 You probably have already some ideas about what sustainability means in relationship to products. But what does sustainability mean for services? And how do you then design for that? That's what you'll find out in this episode. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Anna. This is a service design show, episode 173. Hi, my name is Mark van Tijn and welcome back to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are those hidden and invisible things that make all the difference between success and failure? All to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and, yes, our planet. Our guest in this episode is Anna van der Tocht, who is the lead sustainability at Livework. Now, when I think about sustainability in relationship to physical products, things like reducing waste, net zero and circularity come to mind. From clothing to car manufacturers, it seems that every organization these days is aware of its responsibility to work towards a more sustainable future. But this awareness is much less apparent when it comes to services. What is your bank or insurance provider doing to make their services more sustainable? And I'm not talking here about reducing the number of pay performance that they use. Well, Anna has been exploring how we can bring sustainability as a core component into our service design process. For that, we first have to understand what the quote-unquote material properties are of the services that we're working with. So for instance, when you're designing a product, you might want to use a lighter material to reduce the energy required for transportation. But what does lightweight mean when it comes to services? Are there similar concepts? Spoiler alert, yes, there are. But as you'll hear, there are still many unknowns and unanswered questions. But that makes this topic so interesting. Now is really the time to start having this conversation in our community and with our clients. So if you stick around until the end of this episode, you'll have a much better idea of what sustainability means in the context of services, how we need to rethink our own practice to design these services, and how do you get your clients excited to invest in them? A lot of food for thought is coming up, so I hope you're ready because we're going to jump straight into the conversation with Anna van der Tocht. Welcome to the show, Anna. Thank you. Hi, Mark. Hi. It's always awkward to do these conversations in English when you're speaking to somebody from the Netherlands. It always takes a switch. Nice to have somebody again from this beautiful country. Anna, super excited to talk about the topic that hasn't been on the show a lot, but you have done a lot of thinking around. I think it will be very inspiring and thought-provoking maybe. But before we dive into that, could you maybe give a short introduction into who you are and what you do these days? Yes. Thanks, Mark. Thanks. I'm Anna van der Tocht. I work at Livwork Studio, the Rotterdam office. And I'm our lead sustainability. It's a relatively new role at Livwork. We've been having a lot of conversations over the last couple of years, especially during corona. This really fired away. And we all felt so passionate about climate change and about the planet and about preserving it so that it stays as diverse and beautiful as it is today. And yeah, we felt what is our role in that? What's the design's role in that? And at a certain point, we started building our thinking around that and we started to really make it actionable. Like what should service designers do? What how can they help out in our transformation to a more sustainable future? And yeah, that went really well and really hit off. And at a certain point, we thought, no, we should really take this seriously. So now I'm the first lead of sustainability, which basically means that I coordinate across our clients and projects to really introduce that fourth lens of sustainability to feasibility, desirability and viability and make sure that we update all our tools and our thinking so that it includes that and that we do more work that actively contributes to changing the world. Congratulations on that role and congratulations on sort of pushing this boundary. Now, this is already a very interesting teaser of what's coming up later. But Anna, we also have a sort of a lightning round five lighthearted questions to get to know you as a person next to the professional. Some new I've added some new questions today and you haven't prepared for them. No, just the first thing that comes to your mind. And yeah, well, we won't dive into them deeper. But are you ready? I am so ready. All right. What book or books are you reading? If any at this moment? I just bought the value of a wheel, I think it's called. But I haven't started reading it yet, but I heard very good reviews. It's it's about looking at the value of different things on earth. So it's very much connected to what I just spoke about. But I'm also just a normal human being that loves fiction. So I just finished a bit of fantasy books. And I'm reading a book that's called everything I know about partying, booze or whatever. And then it's ends with everything I know about love. So all directions, fiction, nonfiction. I love it all. Well, we'll add a reading list to the show notes. Anna, what's always in your fridge? What's always in my fridge? I think that would be some tahini. I really like making hummus and I really like tahini. I'm such a sucker for all Otolenghi foods. So definitely tahini. That's always there. Yeah. All right. If you could have a superpower, which superpower would you like to have? Yeah. Thank you for asking that question. It used to always be flying. I think like most people, but I recently changed it to being able to understand and speak all languages in the world. That would definitely be my superpower. I would love to go out and just be able to be curious and be able to really live in that curiosity by having the ability to speak all languages. Nice. Nice. This is a new one. What is your go to karaoke song? Yeah. I think it would be New York from Alicia Keys and well, the Alicia Keys version. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Cool. And final question, which is a tradition here on the show. Do you recall the first time you heard or learned about service design? I don't recall the exact moment. I do know that it was somewhere during my master's in Delft strategic product design monsters. And it was it was immediately a moment that I thought, Oh, that's quite interesting because yeah, I was used to focusing on industrially produced products and not necessarily on services. And it really it really tickled something. I thought, Oh, that's that's quite interesting to look at it in a broader sense. And then it really caught my attention actually due to a television documentary, which most Dutch people might probably know it's vpro tegelicht. And it was all about this architect Thomas Rau that explained that product, more products should be offered as a service if we would want to shift to a more circular world. So that that was really when I thought, Whoa, services, we need to we need to do something with that. Yeah. Nice. Nice. Thank you for sharing and that background story. Let's transition into the topic of this episode. I, of course, sort of in our prep call and prep emails asked you like, what is the central team? And you summarized this as sustainable a sustainable service industry, right? Now, that sounds super interesting. And I would like to understand, first of all, where are we today as a service industry as in it's sort of the the topic maybe sort of implies that the current service industry isn't sustainable. How do you view that? What is your take? Oh, yeah. Good question. So maybe to define it a little bit, because I think what I'm what I think is important is that we're not talking about the product industry. Even products as a services are excluded from this realm, I would say so really like financial services, insurers, insurances, all the typical service services. So the service industries that they usually don't have a product that has a has very tangible materials going into it that has a very tangible energy use during either production or during use or during waste phase. So sustainability is very much seen as a material realm. So it's easier to see how that applies to product and manufacturing industries. And it's a little bit more difficult for service industries because they obviously they have offices as well. But that's not really their biggest impact. Their biggest impact is kind of how they have a lot of influence in the infrastructure of our world and not the physical infrastructure, but the less tangible infrastructure. So at a certain point, we started to think about what is sustainable insurance, for example, that was actually the trigger for us to start thinking about that. And we realized that currently there's a big focus on net zero across the board. So not only for service industries, but basically for everything. And when you look a little bit into the concept of net zero, it is a scientific concept that looks at basically takes one measurement as a proxy for how we're doing. It's not the only proxy. If you look into what climate scientists have been saying or have been looking at, they usually don't take it as the only proxy for how healthy our planet is. But for some reason, it really caught attention and it kind of got a lot of attention and pull and momentum. So we see a lot of companies pledging net zero, which is really good because it's awesome that companies are considering the planet at all. But net zero focuses very much on what the world shouldn't look like. So it focuses on a world without carbon. So it describes a quality that shouldn't be there. And whereas for manufacturing companies, there are also other concepts like circularity or regenerative that describe the desired state, that desired state doesn't really exist for the service industries. So when we start to think about what does a sustainable insurance look like, we realize, oh, there's so little defined. So that's kind of how we thought, oh, that's quite interesting that there's so little understanding of that. So we all get that there are manufacturers and they use materials and ingredients and they extract things from the earth. And then at some point they create waste. If we throw this stuff away and we want to reduce waste, we want to reduce the carbon footprint. I think with a bike manufacturer, a car manufacturer, anything that's like you said, a tangible product, we get that. But then we come to services and you mentioned insurance. I'd like to think of maybe an even more simple example like maybe a barber or a massage, something simple like that. How does sustainability play a role there? And I was thinking, okay, so what is, maybe what is waste in that environment? And I know you said it's not just about eliminating waste because that's just reducing what's already there and that's not per se describing a desired state. But maybe we can talk about both. Like first of all, is there waste in services? Is there waste in services? And if so, what is that? So I think this is already super difficult to answer. And already the examples that you said, like a barber versus insurance versus a bank versus public transport, they all have a very physical and material components, but they're vastly different. And yes, they all use energy that is probably either green or not. Yes, they all have obsolete products. So at a barber, you might think of the hair that drops on the ground or I don't know the plastic in which the hair products enter the salon. So yes, you could say they services have waste. I think that's a very simple answer. So you could look at their carbon footprint. You could look at their material usage. You could look at their waste streams. So in a sense, that is exactly the same as products. But quite often services have an influence on how the world works. So if maybe the barber and the massage parlor are not the best examples for that, but public transport or financial institutions, they do have actually quite a big influence on how the world works, on how material can flow. And that happens almost at different abstraction levels, I would say. So with public transport or with transport infrastructure, you could say, oh, whether there is a way for me to go to Dublin without using a plane has a big influence to how much people use, how much people fly, and therefore has an influence on the material impact of the world. But for banks, that's even different, right? So where do banks invest? Are there ways for them to play an explicit role in what is successful and what is not? So it's quite interesting that they have this big influence on the material impact of the world without their office space or without their own waste to be the biggest component of that. If that makes sense. Yeah, I think so. And this makes it super complicated because this also goes, I think, for product manufacturer to which extent are you responsible for, I don't know, how the raw materials are extracted from the earth, like at some point. And I guess with a service provider, this also goes like, how far does your influence reach? Interesting questions, to be honest. Maybe another angle we can take at this is, again, the distinction between products and services with products, you sort of know what the, what is the word that I'm looking for, like the knobs are that you can dial, you can, like you can see. The leverage points. Yeah, well, you can see how and where your sort of raw materials are sourced from, if that's from a well-maintained source, like I've bought a jacket and there are tons of labels that fur or what is it, the goose feathers are sourced from a good place, like stuff like that. So those are knobs that you as a product designer can turn to be, I don't know, more sustainable. Yeah, have you found similar knobs that also apply to the service industry or is it so different in each sector that it's really hard to identify these, these leverage knobs, dials? I think they might be there. Like there are just like in products, there are patterns in services. There are also patterns. We can see how a shoe is very different from a coffee machine, but in some, but they also have similarities in how they are produced or used. And therefore you can see patterns in how you can maybe turn those knobs that you just mentioned. And my, I suspect that might be the same for services. At the same time, I do think that the service industries, they have a very different role in every, yeah, they own, they each have their own role. And that role is so powerful. They have such an influence on how things work in the world. So for example, yeah, I'm going to come back to the insurance example quite a lot because we thought, we thought about it a lot. So if, whereas a lot of people say, oh, our government should, should force us to do this or that or should force companies to think about sustainability. Actually insurers, they can, they are not government, but they have quite some pool in, they can just tell a business, we will not insure you unless you make sure that your facilities are flood proof, for example, because otherwise the risk is too high for us. So they actually do have a role that to play potentially in getting us to a more sustainable future. Obviously the whole service would change when they start more actively using that because the whole interaction between an insurance company and an insured business would radically change. So the service design would also change because all of a sudden, I don't know, you have to negotiate about how flood proof you should be in the areas where your facilities are. So there's all of a sudden a very different start of the service and this and this of the service design. So yeah, it's good to come back to this insurance example. And I'm just going to, out of curiosity, try to dig into the differences and maybe there aren't that many differences, maybe that might be what we explore here. But how is this different from a product manufacturer that says to their to its suppliers, like, I'm only going to use your raw materials if they, I don't know, if the animals that you use are treated well. So a product manufacturer like IKEA, like they have a lot of influence on sustainability, for instance. Yes. So if you're talking about their suppliers, yes. But if you're talking about their clients, not so much. And that's different. Because IKEA, if you buy, I don't know, IKEA couch, it will be quite weird if the person at checkout says you can only buy this couch if you promise to recycle it or if you promise to blah. Maybe that will happen in the future. Maybe we will come up with certain new business models in which that happens. But that radically changes the business model, probably from a product to a service. And I think that's where manufacturing companies are not changing the interaction with their customers radically yet. Some are, yes, if you think about sharing or leasing or those kind of things, that is yeah, that's different for service industries where from the start you're in this kind of services are kind of co created, right? It's like a co creative act between the service provider and the service customer. So you can see that that has a bigger impact. And that's a very good distinction that it's the relationship with the customer and not per se the suppliers. Because in a service, like you said, it's co created and there is no stock or stockpile. So yeah, that makes that makes a lot of sense that there is a difference. And you can question if what the role is of a service provider towards its customers, like as a restaurant, or as a massage salon, or as an insurance, sure, can you sort of neglect or force your customers to a certain type of behavior or stimulate a certain type of behavior or attract a certain type of behavior, right? From your from the end consumer customer, that that's that's the whole thing here, right? Yeah, and I like the way you say it, like the fact that value is co created in a service means that if you want to make that value more sustainable, you for sure need to do that with your customers, where manufacturers can already do a lot, just create making sure that it is created with recycled materials, whatever without involving their customers in it. Obviously, there's a case for them enforcing their customers in it as well. But they have more control over the product that they send out than service providers do. Well, yes and no, because a service provider, like they have the full control because it's co created sort of in the moment. So you are always active and engaged as a service provider, while as a product company, you sell the product and then it's out of your hand. So you have no control over that. What do you feel it's currently missing in order to get toward this more sustainable vision on services? Yeah, so I think that's yeah, that's why I started with the net zero example. A net zero is about this material world. It's about less carbon. Whereas you see that in the examples that we already discussed that sustainability for service industries might also be about what role they take. So that's not material. That's about this immaterial element of how you help to restructure the world so the material elements can be more sustainable, if that makes sense. So for example, obviously also service providers should look at their own operation. They should also reduce the impact of their own offices. They should reduce the impact of their own travel, etc. So that's not what I'm talking about here. But they have this opportunity to have a bigger impact because they have a certain role in society. And that's not described at this moment. There's no desired state for their role in facilitating this transition to a more sustainable world. Whereas for manufacturing, that is a bit more described. It's about circularity, about regenerative thinking. So there is this future state that they can see if we will build towards that, then probably we are in a future state where we want to be, various for service industries that's less defined. You could say maybe it's as simple as they have to help facilitate the manufacturers of this world to become circular or regenerative. Maybe it's as simple as that, but maybe it's not. I don't know yet. For sure it is undefined at the moment. You've done a lot of thinking about this and have you found a reason, is there a good reason why this is still undefined? Because services, like it's not that they were invented yesterday, they've been around quite a long time. So you would think that people have already put some effort into creating a future state or a desired state. Why is it still lacking? Good question. Well, I think that climate scientists would probably say, well, it's not only lacking there, even though the desired state exists for the more material worlds. Companies are also not there yet. We're just very late. So you could say maybe it's just because we have been taking it too slow. Then I think the difficult thing for sustainability in general is that it's so interdisciplinary because it has to change across industries, across organizations. It's super difficult to understand how. Then it really started from this understanding of systems on earth, which was very much rooted in the material world, seeing how more carbon entered the atmosphere and how that is actually heating up. So that's a very material world. You can measure it. You can sometimes even see it. So as the whole thinking started in that material world, that's probably also why the thinking evolves faster there than in the immateriality of our society. And I do think that transition thinking, so I'm actually not sure what the field is called. But there's quite a lot of thinking about transitions and how you bring about transition and how transitions have taken place in the past. That is probably a first look into that more immaterial way of thinking or system thinking is another way of looking at it. But these are fields that, well, at least in the projects that we come across, haven't permeated the industry as much as circularity or regenerativity has done that in manufacturing. Super interesting. Again, it's great to have a beginner's mind here and being able to ask all the stupid questions. The distinction with products is so helpful here, at least for me. And you mentioned that they do work materials. And then when you think about carbon, it makes a lot of sense. And I was thinking while you were sharing this, okay, so products are about carbon. What are services about? And services are, of course, about experiences, relationships. And is that maybe an area where we should take our sustainability thinking into? So I don't know. How do we experience nature? What is our connection to the outside world? I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud here. Yeah, I think that's wonderful thinking, actually. I think for sure this should be a part of it. We worked with a couple of car manufacturers looking into electrical vehicles. And it was quite interesting how we assume that the experience for driving a fueled car is the same as for an electric vehicle. Our assumption is actually that that experience is probably different. And if you design for it, it's even more different. If I would buy an electric car, I would want to know at what point I've, like if at certain point I drove enough kilometers with it so that the, that at that point, and my choice was indeed more sustainable than a car that uses fuel. I would want to know that. So that's a very explicit touch point that I think should be in there. I don't know if that is actually true for people that drive those, but I can imagine that there is an experimental bit of that. So that's a very explicit example of how the digital services or the whole services around a car should be different. But I do think that that experience in general might have to be different. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And well, maybe that's, that's the area where we have a lot of opportunity, as in, like, again, what are sustainable experiences or how do we, what does circularity mean for experiences? Or I don't know, what else? Just, yeah, sustainable. Super interesting. Now, you've, you work with tons of companies and you're sort of pioneering this, this idea, this concept. When you share this with them, what is that typical response? Well, I wouldn't share it exactly as we talked about it just now, because it feels very vague to them if I would do that. But for example, with insurers, we have talked about, okay, this is what will change for you for sure. Because insurers have, for example, also have risks in climate change. So we kind of, so when we share with them, we usually think about what is their mental framework. So for banks and insurers, they think a lot about risk and risk management. And then we think, okay, how is a climate that is changing in influencing their risks and how they manage that? Well, climate change actually has quite some risks, right? So that's usually then the starting point, thinking from their frame of reference and then reframing this topic from that same frame of reference. So to take that as an example, we all saw that the flooding in the Netherlands and in Germany and in Belgium cost a lot of damages and on quite a big scale. So they had, not only did that cost them a lot of money, but it was also operationally quite difficult to get all those people reimbursed and get all those businesses back up and running in a time frame that makes sense. So there's quite some struggles for them as well. And then especially insurers, they usually have quite a community history. So the origin of many insurers is a couple of farmers that collaborated because if one farmer's crop would fail, then the other would pitch in to keep that farmer alive. So they usually feel quite some social responsibility as well. So they see this risk, they see the social responsibility of making sure that people that live in areas where there's, that are more flooding prone, they should also be protected. So they see quite, there's quite some things that they see happening and that they care about either because it has financial consequences or because it clashes with their value system. And then we start to think about, okay, so if that is for sure their realm and they care about that, how might they change? How might the world of insurance change if they would want to do this more sustainably? And then for example, what I said before, can they negotiate with their customers? Hey, we do want to ensure you, but can you make sure that your house or your business is flood proof for floodings up to one meter high? I don't know. And by the way, can you also make sure that if you flood proof it that you then do that with sustainable materials. And then you see, okay, that's all of a sudden a different service because then you're looking together at the situation of this customer or business. So there's this whole assessment that wasn't there before. So all of a sudden their whole service would change. So that's usually how we kind of start the conversation and say, we think that this is happening for you for sure. If we do a first exploration of what that might mean for what your services would potentially change into, we can already see that that's very different and that people will not all of the sudden adopt that. And that's how we start the conversation. So we don't start a conversation with saying you lack a vision on sustainable services, because yeah, it won't get us anywhere. Yeah, of course, it makes this is the first rule of service design. Don't talk about service design. You talk about the things that matter to the company. And eventually in the end, it's money in a for profit company that matters and values like you said, the values that they have that they want to stay true to. But it opens up doors where they can see how being more sustainable actually helps their business model. So that's that's the opening you're looking for. Now, I like the example where you said an insurer can for instance have a negotiation with its customer about being flood proof and doing that in a way that does it harm nature or it's actually good to nature like, I don't know, increasing biodiversity. I'm just again, thinking out loud here. Do you have maybe a few more examples that you thought through that could be inspiring to paint the picture here? Yeah, so for insurance, we for sure thought about it most actively. But I can imagine that for either for example, we had a conversation with a net provider. So not the energy provider, but the company that or the, yeah, the organization that makes sure that there's an electric electricity network. They are also service provider because they make sure that if you start a business in the middle of nowhere, you have the right to say, they connect me to the energy network. But they have a big problem with the current state because because the network is changing in such a fast space. Many people are installing solar panels or things that weren't there before. And all of a sudden, the needs of a network in this one little area change radically because all of a sudden everybody has solar panels. So not only should it give out energy, but it should also take in energy and the amounts are over very different magnitudes. So that's just one example. And then also they have more fluctuating energy, right? So solar and wind energy, they are less consistent than our old energy sources. So they have this very physical problem. But it has impact on how they service their clients because they see, oh, wow, we want to service our clients. We want to make sure that everybody that wants energy has access to it. And at the same time, it's getting more and more difficult for us to provide that access. And up until now, they've been looking into mostly price dynamics to change this. So can you use price to influence when and how people use energy? But it isn't enough. So then all of a sudden there's a wonderful problem space that as a service designer, you can put your teeth in and think about, so how would that negotiation or that interaction with that customer change? How would that, how can you kind of co-create a system with your customers that makes it easier to balance those energy stocks? And how would, yeah, well, yeah, I can totally see how this access the service to be able to access the energy grid because that's what you're getting. You're getting that as a service and then you need a physical infrastructure. But that's not all we're talking about. So how would that conversation go? What changes? I don't, we don't need to have the solution here, but just like what could potentially change? What are some scenarios in how this conversation, this negotiation, this co-creation with customers could potentially change? Yeah, I don't have the answer for that. But I would love to do a project in which we go around all those different types of energy users and really understand, like we usually do in design research, right? Really understand what are their needs, what are their accessing needs? And can we, I don't know, are there, maybe we come up with personas, but different needs that have that that can be treated in a different way or behavioral archetypes? Maybe there's more that we can do in, maybe people don't need energy all the time they need it, but they do need to know upfront when they can and when they can't. I don't know, I think there's a lot that we haven't thought of yet. And I think every service designer listening can see how the design research for this challenge would be so, yeah, full of meat and so interesting. You, we haven't talked or addressed the idea or the notion that service design plays a role here. What do you feel is, is the role of the service design field and service design professionals in this whole conversation? Well, what I've always loved about service design is that it is a more than than a product design field or any of the other design fields, I would say it, it, it, it, it, it thinks about kind of our, we don't have physical materials to play with, we have the organization to play with. That's kind of our design material. So it has always been our role to kind of be a facilitator of a co-creation between all those different organizational departments and teams and bringing it together and make their whole world revolve around the customer. And I think that is so relevant in this space because having a ESG or sustainability team that thinks through all the, the whole carbon footprint of a company is not enough here. You need to actually change some ways that the world works. And so many different disciplines, so many different people need to be involved in that and need to co-create and need to use their expertise and, and together get to this desired state in which all those different teams, silos and kind of that they're all orchestrated to this new solution. And I think that is our superpower. Yes, we are super human centric and, and that is, I think what, what we pride ourselves the most with, but I think what we sometimes forget is that we are kind of the wonderful orchestrators of change. And I really think that, that we have a big role to use that skill here as well. If you think about this, what would help to accelerate the adoption of this way of thinking in our field? What is, maybe, what is holding us back? I don't know, I'm not sure if anything is holding us back, rather than just not knowing or thinking about this, but what could, what could help to accelerate the adoption of this forward lens? I think, I think what is holding us back is that we feel we are educated to talk about this, that we are afraid to contribute to greenwashing. And, but the interesting thing is that we are also no IT experts. We're also no HR experts. We are also no digital experts, we're no call center experts, but for some reason we're very comfortable to invite all those disciplines to our workshops. So I think we should be more comfortable to, to invite the sustainability experts to, to our workshops and to our processes. And we don't have to be the experts on sustainability to create sustainable services. We're also no business experts, but we still make sure that our services are viable, right? So I think that is kind of a mindset shift that we are, have been starting to make, but where we're lacking behind, because we are a bit afraid of, of coming in too powerful, of, of saying things in spaces where, where we, we don't feel experts. But I, but I hope that this will change and that people, service designers would see, I don't have to know exactly how much carbon this service emits for me to still invite sustainability experts into the co-creation process and to create a sustainable service. I'm, I'm curious. So it's, it's maybe an imposter syndrome problem here, but I'm also curious. We have been selling the, the making services more human agenda for a while now. Like that's the thing we are, we're advocating for. We're saying we need to make businesses more human services need to be more around focused around people. That's already a very big challenge. And we've been pioneering that we've been evangelizing that and it, it took us a while up to till the moment that clients started to create that demand was created. At first it was no demand. We had to create demand is like with this sustainability thing. It's super important, but are we waiting right now for clients to come with the question to us and then we can act upon it. And doesn't maybe feel like it too, too big of a hassle or burden to now also start advocating for sustainable services next to more human services. I don't know. Is that, is how do you feel about that? Yeah, good question. I sometimes think of our work as kind of business is kind of looking at its own, its own operation, looking down at its own body. And then we invite them to look up and to look at their customer and to see their customer and then relate what they see there to what they see if they look at themselves. And I feel that this is almost like the next step in then saying maybe you should open up even more and not only look at the one right in front of you, which is your direct customer, but also at the world around that and invite that. But it does feel like that human centricity bit that we've been introducing is first step, a very good first step of inviting companies to look beyond their own realm. So yes, I do think that you're right. It took us a while to be recognized as experts for even doing this. It won't happen overnight that we're invited to also do that last bit. I think that that is completely correct. But I do think that we're seeing more and more that companies do feel this. So for example, a company that wants their products to be circular thinking, oh, but how do we then facilitate our customers to bring back their products? How do we then facilitate our customers to repair their products? Maybe we should do some service design for that. So that's kind of already the first step right into stretching from customer to more than customer to planet centricity, maybe even I like if somebody is listening to the podcast, they have missed the sort of the physical cues in your story. But I like going from looking down to looking up to looking wide. And I was in my mind I was going full circle on our conversation here because when we apply this way of thinking to our own practice, we as service design professionals are service providers, but we're not selling products. So what does sustainable service design look like? Or more sustainable service design look like? And one of the things could just be that we challenge ourselves to have this conversation with the clients that we work for. So are we inviting our clients to have a conversation about looking wide next to just looking up? And that could be a sign of a more sustainable service design practice. What do you think? Yeah, I think you're totally right. Yeah, like we come in and we say, oh, this is how we do blueprints. We have the customer at the top and underneath we have the operation and we have business. So we already have desirability viability and feasibility in our blueprints. But why don't we also say, and we add sustainability to it as well, they have never seen a blueprint before. They don't know which which layers it should have. I think it is partly about that. And it is also about being a bit more bold and saying, hey, there's quite some human challenges in transforming to sustainability. We know humans, we know organizations, maybe we have a role to play it might be a little bit less, it might be a little bit of a stretch for us to use those exact skills in areas where it's not a very clear start to end service. But still, it's human challenges that organizations have to cater for. That's kind of what we excel at. So I think it's both. Again, I feel like we're going full circle here because at the start you mentioned like thinking about the role service providers have. And again, we are service providers. So which role do we take on and addressing this topic is just one of the roles we already could very easily take on to to have this conversation. I want to sort of try to wrap up and head towards the end of our conversation. I'm sure that there are a lot of questions that are unanswered. But if you could pick one and sort of maybe invite somebody who's listening right now to think with us, like what is the big question that you would like the community to spend some mental effort on? I liked kind of two questions that came along in this episode. Like the one that you said, what does the sustainable experience look like? I think that's definitely one that I would like us to all think about. And then the second is inviting a bit of system thinking, which we already do because organizations are kind of small systems. And obviously system thinking is a bit of a bigger field. But kind of thinking about the sustainability doesn't only have this materiality. It is also making the world work differently. And then inviting people to think about that. How should it work differently? And what is the role of services in restructuring? How the world works? That's I think the two questions that I would love for everyone to think about and to share and to talk about together. Yeah, it will be awesome. And I invite the community to absolutely do so. And my sort of final question here is, if you would listen to this episode or somebody's listening to this episode and they made it all the way here, what is the one thing you hope that they will take out of this? One thing I hope that they will take out of this is that it's okay to think about it, that you're not greenwashing just by thinking about it and that it is scary to think about it. But that it's completely okay and that you can talk about it, make mistakes and think about how we can incorporate it in our world work. Thanks a lot for sharing this, Anna. Again, yeah, super interesting for me a lot of unexplored, uncharted territory, a lot of stupid questions to be asked, especially for Maya trying to understand what this could be and actively exploring and prototyping as we speak. So thank you for offering me the space to pick your brain here. And I hope that we'll hear a lot more about this topic in the coming months, years ahead. Yeah, likewise. Thank you so much for inviting me and for being comfortable with entering this confusing space. Have you come across examples of sustainable services we'd love to know? So please leave a comment down below. A huge thanks to Anna for coming on the show and sharing her perspective with us, especially considering that there are still so many unanswered questions. I hope that this got you excited to help shape the future of our practice. I've been sharing conversations with industry leaders like Anna here on this show every two weeks for over six years now. And I don't plan to stop anytime soon. So if you don't want to miss any of the future conversations, make sure you subscribe to the channel. My name is Mark van Tijn and I want to thank you for spending a small part of your day with me. It's an absolute honor and pleasure. Keep making a positive impact and I hope to see you very soon in the next video.