in the evaluation of the service? Has the service changed as a result

These questions can be answered from the perspective of an individual service user/participant, their informal carer, a front line service deliverer, the administrative staff associated with the service or a front line manager, middle manager of a senior or political level individual. In aggregate, they provide a map of co-creation experience at the intersections between the service lifecycle processes and the personal experiences of participants.