The lesson from Everton’s new home

Listen to architect Dan Meis talk about Everton’s Hill Dickinson Stadium and you hear two themes on repeat: we listened and we understood the place. No “donut” bowl dropped on a random plot. Instead: a brick base that speaks Liverpool docks, a contemporary roof that nods to the Mersey, and sightlines that put supporters right on top of the pitch. The secret sauce wasn’t a shape; it was a process. Fans were treated like collaborators, not spectators to the design.

The result is a building that already feels like it belongs.

That same approach is the difference between any major project, public realm, regeneration, or service redesign, landing with a thud or being welcomed as “ours”.

Collaboration isn’t a vibe, it’s a brief

A great brief isn’t a shopping list of features. It’s the shared understanding of why this exists, for whom, and what “good” will feel like when it’s done. If you can’t write that in a single page that a resident, or a match-going fan would nod along to, you’re not ready to design or deliver.

Crucially, you don’t write that brief to people, you co-produce it with them. The lived experience of staff, users, and neighbours is data. It’s evidence. It’s also where legitimacy comes from. Our consultant’s code is simple: the best solutions are found within the people who work and live the problem, we listen first, then shape, we credit contributors, and we make ourselves redundant by design.

Social licence: the quiet KPI that decides everything

Public goodwill is a project asset. Lose it and your risk, cost and timescales all expand. Earn it and your permission space widens: faster decisions, fewer appeals, smoother handovers, better uptake.

Social licence isn’t won by a logo, a launch film or a single consultation. It’s earned by three things:

1. Fit: The thing fits the place (physically, culturally, historically).
2. Fairness: People can see who benefits, who pays, and how trade-offs are handled.
3. Familiarity: Communities recognise their own fingerprints on the outcome.

Everton’s new ground hits all three: the dockside brick says “here”, the bowl geometry says “Goodison energy”, and the design story shows fans were in the room, early and often.

Stakeholder licensing: how you build “owned, not imposed”

Here’s the practical playbook we use on complex programmes in councils, charities and SMEs. You can adapt it for capital projects, service design, or campaign work.

1. Start with a Discovery that’s humane

Map the system with the people who run it and use it. Short, respectful interviews. Light-touch data gathering. Produce a simple articulation of today’s reality and its pains. This reduces friction later and produces a plan everybody recognises as true.

2. Write the One-Page Shared Brief

Plain English. No spin. Sections: Why this? Who for? What changes? What we won’t do. How we’ll know it worked. If you cannot agree this with your internal team and a user panel, pause. You’re not aligned yet.

3. Co-design the edges

Don’t crowdsource the structure, crowdsource the touchpoints: the arrival sequence, the service handover, the wayfinding, the interface copy. The more public the moment, the more the public should shape it. This is how you get the “fan on the wall” energy in a stadium or the “I felt expected” moment in a clinic.

4. Make ownership visible

Credit contributors in documents (and on plaques if it’s a building). Invite staff and community reps to present key decisions to boards, not just attend. That single act transforms “consulted” into “co-author”.

5. Deliver with the grain of daily work

Projects fail when they bolt on new processes that fight existing rhythms. Fit the new workflows to how teams actually operate, then upgrade the constraints one by one. Or as we put it: consult, don’t dictate; design yourself out of the job.

6. Publish clear benefits and trade-offs

Social licence grows when people see the ledger. Show costs, benefits, mitigations and what happens next. This is where councils and charities can outperform private developers: transparency is a core competence. It also pays well; well-run public programmes regularly return many multiples of investment when engagement is done right.

The commercial case for doing this the right way

Collaboration isn’t charity. It’s a performance strategy. Organisations that build plans with their people and users grow faster, retain staff, and execute with fewer costly rewrites. We see it repeatedly in mapping and strategy work: productivity up, turnover down, and growth plans that teams actually deliver because they helped author them.

When you test and shape new services through a focused viability check, interviews, light research, stakeholder input, you avoid the “big bet” that misses the mark and instead ship something people adopt. That’s why our Growth Check is deliberately short, sharp and collaborative — enough evidence to decide, not so heavy it stalls momentum.

What this looks like on the ground

• In a stadium: Keep the architecture honest to the place, bring the crowd physically and psychologically closer, let supporters co-shape the rituals — the approach, anthem, and neighbourhood care.
• In a council service: Map the current journey with frontline staff, publish the shared brief, co-design the intake forms and letters with residents, and measure “felt fairness” alongside throughput. That’s how you turn a relaunch into a service people trust and use.
• In a charity venture: Commercialise with mission-fit ideas surfaced by your team and beneficiaries, test small, learn fast, and reinvest where the impact is greatest. Ownership drives revenue because teams back what they built.

Pitfalls to avoid

• Token panels. If the “engagement” can’t change the brief, it’s theatre and people can smell it.
• Designing for press shots. Landmarks that ignore lived patterns generate backlash and cost.
• Consultant-led plans. If the team doesn’t hear their own language in the strategy, it will sit in a drawer. Our rule: if we can’t credibly make ourselves redundant at handover, we didn’t do the job.

The precision of empathy

This is ultimately about precision: focused questions, strategic listening, and the disciplined conversion of insight into decisions the community can recognise as theirs. That’s what Everton’s architects got right. They didn’t just design a stadium, they designed the permission for it to exist in that place, with those people, at this moment.

When projects feel owned by the nurse finishing a double shift, by the resident paying council tax, by the fan who’s sung the same song since childhood, you don’t have to fight for social licence. You’ve already earned it.

If you want that outcome on your next project, start with a real discovery, co-write the brief, and build only what the community is ready to own. That’s how you deliver something that lasts.