Day 1 Panel Discussion

Moderator: Patrick Quattlebaum— Cofounder, Harmonic Design

Panelists

• John Mortimer (JM), Systemic Service and Organization Designer, Impro
• Lucy Ellis (LE), Transformation Partner, The Ready
• Milan Geunther (MG), President, Intersection Group

Discussion

Start with first impressions and what we heard from people’s experiences and contexts and what stood out to you and area of expertise and experience adjacent to service design world?

• John: Fascinating in seeing work put together like this, with every single talk demonstrated something different to service design and a wealth of insights through paradigms
  • Moving from just shouting louder as designer, to moving the dots closer together and engaging with allies
  • Both looking at real business problems, and capturing multi-dimensional needs
  • Extending to back-office touch-points, and organization being structured differently to engage in different way without a problem at all
    • How to leverage design across all orgs, and engage with experts in a service and things that stuck out
• Milan: I’ll echo everything John said, and very happy to see this conference, as it is unique in terms of service design events, and language very different
  • Business capabilities of Airbnb and a healthcare delivery engine and all paradigms that were promoted
  • Holding space and sometime uncomfortable situations, and acknowledging what we can do, and learning how to dance with the system
  • Delivered on theme and goal of advancing service design
• Lucy: Coming in as a non-service designer, saw lots of trust-building
• While no one used the word, each case study built trust in capability to have useful influence, and build trust on what the designer’s motivations were
  • Perfect one-liner that trust is very intangible and what makes all of this work
  • Amount of facilitation described was impressive
    • Got into org design through initial facilitation work, and how core facilitation skillset in building trust — and how much facilitation is a life skill to have

— JM: Tension between craft and ongoing dialogue within service design of how much is working with people and is that design or is design making an artifact, and what does that mean for complex systems

• Joining dots together

1. Are there other dot connectors besides service designers?

— Milan: Yes, lot of connecting roles out there within company, who are hired to look at whole and gaps in between parts

• All designers and organizational developers can be connecting dots [i.e. change management as an example]
• Still doesn’t make it a mistake to refer service as discipline that connects dots, but need to think about what is unique and special about service design and how service design connects with the other connecting disciplines
  • Notion of service and remind people Airbnb is a service— and can frame everything as a service
    • Carpets as floor-softening service changes everything, where you want carpets to last longer
      • Service paradigm changes things
    • Also deal with orchestrating a larger ecosystem of all kinds of actors and elements and some intervention and facilitation and orchestrate something that impacts experiences

Thoughts on complexity and systems in bringing dots closer together?

— Lucy: Use complexity a lot, but is it complex or complicated?

• Easy to lose sight that complicated problems have a causal linkage
• Service design has few service design challenges that are complicated, but tempting to map it in a nice end-to-end process, and intellectually soothing to put a complex thing in a complicated framing
  • Managing complexity is equivalent to managing a three-year-old, and you only know how to manage a system, when you probe system itself to see how it reacts
  • Design will never stay static, in response to probing system day in and day out. Need to have sense of complexity consciousness and how things in moment, where you get design all figured out

— John: Discussions are very interesting and not just one view, and connecting dots and see what we heard today and connecting dots of organization

• To do that as designer, need to be closer to organization
• Service designer needs to sit in middle of org, and change nature of how you engage with people
  • Designers can be part of org and understand how it works
• Another thing is changing what is going on between dots, when you engage with the dots. Every org doesn’t have service designers, but the might migh have change agents that design change, and shift dots around and change dots themselves
  • Consciously and work together with change methods
• Design community needs to recognize this and focus on things beyond design on things like education, leading design, etc.

For all this talk of being in organization and engaging with it, a lot of boundary spanning has to be done. What are pitfalls people might run into as they try to build networks and boundaries to span change?

— Lucy: One of things mindful of, as external consultant, is just blending in piece culturally and being mindful of what you can do at certain timescales

• People appreciate when you acknowledge limitations of what to blend in, and going to Carol’s meetings and being like water
• Acting as detective and flowing through space and understanding where blood flow is in environment and what else is there
  • Not paying enough attention to informal networks or respecting legacy of what was already there and staying centered on pain-point
  • Careful of language used and jargon, and that’s necessary and new concept and make it accessible
  • What feels jargony and what isn’t comfortable what’s there as a designer
  • SCARF model as things that contribute to employee motivation [similar process for service design]
• Blending in, comes question of long-haul for and what is equivalent organization, for community or challenge and tradeoff with that

How to get people to work across disciplines?

— Milan: Trust, human connection, and stepping outside of comfort zone. Beyond whatever design problem there is enterprise design challenge hiding underneath that is actual challenge and need to convince people and challenge the underlying brief

• In many other discussions, conversations at metaphor level and ecosystem as universe
• End of day need to go to meetings, ask questions, and create an artifact
  • Making up something that is really wrong and showing it to people and what it means
    • Add explanations later and engaging group of kids that is different but slowly and conversational and confrontational

As someone deep in systems thinking, idea of perspectives. Any advice on role of perspectives?

— John: Perspectives force you to move you from comfort zone of your perspective, and service design often in IT department

• Hurdles that have to be overcome and relatively small

— Customer perspective, by looking at it very differently

• Systems thinking as different way of thinking and seeing
• Hard to challenge boundaries when in same boundary—challenge in different from manager perspective and change consultant perpsective and what it’s like
  • Ask informally
  • What gets in the way are our egos, and embarrassment at having to learn something new
• System thinking can have impact and journey of discovery of what organization is and how it works with complexity, people
  • Start from where they are and simpler aspects, learn about tools, and go forward from there

— Lucy: All of this is about change and facilitation and trust

• Understanding how change happens, like immunity to change framework as figuring out the underlying assumptions of what it means to take medication
  • Even that level of what it means to engage with challenge, especially if their problem is not centered in th process

— Milan: Just reframe things from their perspective and translate to your own language and vocabulary and gap identified. Implementation of engagement patterns and ask questions

1. Comments on authority and bringing people together imply an executive leader and a form of leadership about bringing together people, regardless of title and role?

— John: Good question as organizational culture is directly set by behaviors and attitudes of leaders, and be encouraged and generated by behaviors of leaders at the top

— Lucy: Talk about formal structure with org charts, and informal relationships, and how value moves through organization (like value creation structure)

• Provocate notion of leadership beyond a title and executive level
• Leadership as unlocking people and processes, and taking responsiblity for doing that
  • Assess own influence and authority in a system and how to increase that through relationships, care, knowledge and understanding, rather than just being a service desginer
  • Focus less on role in system, than problems you want to solve

Final thoughts from each of you?

— Lucy: Forwards, trust facilitation change, and complexity. Wrap mind around four things will get reasonably far

• Ask what you are in the long haul for, what corner of world to give value of service design to, and how to center that

— John: Approach someone you don’t know well, but who does work you need to align with. Come to them as human being and learn what they are doing, and how they are doing

• Shift metaphorical desk to operational places

— Milan: Openly steal good ideas from others, and connect to what you are doing anyway