 In this episode, you're going to learn how to harness the ever expanding nature of service design as a discipline without going totally mad. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Clara. This is the service design show episode 144. Hi, I'm Marc Fontaine and welcome back to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are the hidden things that make the difference between success and failure, all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and planet? Our guest in this episode is Clara Lamats, who's currently a business design director at Verityer. And in this episode, we're going to address what to do about the fact that our current service design tool set isn't enough. We need a wider variety of people and skills to be involved in order to deliver great services. But this begs the question, where does the role of a service design professional stop? It's already hard enough to grasp all the existing aspects of service design, let alone that you'll now also need to know about things like organization design as well. But there is no denying service design needs to expand its borders in order to deliver on its promise. We need to start breaking down the silos that we unintentionally have formed over the years. So in this conversation, we're going to discuss how you can foster collaboration and create bridges between service design and other disciplines, which allows you to share the workload and responsibility of delivering great services. If you enjoy topics like this and want to grow as a service design professional, make sure you click that subscribe button because we bring a new video like this every week or so. Well, that about wraps it up for the introduction. Now it's time to jump into the conversation with Clara Lamats. Welcome to the show, Clara. Thanks for having me, Marc. Thanks a lot. Yes. So have you all excited to talk about the topic that we have scheduled for today? But as always, Clara, we start with a question. If you could do a brief introduction, who are you and what do you do these days? So my name is Clara Lamats. I'm the director of business design at an agency called Veriteer. We are working with rather large companies on transformation through design and also delivery. And my background is as a cultural anthropologist. After that, I was working in industry for a number of years and I came into service design in mid-career and have been working as a service designer for the last four years. As an anthropologist, that's an interesting background to have as a service designer. I absolutely can see how it's relevant. And we'll get to your service design bit in a second because we have the 60-second question rapid fire round. Five questions. Your task is to answer them as quickly as possible. Just the first thing that comes to your mind. I read. Yeah. All right. Let's do this. Clara, what's always in your fridge? Milk. All right. Which books or books are you reading at this moment, if any? I just started capitalism without capital, which is kind of showing us a transition of thinking in just assets and how the world is transforming to digital value or non-capital value. It's fascinating, but I've just started. So that's all I can say. All right. We'll add a link to the show notes. What was your first job? My first job. I think it was picking up glasses around my parents' house after their parties. All right. What did you want to become when you were a kid? I think I wanted to become a doctor. Just help people be well and fix things. Well, you're still doing that, hopefully, as a service designer in a different way. Now, you already mentioned something about your transition into service design, but I'm curious, do you remember the very first time you got in touch with service design? Yeah, it's interesting. So I think it's when I was living in Helsinki, I was working as a freelance consultant and I became interested in service marketing. So I started to read about services marketing and started to develop a sort of, I don't know, emergent interest in the discipline. I didn't know what service design was at that time. It was maybe like 11 years ago, and I think it was through that. So through services marketing, reading a very big, heavy book on services marketing. Heavy books, those are usually very good. Awesome. So when we were chatting prior to this conversation, you said it might be interesting to talk about the expanding boundaries of service design as a practice. We'll dig into that a little bit deeper. But I'm curious, how did you arrive at this topic? It's a good question. And I think it's related to maybe coming to service design after having been in industry and in research for more than a decade. I understood that there is a lot of the methodology and the sort of approaches that service design uses that go beyond the type of work that we would be doing as an agency. And it was almost a thought around if you turn the focus of service design to other things, so other design elements like the organization itself, etc., then maybe it works. Maybe you can do something that goes beyond designing the service. And a lot of the kind of elements or principles and qualities of service design as a discipline, as we know it now, would be applicable. And also there was an element of just like playing around with the discipline. So if the discipline is so young and it's not kind of a solid state thing, then how can we a little bit continue to transform it and expand it? And, you know, can it do different things for us? So I think that was like the genesis of all that. And I was very lucky to be on a really long term project in capability building at that time. So that helped me to give me time and opportunity to explore this rather than just being, you know, full on project work. I think that's that's kind of the genesis of that one. All right. So there is an implicit assumption here. And I would say it's true that we currently have formed boundaries within or around service design. Let's let's try to sort of dig into that. How would you describe the boundaries that you see in service design? Ah, wow. So I would say what I see, which could be completely wrong and someone else can come along and say something totally different. But what I saw as a practitioner is, first of all, there was a very kind of almost narcissistic point of view around the way we use our tools and the tools we use. And sort of coming from a social science education background and coming from doing strategy and different type of work in innovation research. I was like, but nothing is truly original. It's a discipline that borrows from so many others. And it takes so much thing, things from social science. Sometimes depending what kind of environment of service design you're in, it might be more or less technology averse or friendly and oriented. So I just had this feeling that. That it's not set in stone. We can decide how we use the discipline, but it's also something about, oh, my God, I just completely lost the question mark. Well, the question was, what are the boundaries? Which boundaries do you see? OK, yeah. So I was thinking more around the boundaries are more self-imposed and sometimes they are just related to the fact that we are not necessarily experimenting with other disciplines. How might we collaborate with others around us? So I'm encountering a lot of this now in terms of setting up a service design practice in a large organization, which has also all kinds of other disciplines or capabilities being set up. For instance, it can be agile product development or scaled agile and so on. So it's almost more around what are these kind of APIs that we need to build to other bits of the business to make the methods work and then do the methods need adjustment. So how do we translate that? So I I've been having a lot of conversations over the years about boundaries and defining a discipline. At some points, it's really useful to have a sort of a common agreement on what something is because it allows new people to get into the discipline faster. You can actually write a book about it and say, like, here's the thing we as a community do as practitioners. And when it becomes bigger and fuzzy and the term that every designer love, which is it depends, we lose some other qualities. Like I'm curious, how do you how do you see that balance? Can we still expand the boundary of service design while still being a discipline, which is which new people well, which new people can access or will it become so fuzzy that it's like that nobody even knows what it means? Yeah, I don't I think that it's not so services and one of its qualities actually is that it's highly structured. It's facing its structure. So I don't necessarily feel that you need fuzziness. I think everything can fit perfectly well into a grid. It's absolutely fine and everything can be decomposed. So I think it's not so much about fuzziness, but I do think there's something about, you know, tools, not rules. So it's almost like, give me a framework and then I will work within the boundaries of that framework rather than tell me how to do it. And I believe that's that's more to the ethos of maybe human centered design, but it's also to the ethos of we do need boundaries, but we don't need to be told how to do things. And then at the end of the day, you know, you can go from a kind of level one of things, which is everything. And we say we want to be holistic and we want to understand the human experience, the lived experience. But if you start decomposing that into like granularity, you you can also do that. And there is a trace. So I think maybe that's where that's where, you know, there there is a grid and then depends of how how much of the grid you want to cover. But you can always trace things down, like ladder things down. So I know I'm curious, how do you see like, what are the things that we should still embrace? What are the key elements that that are sort of that are the key nature of service design? And what are those things that we where we can seek expansion, where we can seek inspiration with and from other disciplines? Maybe. Yeah. So when I went into service design as a practitioner for the first time, I was working only in a service design organization. So we were all service designers in our in our group. And then others outside the group, so always on client side, were not. And that was interesting for me in the sense of, OK, this is perfect because I want to get better at doing the doing and being with service designers like everybody knows more than me. Everybody has been doing it for longer than me. So that was extremely useful. But then if you need to sort of integrate points of view. So to be empathetic, actually, it's part of our it should be one of our qualities as service designers. But sometimes sometimes actually we are not. And I would say even beyond empathy, we might need to be compassionate sometimes and other times it's sort of not to be so principled about what we call things. So let ourselves merge into the local language, you know, integrate the local language. And one thing I found more recently working in teams where on our side, so on the agency side, we are multidisciplinary, working with a lot of people who come from management consultancy or people who come from technology and so on. Is this a lot of product owners? This sort of how do we cross pollinate these points of view and learn to work across tribes, so not be tribal in our practice and be be generous in, you know, allowing to call things by different names as long as we understand those boundaries, I think. Yeah, yeah, makes a lot of sense. I'm curious, like if you you've been thinking about this, you've been experiencing this firsthand. If you trace the story back, like how did we get here? Because you said service design is a relatively young discipline, and it is. And still, you experienced a tribal nature. So how did we get here so soon? Well, maybe it's not soon. Maybe it's right, because it's almost like it's kind of like this hype. No, there is a moment where you are very self-righteous when you're an adolescent and then you mature and you're not so self-righteous. So I almost feel like if you think of it of a human life cycle, it's a little bit like that. No, now we are like, we need to prove ourselves. You know, we are the, you know, we exist. We are here. We need to make our name be heard. We need to give ourselves an entity because it's a new profession. So when I was studying at uni, this thing didn't exist. You know, there was maybe like Shostak's article in 84, I don't know. So I think I think maybe that's that that kind of energy comes from that. And I think it makes a lot of sense and it's good for, you know, when you start and you need to build a basis. So, you know, you have kind of some stability. But I think in in the practice, we still have a lot of room to to move things forward. So it doesn't only have to be in innovation labs or in academia. I think practitioners have a big opportunity to kind of move the dial just by by doing. Yeah. So and I totally see the same way for the same movement where you need like you need to build an identity in order to build critical mass and to be heard, like put your name out there. Like you said, like build an entity and it helps to to put a label on that entity. And now it feels like we're reaching a new level of maturity as an as an entire field where we can sort of step step back and still be doing service design without being so clinked to that identity and having to put our flag in the in the ground. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, totally. I had a little experience actually last week around this. So I was creating a small training board around organizational scoping for client side. And then I got super excited about, oh, you know, the transition of of of of management in the 20th century and got into all this like stuff about your guest Naomi Stanford, who is like a longtime hero of mine about organizational design and how it can be more impactful and sort of humanizing organizations. And then and then I realized that the audience was like, I just want a method. I have a very specific problem that I need to deal with at work right now. I'm not sure how to go about it. Like, thanks for the, you know, for the context. But right now I just want a sort of recipe to conduct this work. And that would have been much more useful. So I thought, OK, it's a good learning that, you know, go and just do it once, do something. And then and then you start to play around with how other ways that you might do the thing. But it's sort of you need to kind of anchor things somewhere. And start practicing. And if you have too many options, so almost optionality is a hindrance rather than than giving opportunities, depending on where you are in your development. Yeah. And now you're feeling that we are reaching the stage where optionality becomes more important. I guess, I mean, I don't want to pontificate. So I don't know if I'm asking for your experience. Yeah. But I personally, from my own personal experience, definitely. And I think I think it's it's nice to be brave about it. So I remember talking about, you know, organizational change. What's the role of service design and organizational change? It can play a huge role, but it also depends if we as designers suddenly understand that the remit of our design is something else. And we thought it was. So it's also for us to kind of embrace that. So again, I'm tapping into your personal experience. Like, how did that thinking change for you? Because apparently you had a perspective on what service design was or should be. And that has shifted towards what it could be. Describe that shift. Yeah, I think it's it's kind of my own my own maturity, I guess, in the in the discipline. So coming coming from studying service design and innovation, UAL start, but but not doing it as a kind of young person, rather as a mid-career person who has kind of other things that they can bring along, that they can transfer. And I think it was more my early focus was just I just want to do the doing. I want to, you know, do customer journey, I want to do contextual inquiry. I want to do interviews. I want to synthesize and understand how what how the process works and etc. And then I think after having been doing that for a while and sort of serendipitously landing on projects that were not exactly, you know, just service design projects or service improvement projects, but rather kind of a little bit fuzzy innovation projects or capability building projects. I think that's where it all started to be a bit more maybe there's something more that can be done with the discipline. Oh, but there is another discipline that already does that. And then you sort of it's almost like you start to encounter, you know, you're sailing in the dark and you start like all the icebergs are starting to hit you. And then you just kind of looking at them and dissecting them. And I felt I suddenly started to feel that, oh, there are overlaps. There are things that, you know, you can apply what are known as service design methods to in, you know, or design practice and so on. So I think it was that was kind of my journey. It was a lot of luck just landing myself on projects that were of that nature and maybe my own background, just kind of asking those questions because I had done similar things using completely non-design approaches. If that makes sense. Yeah, so that it makes sense as you encountered challenges which weren't specifically about improving or creating a new service. Right, that was and I've been in that situation as well. And then you sort of start to realize that service design or that approach, the methodology, the mindset, the attitude can be applied to many different problems. And it helps when you don't cling on to I want to do specifically I want to design a service or I want to improve a service. Now, now that you've been through this experience, which opportunities do you see for the field when we expand our. Our boundaries, what was in store? Yeah, it's good because you don't want to be stepping on other people's toes, right? So you still have a kind of remit. I don't know. So like this question is very provocative. And I'm thinking now just just kind of reacting to it in the minute. I think there's two things. One is is it design? You know, like design is just like doing something deliberately, isn't it? It's just not leaving things to chance. So then it starts to kind of go into this this thinking of what is a service is a service like a distinct entity? Or are we actually designing parts of a service? And if let's say we go down the route of let's call it design, so it's not service development or service architecting or service planning or some other thing that's not designed. Then how does it fit into a kind of ecosystem of other skills and capabilities? So I'm now thinking when I was studying service design, my the name of my master's degree was service experience design and innovation. But the year after the name of the master's degree itself changed. So then at the present moment, we are working a lot on something we call comprehensive design. So sounds probably a little bit pretentious, but the thinking is maybe this is just a class, one more discipline that doesn't do too much on its own. But if you put it together in a kind of, you know, a messy way with other disciplines, so almost, you know, mutually exclusive, but comprehensively exhaustive, then it adds a lot of value. And then that's kind of where that boundary setting exists. So it's like, what does this the brand architect do something different than the experience designer who does something different than the service designer who does something different than, you know, the delivery manager and does something different than the product owner and so on. And then the focus would be rather sideways instead of about the discipline itself. So it's more around how do those capabilities orchestrate with each other to make good outcomes for business, for organizations, etc. Hmm. So what I'm hearing you say is collaboration is key and looking across disciplines and craft is key. Is that correct? Yeah, I think it's it's maybe very simplistic, but yes, yeah, I think so. And that if we do that, it allows us to maybe share the workload of actually delivering the results because that was one of the things I was thinking while preparing this is a lot of service designers of certain design professionals put a lot of weight on their shoulders of actually trying to put services out into the world while we've by now hopefully realize that not even an army of service designers can deliver a service. You need an organization to actually do that. So this would also hopefully free the discipline of the of the load of trying to deliver these services. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I remember you had this discussion about or you have this always this this quote around, you know, the example that is used of the cafeteria, not the cafe. Why would I go to this or that? And then you mentioned that it's about service design. And then it's like, is it maybe it's about branding, right? Like maybe it's like three steps before service design, because they haven't even interacted with the service yet. So maybe it's just like something appeals to them, you know, and that could be related to branding to other things which are like pre-service. And then it's like so how exactly as you say, if this is like a chain of collaboration, where are we in it? And how do we make it effective when we go to others? Sort of, yeah, that interface focus. So where are we in this chain? If we if it is a chain? Yeah, I don't know. So if you ask me right now, based on like the things we are experimenting with in our client cases and in our internal work, I would say that we are not always at the front. So we are somewhere in the middle. So I'm thinking if if you think of, for example, working with retailers or working with this kind of we are working with a lot of brands who are old brands like legacy brands who are moving into a future in transition, but also global. So they have a very high focus on brand architecture, brand identity, you know, aligning all this kind of transition into into digital and omnichannel stuff into their existing legacy brands and evolving those brands. So I think maybe for for a lot of customers, the entry point is not service. It's actually brand brand values. So they might be selling the same things. We're selling shoes, we're selling, you know, grocery. We are selling cars, but we are doing it in our way. There's something specific, which is very important about our own legacy and our own brand values and the way we do things. So maybe that's kind of the first point of entry for for consumer facing brands, let's say. And then the services are something that's more architectural, which is around the how those things will be delivered. And it doesn't mean, you know, sometimes I encounter a situation where it's like, we must hoard everything. We must do the discovery. We must do the research. We must do that. It's like, why? You can outsource it from another department in your business who's just going to be laser focused on that and just get what you need from them as a service design team. So I'm just thinking like, what does that look like when you sort of architect the organization to deliver on service design? And the more I see it now in this large kind of global environments, the more I feel that somewhere in the middle, but it's really instrumental because it holds it all together. And it also has this orchestrating role. So it's, you know, we show everyone where everything kind of sits on a grid so that nobody is operating in silos or in silence or not aligned to sort of laddering up what we were talking about before. It's like levels, levels of granularity. And part of our job is just to make everyone aware of the bigger picture, but then to also be able to zoom into their little part of the grid. That's a bit of a far, far, far, but. Well, I definitely recognize this and like having the overview and seeing the bigger picture and orchestrating those are all terms that I've been using for the last five years on the show as well. I'm curious if you think that's maybe one of the problems. So let me explain because we some, we, I'm talking about the community, the discipline sometimes have the feeling that we hold the truth. Like we see the entire picture. We know how everything is connected or should be and other people need to align with that and that maybe creates a different sense of responsibility, different hierarchical feeling. And that maybe also causes the hoarding that you mentioned. Have you seen something similar? Yeah, that's a good one. So maybe this is, maybe I am myself being arrogant in that. I think, I don't think it's, maybe that's like a mindset thing. So it's almost like I don't, you know, if you think of design as facilitation, service design as facilitation, it's almost like I actually don't hold the truth but I'm going to help you build the scaffolding to put things in order. So it's not just like a mountain of stuff. You know, it's not like a pile of laundry. It's like everything is ordered in shelves and you know exactly how to trace things. I'm almost thinking of like business analysis tools like traceability matrices and stuff like that. And then I just create this environment where actually, you know, things that the house is in order and you people can actually get more activated to do whatever it is that they need to do in their part of the business or the house. My 93-year-old mother was very funny because she said to me, I think I understand what you are doing now. You are putting things in order. This is your job, this is what your profession does. It's putting things in order so that us, and she was referring to elderly people, so she was saying that we are so neglected by society, et cetera, et cetera, so nothing new here. So that people like us can actually have experiences that are based on our own capabilities and our own handicaps related to age and so on. And I really like that thinking of sort of putting things in order because I feel that's a big part of the job but it doesn't mean we hold the truth. It just means that we help build scaffolding. Yeah, and there's a paradox or a challenge there because if you help to build a scaffolding and make sense of the world and sort of see the bigger picture and you are enabling the organization to make smarter decisions about where they are heading, by helping the organization to see the bigger picture, you'll also see the bigger picture. And it's really hard to separate those two things like helping to build a bigger picture and saying, okay, that's just my role. And then not also feeling responsible for making sure that the bigger picture is actually followed up with. That's what I've been seeing. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. But maybe there's some letting go that we need to do there. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe it's like, maybe also part of that, like letting go is nice. It's a good way of putting it because it's almost like, you know when you kind of grow in your career and you go to a management position and it's like you don't do the doing anymore. Now you do something else, right? Like you get work done through others. So the saying goes. So I was thinking, maybe there's something about that. So it's almost like, the kids are growing up and then you are like, okay, now they can do it on their own and then they let it go. So it's like, if I can just help others see that this way of structuring things and organizing helps them to their job better but also gives them oversight of the bigger picture, like some kind of situatedness, that's already such a kind of critical role and that should be like a reward in itself. I might be getting a bit metaphysical here but I think it's, yeah. Yeah, I get that and I often have used a metaphor of being an orchestrator in front of an orchestra. Now that I'm thinking of it, that metaphor works in a lot of situations but it's also flawed because there is just one person orchestrating the entire thing while that's not per se the role we wanna have. We want to help everybody understand what they need to do without having the burden or the task or the responsibility. It needs to be a shared responsibility to guide everything in the right direction. If we make a leap into, okay, let's say that that's the case and that we see this opportunity, what do you feel is currently missing? Which gaps do we need to bridge in order to get to this situation? Yeah, so one thing I find is that, and we talked about this also a lot with our professors at UAL and one thing is sort of designers being interested in numbers, just like general like PNL stuff, you know? Oh, what is PNL? But being interested in the kind of drivers of business because public sector or private sector are always driven, everybody has a PNL, right? And that's a huge part of the work we do is to be within those boundaries, to help improve to a certain extent. Oftentimes we are brought into businesses actually to help things, horrendous things like head count reductions and so on. So I think one is kind of numeracy, just being more interested in business models and how businesses really work and what are the kind of business drivers? And this applies to the NHS as much as it applies to a bank, I believe. And then another one is maybe just having more of an inquisitive mindset about collaboration. So it's not just like, oh, let's be open-minded and work with others, it's more around let's really dig into how others work and why they work the way they work and see how we can build bridges to collaborate together. So I think those two things would be are kind of super interesting and they also need some kind of codification. So how do we codify these ways of collaborating? How do we design them in a way that they are maybe reproducible in a number of contexts? So almost like, again, like tools, not rules, but a little bit of a guidance, let's say. What, I'm curious, what would be a good starting point to learn about numbers and P&Ls and if a research design professional approaches you right now after this episode and says, this sounds great. I wanna follow up on your advice. Where would you point them to? I don't know, because I think there is like a more, there's like an increasing hybridization, isn't there? At least in education sector. So I see a lot of my ex-colleagues who have done these like designers kind of MBAs or which also feels a bit tribal because it's, you know, but I think also there is a lot of collaboration from, you know, kind of business schools to design organizations and so on. So I think there's an aspect of that that it's kind of explore these things, but maybe it's just about, you know, learning some skills of business or business analysis. So I found a lot of skills of, done a lot of kind of short courses maybe on more strategy related stuff, which also has it some kind of tools and frameworks, but also like more granular things like business analysis, you know, sometimes things like forecasting or different tools from finance can also be very, very useful to kind of get your mind into that. Hmm. I have a blog post with 30 book recommendations for service designers. And I would say 25 of those 30 books aren't about service design. Yeah. And I think that's, that should be the mantra. Like you read five books about service design to get yourself familiar with the tools and methods. And then you'll read 25 other books to familiarize yourself with the people and disciplines you need to be working with. Strategy, communication. Absolutely. HR, like those are the things that are going to really help you be effective as a service design professional. Yeah. One thing that I found really useful actually was when I went to work in financial sector, this big capability project was reading ethnography about banking, banking industry, to kind of understand how things work, what is the culture, how things work in there. So that's more like coming at it from a culture and social dynamic side, but I thought it was so helpful to kind of, if you are not a native of the industry to understand some of the quirks and proxies and the way things are there, why they might be like that. So that was another one which I thought like, I think ethnography is like a great way to access understanding about the nature of things you're going to work with in service design often. And ethnography, like we are pretty good at that. Applying it to the end user, we've often said on the show we also need to apply to the organizations we work for, right? It shouldn't be that difficult. Now, I'm curious, similar question to, okay, maybe after this conversation, somebody is inspired and wants to start doing this. What is a good first step? How do you expand your existing perspective on what service design is or could be? Maybe it's what you're saying. Maybe it's almost like, if you would take it as a little experiment on yourself, it's almost like trying to look at any case that you are working on, like a service design project or a service improvement project, whatever you're on at the minute, and just give it a spin. Like, almost like make a map of it and be like, this is what we are working. This is the problem we are solving. But then like, what is around it? Like what is in the context around it? And is there anything else that we could solve for? And it's almost like put it through the process and see what happens. Like, does it work for it? So I think you talk a lot also about dark matter. Like the politics of things or what kind of conversations are being had, are people spending their time? So some things that you might not necessarily be looking around, but they are around the context of the client situation you might be in. So is there anything that can be done to design for that? And oftentimes the services that we are working for in the clients are actually sometimes not working because of that, but that's not in the brief. And we just a little bit ignore it at our own risk. Yeah, and usually we ignore it not willfully sometimes, but often it's just a lack of understanding, a lack of knowledge. And while you were describing this, like I saw a different image popping up in my head where we often have the notion to put service design at the center of what we're doing and map the other things around that. While if you put the outcome that you're striving for at the center and make like if it's a mind map service design, one of the areas that's connected to the outcome, what are the other things connected to the outcome that you are trying to achieve? And like you said, organizational design, HR, employees, suppliers. And that's probably if you start mapping out what do I know about all these other things? And if you cannot map anything that's related to that outcome branding, then that's also a sign that's that you probably don't have the holistic perspective that you may think you have on what you're trying to achieve. Yeah, definitely. I can imagine that this sounds intimidating for some people. Service design is already so big. There are so many things you need to know and it's ever expanding. Like, how do you even grasp and comprehend this? What does this mean for a service design professional? I don't know, probably not much or probably a lot. It depends. I just think it's nice to think that it's nice to remind ourselves as service designers. So if you look at it from an egocentric perspective, now we are putting ourselves in the middle of everything. But it's like, OK, I need a tribe. I need an identity. I am a service designer. That's the tribe I play in or the team I play in. But then it's almost like, how do I expand my playbook? And in order to really kick ass at my job, what other things can I do to be more impactful? Exactly as you say, outputs are one thing. Outcomes are a totally different thing. And I think it's almost like we talk about North Star, we give our clients North Star, we help them realize their North Star and build everything that needs to happen underneath to get there. But it's like, how do we apply that to ourselves as service designers to make ourselves more rounded? And I would totally agree with you that of your list of books or readings or things that you need to understand, probably 80% of that is outside just reading about service design and getting good technically. And it's more around everything else that influences it. And how do you leverage those connections? How do you create a more grounded and maybe useful and almost in not something that you could industrialize but something that you could replicate of making good collaborations, making kind of straight line collaborations with others in the business who might be completely different from you and kind of keep on expanding that understanding. So I do believe that I've heard people transitioning into service design from more visual or like product design disciplines, a little bit complaining that but we are not doing design, it's like but facilitation is the design. You can design a conversation, you can design this kind of intervention in a business where you just ask the right questions or make people ask the right questions, make people be reflective. So I think if we are open-minded about that, we can still have boundaries to the role but we can just keep on exploring where we can make an impact, if that makes sense. Yeah, for me it does. And this relates to a question I had here in my notes where it's around where does it end but reflecting on that question, I don't think that's the right question to be asking because there is no end to it. Like the thing that you need to do probably is keep expanding your vocabulary and your skill set to the people you're working with at least rephrasing this. So in order to know where it stops, you need to know which other things are out there and you need to know at which moment you need to call somebody else. Like okay, I know you need to be aware that branding is there and you need to have a basic understanding of what branding is and their language and then you need to be able to identify, okay, we've now reached a point in our challenge where I actually need to call a different expert. I think that's where it stops when you understand what your own limitations are and know who you need to call next. Yeah, nice. That's where it stops, right? Yeah, nice. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally, totally. And it also, yeah, it keeps you grounded as well and it keeps you hoarding everything on your shoulders. But then I was thinking, Mark, what if the discipline of service design had landed a different name? Why is it service design? Like why didn't we get called service planners or service orchestrators or service developers? It's interesting, right? Yeah, I definitely have a perspective on that and I still think that the term service design makes a lot of sense and it's really relevant. And other terms are also relevant but I definitely see where service design as a term is coming from and why it's still relevant. Yeah, and there's one thing that I was thinking around that as well which is this concept of silent designers. So in every organization, in every kind of, as an agency, you're going to a business context and then there are people who are designing but they just don't know that they are designing and it's like this kind of silent designers who have maybe a very deep understanding of some areas of the business. They are building relationships with other partners inside the business and they are kind of designing the organization just through their own routines, rituals, behaviors, kind of inquiry. So it's also interesting to almost like not be patronizing and understand that there is actually a lot of design going on in a lot of things that don't have the term design on their title. Yeah, and yeah, absolutely. Like referring back to the coffee shop example, the quote that a lot of people refer to. I added sort of an underline there where I said like service design is a thing that makes you walk into one shop, not the other. The update that I gave there is like it's good service design that makes you walk into the one because I think like you mentioned, design is already there. Like every organization is already doing design and more specifically already doing service design. Some do it intentionally, most of them don't. And a lot of people are already designing things, just don't have yet figured out that there's a name and a discipline and something that they can actually learn and train and improve. Now heading towards the end of our conversation, I'm curious, we've discussed a lot of things, explored a lot, how would you summarize this? This thing that just happened here. This conversation, this last 40 minutes, 45 minutes, how would you summarize this? Besides very stressful, just reflective, like I think, I guess it's my very simple message is that it just kind of reminds me that collaboration is everything. So focusing on understanding the limits of what you can do and just working with others is maybe the most kind of instrumental thing that we need to learn, designing services or organizations or whatever we are doing. And then I guess this conversation has just made me reflect on the fact that we still tend to reward individual achievement all the time, when in fact, the most powerful thing we have at our, as a kind of social entities and collectives, organizations, businesses, public sector, whatever is collaboration and the fact that we all have different points of view, different skill sets, different capabilities. I think harnessing the power of that is probably the most important thing and refining that versus still being caught up in this sort of rewarding individual achievement even though actually we kind of understand that what we should be rewarding is collaboration but we just don't really know how to. And that's a really good insight and happy that you sort of were able to pick on this and I think in order to, this is one of those areas where we need to understand, okay, this isn't the area of service design, we need to go to organization designers for this, for instance, and incentives are a huge element of how we do things, why we do things, why things are structured. And like you said, if the incentives within an organizations are to reward individual contributions, then it makes sense that we create silos and that we form tribes. So maybe we need to seek the solution in different areas than in our own or next to our own discipline. Now, one final question I had before we leave off, you've been, again, you've been thinking a lot about this but what's the one thing you wished you knew five years ago about the journey that you have gone through right now? Yeah, I think it's something about not being scared to just be really clueless and ask a really kind of clueless question. So just be confident in not knowing, I guess. And be confident that the inquiry is like the thing that matters, so adaptability and all that. Sometimes you get hung up like, I don't want to be caught out, I don't want to seem like the most clueless person in the room, it doesn't matter. I think that's, yeah. But isn't that the catch 22? Could you have done, can you do this? No, this is like the power of hindsight, it's so easy. Easier said than done. But I think, yeah, I think that's the bit where I just wish, I'm kind of like, I have like a bucket of all the questions that I didn't ask, that I wish I had asked kind of thing. Yeah, and the sooner you arrive at the inside that it's okay not to know, like, the better. I agree with you, you probably have to go through that experience. This isn't something you learn out of a textbook where somebody says, it's okay not to know, you actually have to go through that experience. But the sooner you arrive there, probably the sooner you'll find enlightenment and release and relief. Yeah, and it doesn't apply to everything, right? Like you still find yourself in situations where it's like everything comes tumbling down but it's almost like a muscle, no? That you just keep building that it's gonna be okay. It's, yeah. We'll figure it out. Yeah, we'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. Clara, thank you for this conversation. A lot of things emerged. A lot of probably new questions arrived and that's exactly what we tried to do here on the show, raising new questions rather than giving answers. So yeah, thanks again for coming on, sharing what's been on your mind and sharing this with the community. Thank you so much, Marc. It's been a pleasure. Thanks a lot. We're almost at the end of this conversation. I really hope that you enjoyed it and got something useful out of it. And if you did, make sure to leave a short comment down below. Thanks a lot for watching and I'll catch you very soon in the next video.