Some of the below thoughts are from my new book, now available for pre-order.
https://publishizer.com/the-deconstruction-paradigm
Can you teach Service Design?
Can design finally show business benefit?
Service Design is becoming somewhat of a commodity. Just along with Google Sprints, Agile and Human Centred-Design that it includes, processes and their tools might just become a commodity. Can practitioners though teach it so that we avoid bad examples and low quality? Can companies embrace it so that they create the value we promise?
As I am writing this, I am coming out of a one-year Transformation engagement. The aim of it was to engage and uplift hundreds of people within a large organisation to understand human-centred design, research and why we use the tools we use.
The success was measurable. Some services we pivoted, most we elevated, some we streamlined beyond what the company ever had done before. They all created benefits. Our highlights include services that created 100%-45% of there benefits through design research activities. I made double sure that design was indeed contributing to this like that. Other highlights include teams feeling enabled enough to organise a hackathon prototype solutions with 75 people over two days.
All along that year we went through iterations of how we teach, coach or educate people, who had never had any human-centred design experience.
We saw very bad things and very good things.
Similar efforts are happening everywhere, and it raises the question of how much experience excludes inclusion. A more straightforward way to phrase the question is, are companies getting the quality they pay for?
I was recently discussing this with a friend from Deloitte, and like many other business challenges, this one is complex too.
On the one hand, we want to create the most high-quality outcome we can produce for a client. This ambition usually means we put together a high-quality team of experienced people, who can fast and efficiently create extraordinary results for a company. But this does not scale. The moment we leave, the effect is gone.
On the other end of approaches, you would teach as many people as you can find, to create a movement within the company, so that when you leave, the mindset and ambition stays behind.
With that approach, there is a further complexity, which is, do people follow a pattern or can the adjust and evolve the framework that you teach. We know that frameworks and tools are only guides, but it is very complicated to understand when to stick to rules and when to break it. Experience always takes time. Even in a one-year Transformation project, there is only so much time to bring 5–10 years experience to the people you engage.
Depending on what you want to achieve the question then is, will people have enough to apply and accelerate and progress the outcome of their projects?
I love my job and the fact that I can show people how to understand reality better to improve their products and services. I have been doing this for 20 years.
How much do Google Sprints and Agile workshops contribute to the fact that Design Thinking needs time and has value and the way we research and interpret data is crucial to creating value from that process. Google Sprints can be iterative rather than innovative. Agile is a process which means it still can generate a garbage-in-garbage-out process.
Can we communicate the difference? Can we make sure that a company, who is brave enough for the investment and commitment of changing their processes and team structures, is maintaining that value when we leave?
A person can’t learn in 3 months what another accumulated over 10 or more years. Even being able to identify the best self-starters will only get you so far.
It is essential for a company to see the difference between the impact of a seasoned person and the effect of a person being raised through design democracy.
We are on the edge of a potential commoditisation of service design. We need to show the evidence of business impact to show that three months will not create the same effect that ten years of experience does.
We need to understand ways to scale this mindset without selling it cheap. Commercialism tends to go for the lowest cost. This approach does not help our clients right now. Software development has been prone to that same commoditization, where development time has been undercut to the point where projects could not possibly create quality.
What level of quality can Service Design plant within companies? Will we fall back on having experienced teams doing a special project or will we be able to automate and scale design thinking across every company adequately?
Some of the above thoughts represented in my new book, now available for pre-order.
https://publishizer.com/the-deconstruction-paradigm
Join the debate by answering my survey: https://resonancedesign.typeform.com/to/cpZe8W
Get additional updates and sneak previews here.
http://www.thedeconstructionparadigm.com
