The Universal Language Of Everything?
Is Service Design becoming too complex and inaccessible in order to grow and are we missing the opportunity to become a more holistic discipline of problem-solving? There are many friends out there whom we could speak to. What’s to lose?
Back in 1999, I thought that within five years every designer would also be a coder. Eighteen years later this has not happened. Instead, new tools, processes and disciplines have appeared, shifted, merged and the task of helping companies to be their best selves has become not only more complex but a more crowded market. Clients are likely to suffer amongst the multitude of languages, processes and tools they are expected to implement. Can Service Design as a promoter of simplicity practice what it preaches and embrace our friends from enterprise architecture, systems thinking, business analytics and others to develop a more inclusive and intuitive way forward into the future? While some fight, others move ahead.
Complexity Cycles
Service Design is not the only discipline that went through a complexity cycle when it matured. Macromedia Flash1, later Adobe Flash is/was software that started as a solution to do vector animations on the internet back around 1999. It introduced a coding language called Actionscript to make vector-based websites interactive and experiential. Flash-based websites boomed to provide unique and engaging user-experienced on the web. Actionscript as a language evolved. It started with a few simple commands, written in near English language and a very formalised, restricted way of putting code pieces together. You wouldn’t even write code words, click on buttons to add simplified modules. Version 2.0 had free text coding, just like any other web-based script language. Version 3.0 had libraries, classes, frameworks and had gotten so complex that one could code game engines with it. People started to create 3rd party Actionscript editing tools to manage the complexity of its capabilities better. The community had its conferences, events and accreditations. It was at one of those conferences around 2004 I think when a speaker made a valid point about the excess of its complexity. Back in version 2.0, some basic functionality took three lines of code, easy to be understood and accessible to artists and creative people who had never coded before and had brought a fantastic amount of exploration and new thinking to the community. At the time of this conference, version 3.0 needed a list of classes and libraries to be added to the code and initiation code around that to do something very very basic. The community had evolved from an open, inclusive one to an exclusive specialist one that had replaced evolution with complexity.
A year or two later, it got replaced by HTML5 and its capabilities and died a quiet death. Could Service Design go the same way?
Simplicity adopts quicker
Late last year I took part in Jake Knapp’s Google Sprint2 course at the Barbican in London. I had just finished creating a Service Center of Excellence for BT and had taught and set up and environment that offers Service Design to everyone. I had done dozens of workshops, and I was curious how he would be able to squeeze a week’s workshop into a single day. The answer was simple because his approach was. Most participants were not designers but were able to identify a problem and create a solution to be tested using a straightforward decision-making process. There is a lot to be said about the way Google Sprints deal with customer research and the risk of getting it wrong. But the mantra of fail-fast is very compelling, both for people and for the companies adopting a very accessible methodology without fancy tool names and formalised print-outs and post-it mechanics. No unreadable complexity of a blueprint. I challenged him during a break about his thoughts on Service Design. He appreciates the discipline but finds the number of tools and which to chose complicated and confusing, both for himself and the people he works with. I like a more thorough approach, but his courses are sold-out, and the Google name adds additional credibility.
Tower of Babel
Over the last few years, many different disciplines have revealed themselves to be very close to Service Design’s ambition to improve business and its processes. Systems design, enterprise architecture, business analysts and many others are all problem solvers working on the same problem. Having worked with them reminded me of the old Indian parable about the blind men and the elephant3.
For those who don’t remember, the story goes like this:
“It is a story of a group of blind men, who have never come across an elephant before and who learn and conceptualise what the elephant is like by touching it. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then describe the elephant based on their limited experience and their descriptions of the elephant are different from each other. In some versions(of the story), they come to suspect that the other person is dishonest and they come to blows. The moral of the parable is that humans tend to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people’s limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true. ”
I believe that we are at the moment in time, where businesses are changing and becoming more aware of their context and the processes available to them to thrive in the market. On a more general basis, our problem solving is becoming more holistic and collaborative. Currently, we are still going through the teething pains of new processes and teams because we are too tool or role-focussed. A service designer from NHS Digital told a familiar story during the Dublin conference last year. Being put next to a business analyst as a service designer looked like duplication for the uninitiated, until the extra effort was made to create appropriate tools and newly identify roles and responsibilities. In this case, it happened after the designer joint a project and after the case study was elevated to upper management level. It seems less and less frequent that a project has a process in place ahead of its start.
The big question is, therefore, who will help the blind men understand that they should work together, combine their experience and expertise to understand better what they are dealing with.
A New Language
Science and universities4 are starting to realise the same potential in combining multiple skills either on a team basis or are actively encouraging students to have a second or third complimentary skill or interest area4. This enters the comparison of value between a vertical silo-ed genius and a horizontal open polymath. Our future will very likely be created by freely combining knowledge from multiple sources. Science has already provided evidence5 that being in the top 25% of expertise in two or more areas has equal value than a lifetime of trying to be the very best in one silo. Athletes know that staying at the top and improving a few milliseconds in performance requires exponentially more energy with less and less benefit. All these examples support the notion that an ivory tower approach to one’s discipline is not sustainable to start with.
All these tendencies add up to one big opportunity, which is reducing the friction between disciplines by creating a more open and inclusive language.
Will Service Design be the one that takes this step? It covers quantitative and qualitative insights. It celebrates collaboration and cross-disciplinary approaches. It touches customer-facing and internal processes and experiences. It contributes end-to-end from strategy and purpose to execution and real-world feedback.
A few weeks ago I started a select group of open-minded systems thinkers, architects, analysts, agile practitioners, PMOs and others trying to shape and scope what could be done to take the first step towards this. Contact me if you want to join.
You can find more of this in my new book, to be published later this year.
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LinkedIn version of the article: here
References:
1) Flash Actionscript : Timeline by player version — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActionScript
2) Jake Knapp & Google Sprints — https://www.thesprintbook.com/how/
3) Blind men and an elephant — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant
4) Harward Business Review : Two careers — https://hbr.org/2017/04/why-you-should-have-at-least-two-careers
5) Case for the Polymath — https://medium.com/the-mission/modern-polymath-81f882ce52db
Bio:
Marcus Kirsch is an international award-winning service design and transformation consultant , conference speaker and the writer of the book ‘The Deconstruction Paradigm’ available later this year. He is a founding member of the IoT Council, RCA alumni, exMIT researcher and works for international clients large and small.
Marcus Kirsch is Founder and Director of ResonanceDesign
