As the North West London Obesity Mission prepares to move from Discovery into Delivery this October, the Mission team is not only refining the innovation opportunities to take forward but also co-designing an engagement model that will shape how partners across the system work together to develop, test and deliver them.
Chanelle Corena is a Service Designer at Imperial College Health Partners (ICHP), where she helps health and care organisations work alongside residents, patients, clinicians and partner organisations to design better services.
Chanelle’s career has spanned public health, humanitarian programmes and health innovation, from working alongside Aboriginal communities in Australia to supporting programmes across Eastern and Southern Africa. Across every role, one principle has shaped her work:
“If you want something to work for people, you have to build it with them, not for them.”
Now she’s bringing that experience to the North West London Obesity Mission, helping shape a different approach to collaboration across a complex health system in support of the Mission’s goal:
By 2030, stop the rise in obesity in North West London and set it on a sustained path towards reduction, starting where need and inequality are greatest.
Here, Chanelle explains how that principle is helping create the conditions needed to achieve the Mission’s goal.
Creating the conditions for collaboration
We know that no single organisation can achieve the Mission’s ambition alone. Success depends as much on how partners work together as on the innovation opportunities themselves. We also recognise that this isn’t straightforward. Partners across the health and care system bring different priorities, responsibilities, ways of working and expectations. Creating a shared way of working across such a complex system is challenging, but it’s essential if promising ideas are to move beyond Discovery and into Delivery.
That’s why we are co-designing an engagement model: a practical way of helping residents, partners and stakeholders contribute, connect, learn and make decisions together.
By involving residents, partners and wider stakeholders before decisions are made, we increase the chances of developing an engagement model that is useful, practical and sustainable, while acknowledging that there won’t always be a single right answer.
Rather than asking people to adopt a way of working that has already been decided, we’re creating space for them to shape it from the outset by understanding the barriers to collaboration and co-designing how they’ll work together.
Instead of beginning with a fixed idea of what collaboration should look like, we’ve spent the Discovery phase listening to how people already work, where they experience barriers when it comes to collaboration, and what helps them to contribute, connect and learn from others most effectively. We’re bringing those insights together with the wider evidence base to design an engagement model grounded in both lived experience and best practice.
Across interviews, roundtables and conversations, we’ve come back to the same question:
What would help you work with others more effectively?
What we’re hearing so far is that people bring different strengths and preferences. Some find key engagement moments like workshops and forums to be most effective, while others prefer more regular, informal communication through tools like Slack. Regardless of preference, one theme is emerging consistently: people find it most useful to have opportunities to connect, contribute and learn from stakeholders in the system regularly, not just on one occasion.
These findings reflect wider evidence on mission-oriented innovation. The Office for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Designing Effective Governance to Enable Mission Success) suggests that successful missions depend not only on ambitious goals, but on governance arrangements that enable organisations to collaborate, coordinate action and learn together over time. It makes the case that rather than relying on a single engagement approach, effective missions create multiple opportunities for people to connect, contribute and align around a shared purpose.
For us, that reinforces the importance of designing an engagement model that goes beyond individual events or activities. Instead, we’re exploring how partners can build relationships, share learning and shape decisions throughout the life of the Mission.
Working across a complex system
One of the clearest lessons from Discovery is that collaboration across a complex system requires far more than bringing people into the same room.
Across North West London, partners each see the system through a different lens, shaped by the communities they serve, the role they play and the challenges they face. That diversity is one of the Mission’s greatest strengths, but it also means there isn’t a single perspective on the problem or a single route to the solution.
We’re not expecting to arrive at a perfect engagement model from the outset. Instead, we’re creating opportunities for partners to build relationships, test assumptions, learn from one another and adapt as the Mission evolves.
Another vital perspective has come from our resident panel, reminding us that lived experience is every bit as important as professional expertise when shaping how the Mission moves forward, and that residents are very much part of the ‘system’ we’re referring to.
Designing for all of this means creating ways of working that are flexible enough to support meaningful collaboration, while still enabling the Mission to move forward. Ultimately, the aim isn’t to eliminate complexity, but to create the conditions that help people navigate it together.
Designing for delivery
Through interviews, roundtables, resident engagement and wider research, Discovery has brought together residents, clinicians, commissioners, researchers, innovators, community organisations and system leaders to explore and refine the innovation opportunities with the greatest potential to help us achieve our Mission goal.
As we move into the final stage of Discovery, those opportunities continue to be tested, prioritised and refined with partners ahead of Delivery in October. At the same time, we’re co-designing the relationships, ways of working and engagement needed to bring them to life.
We’re not trying to design a finished engagement model before the work is ready for it. Like the innovation opportunities themselves, it will continue to evolve as we learn more
Ultimately, this work is about helping partners across the system coordinate action around a shared ambition. Rather than creating more bureaucracy, we’re focusing on practical ways for people to work together, learn from one another and support delivery.
That’s why the engagement model is being developed alongside the innovation opportunities, so that by the time delivery begins, partners can build on the relationships and insights established throughout Discovery.
Staying curious
Perhaps the biggest shift from more traditional ways of working is becoming comfortable without having all the answers from the outset. Rather than developing solutions first and seeking feedback later, we’re creating space for partners to help shape both the opportunities and the way we work together.
There’s often pressure to arrive with the answer already worked out, but meaningful collaboration starts with curiosity rather than certainty. It grows through listening, testing ideas, learning what works and adapting along the way.
That also means being willing to challenge your own assumptions. If something isn’t working, the answer isn’t to push harder. It’s to ask what we’ve learned, adapt the approach and keep moving forward. That’s how better ways of working emerge.
What’s next
As the Mission moves through the final stage of Discovery and towards Delivery, our next step is to bring partners together through a series of co-design workshops. These workshops will help us build on what we’ve learned through Discovery so far by co-designing the Mission’s engagement model with the partners who’ll help bring it to life. Together, we’ll explore how we’ll work together to develop, test and deliver the innovation opportunities emerging from Discovery
Rather than creating a fixed model from the outset, we’re building an approach that can continue to evolve as the Mission learns, grows and moves through Delivery.
Although this work is focused on the Obesity Mission, the learning reaches much further. If organisations want to tackle complex challenges, it isn’t enough to design good ideas. We also need to create the conditions that help people shape, test and deliver them together.
Because lasting change doesn’t start with a finished solution. It starts by creating the conditions for people to shape one together.
