Service design isn’t just about designing services—it’s about shaping the conditions for services to evolve. At its best, it’s a systems-oriented practice: one that helps people make sense of complexity, see interdependencies, and take action in the face of uncertainty. This session explores how service design can build adaptive capacity across different organizational scales—team, program, and enterprise—through three real-world case studies:
Higher Ed Org (Team scale): A participatory strategy sprint helped a cross-functional team make sense of fast-changing learner expectations, tech disruptions, and institutional constraints. Rather than charting a five-year plan, we mapped current constraints, surfaced shared direction, and identified small, feasible actions they could take right away. Rather than chasing ideal outcomes, the focus was on regaining momentum and moving forward together.
Health org (Program scale): As CMS introduced the Health Equity Index, this org needed to understand how social risk factors were shaping dual-eligible member experiences and how to respond. We facilitated a “learn by doing” program combining qualitative research, service ecosystem and journey mapping, and narrative sense making. The team built new habits of reflection, systems thinking, and persuasive communication that connected policy decisions to lived experience.
Health org (Enterprise scale): Over six months, we led a program of deep-dive collaboration across the organization to align diverse stakeholders around quality performance and population health goals. These sessions surfaced enterprise-wide dependencies, built shared accountability, and helped teams connect day-to-day actions to strategic intent. The work highlighted how informal networks and emergent collaboration can strengthen adaptive performance in ways hierarchies alone cannot.
Across these three examples, service design was used not only to drive outcomes but to increase an organization’s ability to learn from its present, and act smartly in ways that shape what comes next. They span sectors, scopes, and constraints, but all point to the same shift: from orchestrating fixed plans to enabling ongoing learning.
– At the Higher Ed Org, the focus was momentum—moving from strategic inertia to small, feasible, coordinated action.
– At Health Org A, the focus was capability—developing the skills, tools, and confidence to sustain sensemaking and adaptation over time.
– At Health Org B, the focus was coherence—linking strategy and operations through participatory learning structures that built durable cross-functional alignment.
Together, these cases challenge dominant narratives of performance as something to engineer and optimize. Instead, they illustrate performance as an emergent property of learning systems, which service design is uniquely equipped to support when practiced with complexity in mind.
