 Hi, and welcome to the Service Design Show. In this episode, you're going to learn about a tool called the Crisis Campus, or maybe more appropriate in these times, a Corona Campus, and the person who's going to explain how the tool works is Russell Clark. Russell runs a studio in Sweden called Humble Bee, and he approached me some time ago with the fact that he created a tool which might be useful for the rest of the Service Design Show community as well. He used this tool with some of his clients to help them understand the implications and the opportunities of the challenging times we live in these days. What I like about this Crisis Campus or Corona Campus is that it takes existing Service Design methods that you're probably already familiar with, and it puts them in an order that helps you to ask the right questions at the right time. So it's probably really easy for you to grasp and easy to use for your clients. Now, if you have a tool, method or framework that you're excited about and want to share with the Service Design community here on this channel, just send me a message that's exactly what Russell did and now we're here. So let's jump into the Crisis Campus. Russell, take it away. Hi everybody, nice to meet your acquaintance. My name is Russell Clark. I'm going to talk about something called the Survival Equation today, which is a simple framework in five stages which helps you, helps your companies navigate the COVID and Corona crisis and hopefully come out the other side and flourish for the better. So when you've went through this framework, you'll be able to help them analyze their biggest concerns, hopefully filter down to something that they can focus on that's going to help them come out the other side of Corona in better financial condition than expected, basically. So let's fire into the Survival Equation. Very, very simple mathematics here that the equation to help you navigate your new normal as a company involves understanding your situation and reacting as quickly as possible and the size of the pivots or the choices that you have to make and the speed of your time to make those changes. So that's the Survival Equation in a nutshell. Slightly cheesier title here but we call it From Crisis to Come Back because it is a canvas that's going to help you for hopefully navigate this completely unprecedented situation that we find ourselves in. So if we jump, we can jump right into the framework, I think. The first step when we sat down with our clients is to unpack and understand these effects of Corona just now. I think to give you some context, I can say that we started this process with maybe five or six clients, we've gone through this workshop with them. Why did we do that? Because we saw in our local community here in Gothenburg in Sweden, we began to see the effects of Corona. We began to see things slowing down and orders being pushed forward to next year and manufacturing starting to close and people being sent home from work, et cetera, et cetera. So we thought how can we help as service designers, as design thinkers, how can we help these companies navigate? So we managed to get in front of our clients and invest some time with them, say half a day. And it's really important to bear in mind these people are not service designers, they're not design thinkers. So the whole of this framework had to be very accessible for anybody. But the first step in the five-step framework is to unpack and understand the effects of Corona. Let me use that with a sort of simple post-it note exercise. Could you map out the expected effects short-term and long-term for your company? Let's jump into the canvas here. So say you're with your client, you want to map out with them in a holistic way. What are the expected effects of Corona? Short-term and long-term. Now, short-term for a restaurant, for example, might only be a few weeks, but for another kind of company, it might be six months. So you have to have this dialogue with your client, obviously. But you want to map out the short-term effects on your company, on your customers, and on the citizens at large, basically. Similar process for the long-term. What will the long-term effects be on this company, on its customers, and for the citizens at large? To give you some idea of our situation, we went through this with a company who sells carpets, quite big-ticket items, i.e., very, very expensive carpets, sometimes with a lifetime, with a guarantee of 20-plus years. And they're very expensive. So it's almost like buying a car. It's in that bracket. They have a long lifespan, and they cost a lot of money. That was one of the companies that we went through this process with. So we talked to them, well, what will the short-term effects be on your company? Well, they started to post that they were starting to furlough staff, and they saw that their manufacturing suppliers, et cetera, were slowing down, and orders were drying up. And on their customers, their sales had slowed down as well. So we mapped out a whole macro situation for this carpet company on post-it notes here. And just the unpacking of this, I think, was quite therapeutic, because nobody wants to talk about what might happen, worst-case scenarios, but just unpacking that, having that dialogue, seemed like quite a therapeutic process to go through. So that was the first part of the framework. The second part of the framework was mapping out the resources and the assets. Try and break this up into the skills that your client have, the unique assets, hard and soft. And they have machines and trucks or data, any intellectual property at all that might be unique. And then the partners, who do they have in the partner network? Who are their primary business connections? Is there anybody there they can utilise and create new value together with? Again, simply mapping them out in this any kind of post-it note exercise that you choose to adopt, map out skills and the assets and the partners available. Now, going back to our case study with the carpet company, they had so many skills internally. They were incredibly proficient when it comes to installation of these carpets and maximising their lifetime value. Again, they have this 20-plus year product lifespan that they have. So their skills and their assets were this incredible knowledge bank that they had and their staff had. Again, once we'd finished, we'd managed to map up a whole range of skills and assets and partners in their near vicinity of this carpet company. The next stage in the five-step framework is to ideate opportunities. Now, I'm presuming that you are watching this because you work with service design or you work with user experience or empathy-based design in some capacity. So ideation is nothing new to you. So the next stage is to ideate using the inspiration that you've just mapped up from your challenges in the first stage, your partners and your assets in the second stage, and there's plenty of ideation and exercises that you can go into. So you want to, if you can, cluster these ideas that come forward from the group into ideas that could have incremental, shorter changes in the short-term future and more fundamental changes that might be more radical in the new normal, so to speak. Again, to go into the example with the carpet company, we started to map out, there's the idea of starting to bubble up around more niche e-commerce, maybe taking one product or one product range and making a niche e-commerce offering around that and testing it. They came up with ideas about digital tools that would help their relationship with designers of these carpets. That was seen as critical from the group for some reason. There was an idea that popped up around a potential leasing model. There was an idea that popped up around a potential second-hand trading area because, again, these carpets have such a long lifespan they're almost like buying a second-hand car in theory. You cluster up these ideas that come from the group and divide them up into incremental ideas that might be doable in the near future and in the longer-term future. Next stage is to try and assess these ideas and make sure you have something that is credible and that you can actually make happen. We use this extra layer for clustering and finding the funding fundamentals for the ideas that the group has just created, basically. The canvas you're about to see helps you map things out on a business category, and whether the idea is more fundamental or whether it's more incremental. I'll just pop right into the canvas here. As you can see, three rows, if the idea is more about people change or tech change or infrastructural change. Lots of little matrices here, many matrices because you hopefully will have a lot of post-it notes. You want to look at the columns, whether they're incremental, substantial or fundamental. Really, this is almost like theater because in this situation I was only interested in the ideas that would be placed in the fundamental column. That's where I wanted to get with the group. Once you get there, hopefully you've got the, say, three or four ideas left in the fundamental idea column. You want to check the criteria again. Just again for context, the carpet company idea that we focused in on the most, I think we had three, four ideas with the carpet company. The one that kind of ticked all the boxes here in this final idea matrix was a potential second-hand carpet digital service, basically. The group thought that this was feasible. They thought it was an idea that could be of its time because the sustainability is obviously absolutely critical going forward for any company. It was an idea of its time. It was the products that we're talking about had the potential to go into a second-hand venture or system. When we went through the criteria on this matrix on front of you, could the MVP be built within six months? They had a budget. They didn't want to go beyond. Did they have resources or partners to help them, et cetera, et cetera? You want to get your top ideas and you want to see as many why for yeses in the idea elimination matrix as possible. Again, you'll have to find your own parameters according to your particular business and industry and situation that you're dealing with, obviously. But you get the idea. This is an idea elimination matrix, basically. That's it, really. That's the five-step framework for this survival equation, this corona crisis comeback, if you will. I'd say that the obstacles to using this. First, you have to get the right people in the room. Their focus is not on ideation exercises right now. If they're having problems with corona, then they're having existential problems. They really have bigger things on their mind. It's important that you have the right people in the room and you convince them that this three hours is something that they have to go through because not talking about major new services or not talking about major changes is not an option just now. Of course, they have to go through all the terrible, terrible process of letting people go and making cutbacks, but they should also be going through this process as well, which is a little bit more positive. It's good for morale as well. That's an obstacle. Getting people in the room, getting the right people in the room, but then the second obstacle is hopefully you're going to come to a situation when you go through this framework that you'll land on something concrete. You'll land on some ideas that you can actually build or take forward or poke the market with. That in itself takes some kind of investment. If you're lucky enough, like my company Humble Bee, we are a digital service design studio, so we are able to build the digital services and we can create a risk and reward payment condition basically for the client if they maybe don't want to, that maybe they can't invest in a new digital second hand service app, let's say, but we can suggest to them that we come in as a joint venture together with them and with some kind of shared risk and some kind of shared reward. That in itself is a model that I believe is the future for everybody here, certainly listening to this. How do you move away from being paid per hour to the added value? It's inevitable. I think agencies that don't do it are going to be in sticky waters quite soon. That's one way of doing it. How do you make sure your services happen? How do you take them to the next stage? How do you take them onto the market and poke the market a little bit with the absolute least risk and potentially largest reward? That's where business design comes in and how do you get to 50 interested people? How do you get to 10 paying customers? What happens when you get past this growth gate, the next growth gate? That's something you have to work out with your client and hopefully you meet the people at the client who have shared values as you do and are open to this kind of setup basically because that's a major risk. If you go through this process and then they can't act on anything that's came out of the process, that's a shame when that happens. That's it. Hopefully the five-step framework might help you. I'm sure it's nothing new if you're a service designer. We've found it as a nice talking point, a nice series of accessible, simple exercises to help people navigate and hopefully come out of COVID on the other side, a better company. If you want to download the Canvas, check out the links down below in the show notes. And if you have a tool, method or framework that you'd like to share with the service design community, just send me a message and let's have a chat. In this playlist, there are more useful tools for you to use. So check it out and I'll see you in the next video.