 I'm Dave Gray and this is The Service Design Show. In The Service Design Show we talk to people that are shaping the service design field. In this episode I'm talking to Dave Gray. Dave is the co-founder of Explain and the writer of the popular book called Game Storming. We're going to talk about customer centricity, internal culture, habits and norms and how it all relates. And at the end of the show Dave is going to talk a bit about his upcoming book called Liminal Thinking. So if you're interested in that be sure to stick around till the end. Welcome to the show Dave. Thanks, it's great to be here Mark. Awesome, awesome. You're actually like I already told you. The first one outside of Europe to be on the show. How does it feel? Very exciting. Very exciting. Not many people choose St. Louis for their first connection to the U.S. So that's great. Well Dave I'm not sure if this one this question actually applies to you but so far I've had people that are actually really in the service design field. I asked everyone do you recall your very first memory of service design? Does it apply to you? Do you recall your very first memory of service design? Yeah actually I was visiting London in fact and on Twitter somehow connected with a guy named Ben Reason who runs a company called Live Work. And I met up with Ben for a coffee and I asked him what he did and he told me service design and I said what's that? And when did he tell you? Whoa you're asking me to go way back but I think he told me something along the line of it's the design of services. I've read a number of you know I'm a founding member of the chapter of the service design network in St. Louis here and we've had a lot of these we've had this sort of conversation on the board about defining service design and I've always been the one advocating for why are we making this complicated because what's wrong with saying it's the design of services. But apparently that's not clear enough for some people. I've been in the service design field for 10 years and I've let go of trying to define service design so I wish you luck and let me know if you are found consensus on the definition. Dave you're part of the service design show and we have a co-creation format on the questions we're going to talk about. Let's explain the format just very briefly for the people who've never seen an episode before. I've got three topics over here that we can talk about and you also have some question starters not on paper but in a more digital way right can you show one. Sure I got my iPad here and there's pictures that you sent me. Yeah so for instance you've got a what if and I've got internal workings and it will be up to you to come up how can we to come up with an interesting question that you're going to answer yourself on this topic. Sounds easy right? Okay. We'll see how it goes. Let me just start and we'll see where we end. The very first topic I'm interested in is this one that you provided me. Customer centric organizations. What question starter goes along with this topic? Well I guess I'd say how might we create more customer centric organizations. Can you elaborate on that? Sure I think well I think this is a challenge that a lot of organizations are having today. They are many organizations that have been around for let's say a hundred years or more have organized themselves around internal efficiency so they were the phone company or they were the bank or they were the taxi company or the hotel company and their primary purpose was to within the hotel industry to do a great job and become efficient and so forth and every company had a strategy but the over many years those organizations have many of them have become focused on internal efficiency and operations and lowering costs or increased profits which sometimes takes them away from really understanding customers and what's happened as I'm sure you and I and many of your viewers are aware is that technology has shifted the landscape so significantly that and those companies in their quest for internal efficiency have pissed off enough customers or alienated enough customers that there's a huge set of opportunities now for organizations to spin up relatively rapidly a brand new value proposition that disintermediates or really disrupts those existing business models for example you're in the hotel business Airbnb comes along serving a totally taking your customers away and giving them a very viable option that doesn't use hotels at all you know I've used Airbnb and I haven't used it in Utrecht but I've used it in Amsterdam I rented a houseboat was great and that's all money that would have gone to a hotel so what organizations you know are trying to do now is to become more customer centric become more oriented towards customers so they can get do better at figuring out those customers need and maybe avoid being disrupted quite so easily right so and I hope that all the viewers and listeners of the show agree that becoming more customer centric is the only way to survive in the coming decade but what do you see as one of the biggest challenges in this because yeah again we all agree what is the biggest struggle for organizations what one of them yeah Ben reason told me in fact when we did talk about this and he said well I believe it was Ben who said to me it's easy to design a customer a service that customers will love it's easy to you know draw it out on a service blueprint or to draw a map of it what's difficult what's really hard is getting the organization to adapt in order to deliver that service consistently so whenever you whenever you design a service if the company you can just you can design a new service and start a new company in which case you have a challenge still a service delivery challenge you've got to still be able to deliver that but if you're actually creating a new service experience for an existing company it's even more difficult because you've got a company and an entrenched embedded habits that might be you know that are just kind of worn into the organization and just like any habit they are hard to break yeah so we'll get into habits in a second but I'm also interested in when you think about customer centricity and customer experience what is the biggest question you have around that topic around which topic well how companies become more customer centric well I'm very fascinated by the internal organizational challenges you have you have companies I've seen companies where everybody knows the right thing to do and yet nobody does it so why is that yeah you know why is it so hard to change organizational habits and behaviors why are the what makes it so difficult I'm fascinated by culture I think organizational culture is something that we could have a lot of probably a very long discussion on even what it is or how to define it but I think culture is widely recognized as one of the one of the major drivers of success but also one of the major barriers to change because it is culture is like habits and you know kind of habitual behaviors is it creates momentum in a positive way if you've got if you've got certain behaviors that you don't think about but you do in their successful behaviors it's great but sometimes those behaviors that have been successful in the past are no longer successful because the business environment has changed and so the company has to figure out excuse me how to change its habits yeah so I'm thinking about culture habits and norms is actually laying here in front of me I would say you could say even like I mean one very valid definition of culture is the culture is the habits of the organization so let's just move on to that topic that we've got here and the only thing you need to do is to pick a question started that goes along with this one we already tapped into it let's see here let's make an interesting one a challenging one well it's about culture norms habits and behaviors yeah none of these are really fitting very easily for me well why do I say that culture is I can't read your picture there why do I say that culture is norms habits and behaviors how's that and what would be your answer well I think you could say culture is whatever you wanted to say culture what I've noticed is that when major initiatives fail often culture is the easy target to blame and one of the reasons that people can blame culture when there's a failure is because nobody actually really knows what it means so you can say well we failed because of the culture because culture is not something that most companies measure they're usually are not people in the company whose job it is to focus on the culture blaming the culture is in a way like blaming nobody or also a way like blaming everybody exactly yeah and saying well you know we couldn't do it because the culture wouldn't support it I've heard people talk about the culture as if it's the immune system of the company as if it's antibodies or antigens or you know that the culture the company rejected this initiative just like a patient rejecting an artificial heart it just kind of you know popped out it didn't work and what is your response to that well I think the question is if that's the case then we need to get better at defining it and we need to get better at understanding what it is and how to shift it I got sick of hearing it honestly and that's why I developed this tool with Alex Osterwalder called the culture map is I felt that organizations needed a better way better tools better practices better understanding of what is culture what does it mean how does it come to be and how does it come to be changed how does it come to how does it evolve and how can we become more intentional about the the culture in the organization what if you had a chief culture officer what would that person's job be what would be measured how would you measure the success of that job how would you what are the KPIs of the chief culture inside on that because I think this is really essential yeah I think well I think here's the thing I think there are there are organizations out there that will purport to measure your culture for you and many of them do it through surveys they will they will have a kind of a wheel or diagram and they will orient they will they will say tell you where you are kind of like a clock where you are in the or a compass yeah where you are in this diagram are you a competitive organization are you creative are you collaborative are you more control oriented and I think those kinds of assessments can be helpful but they are so high level that they do not get into I mean really in some ways they're saying there are only four kinds of organizations which is of I see as a great oversimplification it's like saying that there's only four kinds of cultures can you imagine and you live in Europe yeah you think there's only four kinds of cultures in Europe yeah yeah have you traveled around that much I mean you go to Spain you go to Finland you go to Sweden you go to Switzerland I think there's more than four I think and I think what makes just like what makes a country unique or what makes a family unique or what is also what makes organizations unique culture can be a fantastically valuable strategic asset for a company if you understand it if you understand what you have and if you understand the strengths and weaknesses because every culture inherently will have strengths but also will have vulnerabilities as well and weaknesses so you mentioned something about the culture map is that the two yes I'm actually not familiar with it could you elaborate a bit on that oh wow yes I don't have a print out of it in front of me but I can share it with you after and you can link to it yeah I will definitely send a link yeah so if you're familiar with Alex Osterwalder he's a business model canvas the value proposition canvas he's designed a few of these and he's a friend of mine and an advocate for business tools for strategic thinking so the service blueprint which many of your viewers would probably be familiar with as an example of or a customer journey map as an example of a tool for strategic thinking the culture map is specifically a tool for strategic thinking about culture and it's very simple three boxes but the purpose of it is to help any group or organization start to get a better understanding of what are the habits of the company what are the outcomes that are being delivered because of those habits and what are the enablers and blockers that help or hurt those habits from coming into being it's also a design tool for helping to think about well if we want to get some different kinds of outcomes what kind of behaviors would we need to be thinking about and then how might we build management and infrastructure in support to enable certain behaviors and block other behaviors it really reminds me of a tool that we've used in several projects where we actually make a persona or a real-life person out of the organization so if your company would be your neighbor how would he behave, who would he be, what kind of clothes would he wear and I see that a lot of organizations are struggling to actually define something like that it's really hard to... Well, but even if you can define it that's the easy part because then you say let's say our company is a really friendly neighbor our company is a generous neighbor you can borrow his or her lawnmower anytime you want if you need a cup of sugar you can go and get that and then to turn the organization into that neighbor that's the difficult part just like a service design you can imagine a beautiful universe but that doesn't mean that you can make it happen part is the hard part and that's the part that fascinates me how do you actually... once you envision that wonderful neighbor how do you actually turn your neighbor into that person? Oh yeah and on a personal level we know that if we want to exercise more or eat healthier quit smoking we know what procedures we can follow to change our habits have you encountered similar things for organizations do you want to change their habits to norms to culture? Oh yeah I'd say it's about the same just imagine 5,000 people trying to quit smoking all at the same time and that will give you a good sense of the challenge of culture change And I think the challenge is clear and what fascinates me is where can we find clues towards the answers on how to make that shift actually happen Where can we look? The culture map is designed to help you think about those things but the middle layer, so imagine 3 stripes like a flag do you have...the middle layer is behavior so the behaviors are all the things that we do the habits, the things that people do in the organization the top layer are the outcomes those are the things that we get we behave a certain way we see this kind of profit we see this kind of outcome maybe one of the outcomes we see is that we move slower than we'd like or that we are not as customer oriented as we would like we get internal efficiency but we don't get customer satisfaction these are the outcomes and then the layer below behavior is called the enablers and the blockers these are the things that management and an organization can control they are things like the physical layout of the office space the way that people are recruited and hired the kinds of people that are recruited and hired the way that the incentives are set up the way that the organization is structured the way that the org chart is designed the way that we are organized to deliver these services the informal rules the things that are unwritten rules but the things that people do even though they are not in the policy manual they do them because it's the easiest way to get things done or the most expedient way just because they've been doing it that way for years and years and it's the way that they know so those are the areas that management often has a high degree and even the workers have a high degree of control over and those are the things that will help to shift culture for example if you are trying to quit smoking what are the things you could do well you can make sure you have plenty of snacks handy you can make sure that you don't hang out with your friends who smoke you can make sure that you don't go to places where people smoke you can get yourself a Nintendo which is what I did when I quit smoking get yourself a video game controller so your hands are always busy when you are sitting in your favorite chair there are a lot of things you can do to support habits and behavior change this is one of them when an organization is trying to change its habits I recommend that they only focus on one at a time you may find that there are 15 or 20 different habits that you are going to need to change as an organization well which one do you focus on first if you're going to just do one at a time that's another thing that the culture map is very helpful in because it helps you see the connections between outcomes behaviors and blockers and enablers so you can find those keystone enablers or those keystone blockers that are the very core things that you want to move first because they are going to have the maximum impact I can give you examples there is a company I was working with where it became very they were trying to become more collaborative more it was again more customer oriented but very much more collaborative they were trying to break down the organizational silos the disconnects between the different divisions and one thing that kept coming up in our culture mapping over and over was well we have a culture where I feel chained to my desk I don't feel free to get up and move around we heard things like well I don't feel like I can walk by the management team because they feel like I'm not working or if my boss comes by my desk and I'm not there I feel a lot of pressure to be there we know that the senior exec team has told us that we can work from home but I don't feel that I'm free to work from home and I've had I have this person who's just down the hall and I've had over the course of a week 20 or 30 emails with this person and I could have just walked down the hall and had a 10 minute conversation and we could have solved the whole thing but we didn't do it you know I feel chained to my desk so that was the first habit that we decided with that organization okay what's the habit we want to change first do you feel free to move around do you feel chained to your desk and can you give an example of what kind of intervention you actually did did you have the opportunity to actually change something yeah well in this case it was a matter of the senior executive team stating it and focusing on it for a period of time and also measuring it so you know this is maybe a trait of many organizations but something that the executive team makes a commitment to and something that they're measuring and that's a priority something people pay attention to which is this is the reason why I recommend that a company focus on one thing at a time so what happened in that case the executive team said we're going to focus on this habit until we've made progress on it we're going to measure it and every week at the end of the week you're going to get an email it's going to be anonymous we just want you to tell us on a scale of zero to five do you feel free to wander around or do you feel chained to your desk zero means chained to your desk five means free to walk around and we're going to keep doing this until we see that we're consistently you know up around for we're moving forward so we'll work on the next one and so every week on Friday people would get that question and every Monday the executive team would be looking at it and saying well why is this so low and they would look at the comments and they would start to work on that stuff and so I think it's just a matter of just like any kind of habit focus attention continue to focus on it that is I mean basically making it a priority is what makes a new habit take hold and I think that's maybe one of the hardest things for organizations to actually realize that this is a long-term investment and it doesn't provide results on it might not provide results on a short-term notice I think that's the hard part I think people do realize it I don't think that's the hard part of a long-term investment they realize that it's hard but it's the same thing as your New Year's resolution the hard part is not realizing that in order to lose weight you have to eat less the hard part is eating less actually those making those tough decisions every day and those trade-offs I think it is hard work I don't think that culture initiatives fail because people don't realize it's hard work I think culture initiatives fail it's hard work I've got one last topic here and I think we've touched upon it in the last 20 minutes all the time but maybe we can add something to it and this is about the internal workings can we add something to the conversations we've already been having so I think you mentioned something about how do we apply service design to the internal workings of our organizations that was one of your yeah well how can we shift the internal workings when we have a service design or a new idea and we know that it's going to be a challenge how can we shift the internal workings of the organization how can we go into that clock and all those gears that are designed to make us turn left and suddenly how can we translate that so we're now turning right instead of left what can we do with those internal clock works and I say clock works because a lot of organizations are designed in a way like a clock they are designed as step one then hand off then step two then hand off then step three and then you've got it you've got the ball we're going to hand it over to you I think that the it goes back to customer centricity so if you've started and you've done some great service design work and you have an idea of a service that you want to deliver to customers I think it's almost like you might want to pilot it and initially try and deliver that service in one location with one team and maybe even where you as a service designer are actually doing the work yourself to figure out how this stuff happens and if there's software that needs to be designed maybe you've got a paper prototype or something that allows you to really understand those workings and what people have to do and if you're forming if you're finding that you or a team is actually kind of running the interference in other words doing it by hand in a way to figure out what needs to be done and like do it in a relatively controlled in a relatively small way and actually figure out what all the problems are and expect it to break and let it break and let things go wrong and actually start having conversations with people and actually look at the internal challenges as another whole other service design project because everyone internally can be seen as someone or a team who provides a service to another team so if you just continue you're not done with your service design project when you've designed the service for the customer you've got probably hundreds of customers and hundreds of services that need to be designed in order to support that service being delivered so that's I think think about service design as something that needs to permeate throughout the organization not just on you start with the customer but you've got to work your way in and it seems to be a recurring pattern in the talks in the episodes so far that organizations that actually want to become customer centric might have to focus first on their internal customer instead of the external you know that's the I think it's both you've got to work from the outside in and I think you've also got to work from the inside out and if you're lucky it's like the railroad tracks in the old west where they met and they had the golden spike and they nailed down the spike in the middle in Ogden, Utah if you're lucky they made in the middle exactly the right spot I think that's the challenge I've seen companies where they've done great work on the customer side there are many different kinds of customers and their the work maybe on the customer side is perhaps too high level for the internal teams to be able to connect so those connections I think you need to do both I think you need to work from the outside in and from the inside out and find and there are probably almost always some compromises one side or another and you want some to make those tradeoffs that you're planning we are heading towards a rep up of our conversation so I'm really curious when people approach and say Dave I want to get into service design I don't know how often that happens but let's say they do what is your tip for them for people that want to start with service design well I mentioned that we started up the service design network chapter here in St. Louis that would be one of my first recommendations let's join the service design network find peers find the other people who are doing service design you can learn from them there's a wonderful community that's emerged over the past few years that is focused on this there are tons of people practicing it it's an organizational imperative in many organizations to figure this out not just customer centricity but digital transformation there's a lot of services that have been done in manual ways that are needing to move to digital delivery needing to be enabled by mobile devices there are a ton of really fascinating and interesting problems that need to be solved so I would say first step would be find those peers find those people who are doing it and start learning from them and we have here in St. Louis chapter there will be events where you'll have people coming in our next one is on citizen focused service design so we've got people coming in to actually talk about government and design for citizens how do you design government services for with citizens in mind so there's just so much exciting stuff going on and that's for me that's the first stop join the community yeah actually talking about service design events there's one coming up in Amsterdam later this year oh great it's going to be the global service design conference actually we might see you there it's in Amsterdam well I always love a good excuse to come to Amsterdam well be sure to let us know this is your chance Dave any question that you would like to ask the viewers sure I guess one question would be how can I help you how can I help you do your work what can I do to help you get better at your work okay and before we totally wrap up we haven't touched upon it explicitly but you have a new book coming up right I do can we talk two minutes about the book what is about yeah okay well the book is called liminal thinking which doesn't necessarily mean a lot to people who are not familiar with the word liminal but where it comes from is this internal change problem and you know I've done a lot of design thinking work, co-creation use drawing, making maps working with sticky notes etc and I've noticed that one of the things that the design thinking type of work is not good at is helping people change their thinking, helping people become more self aware become better at listening to themselves and their emotions excuse me become better at changing their own mindsets and behaviors and what I mean by that is I've seen many initiatives where we were doing everything right and the senior team was running around asking people to change their behavior and the senior team wasn't changing their own behavior in a way that was setting the right example and yet they believed that they were they thought that they were changing their behavior but they were not so what's going on there and how do you actually get to inside of people get them actually doing more of that introspective reflective kind of work about okay who am I how are people perceiving me how am I contributing to the problems that I'm seeing and are there better in different ways for me to try to solve those people issue, those behavior, those human social relationship oriented issues we call sometimes politics all those social and relational type issues that cause problems in organizations but can also make them really wonderful liminal thinking is a book to help people figure that out one of the questions that I've heard a lot from people is well I see that my organization needs to change but I'm not the CEO I'm in the middle somewhere what can I do I'm in the front line or I'm in the middle I'm a middle manager and liminal thinking is a book that answers that question it took me a whole book to answer the question so I can't give the brief version but the brief version is there's a lot you can do there's a ton that you can do none of it is there's nothing you can do without taking some personal risk but if you're willing to think about it, be thoughtful about it be reflective and take some small personal risks you will amaze yourself at what you can do how did writing the book change yourself? oh well I mean it I've learned a lot I started out writing a totally different book than I ended up writing I learned a ton it's changed my... just to give you some results my relationships at work are better I've been told that I'm coming showing up to work in a much better way I am I'm less attached to specific outcomes I'm more focused on the stuff that's appropriate for me to be focused on I don't get dragged into the weeds as easily my office is clean and well organized and much more well organized than it has been in the past my personal relationships are much better my relationship with my wife is improved my mind feels fresh and clear every morning I mean really it's been tremendous there's been a tremendous amount of change and that's not just because of writing the book but because of the learning and the book is full of exercises too it's actually doing those exercises sharing the book with my wife doing some of the exercises and experiments together it's really been a fascinating journey I have to say can you give a rough estimate when the book should be available it should be coming out this summer we're just working on the cover designs now the internal layout is complete the copy is editing is pretty much done it's looking good I think we're just trying to get that final cover layout designed and it should be out by the end of the summer I think once the book is out we'll do a giveaway for the most interesting comment on this episode excellent thank you wonderful Dave we've run out of time so I want to thank you for being the first outside of Europe to join the show thanks for giving us insights in your challenges thoughts ideas my pleasure thanks for having me what are your thoughts about the topics we've just discussed with Dave how does culture influence customer centricity let us know down below in the comments if you enjoyed this episode and like to see more interviews with service design pioneers subscribe to the channel and be sure to check out some of the past episodes with the service design show we help you to stay one step ahead by talking to the people that are actually shaping the service design field thanks for watching and see you next time