Key Insights and Impact
The workshop generated several powerful insights that reshaped how we viewed the original problem:
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Trust gaps are relational, not just technical. It wasn’t the AI or the scanner alone that caused friction—it was how people felt watched, judged, or dismissed within those systems.
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False positives hurt loyalty more than theft hurts profit. Regular customers who felt wrongly flagged said they might stop using self-checkout entirely.
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Frontline staff carry the emotional burden of automation. Hazel’s persona repeatedly surfaced as the “buffer” between angry shoppers and silent machines—without enough tools or voice to escalate feedback.
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Policy and tech rarely align in real time. Legal constraints, tech updates, and operational protocols often work in silos. Our workshop helped bring those misalignments to light, especially through Jordan and Mariam’s back-and-forth.
What this helped us do
Most importantly, the workshop helped us reframe our problem statement. Initially, we focused on “making self-checkout faster and smarter.” Post-workshop, we shifted toward:
“How might we redesign the self-checkout experience to restore trust, reduce emotional labor, and make accountability visible for all actors in the system?”
That’s a far more human-centered, multi-dimensional problem—one that emerged only because we created a space where every stakeholder had a seat, a voice, and a story.
What Worked Best
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Role Immersion through Persona Fidelity:
We didn’t just “talk about” stakeholders—we embodied them. Each participant took on a detailed persona card, complete with frustrations, needs, quotes, and behaviors. This led to richer, more authentic discussions and truly empathetic engagement.
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Scenario Design with Real-World Tension:
Our simulation wasn’t generic—it was scripted to reflect real-life scenarios (e.g., a loyal customer being flagged, a shoplifter going unnoticed, an overburdened staffer forced to juggle priorities). The emotional and practical tensions created in those moments led to laughter, debate, and real learning.
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Structured Chaos = Realistic Systems Thinking:
We allowed multiple threads to run in parallel—legal vs. operational, shopper vs. AI, manager vs. policy. This complexity mirrored real service ecosystems and gave us a systems-level understanding of how cause and effect unfold in messy environments.
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Clear Framing of Workshop Purpose:
Repeating the goal—“We’re not here to blame, we’re here to decode the system”—created psychological safety. Everyone was encouraged to speak as their persona, not as themselves, which surprisingly led to more vulnerability and truth-telling.
Structure & Best Practices
We designed the workshop to follow a six-step structure, each phase intentionally building on the emotional and cognitive energy of the previous. We began with Preparation & Framing, aligning the team on stakeholder personas, the broader ecosystem map, and interdependencies. Clear role assignments, visual aids, and immersive environmental elements—such as signage, mock checkouts, and name badges—helped set the tone and context for deep engagement.
The second phase, Warm-Up & Alignment, featured an interactive icebreaker titled “Scan or Skip?”, where participants physically moved across the room in response to ethically gray checkout scenarios. This lighthearted activity revealed underlying attitudes around surveillance, responsibility, and system trust, while instantly energizing the group.
In Stakeholder Experience Mapping, participants used pre-printed journey maps to annotate frustrations, decision points, and emotional reactions from their assigned stakeholder’s perspective. This phase proved extremely effective in helping individuals “unlearn” their personal biases and empathize with other roles in the system.
The fourth step, Root Cause Exploration, was the heart of the workshop. Through a live simulation titled “Checkout Drama: Behind the Beeps”, stakeholders enacted scripted and improvisational scenes filled with real-world tension—system overrides, mis-flagging, shoplifting ambiguity, frontline overwhelm, and legal grey areas. Participants were fully immersed in the complexity of day-to-day service interactions, allowing them to feel the failures of both system logic and human processes. The result was raw, honest, and illuminating.
Following this, in the Synthesis & Direction phase, participants reflected on the simulations and contributed sticky-note insights framed as “How Might We…” opportunities. These ideas clustered naturally into themes such as: Redesigning trust triggers, Clarifying override protocols, Reducing false positives while maintaining security, and Empowering frontline staff with real-time context.
Finally, we concluded with Closing & Reflection, where each participant shared a personal insight or unexpected learning from the experience. We closed with a dot-voting session to identify the most urgent and promising opportunity areas. This allowed us to prioritize ideas with cross-role consensus and set the stage for actionable next steps.
Workshop Objective
The core goal of the workshop was to identify the hidden tensions and system-level blind spots within the self-checkout ecosystem. We sought to move beyond surface-level complaints and instead investigate why certain problems recur, how they affect different stakeholders, and where alignment (or misalignment) emerges in practice. Ultimately, the workshop was a vehicle to refocus our problem statement through lived experiences and shared meaning-making.
A Deep Dive into the Co-Creation Workshop for Kroger’s Self-Checkout Ecosystem
As part of our diagnostic research into the systemic frictions surrounding Kroger’s self-checkout experience, I led a highly immersive Co-Creation Workshop designed to bring together multiple stakeholders in a shared space of insight, empathy, and systems thinking. Our objective was not merely to collect feedback, but to diagnose root causes, reveal cross-role tensions, and generate collaborative direction for a more inclusive and effective self-checkout experience.
The self-checkout space is inherently complex—blending technology, human behavior, corporate policy, legal scrutiny, and emotional reactions in real time. The workshop was structured to reflect that complexity through dynamic formats that encouraged honesty, role-play, and collective synthesis.
Hosting a Co-Creation Workshop
The Co-Creation Workshop, led by me, was designed as an interactive, role-based experience to uncover the root causes of friction in Kroger’s self-checkout system. Centered around six key stakeholders—from frontline staff to legal and tech—the workshop used scenario simulations, mapping exercises, and collaborative synthesis to reveal systemic blind spots and emotional tensions. I guided the team in curating each moment to balance depth and engagement, ensuring every voice in the ecosystem was heard. The result was a dynamic, insight-rich session that not only surfaced actionable opportunities but also strengthened cross-role empathy and alignment toward future improvements.