 In this episode, we'll be talking about what does it mean to democratize service design, we'll be talking about the role and value of their brand design thinking, and finally, we'll talk about how to successfully embed service design in an organization. And here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, my name is Jerry Scullion and this is the Service Design Show. Hi, my name is Marc and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to design services that have a positive impact on people and business. My guest in this episode once opened the show for the fun-loving criminals. He's currently the Service Design Principal at EY Seren in Ireland and you might know him from his podcast, This Is Human-Centered Design. His name is Jerry Scullion. In the next 30 minutes or so, Jerry and I will be talking about what does it mean to democratize service design, we'll be talking about the role and value of their brand design thinking, and finally, we'll touch upon how to successfully embed service design in an organization. We post new videos every week here on this channel. So if you're looking for a way to take your service design skills to the next level, be sure to subscribe and don't forget to click the bell icon so you'll be notified when new videos are out. So that's all for the introduction and now let's quickly jump into the interview with Jerry. Welcome to the show, Jerry. Thanks for having me, Mark. Awesome to have a fellow, I don't know what shall we call it, content creator. I don't know, people call me a design troublemaker. Design troublemaker. I haven't gotten that title yet, so we have a few on it. Jerry, I mentioned it in the introduction already, but for the people who don't know who you are, you're running a podcast called This is Human-Centered Design. Correct. Tell us a little bit about that. What is it? Where can people find it? Why did you start making it? All right. I started it earlier last year when I was based in Australia. I'm now based in Dublin. I've just moved home. The podcast came off the back of many conversations over a couple of years where I was repeating myself and having the same sort of conversations that I just wanted to be able to create something that enables conversation around topics such as breaking tribalism and design and allowing it to be a little bit more accessible for people who are trying to get into the discipline of design. From that, we started with a couple of episodes more as a trial to see how we get on. It's just gone from strength to strength. It's now currently in the top 10 and a lot of the podcasts, listings and iTunes and stuff. So it's been a great success and it's something that I'm really proud of. I've got a great team of people working on the podcast with Shirley Ryan, who I know you've had on the episode as well, Cheech, and Adrian Tan in Australia as well, who's podcasting about product management and how service design and product management and UX all can work together, which is great. Yeah, I'm sure a lot of people who are listening or watching this episode will be interested in what you are doing. So if they're looking for this is HCD or this is human-centered design, where can they find the episodes? Yeah, they can check it out on this is HCD.com, but it's also on Spotify and iTunes and lots of the major podcast hosting services. So it's pretty accessible. It goes under this is HCD or the human-centered design podcast. Awesome. I'll add links also in the show notes. So if people really can't find it, just check the show notes. Be sure to subscribe. It's really cool. Jerry, first question. This is usually the first question I ask people, but now it's the second one. And that is, do you remember the first time you got in touch with service design? The first time I was introduced to service design, like I'm actually a qualified industrial designer. I studied industrial design way back in 2002. I was aware of it in the early 2000s, but I was living in Ireland at the time and it wasn't really mature enough to get a job as a service designer. My first encounter was at Cochlear, the medical device company in 2011, I believe, where I was brought in from a UX background. There was more strategic UX at that time. And I was designing a new service for them called My Cochlear. So that was my first real big project about designing a new service. That something wasn't there. That wasn't just a digital interface. And that was like in the 2000s? 2010, 2011 maybe around that time. So about six or seven years ago, I've been working primarily as a service designer since then. Cool. Jerry, you gave me three interesting topics. It was really fun to have topics from somebody who's usually on the other side of the microphone. Yeah. So we'll dive into your three topics in a minute. You've got some questions started printed next to you. And we'll co-create the show from here on, right? Are you ready? Absolutely. Let's do it. All right. So the first topic that I want to address with you is this one, democratization of design. And two of your questions started that goes along with this one. Okay, let me have a look. I'll go with this one. Why the democratization of design is important? Okay. Well, go ahead. So democratization of design, let's break it down and just explain it a little bit. Democratization of design is making it accessible to people who are really not designers or from a not design background. I believe it's important to bring people who are from the non-design discipline into the conversation as early as possible. And it's really important for the success of a project, but also the success of services to be delivered by bringing people along on those journeys. I don't believe, though, whoever that it's always possible to make those people who are non-designers designers, but I think it's important to create a shared understanding and a shared language between those disciplines. So just going back to what I spoke about earlier about the podcast and breaking down tribalism and design, you could be working with product managers or could be working with visual designers or you could be working with people in the business profession or financial backgrounds. The democratization of design really focuses on delivering the outcome and making sure that you're all behind that outcome and you're able to work towards delivering that outcome, as opposed to getting stuck down into the politics of the nitty gritties of who owns what and who's doing what. So it's such an important piece to bring. What do you see as the big challenges regarding to democratization of design? So I guess the ownership of who does what in a general project delivery process. So I know I've spoken about this in the past around user experience people. How do they contribute to some of the processes within service design? And the democratization of design, I guess, it's not really so much about having ownership of things as having a shared ownership and having a shared understanding of what you're trying to achieve. So at certain times you might have user experience people who are much stronger at certain skills and it should be encouraged that they're able to do those processes as opposed to like saying oh well that could be a service design piece. We only do this. This is ours. It's not about that. It's about being able to work human to human and working as a team. So democratization extends beyond that into the business function and really articulating and helping the maturity of an organization grow so that they're able to understand why we're doing things and why we're not doing it the way they've always done it. We're doing it because we want to get a shared understanding and we want to try and get the best possible outcome for the delivery of a new service. And is democratization of design, how far are we off from true democratization in your perspective? How far from like, I guess, is there a point where we're trying to get to and I don't think it's ever going to be realized really. It's about having an empathy for the other person that you're working with and saying it's okay if you don't understand what's going on. Ask me any question you want. It's about having that trust and making sure that when they do work with us they're not feeling like they're like excluded. It's been an inclusive process. So I think more and more the role of the service designer is becoming closer to that almost hand-holding piece, taking businesses through that process of transformation. I hate to use that word transformation but it really sums up what we're trying to do a lot of the time. It's a change management function in some ways. So Jerry, do you think we need some specific skills or specific skills to actually enable or help democratization of service design or design in general? The first thing I'm thinking about is we need to be excellent communicators. Communication, like everything, is kind of key to the delivery of anything. So being excellent communicators, having a natural humility for the people going through this process, we're effectively changing behaviors and we're disrupting people in their day-to-day lives, changing behaviors and how they work in a lot of the stuff that we do. Things that we probably could do and what's important to do is I think is losing an arrogance about what we do and enabling people to buy into what we do. So sharing the work that we're doing is super important in anything to do with democratization of design. Again, my whole vision of democratization of design is not to make people designers, it's about getting another outlook and another perspective on the work to make sure that it's been as inclusive as possible. So a final question regarding this topic, what do you do on a day-to-day basis to contribute to this? My role at UI Sarin Ireland, I'm the service design principal, a lot of my work is down to I guess trying to increase the awareness of the capability of service design. It's working with clients to really identify areas of opportunity across their full ecosystem as opposed to just thinking of it as a touch point and working at a very macro level. On a day-to-day basis, it could look like I've got a little girl, so I'm up at five o'clock every morning, which is really kind of her. It's why I look so harboured and I'm actually only 25. I can empathize with you. Okay, right. So my day starts really early and it finishes relatively early at around 9.30, but in between then I'm back-to-backs, a lot of meetings. I'm not doing as much of the craft of design anymore in terms of the actual creation of artifacts, mostly it's around education and facilitation of the craft. So, Jerry, let's move on to topic number two and I know this will be an interesting one as well, because this contains the magic words at this moment, because this is about the brand of design thinking. Do you have a question starter that goes along with this one? This is a tough one. I'm going to go for the same again. It's all reliable why the brand of design thinking is important. Maybe what is the brand of design thinking? Well, this is really important because moving from Australia or design thinking, it entered the conversation for me as early back as my second time in Australia in 2007, 2008. It was discussed and I remember going to interviews and people saying, do you do design thinking? To me, it was actually such a funny thing to say to a designer, there's an industrial designer, do you do design thinking? I'm like, yeah, well, what else would I do? It's a given. I started to see a creep more into the conversations and why design thinking is really important is I worked in several large organizations where there were training lots of people to become design thinkers and they were accredited to become design thinkers. It started to create a new wave of profession that started to creep up into workshops where it wasn't so bad. I was getting people pushing back saying, well, I'm a design thinker. I was like, okay, well, I've been doing this for a long time. I started to see a little bit of resistance between somebody who's just entered the craft and they've done a little bit of design thinking. Design thinking, the brand, whenever I speak about it, I try to understand the context of where that person has come from and the legacy that they hold. I'm like, okay, well, what is design thinking for you? I've spoken a little bit about this with Mark Stickthorn and I know you've also had on the podcast as well. It's really trying to understand how they're using it because it's just a toolkit. It's nothing to be afraid of. I don't mind when people say like, I do design thinking. I'm like, hey, but what are you doing with the design doing side of the conversation? Everyone is saying the same thing. It's pretty much been spoken about to death. But too often what I find is the design thinkers, they will take it to a point and they almost become an SME, like a subject matter expert in that area. It's okay. Going back to the first question of having that shared understanding and that shared language, it actually has given us so much. It's actually helped make the craft a lot better and it should have made the process a little bit easier for us as professions or as professionals. So I don't see it as a bad thing. I don't see design thinking as anything to be worried about. It's how it's applied is what I really care about. And is that something that you're worried about, how it's been applied, being applied? Yes. So I fear for organizations thinking of it as a shortcut and not really taking into consideration the craft of design. Like the whole experience of going through training is fantastic to become a design thinker. But the application of the knowledge and the experience of when something falls outside of those training classes, you don't have that experience of the craft to be able to say, well, actually, this is, I'm going to have to change tack here. I'm going to have to move to a different approach. And that only comes with experience. I liken it to be the difference between a carpenter and a master craftsman. There's a difference. You'll still be able to make a table, but one of them will be marvelled and the other one will just be able to be used. So it's what are you going for? What are your outcomes you're trying to achieve? So design thinking, I always try and identify, I guess, to sum it up. Are they thinking about the brand of design thinking like Dave Keely's from IDO, who's one of the four fathers of design thinking versus actually, are they using the design thinking toolkit with the view to delivering an outcome? Hopefully, it's the latter. It's really interesting that you said that I hear this a lot in the design community, that people are sort of rebelling against design thinking. And you said regarding the training, what sparked my interest in this conversation is that I think what people underestimate is their design thinking and being a designer is also about certain personality characteristics. Just the first thing that comes to my mind is the ability to be a great improviser, to improvise on the spot or to be a great listener. And those kind of threads or skills, it's not something you acquire in a two-day workshop. And that's, I think, something people miss. Absolutely. I know John Calco has spoken quite a lot about this, about the role of making business people into designers and the role of design thinking in the process. Too often, I look for a mindset and I look for personality when I interview people. How comfortable are they working within the process of change is super important because what we do is not easy. And not everyone can have that mindset and it can break a lot of people when you're working in mass dysfunction and it's been able to stick and have that resistance to deliver something. It's just super important. And it's a personality trait that I try and dig deep into interviews to try and make sure that they've got that in their locker, so to speak. What's for you the big question related to design thinking at this moment? I guess the big question is where do we go from here? What happens after design thinking has been applied into organizations? I actually did a talk before I left Australia in a large organization of maybe like 60,000 to 70,000 people and they'd spent four years training and they'd hit this point of saturation where everyone had pretty much heard about design thinking and that shared knowledge was there. But what next? Where do we go from here? We've hit that point of saturation where now we've got an organization that know what design thinking is, but nothing is changing. Too often, it's the behaviors of the organization and the cultural communities and the tribalism that works against the methodology to succeed. So it's looking inwards is what I'm trying to say, like how are you working together? Like what are you doing in a day-to-day basis? It's applying the design thinking methodology inward to really enable the growth and it's not just about having a deliverable on a Tuesday afternoon so it can be met with a delivery team on a Wednesday. It's really about making the culture safe and making sure that the people are able to grow as individuals, making sure the environment. There's so many factors to be able to enable design and innovation to succeed in an organization. Design thinking can never be seen as a silver bullet. And the metaphor is like design thinking if that's the seed and if you don't put it in a, I don't know, in a vase and you don't give it water, you don't provide the right context, it won't ever flourish, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. It's like you have to provide and you have to encourage the behaviors of an organization to enable it to work. And that may mean like the shift of power in an organization to be moved from the top down into the middle or down into even the teams to be able to make educated decisions. At the end of the day you should be hiring adults and there should be a culture of trust. They shouldn't be like trying to work against the professionals who they've hired, the smartest people in the room. I know Steve Jobs has got some fantastic quotes about this. I mean if you're hiring the smartest people to come into your organization and you're not allowing them to do what they're doing, why are you hiring them? Exactly. Yeah, true. Let's move on into topic number three because that's also a big one next to design thinking and maybe this one is sort of the follow-up to your question, what's next? Is this what's next? Let's see. Embedding service design, again the question. This is great. Yeah, do we have a question starter? First of all, are you free to use why again or surprise us with something completely different? Just how can we embed service design? How can we embed service design? Service design I guess the definition of it for me is just to wrap that up a little bit. It is nothing other than the design of services and I've seen hundreds of explanations that go paragraphs long and it is that. I just want to say it's the design of services. It's nothing more fancy. How can we embed service design? Tactically, there's a few things that I look at in organizations when I've been brought in to help this process happen. First of all, is the design maturity of the leadership team. What I mean by that is what is designed for them. I do certain things like there's a few key books that I always try to purchase as presents and I drop them into the bags of the leadership team. Which one? I mean, transform by Jerry McGovern and I'm not saying that because he's Irish and he's also another Jerry. Fantastic book. It's about the digital rebel and it's about really enabling that culture to wrap itself around the methodology. That's one. Then I guess this is service design thinking, service design doing which I contributed to the latter. I'm not just saying that's a fantastic book because I had a very, very, very, very, very small part to play in it. But it is a fantastic book to give to people who are working currently in organizations that are doing or they're delivering or they're shipping. That's too often forgotten when we go in as service design practitioners. More than often, they're doing service design anyway. They're already doing it. Every business is a service business. Absolutely. It's funny. I was speaking to my auntie only the other day and she used to own a hotel in Ireland and she was asking me like, what are you doing these days? Why are you back? Why the beard? Why the glasses? And I was like, look, I do service design. She's like, well, what is that? And I was like, well, look, you were doing service design for 50 years in Ireland before it was even a thing in Ireland. And I explained to her about the front office and the back office and the experience when you walk into the hotel. So quite often when we walk into an organization, whether it's a software business or a hotel, it's understanding that they're doing it, but it's also like, how can they do it better? So what I tend to do is I work with the leadership team to make sure that they understand what it is. So I create a shared understanding of what service design is, what it's not, and how we can work together and trying to work out that little space in between. Then after that, I guess I move more into the tactical side of things. I look at what's currently happening in the organization, how the teams, how the office is structured, the placement of the teams, like in the logistics of the organization, like, do they have a scrum? What are they working on? And I'll identify a small piece that's like low risk, but I'll take them on the journey of going through that process. And I think it's really important to do that type of tactical exercise to make sure that they feel comfortable enough that if they're going to give me money, and I'm going to be taking people away from who are currently shipping service designers, shipping a service, and they're going to start working with me in a more of a strategic process, I define the outcomes that we're trying to achieve here, like whether it's like, working like through symbiosis with me, like on a day-to-day basis, and you're going to try and upskill this person to be able to take the craft and apply it after I've left the business, or it's just something that they want to do on a day-to-day basis. So identify the small little pieces that we can actually work on, and we wrap that up together, and then we start working on it as regards to the bigger overall strategic direction of a new service or a tactical service. Yeah. Okay. And I'm thinking about embedding service design. What does this mean for you in terms of how does the organization change when service design is embedded? What is different when service design is embedded? Yeah, look, I don't know if the answer to this question is if you go and you hire six service designers and put them in the corner and say, we've now embedded them. Yeah. And it's a thing that you can hire service designers, but if the culture can't actually reciprocate making it a place for them to grow and feel welcome, then it's not going to happen. So as regards embedding service design into an organization, I think the thing called service design probably should change. So it shouldn't really be called service design anymore, it's more of a mindset. And over time, it should really blend into the culture and it's just a thing that happens. And you've got champions who are like deep expertise in that thing, who actually enable it. So I'm not saying that in the future, we're not going to have jobs. I'm saying like we're going to become, you know, there's going to be people who actually understand it a lot more, and they're able to work with us on a more of a day-to-day basis, and they'll have a deeper appreciation for the craft of what we do. But at the moment, when I come back to Ireland now, like, and I look at it, the whole service design craft is, it's like 10 or 15 years ago from where it was in Australia and even central Europe. It's still a thing that is viewed with suspicion. They're like, isn't this just design thinking? Isn't this just this? So a large part of it is really enabling, I guess, raising the awareness of what service design is and what it can give to your business and what it can give to your organizations. I fully agree. And I think we should be much more aware that we need to articulate those kind of things. I think we are pretty good at talking about how it works. And we should much more and much better at what it actually does, what it delivers, what the outcomes are, right? Absolutely. I mean, like, if you're not delivering, you're not going to be embedding, right? So it's that simple. Like, there was another point that I think Mark Stickdorn mentioned about the guy. He could do it for a living, couldn't he? He could write a book about it. Yeah, I could write a book about Mark Stickdorn. But like, he just, he's done it, so he's able to speak about it with confidence. And it's really about understanding the methodology and taking them on the journey. But it's the appreciation for research. And it's too often said, but it was Mark that really hit it home for me. It was the quality of research appreciation of, you know, how it's championed and how it's actioned. So I started doing a tool called the Wall of Pain. It's two years ago that I came up with this methodology, where I mapped the customer journey map, and I work with the customer career team. So it could be a call center, it could be like an online chat, whatever it is, whatever quantity I have, I map it back against the customer journey, so the flow of some awareness all the way through to exit. And I work with the team to identify the main pain points on a day to day basis in the top five across the five stages of a customer journey. So you could end up having like certain tickets that have been coming in, and it's basically trying to close that feedback loop. But you'll end up having a relatively static wall of pain after about a week or two. So these are the tickets that are recurring. And it's how those problems are getting, you know, transacted and how they're getting placed back into the delivery team. But it's then taking it to the next level and putting a dollar value against each one of those tickets. So you're changing the conversation around, you know, what are the problems, to how much it's costing, and then taking it to the next level of accountability. Who's responsible for this? Because, you know, the customer is telling you there's a problem. How are you going to answer that? And that is the most basic level of what we do. We're trying to close the conversational loop. And I think these kind of conversations, we should be having them much more with our clients. That would propel our field much quicker than it's doing now. Absolutely. I mean, if you want to close the conversational for the business person, being able to articulate it in terms of a dollar value in terms of each one of the stages and where the opportunities are in terms of financial loss, it happens really quickly when you start putting a dollar value. I remember like I did this in a fantastic organization in Australia. I'm not going to name the names. But I looked at it from an anthropological perspective where I observed the suspicion and I put up the wall of pain and there's a fantastic CEO in Australia who owns this organization. And I think he thought I was a bit crazy. He was like, a wall of pain. But then I noticed over a week or two afterwards that whenever the investors were walking in, they'd always stop at the wall of pain and he would be very proud to talk about it. And he was like, this is the dollar value. And it's such a simple tool, but it's actually bringing a closer back to the business conversation about what we can actually do on a day-to-day basis and making it transparent. Okay, Jerry. Time is flying by. I've got one more question for you. And I know you didn't prepare this one. So let's ask me anything. There we go. So Jerry, is there a question that you'd like to ask us, the listeners and the viewers of the service design show? I guess the question that's been weighing in my mind recently is, does accreditation in the service design community or is it important? And I guess my thoughts on that is it's less so important. I don't think it's something we need to focus our attention on right now. I think we should be trying to build relationships across just disciplinary professions. And I'd hate to see accreditation to be seen as a form of exclusivity amongst the professions. They're accredited. They're not accredited. For me, it's about getting as much diversity and inclusion into the service design community to help better articulate the needs and reflect what the work that we're trying to do. I'd hate to see it to go into an accreditation model where everyone who's been practicing this craft for years suddenly feels the need to go back into a training course. So as much as I appreciate the efforts of some places, but I just don't feel it's contributing to the success of service design globally. Great question. I have some opinions about it too, but I'm really interested to hear your opinions. So leave a comment on this episode and let's see what this leads to because I do see a role for accreditation and I also understand your concern. But interesting discussion to follow up. Jerry, we're heading towards the end of our talk and the first thing I want to do is sort of thank you for your time and thank you for sharing what's been on your mind here on the service design show. No worries. Thanks so much for the opportunity to come on and talk and I'm more than happy to be here. Awesome. So do you see a role for service design accreditation? Leave a comment down below and join the conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, please give a thumbs up. I really appreciate it. And of course, if you know someone who might benefit from what we've just discussed, please share this video with them. Thanks again for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.