 As a service design professional, you want to drive towards positive change. But even though everybody might be in the same car as you, the one wants to step on the brake, the other one wants to go left, while you know that you should accelerate and go straight ahead. So, what does it take to get everyone in the car aligned and trust you with the keys? That's exactly what we're going to learn in this episode. Here's our guest, let the show begin. Hi, my name is Brad and this is episode 192 of The Service Design Show. Hello brave change agent, welcome back to The Service Design Show. The place where we explore what's beneath the surface of service design, what are the invisible 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 of course, our planet. I'm your host, Marc Fontaine. Today we're joined by Brad Alfonso. Brad is an experienced service design leader at one of the largest healthcare partners in Australia and we're going to talk about a topic that we all can relate to. One of the common critiques service design gets is that very few insights eventually get turned into solutions that see the light of day. The service design is primarily focused on ideas and insights, but in the end, not solving important business challenges. And to be honest, it's not for the lack of trying, because I know many service design professionals are actively advocating for this. So what's happening is that a lot of our ideas get stuck and die in the handover moments between teams, departments and people. Different goals and priorities determine what gets done. And we as service designers don't have the ownership, mandate or responsibility to influence those priorities. So here's a radical idea. What if there were no handovers? What if it was service design all the way through to the very end? According to Brad, service design is perfectly positioned to be the connector across the entire organization. We have a unique set of skills that allows us to connect the dots in ways others can't. Now, this sounds great, but stepping into this connector role isn't something that's going to be handed to us on a silver platter. Because we really have to trust us to take the keys and lead the way. Well, somehow Brad managed to get the keys. And today he's going to share with us how he did it. And if having the keys really allows service design to live up to its full potential. So let's get around the campfire to learn from Brad what the secret is to getting people in the car aligned with us. How we need to be smart with numbers, because what gets measured gets done. And how we can get over imposter syndrome and do things that are vital for success. But don't feel like design. I hope you've got your marshmallows ready, because I can already hear the fire crackling. Which means it's time to get comfortable and give our full attention to the wisdom Brad has to share with us. Welcome to the show Brad. Mark, thanks for having me. Really great to join you today. Yeah, I know you as one of the circle members. And you've been a very engaged member, which is absolutely great. And it's nice to have you here on the show, because you're not just a circle member, you're also doing very interesting stuff around service design in your organization, which we'll hopefully talk about today. For the people who don't know who you are, Brad, could you give a short intro in what your role is today and what your responsibilities are? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, as you mentioned, Mark, member of the service design show circle. And that's been really great being part of that program in that community. Currently, my role is the Senior Service Design Manager at Boopa Australia and the health insurance business. We're doing some really great stuff centered around customer at the moment. It's a pretty interesting time in our space, moving into healthcare or health caring, as we're calling it internally. We're really excited with all the change and shifts that we have in front of us, quite a customer centric organization. We are driving with the customer in front and our service design team is really in the center of all of that change. So it's quite an exciting transformation that we have in front of us. Let's not spoil too much at this moment, but the next question that I want to ask you is, do you recall the moment you learned about service design? Do I recall the moment I learned about service design? Okay, I learned about service design, the phrase about service design in about 2015. That was the time where I came across corporate innovation and the application of design thinking through the practice and craft of service design, and that was 2015. And since that, I've gone on a bit of an odyssey, immersing myself into the space in service design in a corporate setting and really excited. It has definitely taken my life and my journey on a path I did not think I would go. Now that you mentioned this, we actually have an article that talks a little bit more about your background. So I'll make sure to add it in the show notes, where you share actually how you got into service design and share a bit more about your journey. So that's, I think, a very good interest and an interesting piece to share. Brett, we also have a rapid fire lighting question around five questions to get to know you as a person next to the professional. I see you smiling, so you know what's coming, but you don't know because I shuffle them around this time. Are you ready? Let's do it. Please finish this sentence. The most important quality in a friend is patience. The best part of my day is when? That's a tough one, Mark. You're cutting deep here. When I wake up, that's a good time. Wake up. I'm here, got my family. Pretty grateful for the life I live. That's a good place to be. All right. Next one. My greatest fear is that? That I will live a life without reaching my potential. Next one. Fourth question. I've always wondered why. Oh, there's too many, Mark. You got me tramped. I'm stuck. Just the first thing that I'm too curious, Mark. I'm too curious. All right. I'm too curious. Look, I've always wondered why things always appear harder and more difficult than what they need to be. Right. Noted. OK. The fifth and final one. And then you'll be off the hook. Our world needs more. Needs more services, aren't it, Mark? Come on out. We know this one. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about that. Brett, congratulations. These are tough questions. We spiced them up a few episodes back. Maybe, yeah, maybe we need to tone them down. But then again, we want to get deeper personal here. Cutting date, Mark. Cutting date. Yeah, yeah, that's what we do here on the Serves Design Show. So let's talk about the thing that you want to address with us today. And that's that as Serves designers, we should own the entire journey. Is that correct? Is that how you feel about it? It's an interesting call out. I've started to develop this belief that, you know, Serves Design, we look at the journey of the customer experience end to end. That's a really great role that we play. And part of that role is we design. And, you know, we won't talk about specific methodologies. You know, it's not a good week for design thinking in some forums and circles this week. But we use methods to be able to design for a customer. And we, you know, become the idea factory. And I'll use, you know, words that have been said over time. You become the ideas factory or you're just in that space around concepts. But is it time that we really start to really take that holistic approach to taking ideas and empowering organizations by going right through to implementation, being the owners, the champions of taking those ideas right through? So I believe that there's probably some really strong value in really showing that, you know, inside interaction and really turning the coin on what Serves Design can deliver and the value we can bring an organization. That's interesting. So I'm happy that we're able to spend some time on this. Can you take us back to the moment or take us on this journey? How you started to develop this belief? What got you thinking about this and sort of trying to make it explicit? Yeah, I love, I love the discovery process. I love the art of designing. I love the art of bringing things together to be able to tell a really great narrative and a really great story around a possible solution that you're going to solve these really great customer problems. And for me, I believe the pain for me on this journey is being able to craft these really great stories and these really great solutions and concepts for customers, a lot of thinking. But the pain comes from not being able to take that through to delivery. The pain comes through and we're talking in an enterprise environment where, you know, our listeners are largely from, you're fighting the good fight of Serves Design within enterprise, there's constraints, there's complexity, there's integration. It comes from the pain of being able to push through that and get your solutions to mark. Have you, and I think you rightfully mentioned that we do feel this pain as a community where we feel that we're not able to push through to implementations where we actually see our recommendations or ideas make an tangible impact on customers, on patients, on the business. Have you been in situations where you sort of firsthand experienced this pain? I think it's part of a passage for Serves Designers, right, in an enterprise and definitely the way that Serves Design gets set up and I can only speak to an Australian market and understanding the Australian market and its application within our space currently for Serves Design is deeply embedded in large enterprises. There's very much a focus around customer and we have a lot of things to be grateful for that. And you've seen Serves Design scale. But with that scaling of Serves Design within large enterprises, they come lots of pain points. It is being able to take an idea through to implementation. We have organizations that are split up by silos. We have organizations that have a distinct handoff and for most part, roundabout way of answering the question, we do all this really great design work but we get to a handoff point where there's a friction and the work stalls get stuck, gets paused. And that handoff is a pivotal moment and it seems that there is currently always a handoff at some point to somebody who's working on the actual touch points, who's working on the channels, whether that's a digital channel or physical channel or whatever, there's somebody always at some point responsible for the implementation and we're not involved in that. Have you found an, I don't know if there are right words as an alternative, but should we try to eliminate the handoff? So this is where I landed on this idea of Serves Design really taking it right through. And realistically, we can't do everything where we're very much not experts at everything but what Serves Design does as a craft, I believe we're great facilitators, we're orchestrators of not just the experience but potentially orchestrators of an idea through the implementation. And what I truly believe here is for Serves Design is to be able to play the role of facilitator in a truly cross-functional fashion by ideally leveraging the skill sets with all of the key players and all of the key stakeholders and all the key SMEs that we engage as part of our project. If we are able to actively leverage that cross-functional brilliance, then that will be a vehicle for us to be able to push through in owning idea through the implementation. It's not something we can do on our own. Yeah, I think most of us will agree that and I don't think we have the ambition or the naive vision that we can do everything maybe in the early days, but I think we are getting a more realistic idea that this is a team effort, collaborative effort. The challenge that's here is Serves Design has to be positioned in a certain way in the organization to be able to fulfill this role. And my experience is that that's often not the case. I'm curious what have you found? Some things need to be true for this to succeed. And ideally, I feel like one thing that's really important is Serves Design sits from a problem-solving space in a unique spot. We are able to bring together the business need and the customer need. And we have a really great understanding of connecting strategy right through with product or implementation. We play that unique role in being that connector, which is absolutely fabulous. So we're uniquely positioned to do this. I feel that being able to leverage the cross-functional teams, bring them together around a problem and take it right through. It requires Serves Design to be, yes, you're right, in a certain position, respected in the business, viewed as important. It needs to be viewed as valued and connected to strategy in order for it to execute on this. And those are already pretty challenging conditions to create. But let's, for a second, assume that that's the case. So we are in this good spot. We are well positioned. People do respect us. How do we make most out of our potential out of this situation? You mentioned something about cross-functional collaboration and communication. Could you share a story with us how that played out for you? There was a particular piece of work that I led as a Serves Designer. It was a Serves Designer sprint. Really engaging piece of work. We had a cross-functional team that we set up around a key customer problem. And it really was a customer problem at that time. So very much led with the customer lens. We unpacked this sprint. We had channel teams and working in a service organization. Our front-line teams which manage our physical touch points. Contact centers and retail teams. We had messaging teams, digital messaging teams. And we had our digital teams as well. So our digital touch points are web and app teams involved as well. But to that point as well, we also had some of our back-end teams involved as well. Some of the systems that have information that we need. Our customer information. Our product information. So we had this pretty cross-functional team. Front-end and back-end. But also a team of people that really understood the business as well. So we had some key business stakeholders that manage different parts of the business that are invested in this particular customer problem. And so true cross-functional brilliance we were able to take this team through this initial sprint. And we understand this as power services. We run this cross-functional team. We come out with a concept at the end. That part is all consistent and all-in-all. Where the idea into execution or the strategy into execution part came through is once we came out the other end of this piece of work there was collaboration then with the further digital teams or the people that would be working on the front-end. There was work closely by myself with our back-end teams to be able to take the data and start to feed that through. And what happened out of that was there was a bit of a transition from my role and my day-to-day changed in very much a service designer to playing a bit more of a product management role or a management role of this piece of work. Now I wasn't doing a whole lot of design work in the true sense that we think of design. But what I was doing was I was still owning that idea. I was owning that concept and I was owning that piece of work and orchestrating to the expertise of those supporting teams. Thank you for sharing this example with us. One thing that I'm sure a lot of us are curious about is you quickly stepped over the moment where you said, well, we have this amazing team in the room, multi-cross-disciplinary. Can you tell us a bit more about how did you get there? What does this require from the organization, from you? Because I get that the implementation part and pulling through it is important, but the first step is how do you get those people in the room in the first place and make them want to contribute and collaborate? And I'll leave it there. Can you tell us a bit more about the journey up to that moment? One thing that needs to be true is having a customer-centric organization. So for this part and with this particular experience, we had a customer-centric organization where there was a focus on customer need. And so that was our right to play in engaging a broad stakeholder network and getting people engaged around this particular problem. The next thing that we needed to do was we needed to prove the business benefit. There has to be a commercial connection. And as services owners, we need to be able to talk both. Yes, we can talk customer, but we really need to speak the commercial side of the problems we're trying to solve. They need to be handing glove. We need to be solving for both. So with that, once we were able to work through that market size and we had a clear business case behind the type of problem that we wanted to solve. Thirdly, one of the things that was a bit of a win in being able to cross this chasm in getting by not only did we take people on the journey as you do with the services on process, but what I sought to do as part of this engagement is really work hard to understand the perspective of each of those teams that were supporting the work and what was the win-win for them to engage within that work. And what we created was a set of win-win circumstances or situations that we were able to bring together as we drove through this MVP. So it sounds like that you did quite a lot of work up front before you were able to get people ready to take action and collaborate. Is that correct? A lot of context setting. Let's talk about a really practical sense, right? Sure. You have a business problem and as a service design, a working customer experience, that's our home. We're really close to those customer problems. We connected them really quickly. They're part of our working rhythm. We understand that. Bringing together the commercial side required me to connect with some teams to be able to pull those dumps together. So that's one key task and one job that we need to do. The next part about bringing people on the journey outside the process of service design was really working hand in glove with their product managers, their product owners, really understanding their systems, understanding the problems that they face, also trying to understand the ambitions that they have. And so coming together, really practically, what's your roadmap? What are you trying to achieve? What's your product vision? Now, I want to pull three different products into my one solution. How do I make that happen? Yeah. And that's contextual awareness about what's important to the business as a whole and every moving piece in the business as an individual, every department. That piece of knowledge and insight is the thing that allows you to take the next step. If you step over that and just try to get people in the room, they might join your session, but then you're never going to be able to actually get them to take the next step as well. That's at least my assumption. Yeah, absolutely. I like to think of services and we're very uniquely placed, as mentioned before. We have this broad remit. We go from strategy down to implementation. We need to play with the win-win mindset. What we can solve together can suit all of us. It's not a matter of bringing people on the journey to serve on purpose. Do you feel that we should first try to map the organization and the needs and desires of the organization before we start looking into the needs of the customers? That's a good one. Where does my brain jump with that one? There's ways that an organization can align around problem spaces and whether you're customer-centric, whether you're product-centric, or platform-centric. And then, you can align to one of those or there's a handful of others there as well that I haven't mentioned, but you can align yourself and put everything in the kitchen sink against that. And maybe that's the way to run things. The other part, second part of that is, especially in service design, to go back to your point around mapping problems. If we were to map problems, we would go back to what each system can do, what each team can do, and what are those dependencies that cross interlay with that. That's where the trickier and the fun stuff happens. We are really curious to learn about how did you get those other teams to sort of put you in control or I don't know if that's in the lead. So, they have their own agendas. They have their own KPIs. They have their own ways to measure success. And now you are bringing them together with other departments who have their own KPIs. What did it take for them to trust you to go on this journey with you? To be trusted, you have to trust. So, in getting people around a problem, we will work on this problem together. We will get to that solution together. There is great value in engaging everyone that is going to touch the solution. Engage them right at the start. Have them be part of all of that kickoff. There is a habit of service design where we may only engage certain parts of the business to a technical realm and then try to work through something yet technical teams or system teams have been engaged and so they are a bit disconnected. So, the first part is to be trusted, you have to trust and get people engaged around your problem at the start. Provide a vision of where you want to go. There are the experts in their space. Let them feed into it. Yes, trust to be trusted. The way you are describing this to us, it sounds like it might be pretty big from the start. So, involving everybody who needs to be involved by require quite a lot of people, quite a lot of logistics, coordination. One of the things that I have heard often, people recommend a service design is start small and do the things that you have direct influence on. This does sound a little bit like that's contradicting your approach. How do you feel about that? I don't think there's not one set way to solve problems. So, I think in looking at a problem space and I think it's a matter of picking your battles. Some problems, yes, start a small operate within your circle of control. Other problems that might require you to shift your approach might require you to think differently. And maybe there are some problems that you do stretch out of that circle of control. You do try to play your card at influencing and creating a greater circle of influence. I think it's taking a step back and checking out the environment. When I was formulating my question the next thing that came to my mind was let's assume that there are different challenges that require a different approach. If you reflect on the example that you described what made this challenge this scenario suitable to take this more holistic approach compared to something where you would have started small. I think there was a few factors that played into my favor in this particular situation. One of those was I was deeply passionate about the solution and I think there's a danger in that but in this particular instance it was something that I was deeply passionate about. It was a solution that I believed in and I needed to drive it in that sense. Secondly we were able to set up and this is something that people can take away. There's passion in if you really love and you really engage in this particular problem and you really want to drive it through that was something that I needed to push through because it wasn't all everything I might have hoped for. There were many setbacks as you can imagine so I had to be passionate. The next part was as services designers I was able to make a really clear connection with each of those teams and use system thinking to understand how they played a really important role in the bigger picture of what this solution could be and there's value in that and so setting that vision with those system and product teams I was able to align this particular product that we were trying to build the vision of that with the vision of their individual systems and products that they were leading that would come together in this final solution. The second part is also very interesting but I briefly want to zoom in on the first part you mentioned about your passion. What was it about this uncommon situation because I don't hear a lot of services and professionals who are passionate about their work but they lose the passion for maybe the organization or they get bombed out by the slowness and the bureaucracy what made you passionate about this specific challenge? I think there's a few factors here and one of those ones that I like to remind myself throughout this journey was I needed to be able to recalibrate my mind on what success was and what the metrics of success would be for me in delivering this particular project and so traditionally service designers we look at or traditionally I at the time looked at delivering projects you do some really great design work you have a killer pack you have a really good showcase you engage the business and really excited around this particular problem space but then being able to own that piece of work post that part take it through I was especially passionate around this particular concept but once I got to that next point where it became a bit more of a product management role it was really being able to dig in deep change my metrics of success recalibrate what I considered what would be success and set myself on a mission for that and I believe as service designers we have enough tools in the shed to be able to navigate problem spaces you know always using a double diamond but you're working from mist to clarity you're being able to push through a solution in a problem space you're being able to pull in the right people at the right time because you understand who plays a role in what and I just had to keep pushing towards that and having that as an end goal and giving myself a mission was something that was able to drive me through and when you say that you had to recalibrate your metrics and what success looks like could you share a bit about that with us there's probably layers to that to be fair the first one being you know metrics of what completion is you know this is success for the project I've delivered this project and now it's done I'll move on to the next one I think there's a metric there within myself internally what I was going to get satisfaction from what I was going to be fulfilled by the next part was resetting myself on what I wanted to learn what was I going to learn out of this next part getting really pointy around the commercial side really understanding the commercial metrics and writing our business cases really diving into that product management aspect and then thirdly really digging deep into the technical side of my delivery so really understanding the individual platforms I was working with working closely with the devs that were writing the code around this particular product those were all going to be stretch goals for me so my metrics of success changed that was not what I'd set out when we initially looked at the problem so I made it my mission to understand every one of those details in the greatest possible way that I could but also at the same time play the role of service design in connecting that detail into an overall strategy and one of the wins out of that was I was able to give these teams who are so in the detail a real clear connection to strategy and what they were doing would play out and benefit customers that was pretty cool what does this tell us about the position inside the organization and your role inside the organization that you had the freedom to recalibrate your metrics I'm saying this because often what success looks like isn't defined by ourselves we have a superior who tells us what success looks like and I think this is also one of the barriers to working in a more holistic way and getting to implementation is that we are measured by other means of success so again coming back to the question looking back at this what does this tell us about your position and role inside your organization a lot of this comes back to trust so there's obviously a level of trust to be able to take the keys with an idea and take it from idea to implementation there's certainly a level of autonomy that our service design team service designers are charged with which is really exciting and we're really grateful for that and there's also a culture that we operate within where service design and customer experience is highly valued and I think that's something to not take for granted and something to really acknowledge as key factors at a cultural level there for service design to thrive in this way you need to have that so I like the way you express this handing over the keys or giving the keys or giving the autonomy to service design there is a big leap and the fact that your organization values customer experience I'm assuming a very high strategic level that definitely helps like there's less convincing to do less selling to do and there's more actual implementation to do I don't want to get too deep into the details but how how much time did this take to get your organization to this level was this a gradual iterative development process or was it a matter of a new CEO stepping in and saying okay this is important from now on or was it option C something else how do you see this what we've had we've been on the path of transformation around customer for nearing on 36 months now we've had some really strong leadership and endorsement around customer and that's a really clear approach that we have around solving for our customers there's a lot of work there's a lot of really good people that are they've spent a lot of time setting this up and embedding and implementing and what we have is a really strong culture around customer and so service design is valued as important it's valued and so within that that's like the bigger picture what we've needed to do and goes back to that commentary around trust to be trusted you need to turn up you need to be credible and some of the things that we've focused on in service design is delivering really great work within our circle of control and aim to do is really talk to the key business needs by bringing that together with the key customer needs that's been our focus and when you say we've been able to deliver some really great work what does great what are the criteria of great yeah it's a good question so what we really focus on and currently to date our focus has been really on the biggest customer problems so our team picks the biggest customer problems from a customer point of view so we use specific measurements and frameworks around measuring what works for customers and what our customers want and need particular surveys etc and so our team works really closely around those metrics remembering what doesn't get measured doesn't really matter so if we're not measuring it we need to be we need to make sure we do because if it's not measured it doesn't matter so that's the main thing the other part is we work really closely around understanding the commercial side around our problem spaces so that when we are designing solutions we are able to very clearly articulate what's the business benefit we can attach to a really great customer experience what does it take to do this because the business benefit that we sort of understand but find hard to implement do you have any special expertise on your team or was this just there from the get go how do you bring that in? as mentioned at the start of the call none of these things are done in isolation and we certainly don't operate in a vacuum where we understand how to do everything here but we we definitely rely and connect on really great people around the business we leverage that cross-functional excellence and as mentioned when you've got some really great people to bring into your problem space from the get go that's what we do and so we'll bring those right people in from around the business to be able to collaborate on understanding the business value of the customer problem who would you say has the biggest contribution of the people you bring in in that stage to define that business value for us personally within our team we belong within customer experience and so it's a customer experience and services on team and we have some really crack customer experience managers customer experience life cycle managers and they're really charged with owning that customer journey understanding the value of experience uplift throughout that journey and so working closely with them to solve problems we're able to really work through the ROI of those problem spaces so these people these customer experience managers these journey managers they have the ownership and responsibility for looking at the metrics from a customer experience point of view and also from the business objective perspective so I know that we discussed a lot of things related to setting the conditions creating the environment to make this happen I think that it is very important but maybe you also want to address some things that happen after that moment I know you touched upon that that your role changed to being a more of a product manager is there anything that you'd like to additionally highlight around that stage of the process I believe that what we have is it's just an interesting time right when you're going through that problem space and you're trying to solve for this particular solution being able to take that idea through implementation carry that vision through it forces you to let go of a few things that we really love as service designers and it does force us to move into a space that might be a bit more uncomfortable a space that's not familiar or a space that's you know really going to test us and doesn't quite follow the process or follow an approach that's set out for us and so being able to shift my mindset around what was in front of me and being able to leverage the expertise of people working closely with me I think that was what set me up for success in being able to take this particular problem right through the solution maybe maybe a bit more specific like what was the change what was the transformation that you had to go through like in myself or the project itself let's start with yourself so from that point before I had to just be open I had to be open to exploring the change I had to be open to taking charge of this particular problem and driving it through to implementation I had to be open to taking on and wearing different hats that I otherwise wouldn't wear I had to the title of service designer in some part or what was good service designer what is service designer had to let go of that that was me internally and then within the project itself the shifts and changes within that it was less of a focus on handover and it was more of a focus on throughput so I wasn't handing over anything I was taking it through that's a mental shift and that shift what was the if you look back on this what was the most challenging part there I have some assumptions but I'm curious if you have some thoughts on that for you what was the biggest challenge in that shift I often describe the project as the myth of Sisyphus so it's a Camus short story about a man that's destined to push a boulder up a hill and without ever really getting to the top and that was that was how I coined this project and it did feel a little bit like that at times but it was settling into that discomfort that maybe wasn't exciting in the same way that much of our craft and the service design process can be but it was settling into that discomfort that served me well that was one shift that's interesting so settling into this comfort that it is hard work it is mostly not exciting it is the grunt work the grid work to get to the top of the hill even though you might never eventually make it and still push through yeah we're almost conditioned to see progress as you step through a process you step through the design process there's some really good milestones but struggling to see that in a vacuum of heavily integrated organization matrix systems dependencies business cases then being able to take that through is the exciting part very very fundamental here we often talk about patience and perseverance with regards to service design I'm very curious what what kept you going in this journey when you didn't see immediate progress or you weren't able to measure or quantify immediate progress I always thought about the fact that I was learning and that's one part I was learning something if it was uncomfortable if it was a challenge looking within myself why was that a challenge why was it uncomfortable our reflection itself is a learning then on top of that is all of the technical work all of the work that you are connecting in with the teams and learning this different space around how to take stuff through to implementation but owning that part of the implementation not being the practitioner not being the designer in that space I was learning and that was something that I was able to lean back on I was always learning I can imagine that that's a metric for you and sort of enjoy the process and enjoy the learning aspect but if you have to sell that as an outcome to the organization to your manager to your sponsors to your stakeholders it might be a hard story to sell that you are saying it doesn't look like we made a lot of progress but we learned a lot in the last six months how did you frame that as I said before if it doesn't get measured it doesn't really matter so everything needs to be measured if you want to make any kind of change it needs to be measured and that's consistent with everything in life so can it be quantified can you qualify that and so every part of the project we were able to take away some key learnings we were able to drive a connection to what we were doing on the ground with this particular product into a commercial sense we were able to speak the metrics we were able to speak the benefit to business we were able to speak the benefit to customer if we were able to deliver it as well that was something we were able to reiterate and within that time as well we actually set this particular piece of work of as an example around a test and learn culture and being able to drive that through as a particular initiative that thrived in this environment and so we really lent into that and that was something that we were able to talk to the business back and get some clear understanding that makes sense to also use this as an example of how this culture actually looks in practice Brad we went into a lot of directions and had a pretty holistic conversation about this topic if you had to summarize our conversation so far and offer us maybe a single piece of practical advice that we can take away and apply in our practice the next day what's the first thing that comes to your mind I think I believe the future of service design is taking ideas through the implementation I believe that it's our role and we have a responsibility to be able to lean into being able to take things through the implementation one of the key pieces advice that I would give service designers looking on moving in this direction or even if you're not something that we'll sit with you all is really focusing on what's measured and what matters and bringing that into your work that has to be part of your conversation daily have that in your standups with your team talk to your practitioners around that there's deep growth in facilitating environment where service designers get exposure to all of that we'll definitely make a note of that and I encourage and second your advice Brett thanks so much for being so open and addressing this topic and sharing a bit about not just the journey that your organization is on but also your journey very interesting to hear I'm sure I'll learn more about it inside the circle but for this episode we have to leave it at this thanks again for coming on and for sharing with us and thank you so much for the opportunity really great to speak with everyone thank you was there anything that inspired you from the lessons that Brett showed with us leave a comment down below it would be great to hear from you it's great that you're still with us to the very end of the conversation if you've enjoyed the episode you can do me one big favor please click the like button on this video if you haven't done so already not to feed the youtube algorithm but to let me know whether or not we're on the right track by addressing topics like this and before we part ways please take a moment to reflect and celebrate that by joining us today you've invested a part of your day to learning and growing as a professional so from everyone who you're going to impact through your work for taking the time and making the commitment my name is Mark van Tijn and I look forward to having you with us again for a new conversation on the service design show take care and see you soon