Author: Andrew Meakin, Director, Expert Citizens CIC
In this guest blog, Andy Meakin reflects on how involvement has become an expectation rather than an exception, embedded in commissioning, strategy, and audit processes.
Increasingly, involvement has become an expectation rather than an exception. Commissioners ask for it. Strategies promise it. Audits report on it. Yet a fundamental question often remains unexamined: who decides what “good” involvement actually looks like?
At Expert Citizens, this question has shaped the development of the Insight Quality Standards. What follows is some guidance for organisations working with the Standards. That is organisations who want involvement to be credible, developmental, and led by people with lived experience.
Start with coproduction, not compliance
The Insight Standards were coproduced with people who have lived experience, drawing on nearly a decade of practice, revision, and reflection. They are not a checklist imposed by professionals, but a shared articulation of quality grounded in how involvement feels, functions, and influences.
This matters because many involvement frameworks answer the question about good involvement from the outside. The Insight Standards start from the inside, from the perspective of participants, and refined through repeated cycles of listening and learning.
For evaluators, the practical implication is simple but challenging: treat involvement as negotiated meaning, not fixed criteria about what to do. The role of evaluation becomes sense-making with the people involved, not prescribing a methodology of involvement to be scored against a checklist.
Train and support lived experience evaluators
A distinctive feature is that people with lived experience are trained and supported to carry out the evaluation. This is not merely symbolic involvement. Lived experience evaluators lead conversations, assess evidence, and shape judgements.
From a practical standpoint, this requires investment:
- time to build confidence and capability
- support structures that recognise emotional as well as technical labour, and
- evaluation designs that value different forms of expertise equally
The payoff is depth. Organisations consistently report that feedback carries different weight when it comes from lived experience rather than external professionals alone. Evaluation becomes relational rather than extractive.
Importantly, this approach also produces robust, credible evidence of involvement practice that commissioners value. It demonstrates that people with lived experience were involved, and how, at what level, and with what influence. This aligns well with commissioning expectations around accountability, learning, and improvement.
Use appreciative inquiry to enable honesty
The Insight Evaluation uses an appreciative inquiry model, focusing on what is working, what can be strengthened, and what is being learned. This is not about avoiding challenge. It is about the psychological safety needed for honesty.
In practice, this shifts evaluation conversations away from defensiveness and towards curiosity. Organisations are encouraged to be open about where practice is still emerging, recognising that welcoming and listening are valid stages of maturity that are worthy in themselves.
For evaluators, appreciative inquiry offers a practical tool for balancing rigour with trust. Evidence still matters, but is interpreted developmentally rather than as a checklist.
Work with the ladder of improvement
At the heart of the Insight Standards is a ladder of improvement. From “Welcoming” to “Listening” to “Learning” to “Leading”. The ladder is used diagnostically more than as a hierarchy.
Its purpose is to help organisations and evaluators locate current practice honestly and without judgement. It recognises that involvement develops unevenly, and that organisations may be at different stages across different services, activities, or standards.
The ladder supports reflection rather than ranking. “Welcoming” and “Listening” are worthy and necessary stages. By making patterns of practice visible, the ladder creates the conditions for a deeper question: how does involvement move from access to insight to influence over time?
Make theory of change explicit and lived
Many evaluations imply a theory of change. The Insight Standards make this explicit, embedding a logic chain within each standard and across the framework as a whole.
This approach creates coherence. Evidence gathered at the “Welcoming” and “Listening” levels is foundational, not superficial. Evidence at the “Learning” level is expected to show change, not just activity. And the “Leading” level is assessed through active influence and sharing.
The practical guidance here is to design evidence collection that aligns with developmental logic, rather than retrofitting findings to abstract outcomes.
Who decides what good involvement looks like?
Ultimately, the Insight approach keeps returning to the same question: who decides what good involvement looks like?
Our practical answer is: the people who experience it, supported by structures that value their judgement. Evaluation, in this model, becomes a shared act of reflection and accountability, rather than the verdict of an external audit.
This raises a challenge worth embracing. If we are serious about involvement, then our evaluation methods must be willing to redistribute not just voice, but also power and authority.
Our thanks to Andy Meakin for this guest blog and for contributing their perspective to the UK Evaluation Society’s work.
Andy Meakin BA(Hons) MBA
Andy is a Director and co-founder of award winning Expert Citizens CIC. He is an experienced public and third sector leader specialising in coproduction, commissioning, and evaluation with lived experience. Andy has led multi-agency programmes, coauthored academic research, and supports organisations to embed meaningful involvement and improvement across health, care, and housing. He also is a Research Fellow with the Centre for Health and Development at the University of Staffordshire.
