 In this episode, you'll learn about the seven roles of service design. You'll learn how service design drives and facilitates change and why employee experience is the new breaking ground for service design. Here's a guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Robert Baud. This is the Service Design Show, Episode 99. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to design organizations that put people at the heart of their business. The guest in this episode is a sweet who now lives in Chicago and he works at the Fjord office there where he champions design thinking and service design. He's also the person who built the service design program at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His name is Robert Baud. As you'll learn in this episode, it's quite a funny story how Robert and I actually met. If you've been listening to the most recent episodes, you'll probably know what I mean, but stick around, we'll explain that in this episode. It's fair to call Robert a service design veteran. He's been in the field for many years. He's seen the field evolve and that's why I'm so excited to have him here on the episode because he understands and can very clearly articulate what value service design brings to the table and brings to organizations. He also has a very clear vision about where the field is heading to. This episode is full of interesting insights about our field and I learned a lot from speaking with Robert and I hope you'll do too. If you're new to this channel, we're at episode 99. We've been doing this for almost four years. If you haven't subscribed yet, click that subscribe button and that bell icon because we bring a new video about service design at least once a week. That's all for the intro and now let's quickly jump into the interview with Robert. Wow. Welcome to the show, Robert. Thank you, Mark. How are you? I'm good. It's a weird time. It's quarantine time but the sun is out. Yeah. So how about you? Yeah. We're holding up here. It's my fourth week working remotely. So trying to keep my heads down, keeping busy, trying to actually be more mindful on what I do. So I'm using some online services to increase my mindfulness, gives my anxiety levels lower to be honest in a good way. Care to share which one? I'm using Headspace. Headspace, right? Yeah. So you can imagine breathing exercises and tons of other physical activities you can do just to reduce your anxiety levels and be more productive and with more mindful of what you do. So you've got to help me personally. I haven't tried Headspace yet. I'm using the Waking Up app by Sam Harris. Also recommended. Excellent. That's the difference. By the way, I'm having a adorable French bulldog called Sky because I take her on long walks every day and that's a great way, by the way, just to get some fresh air and calm yourself down a bit. Walking, being outside, we're lucky that we're still allowed to do. So I guess there are regions in the world where people aren't allowed to do that anymore. That's true. That's true. That's a different start of the show. But let's give people a little bit of context how we actually met because it was coincidence. Who knows? I don't know. We had a guest on the show, Lincoln Nager. And in that episode, it was like two or three episodes ago. He said, you know what? You might want to invite one of my former professors, Robert Bauer. And then literally two days later, I was in Cologne. So were you, and I was having lunch at a conference. And I met a random guy during lunch over coffee. And that random guy turned out to be you. That was me, yeah. No, it was funny, actually. It was great pumping into you at the Future Services Science Summit. It was a really good day, by the way. But I met all these fantastic people, including you, of course, Mark. Yeah. So it was serendipitous, I suppose, to meet up that way. It was, yeah. I did check out Lincoln's podcast, by the way. I thought it was great. I loved the format of the show. And I thought Lincoln came across really well and had a really interesting topic. And did a very nice shout-out to SCAD and to me personally, as being one of his professors. So it was really a great time. If the people are interested in the episode with Lincoln, if you're listening to the video, then it will pop up somewhere over here. And if not, if you're listening to the podcast, it will be down in the show notes. Robert, before we forget, I can imagine that there are some people out there who don't know who you are. Could you give a very brief introduction? Sure. So I'm a senior service sign director at Fjord. Fjord is part of a center in directive. Fjord is nowadays one of the largest, perhaps the largest design firm in the world with 33 studios on all five continents. Personally, I'm based in Chicago, but I work across the US and also have global clients. So basically, on every single day, I'm directing multiple projects, multiple teams, providing oversight, providing direction, focus, making sure we have quality and everything we do from start to finish. And the things you're going to say today are solely your own opinion, not per se. Yes, I do need to put in that disclaimer, right? But today, on this show, the contents reflect my own views, and that does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer center. You put that disclaimer in whenever I'm on social media. So there we go. We have it on tape. We have it on record. So I'm following corporate policy. That's all good, I suppose. All good. All good. We should. We don't want to get you in trouble. No, exactly. Oh, we're going to talk about, well, partially the future of service design. So I'm really excited about that. And we're going to do that based on, oh, no. I'm off my rhythm here. Of course, I should start with the question, Robert, your service design evangelist, a pioneer, a veteran of service design. What was the first time that you got in touch with service design? I almost forgot to switch to this side. Yeah. Thank you for asking that. I actually remember it very vividly, funny enough. I moved to London around 2004, 2005, and I bumped into these two amazing guys that had founded Engine. Engine is one of those two pioneering service design firms in the world. And back in the day, it was live work, and Engine really sort of leading the way. And these two guys, Joe Heathby and Oliver King, very inspirational guys. I worked with them on a couple of internal projects. And since then, I've already looked back. To me, service design was that real exciting blend between business and creativity. And I changed my wicked ways of working. I became much more human centered, much more collaborative, and so on and so on, putting much more prototype in my way of working and so on. So that was great. I used to run a brand and design firm in Stockholm with two partners. So while I had a lot of consulting experience at that point, I was so inspired by how Joe and Oliver were working. Yeah, I guess we have a lot to thank to the early day pioneers, mainly from the UK, but also from Scandinavia. Yeah, definitely. Scandinavia was definitely up there, I feel. And of course, Netherlands as well, by the way. Yes. OK, let's jump into the topics for this episode. Are you ready? I'm ready. Let's go. We're going to start off with topic number one, and it's going to be about seven roles. Yes, seven roles of service design. So my question would be, who are, or let's put it this way, who is the service designer? Something I have to explain almost on a daily basis, not actually only to clients, but also to my central colleagues and counterparts on products. So that's why over time, I have come up with these seven roles to explain the breadth and depth of what we do in complex projects. OK, really curious to hear about them. Yeah, and you will see up on the screen here an overview of the seven roles. But let's start from the left, talk about the Emphasizer, which really someone who explores untaxed complex problems. Someone who uses different research methods, both qualitative and quantitative, to understand people, markets, industries, organizations. So this is something much more than just that demographic research. OK. The second one is SenseMaker. For the people who are listening right now, you'll be able to download this sheet with the overview in the show notes. Again, if you're watching it, you're seeing it here. But yeah, OK, Emphasizer and the SenseMaker. SenseMaker. So SenseMaker is simply someone who can uncover those deep insights and patterns and themes and so on across all research sources and methods and also frame or reframe, hypothesis, problems, opportunities, and so on. So really important role. The next role, if you go from the right, is the creator. So someone who systematically generates ideas, create concepts to both change behavior, but also get the job done. So coming up with new products, services, experiences, and so on. And then the maker is someone who simply conducts experiments, builds, prototypes, launches, pilots, and so on. And then we have the navigator. Someone who sets the overall direction where the company is going, the client is going. Someone who creates strategic platforms, creates implementation, roadmaps, and things like that. And then the servant leader, which is one of my personal favorites. I like to believe I'm one of those. Personally, it may say so. Someone who can empower people from behind. Someone who equips really people, teams, and someone with the right skillsets, the right mindsets to do amazing work. And that can also be, by the way, also on the client side. So someone also embeds design thinking, and you intend to design on the client side. And then in the middle, we have the storyteller. So someone who can simply craft, dramatize, and tell amazing stories, whether it's about research findings or this new prototype you've built and tested or about this new amazing business model you've created for your clients, whatever it might be. So seven roles. It seems like a lot for a service designer. Yeah, that's why I like to say that no one really it can excel in all seven roles. For me, also it's a life-learning path your own could become really good at these seven roles. I have relative strengths weaknesses. So I think this is more capturing what a good service design team could be able to cover. So one way you can use these roles as to assess your capabilities as a team, both individually, but also as a team. So where are your relative weaknesses and strengths? And do you need help externally to fill in some of your capability gaps? So should we be talking about a person as a service designer? Is that still a valid thing? Or should we shift our conversation towards service design as a field, service design as a team? What is your take on that? Now, I think that's a good, very good question. I think it depends also what you're trying to tackle here. If you're trying to unpack and solve for complex problems and also you're operating not just in a complex problem space, but also in a complex solution space. Then I think you do need a team of these roles to be able to do that properly. So yes, in that sense, I don't think a service designer can take on all these seven roles. I think based on my experience, we're going to start a signers for a good 15 years now. There are some people like to specialize in one or two of these roles. Some people are pretty good generalists, but still we really haven't met to date in a way someone who really excels in all the seven roles. I think that may be almost impossible. So what would you say to somebody who's struggling a bit with their identity and trying to figure out, am I a service designer? Or at which point is it fair for somebody to say that they are a service designer if they don't embrace or maybe not embrace and compass all these seven roles? What would you say to that? I think that's a great question. And I would say that the first thing, rather than thinking capabilities, is actually thinking about your mindset. Do you have the right mindset to become a service designer? And that goes beyond just being human centered, because I would argue that most designers nowadays are human centered, something unique for service designers alone. But the mindset really of being passionate about services, understanding that we do live in a service and experience economy, you need to be passionate about different type of services, understanding how services can be co-produced and co-delivered over time in different ways, understanding different business models and so on, understanding different type of customer experiences you can stage around these services. So I think you need a passion for services and understanding how services simply work. Then there's another part as well, Mark, is also as a service designer, it's not just looking how the customer is doing or how the customer is interacting with employees, but also looking internally, how do you empower employees to serve and support customers? Sure, yeah. That means you need to have an interest in things like processes, systems, you know, things like that. That's a really, really good and clear, and consistent, not a definition, but explanation. I think being passionate about services is what defines a service designer and you can be a designer without actually being interested in services, which isn't a good or a bad thing, it's just understanding your position in the entire design space, right? It's totally okay. It's totally okay. I just wanna say also, there's some rigor behind these seven roles. I won't go through it now in this particular show, but there are three capabilities underpinning each role, clearly defined, each capability, in order to deliver on it, you need to carry out a series of interconnected activities and of course, you're also using methods and tools. So there is some rigor behind these seven roles, but for this particular show, I'm just giving it a review. So if you wanna learn more about them, just reach out to me. Yeah, that's good. Seven roles, and I think it's a good moment to transition into topic number two because there's, next to a passion for services, there's something else that ties in these seven roles. And that is, I think, the topic of change. Yeah, change is my new paper topic today. And that is also linked to my question here, or your question here. What if service designers got involved in service and change processes? Aren't we already? Are roles of service design in change? Aren't we already involved in change? Well, we are, because we're involved typically in innovation projects, right? Trying to come up with new services, new products, new experiences on behalf of our clients. So yes, we are, and of course, innovation requires change, right? Or innovation drives change at the very least, and change requires innovation. So yes, one way they are very intertwined, but specifically though, I don't always see service designers involved in change processes. Typically, service designers debuts before large-scale implementation. Right or wrong, but that's what typically has happened in our industry for many, many years. So in order to get more involved in implementation in large-scale change, we need to think, what are we good at already? Hence my seven roles. How can we bring those superpowers into change processes? So we can empower people and leaders to not only embrace change, but also drive change. So if we're already part of a change process, whether we are conscious of it or not, what would be, yeah, what can we do to take that to the next stage? Because we're already doing research, we're already doing ideation, we're making prototypes and you say, okay, we did about that. The moment we try to scale up and implement, I really recognize that. So what's the next frontier for us? How do we take this to the next level? Yeah, so that's a great question, of course. The question I was asking was, is that right to unpack that really? So what's the best way of figuring out the role we can play, the roles we can play in change processes? Because typically you have other type of consultants involved there. You have like organizational consultants or management consultants, but not always designers and particularly not service designers. So I'm trying to figure out the role we could play. And one way I felt we need to understand change, what is change? And also the fact that organizations can drive change in different ways. And that's why I came up with this very simple two by two matrix to simply unpack different ways organizations might drive change. Because if you understand that, then you can try to figure out what role can we play or roles can we play? Let's give it a go. What kind of change are we not out there? Is arena a good word for that? Yeah, arena is a good word. So I have a simple two by two matrix which is flashed up on a screen now. And basically there are four types of change. You keep it for simple. This is my way of synthesizing tons of change models and change framework out there, right? So this is a simplification, but powerful, nevertheless. So four fundamentally different ways to drive change. And the first one is called directed change. Simply this top down way of driving change, typically led by leaders or experts. And typically this type of change is supported by this compelling North Star. And basically what you're doing is what the leaders are trying to do is to force employees to take action. So you do it through different types of top-down interventions. You can either force people to take action to adapt to this change and help try to change or you encourage them to do it in different ways. Encourage. So very much a top-down way of driving change. Resistance is typically high, right? Because people have not been involved in this. And the leader may not be right as well. As you can imagine, it will get quite a few skeptics and even rebels, right? A real big change as well. So it's really interesting. And it's quite a common way, by the way, of driving change. I've been working in the US now for a good seven, eight years and I feel most change I've seen upfront is really this type of change, this directed change coming from the top. Sure. So it's interesting to see what type of role we can play, but I'm coming back to that just in a minute. And then the next one is guided change, which is more of a bottom-up approach. So you will still have some kind of north star, overarching north star, but the change is driven by employees, not by the leaders. That's a big difference. So basically the overall direction is really decided by employees. So they're analyzing their own work environment, analyzing what's working, not working. You're using expert facilitators who drive this. They're experts in experiential learning and action research and things like that. And then, so they're simply unpacking the problems, everyday problems that work and also solving for them as well. So much more of a bottom-up approach. Okay. So that's the second one. The third one is self-directed or organic change. Basically is that the leaders provide no direction whatsoever. And the leader's role is rather just to encourage people and teams to bump into each other, so to speak, to interact with each other, to play with each other. And let's see what happens. So you have to take a step back and you're just encouraging really, just encouraging really employees to collaborate. And some people even call it play, to play together. Really interesting. Increasing serendepity. Yeah, serendepity. You just, as a leader, you're simply encouraging these interactions to happen. Okay. And then according to some people, this is the best way for organizations really to survive and thrive in turbulent environments. Okay. So this is based on chaos theory and complexity theory. This is viewing the organization as an adaptive complex organism of sorts. Interesting. Yeah. I have personally not been involved in that type of change. I haven't seen it upfront for real, but I know organizations do change in this way. Have you been involved in that? Have you seen that kind of change? I don't think, to be honest, but that's a hypothesis. I think these kinds of organizations wouldn't need a lot of service designers, probably. Ah, yeah, to that point though, I have actually tried to figure out what role could it play in that. So I'm going back to that for a moment. It's a good point though. Good point. Let's finish the fourth one, because I'm getting curious. And the fourth one, which I call it, Darwinian change. So there might be a North Star sort of guiding innovation and change efforts within organization, hopefully. But the leaders don't really know how to get there. So they want to become this, but don't know how to get there. So this is about encouraging really independent or semi-independent units around the organization to compete for attention, battle for resources, they fight for the best, or they come up with ideas and then they battle for these ideas, right? So it's really survival of the fittest, hence the name Darwinian change. And you know, they could be done in different ways. You can imagine, you're like Skunkworks, innovation sandboxes, you know, and lots of other ways as well, to drive innovation in that kind of competitive way. So this is a very competitive environment. Also super interesting, I've seen this happen for real. So this is really interesting, right? That it's not sort of just one head sort of corporate R&D department or innovation department doing this, but the innovation is happening in pockets all over the organization and they're really battling it out. So survival of the fittest, let the best ideas win and bad ideas within quotation marks fall off the radar. Okay. So let's see if I remembered correctly. Directed, guided, organic, and Darwinian, right? Yeah. Yes, fine. Good memory. Good. So before I talk about the roles of services I'm here, which I'm just gonna practice my storytelling skills here at HomeMine, and I have come up with four metaphors just to bring these four types of change to life. Cool. And then I will quickly move on and promise and talk about the roles we can play. Yeah. So for directed change, the metaphor is like winning hearts and minds and occupied territories. For guided change, it's like wandering into the unknown with sharp buzz by your side. So you are guided, we don't really know where you're headed. Self-directed change is like jazz improv or improvisation, which to be really improvised on stage, you have years of practice, but it's also about, which really allows you to be spontaneous in the moment, which I really like, by the way, that balance, right? You can't just improvise on stage. It's based on years and years of practice. And then there'll be any changes like battle royale, which is this 2000 Japanese dystopian thriller. I love that movie, right? But a more recent metaphor would be Hunger Games, for example, where people are simply battling, right? Then let the best man or woman for that matter win. Do you want to say something? Because I have a question around this, but... Yeah, go ahead, go ahead. Well, my question would be, do you see a natural tendency or preference within Serb designers towards one of these change arenas? Well, I don't think that much choice. That's the thing is that Serb designers are never dictating the change approach, right? That is just from the top. So either you direct it or you let go of it. So they need to simply... Well, anyway, they simply need to understand how do leaders want to drive change here and then adapt accordingly. Okay, yeah, so let me... Good point. Let me rephrase my question. Do we feel more comfortable in one of these areas? Well, we are Serb designers, right? And as human-centered designers, we are trained to be collaborative facilitators, right? We're experts in co-creation. So co-creation can occur in all four types of change. I would argue that indirect change is top-down imposed by the leaders. Co-creation does happen, I've done it myself several times. But it's more of a symbolic gesture doing it because maybe involving like 40 people or 50 people or 100 people, something like that. But it's still quite symbolic. If you're working for an organization with over 200,000 employees across the world, it's quite a symbolic gesture, right? Doing co-creation with the few selected people. So, but this guided change or self-directed change was much more bottom-up. Yes, it's all about co-creation really. The question is though, in that guided change, right? When it's about analyzing your own work life, maybe you could argue that cert signers do play a role, but I would argue they are also expert facilitation needed, experts in things like action research, experiential learning and so on. I'm not saying cert signers cannot learn that, but they are expert facilitators. So I would say working side by side with them to drive systemic system-wide co-creation with an organization. If people are intrigued by this and want to learn more, I guess you also have some material around this. Yes, I've written an article recently that called, Cert Sign to the Rescue, The Critical Role, Cert Signers Can Play Organizational Change. So a great issue, by the way, because the whole issue is about change, about change management. And there's some really interesting articles in there. I happen to be also the guest editor of this particular issue. So I can definitely vouch for the quality, I must say, some great articles there. So I do recommend you check it out. And I just want to, until that note, if we can move on, just wanted to quickly talk about how Cert Sign can play a role in these four different types of change. Yeah, okay. That's okay, Mark. We're going to do an extended version of this episode. So let's go for it. Yeah, let's go for it, Mark. I'm going to talk to you. Let's go, let's do it, Mark. So direct to change, right? The role of Cert Sign really is about helping leaders make the case for change. That's what we do. And I do it all the time on my projects. So you can do that through buying, coming up with those compelling North stars that people can rally around, but coming up with these stories, right? That people can get inspired by by creating service concepts. So future services, future products and so on. And also helping create the value cases and business cases, among many other things. So we do play a big role there, right? But that said, we're not really telling the leaders what change is. That's been dictated to us, but it can help the leaders bring it to life. Yeah, and that's what you mentioned with winning hearts and minds. Yes, yes. Okay, yeah. And you will have to realize as a Cert Signer that you have a hostile audience. Doesn't matter how much cooperation you do, right? Resistance will be high. It's interesting. We need to come up with ways to, to mitigate those barriers down, right, to, you know. Anyway, guided change is more about bottom-up innovation, right? And I mentioned this before that, of course, it played a big role by co-creating, right? But by encouraging co-creation across organization. So, you know, systemic, systematic co-creation, organization-wide. At a scale that we're probably not used to. So imagine doing this bottom-up organization with 100,000 employees, 200,000 employees. This is a scale we're not used to. But if you want to do it properly, that's what it takes. This is not symbolic co-creation. This is genuine co-creation, true bottom-up. This is like crowdsourcing almost like internally, right? In the best possible sense of the word. But then the self-directed change is organic thing. I think the best thing we can do really is actually get out of the way, let people get on with it. But we can help leaders create the conditions for change and creativity and co-creation. We can create how-to guidance. We can set up the rules of engagement, right? So how people can collaborate better together, things like that. So we can create the conditions to make it happen, but then actually get out of the way. So there's a role we can play, not super active, but more creating the conditions. And then there will be a change. This is like viewing innovation as a game, innovation-wide game, really, of innovation. So imagine that we can help design the rules for this. We can set the tone for it. We can create innovation playbooks. We can help leaders determine how do you measure performance, how do you assess which ideas are better than other ideas, and so on. So we can help leaders in that sense to drive innovation in this decentralized way. What I like about the point that you're making here is that you sort of have deconstructed service design into, like we said, the different roles, the different capabilities and skills, and have put it into different change arenas and use those different skills in different ways. And the reason why I like that is it gets away from the too simplistic notion of service design being about creating journey maps and using that. It's not a caveat, but the only catch here is that all this change is related to some kind of a service organization which is basically every organization these days, right? Yeah, there might be that caveat, so to speak, but that said, if you listen to Vorgul and Lush and so on, and other thinkers, other academics, all organizations are service organizations. This doesn't matter if you, I guess Vorgul actually, my most recent project was this global, international automaker, right? In theory, they're making cars. No, no. No, they're service organizations, especially moving into the future, that's all about mobility, right? Which is, of course, a gigantic service. And so they're changing their mindset as well internally. Just an interesting side note, but basically, we believe in the likes of Vorgul and Lush, all companies are service companies. I fully agree. And we've got one more topic that I'd love to cover with you in this episode. So let's do it because it's a natural transition as people will experience, because this is about employee experience. Yes, so let's see if I can find a good question here. So let's put simply put this one, why employee experience? This is a new arena really for service design. It's not really new because, as I said before, in the beginning, we do look at what it takes internally, right, to stay fed an amazing experience. So it's not new, but it's been focused, a renewed focus on employee experience. We have, of course, a bit historically, always been very good at understanding the entrant employee, sorry, the entrant customer experience, trying to say. So this is just sort of redirect that focus to the employees, based, of course, on the premise that how can we empower employees with better data, better insights, better tools, better services, better platforms, so they can do their job properly. So they can serve and support customers so much better than today. What is driving this focus towards employee experience? I think there are several drivers. I think one big driver would be the need for organization, the perceived need for organizations to be much more agile. I'm not talking about those, you know, scrum and software development, but more the need for organizations to be fast, nimble, adaptable, flexible. And that means, among many other things, means restructuring rights internally. It's about much more of a team-based collaborative model. It's about pushing down decision-making down to lowest level possible. So in other words, it's all about empowering employees and teams, and that fits very nicely to, that means, in other words, a leader's field is the time to rethink of the employee experience. That's one reason, but lots of other reasons. Another reason, just among many, is of course the need to attract and retain talent today. Who knows, this might change now after this pandemic. But that said, at least up to now, it's been a real battle for talents. And when companies are moving much more into service mindset, which is typically empowered by technology and so on, they're competing for the same talent. They're competing for this talent with Silicon Valley companies and so on. So they need to simply rethink the employee experience. How do we attract and retain talent? One more question that just popped up in my mind is, I think a lot of service designers deeply want to create a better employee experience and to involve employees. In the projects that I've been involved with, there usually wasn't a lot of, there weren't a lot of resources to actually do that. It was a lot focused on the customer experience because that's where the robber meets the road or something like that. So who would be the clients that actually are interested in improving the employee experience? And yeah, that's, yeah. That's a great question. Yeah, I think it's, you know, service line firms have traditionally worked a lot with CMOs. Maybe also CIOs and CTOs and the like. Nowadays, of course, you do find CXOs and CBOs, you know, whatever. But I would argue that if you really want to work with employee experiences, you need to build strong relationships with CHRO. So basically working with the HR function internally. Those are typically, those are in charge, so to speak, of talent management, employee experience and so on. They're pretty old fashioned though, generally speaking, right? While some parts of organization has typically jumped on the bandwagon, the design thinking, human center design bandwagon, HR is probably one of the last corporate functions to do that, think that way. So it's a bit of a challenge for service signers, but very interesting type of challenges. How can you make HRs a function or more agile? How can you help HRs a function be much more human centered and employee centric in the ways of thinking and doing? How can a, what's the role of HR to really empower employees? And so on and so on. So it's really an important challenge. Yeah, it's basically seeing HR as an internal service or a set of internal services, right? Yeah, totally. So a sudden HR becomes a service provider rather than just thinking, not just, but just thinking talent pools, you know, policies, procedures and things like that, right? This is not just about, you know, seeking maternity leave or, you know, checking your benefits and things like that and, you know, choosing your health plans which is a big deal here in the US. This is so much beyond that, right? It's really as I've mentioned before, but how do you empower employees? And do you have an example of how you actually do that? How do you, maybe a project that you worked on? Sure. So I've worked, I've been involved quite recently with three really good projects, just an overview and then I can take one of them and just quickly show you how you did it. One was for global leader in retail and wholesale pharmacy. It was, they were in a midst of going agile as an organization, want to be much more customer obsessed their words and much more innovative. So basically our role as a service line team was to help HR figure out what type of services could they offer and deliver internally to make employees more agile, more innovative, more customer obsessed. And we also took it to the next level, not just employees at large, but also how can they help innovation teams become more agile, you know, innovation, focused and customer obsessed. So it's really interesting, we come up with like 30 service as a fully fledged service concepts. This is a big, big shift in their mindset. Also become this internal service provider. Another project was for healthcare, one of the largest healthcare providers in the US, which I can mention which one, but this is all highly confidential. And they were battling with, just like many other healthcare providers for that matter, but battling with things like, you know, people, clinicians feel stressed, demotivated, disengaged at work and so on, but don't feel they have access to the right tools and data to serve patients. Quite a big problem, in other words, which means that quite high turnover and help industry and even burnouts and so on, which is terrible. So we reframed that project quite quickly and talked about how to bring joy back into care and also help clinicians and care teams operate top of the license. So while there was a productivity element to it, how can we empower teams, care teams to be more productive, right? And spend more time on value added activities and actually help patients get better rather than spending on admin and other things. A big, big part of it was really how do we increase employee engagement? How do you increase workplace happiness? How to get people more engaged? So we came up with 25 comprehensive services. Half of them were really about workplace happiness and engagement. Another half were more about team productivity, turning teams into high-performing teams. And the third one was, for that multinational automaker I mentioned, how can, what's the role of HR? How can HR resolve pain points in the end-to-end employee experience? How can they elevate moments that matter? And how can they help make organizations become more agile over time? Once again, we came up with a number of service concepts to help them do it. All based, of course, all three projects, all based on doing research, just like in any other customer experience project, but the research is more directed internally. So you're talking with different types of employees in different parts of the organization. And it's a project that's global, like I talked about the automaker, and you're doing this across the world as well. I can't imagine that you took a lot of learnings out of these projects, employee experience. For the sake of time, if you, are there one or two maybe key, learnings that you'd like to highlight? Sure. So first of all, when you work on employee experience projects, you need to understand the overarching organizational quest. What do they want to achieve? Is it about productivity, right? They've been in those projects as well. They simply need to cut costs. They need to adapt appropriately, right? And it's all about how you make employees more productive and more high-performing. But more often than not, nowadays I feel organizational quest is not really about productivity. It's actually about being more agile, as I mentioned before. And that's super, super interesting for social science to be involved in this type of project. Another one, of course, not a takeaway is that change is typically top-down, at least in the US, or these global organizations with American headquarters. It's not just top-down, but it's also very US-centric. So while organization is typically very global, it's still very much a US-centric mindset, which we need, of course, to fight against, so to speak, or, you know. So try to make sure we are including people from all over the world, not just, you can't just come up with solutions in the US and impose them on the rest of the world. That's a very US-centric mindset. Another thing, FL, is striking that balance between thinking big, thinking holistically, but also zooming in on what matters and one way to make sure you're focusing on the right things is identifying those moments that matter in the end-to-end employee experience. So typically you go all the way from hire to retire, keep it simple, but that's a pretty long journey that can stand over several years. So identifying really moments that matter in that end-to-end employee experience and using that to prioritize your research and design efforts. Another one I would say is, and that's a really cool thing why we should get so involved in change, is that we're literally empowering employees. To come up with the right solutions, we're empowering employees with much better data, much better insights, much more appropriate tools, the right services, the right systems and so on. So we're driving change by empowering employees. Compare that to other type of consultants like organizational consultants or change experts that typically recommend things like more training or more internal comms. And I would argue that's fine, but not enough. We're literally empowering employees. Big difference, we're not just informing them or communicating with them, we're actually empowering them. So that's really the power we bring to the table being a service designer in change processes. And then another final one that I think is so interesting while what makes employee experience projects so challenging but also so interesting is the fact that we have to deal with tensions and paradoxes all the time. As I mentioned before, like one tension between global versus local or US-centric mindset versus a global mindset. Tension between focusing on the now and focusing on the far, focusing on the future. Another tension could be between standardized solutions, your streamlining things versus personalizing solutions for individual employees or inclusion, exclusion and so on and so on. It's really interesting. And if it's something we recommend by the way that just try to highlight these tensions in your research and make them visible to your clients part of the way of driving change. I think you mentioned in our chats before this call is that you see employee experience as a new frontier for service design. Yes, it is at this scale. Yes, it's always been involved before, right? Especially around the new type of service or a new type of digital product but this is at a scale I haven't done before. I must say that's one of the advantages of me joining Fjord that you can teach an old dog new tricks. So for me, this was actually opening up a new world for me doing at this scale. That said, of course other design firms are also doing this but they're sometimes calling it organizational design which is interesting. It's not always calling it service design but organizational design. Just be a bit cautious of that because it implies that only strategists can do it which is totally not the right way to do it, right? You still need a really well-balanced service design team with all the different roles we've talked about before to really carry out these change. So be important partner in these change processes. You can't just put a bunch of strategy consultants and think that they can do as well as a really well balanced fully-fledged service design team. That's a really nice plea for our field. Robert, we've discussed a lot and you've shared a lot and there is much more in the show notes if people wanna dig in but I can also imagine that you'll have a question that's on your mind that you'd like to challenge us with. Yes, I would love to get in touch with the broader service design committee around the world. And I would love their help to based on where you sit in the world, the type of projects you're working on, what is the role of service design and change? So I'll be really eager to collect those stories from around the world. How service design is actually empowering people and teams and leaders and so on to drive change. And if you read my article, it is the first hypothesis. It's the first version of my thinking. I would love to pressure test my thinking with these real-life examples to see if I can involve my thinking, I could even better and sharper over time. Just like any design process. So I found my article, but it is the first hypothesis and really want people to pressure test it and come up with their own examples and help me just make this model much better. Yeah, so it's again, it's really interesting. This helps to articulate and understand where we are, which role we play and then seeing if we actually have real-life examples in cases that span beyond your own experience. So please leave a comment down below. If people want to continue this conversation outside of this episode, what's the best way to get in touch with you? I think the easiest way is LinkedIn. Hook me up on LinkedIn, I'm really happy to strike up dialogues with people around this. Cool. We'll make sure to include all the relevant links. Like I said, this was an extended episode and I hope it was worth it for the people listening. Thanks so much for sharing, Robert. It was really interesting to get a peek inside what's going on in your head at this moment. Yeah, I just wanted to say also, thank you to you, Mark, right? I think you're doing such a great job. I love this format. You're really spreading the gospel as a person around the world. That's fantastic. So I do appreciate that. It's all for the community. It is indeed. Thanks. So what's your biggest takeaway from this interview with Robert? Leave a comment down below. Let me know and let's continue the conversation over there. If you enjoyed this episode, there's one thing you can do. Please grab the link and share it with somebody who might find this interesting as well because that way you'll help to grow the service design show community. And that helps me to invite more interesting guests like Robert here on the show for you. If you wanna continue and get inspired about service design, check out this episode because we're going to continue over there. Thanks for watching and I'll see you over here.