 Hello, I'm Adam Lawrence and welcome to the Service Design Show. I'm Marc Fontaine and this is the Service Design Show, the show that helps you to stay one step ahead by talking to the people that are actually shaping the service design field. We talk about the current state of the industry, exciting new developments and challenges up ahead. Our guest in this episode is Adam Lawrence. Adam is of course the co-founder of the Global Service Jam and he just told me he has a background in psychology and theater. Welcome to the show, Adam. Good morning Marc, welcome. Hi. Awesome that you could make some time because we are recording this during the weekend, so. No problem, that's great to be here. Adam, this is the first question I ask everyone. Do you recall your very first memory of service design? I do actually. I was writing a blog years ago about theatricality in commerce, so I was looking at things about business, which are theatrical, obvious stuff like costume and lighting, but also less obvious stuff like timing and rhythm and dramatic arcs and stuff like this. Some people popped up on my blog and making comments, one of them was Joe Pine who's the author of The Experience Economy and other great books. Those people started pointing me towards this community called Service Designers. At the same time my colleague, Marcus Hormes, the co-founder of my company, was on a conference in India and he met the live work guys, so we sort of at the same time discovered this community and came back from the summer and went like, service design could be a place where we feel at home. What happened after that? So you got in touch with the term and then? We went to some conferences. I think the first one was the service design network conference in Berlin, met some people there, met Marc Stichthorn there who's become a collaborator of ours and people like Birgit Marga who runs the service design network and just really enjoyed the vibe. We were outsiders coming into this, we always have been outsiders, we'd have no design background. Our background is process, design, marketing, product design, theater, stuff like this. But we thought we could add some tools and some ideas to these guys and certainly learn a lot from them and so it sort of basically started on that level of exploring each other, you know what's going on here and recognizing so many echoes and similarities between our work, especially the theatrical background that we have and service design process. I still remember that you actually published some kind of white paper or book that where the last chapter wasn't finished and I actually downloaded it and that was the first time that I stumbled upon your idea. That's right, I think it was called theatrical tools for customer experience or something like that. It was many, many years ago. Great piece. Nine years ago, yeah, it's still out there actually and there was a second chapter coming soon which has taken some time. That I guess is coming up at the end of this year with the book I've been working on right now. This is Service Design Doing with Marc Stichthorn, Jakob Schneider. Yeah, I'll put a link to that definitely up there, this is service design doing. And Adam, what's up with this? You mean this? The rubber chicken. Yeah. I've become quite famous for this rubber chicken. We have, I guess, though I started it, it's all my fault. I've been using that kind of tool in my work for a long time and people ask me what it means. That's a very good question. What does it mean to you? But some of the things that rubber chickens mean to people are around having permission to play, having permission to take your project seriously and take your customers seriously but not take yourself too seriously. Because one of the dangers I always think of being a designer is the danger of starting to believe yourself too much and start to think you're some kind of prophet or guru rather than a facilitator, rather than someone who helps people understand their business much more than you do, get better at it and help their customers or citizens or clients more. So one reason I carry a chicken is to remind myself not to take myself too seriously. It's also the perfect prop. It can be anything. It's the first prototype. Is it a phone? Is it a device? Is it a cooking pan? What is it? It can be almost anything and it encourages people to get up and try things out and whatever it means to you. What does it mean to you? To me, I think it's mostly that permission to play. I was once in San Francisco with a colleague I just met her and we had some time to kill before a conference. So we said, let's explore the city. We walked around and she said, why do you always carry a rubber chicken? I said, don't you have one? She's like, no, I said, that's terrible. And there was a pet store right there. So we rushed in. I bought her a chicken, an emergency chicken really quickly. And she said, what do I do? I said, don't do anything with it. Just carry it. She put it in her handbag and 10 minutes later we got on one of the beautiful street cars in San Francisco. And she's trying to pay. And the tram driver, he sees the chicken in her bag and says, what's that? And she squeaks it and he takes it and he starts squeaking it and it gets passed down the bus and everyone's squeaking it and playing with it. And I say, this is why I carry rubber chickens. Everybody should carry a chicken all the time. Well, imagine you needed one and didn't have one. What would you do? Exactly. That's a very good takeaway already from this video, Adam. Let's explain the format that we are going to do. Some people might have seen the show already, some might not. So we're going to co-create the questions that we're going to talk about. And I've sent you a set of cards. Could you show them up? I call your cards the question starters. And I've got a few topics that you've sent to me, myself here. I'll pick at the topic. You'll pick a question starter and it's up to you to give an answer to the question you created yourself. OK. Right. Put that on the side of me. Let's just kick it off. I'll pick, yeah. We already talked about the global service gem and let's just start off with this one. Gem in three hours. What is the question starter that goes along with this one? Yeah. There are kind of two around that one, which is when they want to ask us to help it's this one. But I think the most important one might be this, yeah. Great question. Can you make out of that? They usually say things like, OK, we have an organization, a company, a department, how we have like three hours, four hours. How can we jam in that time to find our next profit driver? How can we find the next big idea in three hours? Can you give the people an idea of what the jam is? Probably already everybody knows it. Most folks know what a hackathon is, yeah. And that's quite a similar model. The idea is people come together and have a crazy short amount of time. And in that time, they have the luxury of focusing on one thing. So they get some kind of theme at the beginning. Then they might ideate around the theme. They might form some teams. Those teams might do some basic research out on the street about this thing. They might start generating some ideas, picking some ideas and then get prototyping, prototyping, prototyping, prototyping. And at the end of the jam, they have to, in our world, they have to upload documentation of a functioning, interactive prototype. And at the global jams we run, like the one on my button here, that's 48 hours maximum time that you have, yeah. So about two days is pretty different. Like a hackathon. But it's not quite like a hackathon. We take the word jam from music, where people come together to play, you know. And we often say, if you're a musician, you don't jam to record an album. That's what a studio is for. But you jam to get to play better, to learn new techniques, to motivate yourself, say, I can keep up, or can I keep up? Right. And also to meet new collaborators. And the jams that we foster are very much in that theme. Sometimes you get awesome grooves out of a jam, a great riff, you know. You very rarely get a complete song out of one. And it's the same in our world. You get projects at the end of them. Most of them just disappear. It doesn't matter, because the people have learned something. They've met new collaborators and they can move that on. And occasionally you get a project which can continue. More often you get parts of a project, DNA, if you like, which moves on. So you're increasing the chance for serendipity, basically. That's a very good way of putting it, yeah. You get people together who have a similar vibe often. They're very diverse, but they want to explore new ways of working. And they want to do and not talk. I think as one of the jam motto says, doing, not talking. And we were able to follow after the first GovJam, which we set up with proto-partners, an Australian agency, a great one, and the Australian federal government. The first GovJam, we were able to track many of the participants afterwards because they were Australian government workers, federal, state, or city-level government workers. And our colleagues in the Australian government said that those 10 or so teams at the jam, in the weeks and months after that, launched or at least scoped more than a dozen new projects. And these were things which had popped up at the jam often, or the results of conversations at the jam, but which had not been jam projects. Those jam projects, some of them moved on, most of them died off, as we expected. But it was these conversations, these encounters, the serendipity, as you say, which led to real contacts. Honestly, at a networking meeting, you exchange business cards and you never ever call that guy, unless there's a super, super tight connection. But after jams, after you've worked with someone, you've sweated with someone, you've had a failure with them, you know, you've failed at something and covered and then had some success after that, that person you do call. And that's the difference. You know you can work together. And now let's get back to the question, can we do it in three hours and come up with the best business idea of the year? You might be lucky is the best answer for that one. But really, I think it's very, very, you have to be very careful, hey, there's expectations around that time. Three hours is not really time to get through one cycle of innovation, even meaningfully, never mind two or three cycles, which you try to aim for. So what I think you can do in a few hours is learn a couple of tools and you might introduce these people to each other, but they're not going to get the depth that they need to really connect. And if you do find your next big idea, it's a question of chance rather than strategy or system that does it. So I always say at least a day if you can and two days is something magical about two days is that overnight sleep, it's letting things settle in your head, it's the revelations that come to you in the shower in the morning. That really makes a difference. I call that time the incubation time. Yeah, that makes absolutely sense. You need to give it some attention without giving it attention. Yeah, I like it. And what is your common answer to that? Can we, besides saying that we need more time? Yeah, I mean, we do do events which are sort of four hours, five hours, something like that, and we can get results out of them. But I have to say you really have to be clear on what you expect out of this. Yeah, as a way of giving someone a taste of, let's say, pressure cooker formats, a taste of some of the tools of design, thinking, service, design, whatever you prefer to call it, they can be effective. And they can be a great sort of warm up kickoff. I did one, for example, with an organization where they looked at their world 10 years in the future and thought, how are we going to be working 10 years from now? And they were supposed to reach into the future and bring back an artifact, some meeting notes or a platform, whatever it was, and try and make a prototype of that. And then the new management team went around and said, I found this project especially inspiring because in the next few years, I'm going to be pushing this thing. Or I found this project especially interesting because in the next years, I hope this will happen. And so it was a good way to sort of get a shared view of the future. And also a beginning of the understandings of how difficult it is to build the future thing. Right. And so for that kind of thing, it can be very, very good. I wouldn't rely on it as a very, very earth-changing thing if it's just a morning. All right. Where can people find more information about the global service jam or the jams in general? Jams in general, you can go to any of our Facebook pages or to our websites. The three jams are global service jam, global sustainability jam, and global Gov Jam. And if you put a dot org after most of those names, you'll find the website. The one that's coming up next, here we have the advertising message. Yeah. It's the global Gov Jam. That's the hashtag, hashtag G Gov Jam, which is coming up in about a month from now. All right. Yes, yeah. On the 1st and 2nd of June, some countries choose to start on the 31st of June or even earlier if their weekend is different. That's a weekday event. Unlike the other two jams, a bit more professional, lots of government workers, public servants come to that one. For them, it's work time, so I think it's fair they get paid for it. And we try and work on public services there. I think it's the most exciting jam, personally. All right. So if people want to work on public services in a jam or public services, check out the website and just collaborate with your local jam community, right? That's right. Or start your own jam. You don't need to start your own jam. All you need is an open mind, really. You can use your own techniques. All you do is you have a common global theme and you have a time slot. You have to fit inside that time slot. You can be shorter, but you can't be longer. And if you wanted to do that, anybody can jam. We have done it here in Utrecht, and I can really recommend it to everyone. It's a great experience. Adam, let's move on. There is so much to discuss. And I know this is a topic that is very close to your heart. Maybe it is you, this topic. So work and play. What is the question starter that goes along with that one? Let's try the classic. Why? Work and play. And I'll put a dot, dot, dot after it as well, because people find it really hard to combine those two ideas in their head, which I think is a real shame. Why are we always so happy to finish work? Why do we look forward to retirement? Why do we want to win the lottery and never work again? Where work is supposed to be where we create value, where we actually change the world, where we in many ways give that part of our life meaning. And I think it's really, really tragic that people think work has to be horrible. I enjoy it. I'm lucky, but I've had jobs I don't enjoy. And what we often hear after the jams again is people come out of a jam and they say, I just did three weeks' work in a weekend and I had a great time. And it's a shame that those things seem to be sort of opposites for people. I really enjoy Jay McGonagall's work. She's also supported some of the jams. And she wrote a book called Reality is Broken, where she talks about the power of play and she points out that basically something like World of Warcraft is a job. If you play that game, even a task, your character goes off and does the task, you come back, you get paid, you get the next task and so on, you're basically working for free. And people invest millions of hours into this and they're totally engaged and they love it and they can't wait to finish their real job to get into this job, where they're often doing basically the same thing just with orcs, you know. So why is that? And she points out that work and play are not opposite. And I find it very hard to get people to understand that one until they've tried it, yeah? The thing is when we're playing, my background is psychology, so I'm quite interested in this stuff. When we're playing, we are measurably more creative, we're measurably better in the breadth and number of ideas that we have. That's a great thing to have, yeah? We seem to be less likely to hurt ourselves physically and mentally if we're being playful, which is great. I mean, think about the problems of lost work days through illness, through stress and so on. And also we seem to get a whole lot more done. I mean, look at those World of Warcraft players, all that hard work they're doing for free, I see paying to do, you know? So those are the ideal situations for a worker, you know, productive, not likely to hurt themselves and creative. So it's interesting to me how to bring playfulness into work. And that doesn't mean you're not being serious, yeah? Play is also for me not the opposite of serious because you can play seriously without wanting to step on Lego's trademark there, yeah? You can be focused when you play and that's the difficulty for many people is finding that focus. We use time limits to make people focus when they play, for example, at the jams. But if you can be focused with your playfulness, we find all kinds of benefits come out of that. People are much less worried about ownership of ideas if they're being playful. They're much less worried about protecting their corner and arguing for ideas whose time has passed if they're being playful. It's much easier to try something out, give it a go, build a quick prototype if you're in a playful mindset. And things like this come back to the chicken again. That's one more thing this can do. Mindsets are sets of behavior that we have, a certain response to a certain stimulus. In a different mindset, I respond differently to different stimulus. And I'd say a lot of people would agree with you and this is sort of like the dream scenario for a lot of people but what needs to happen to get there? I think it's easiest for people to try it out in a sort of a safe environment. Yeah, I talk a lot about safe space in my work and a short timeframe like a jam, for example, or a workshop or a project, you can kind of separate it from the rest of the world in your head. And you can say, look, let's behave differently in this limited area and see what it does. And then decide after that for ourselves how much of that we want to let reach out into the rest of our work. It's impossible, I think it's impossible to someone just saying, I'm gonna change the way I work overnight. Especially if somebody external is motivating them to do that. So let's not even try. Let's not say your world is broken as Jane implies in the title of her book, but let's say, you know, there are other ways. Why don't we try some other ways to work and see if we are more productive and more creative by doing that? And if we're not, then okay. Is it like just basically practicing in young sports? You need to do it on a pitch and then put some hours in it and then probably... I think it's almost more like practicing a disco dance, you know? You might want to do it at home in front of the bathroom mirror, first of all, and see if you look like a fool, yeah? Right. But you need some people around you to do that. So what's the kind of situation you can be in where you're not worried about looking foolish? Because everyone is trying something new. And setting up those kind of situations and then transferring the learning out of that into every life, that's what I find fascinating. What is your biggest inspiration when you look to work and play? Oh, that's a really good question. I think the inspiration is the people I see doing it. You know, when I see people who've started a workshop in a very... skeptical sort of position. And that's great, I welcome that because you need to be challenged, yeah? But who are able to say, I'll give this a morning of my life or I'll give this a day of my life and see where it takes me, you know? And then to see those people, first of all, start to enjoy themselves, feel a little guilty about enjoying themselves sometimes, then start to see results and stop feeling guilty about enjoying their work and then really start to rock and roll, as we say, and produce amazing results because they figure out they can focus their energy of play and get tremendous results out of that. It's not the only way to work, yeah? And these very creative phases, you need to have a reflective phase after that, you know, where you look back on it and say, okay, what was useful wasn't useful. And that's important too. But I enjoy watching people open up. That's inspiring. Work and play, we need to have more fun in general. And maybe I wish you'd send out a chicken, ask the United Nation to send out chickens to all the companies all over the world. I always say you have to reach for your chicken. It shouldn't be given to you. You have to see it there and take it until you're ready to reach for it. Maybe you're not ready for your chicken yet, whatever your chicken might be. Interesting. Okay, we've got a third one that we also want to discuss and time is flying by. So I'm just going to introduce this one and this is theater as a toolset. Yeah. What if? I just picked a random one. What if theater were a toolset? So what if we were looking at theater differently, yeah? Now, I come from a theater background and so my, the picture in my head of a theater is probably different to most people's. When most people think of a theater, they see red curtains, you know? They see the stage, but that's just the front end of a theater and behind that stage, literally behind it, there are rooms and rooms and rooms full of people working and there's the state theater here in Nuremberg, the excellent one here. They have about 50 people on stage not counting all the choirs, you know? About 500 working backstage and lots of those are admin and ticketing and stuff like this, but many of them are basically involved in the handy work in the craftsmanship of innovation. They're trying to create an experience every six weeks on time in budget that people want to pay for, you know? And tickets, despite the help from the government, are not cheap, you know? So they're a very, very pragmatic innovation factory and I think theater can teach us a lot about ways of working. It's also a prototyping method. Theater is a way of prototyping any human exchange or even human machine exchange, which has been tried and tested for about 2,500 years in the West. That beats desktop walkthroughs, you know? So I find it very, very, what if, you know? What if more companies were saying, let's get up and try things out, you know? We're doing lots here on papers with little lines and so on, that's really good when we're maybe simulating using computers and so on, workflows and so on. So what if you just got up and tried it out? And what they find when they do that is, one, it's really quick. It's unbelievably fast how quick you can iterate when you're doing theaters. Now, stop trying again, stop trying again, you know? And also, you start to prototype emotion and that's a big step. Business people are scared of emotion because they find it very, very slippery, you know? They say, well, I can't quantify it. I can't predict it. So I'm not sure if I want to be thinking about that too much. It's not really a sort of key business theme. They talk about delights, they talk about satisfaction. Those are impressions, you know? But with theater, you've got a set of tools which can cope with emotion pretty robustly and have been doing it for thousands of years, you know? So you start to move through space, you start to try things out, you iterate, you iterate and you start to feel, this feels weird, this feels wrong, this feels good, you know? Of course, you need to base it on research. Of course, you need to prototype with real customers and so on. But it's a great, great tool to experiment with. And what if people were experimenting more by getting up and trying things out and building things rather than just thinking it through in their heads? The problem with my head is that everything in my head works the way I want it to. Yeah, ideas are brilliant in an ideal end. Ideal end is nearly as good as PowerPoint land. Everything works in PowerPoint land. Everything works in ideal end. Do you think that there is an opportunity for theater schools here, business schools or design schools? Where are we looking for the connection? I don't think you really need much training in this stuff, honestly, because when we're kids, we do it all the time. You know, we play it through. We just get up and try it. And my colleague, Marcus, when he introduces the tool Desktop Walkthrough and he's showing people how they draw out the locations on a piece of paper and they take their Lego pieces or Playmobil, whatever it is, or a piece of paper and they walk through a process on a table to do a kind of very primitive but robust process simulation. He says, you know, if you were kids, I wouldn't need to explain this. And I think theater is often the same way. Just drop down, you know. I'm not asking anybody to act. I'm not asking anybody to be somebody else. I'm asking them to just, okay, just be yourself. You know, what would you do if this customer came in? You know, I can be a customer. I'm a customer every day. You work here every day. Let's just try it. Do you have a favorite example of a company or organization that is really doing this well? I know that McDonald's work well in this way. Byron Stewart from Dramatic Diversity in Chicago presented this with McDonald's at a conference and he showed how they developed some of their offerings. And I know this team worked, for example, on the McCafe. I'm not sure if they use this tool for the McCafers. Don't quote me on that one too much. But those kind of people in McDonald's, they have a four-step process which Byron talked about. They start off in an empty room, so nothing. You know, just people. And they give you a bag of hamburger and there's nothing in my hands, yeah? Then they move to a sort of a low-fi prototyping level where they cut things out of cardboard. There's lots of cardboard prototyping now. I've seen great examples in the Victorian Civil Service. I've seen examples from all kinds of companies right now using cardboard prototyping to make spaces. So now I've got a window that I can give you an empty bag through, you know? Then they have a technical prototyping restaurant where they can move everything around on wheels. So now I'm working with hot food and giving you real hot hamburger in a bag. And then they try it in local restaurants, yeah? So there's a real progression there of investment from nothing, just the people, through some sheets of cardboard, through to a fairly expensive prototyping space, through to real restaurants and real customers and the risks involved in that. And I find that fascinating. It's so good to fail early on when it's just you and me in a room, you know? And it's cheap and it's fast. It's cheap and it's fast, yeah. So I find that very inspiring. Lufthansa just did a great project with Ideo with their business class where they ran, I think, 50 or so transatlantic flights without leaving the ground and tried, tried different ways of having business class without changing the seating, without changing the plane at all, but different ways for their employees to interpret the role of a flight attendant. That's fascinating as well. I, in a previous episode, I talked with Erik Roskamp-Obbeng and he talked about experience prototyping and what Dave did just by prototyping 10-year concept and just take one day for each concept, you know? And it's really powerful, but our conclusion back then was that within the service design world, there is a bit of a gap or a lack of knowledge on how to do it. And you say it's within us, but I guess... I think it's within us. If you want, people worry about this. They're scared of making a fool of themselves, yeah? And I talk a lot about safe space and how you set that up. The kind of mindset, the physical and mental space in which it's okay to fail, yeah? Things like giving yourselves crazy short deadlines can help that. Things like closing the door really can help that. Things like not having any observers in the room can help that, you know? Sort of fairly basic rules of theater. If you want to have some technical assistance in this, go and do some amateur theatricals, you know? Or look for a group of people called the Applied Improvization People. There's a great network called AIN, Applied Improvisation Network. And they are people who use the philosophies and skills of improvisation offstage. So they're helping people learn, change, solve conflicts and so on, using the concepts of theater without trying to act, without trying to perform something. And that's fascinating as well. But I think it's in us. I think just do it. I'm only asking you to do your job in an imaginary situation. I imagine how you would do this job in this situation. You don't need to be Hannibal Lechter. You don't need to be Henry IV. You know? It would be nice if you are. Yeah. Adam, the next thing I want to ask you is you talk to a lot of people in workshops that are maybe new to service design. If you had to give them a beginner's tip, most important tip if you want to get started with service design, what would that be? The one I often say to people is if you're doing service design and apart from all the usual things like trust the process and so on, iterate. But the one I often say is if you only do two things, do research and prototyping. And if you only do one thing, do research. I think we all trust our own assumptions much too much. I see this over and over again. We're very, very experienced people. Do a little bit of research and find their assumptions are wrong about their customers. They know really well. So get out there. Get out on the streets. Get off your seat. Get out on the street. Talk to your customers. Observe your customers. Possibly more important than talking to them. Put yourself in their shoes. Use your own service. But get out of your headspace and get into the real world. Get into the real world. That's something I can strongly relate to. Adam, this is your opportunity to ask the people who are listening and viewing this episode a question. What would you like to ask the people, viewers? I would like to ask the people the next time they're working with colleagues or with customers, especially with colleagues. How can I find a way to do this task which relies less on the use of words? So how can I be less verbal or less written about this? Whatever the task is, if it's a meeting, if it's an innovation process, if it's a coaching session, whatever it is, how can I do this using fewer words? That's my challenge for everyone. It's up to you people who are listening or watching. Give us your comments. So I'd love to hear what people are thinking about this. Less words. Adam, thank you for making the time in Nuremberg. Thank you for having this session. I enjoyed the topics a lot because these are the topics we haven't discussed yet in any previous episode. So thank you again for sharing. Thanks for having me and have a great day in Utrecht. What are your thoughts about the topics we've just discussed with Adam? Work and play go together. Let us know down below in the comments. Also, we'd love to hear if you have any suggestions on who we should invite next on the show. If you enjoyed this episode and like to see more interviews with service design pioneers, be sure to check out some of the past episodes and subscribe to the channel. With the service design show, we'll help you to stay one step ahead in service design by talking to the people that are shaping the service design field. For now, thanks for watching.