 In this video, I'll explain why you're doing a big disservice to yourself and your clients if you make them believe that they can do service design projects on their own and what you can do to set the right expectations. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you to do the work that makes you proud by designing and delivering services that have a positive impact on people and business. And in this video, I'll be talking about a question, a really common question that I've been getting from a lot of clients and also from people watching the show. And that is, how do you deal with clients that approach you with a question? Can you learn me how to do service design on my own? Is that even possible? How do you respond to these requests? Of course, there's nothing wrong with the ambition to become skilled in service design. But there is a big misconception that you can hire a consultant or an agency to do a one-off project or to do a three-day service design or design thinking training and after that do it on your own. I see that a lot of service designers fail to set the right expectations about what it is that you will actually be able to learn your client. And the consequence is that once you are gone after the single, the first project, often your client will get stuck because they will run into situations where they won't know what to do. So they won't be able to continue doing your work. And also, if you make them believe that they will be on the same skill level as you are after just a training or a project, then you're really doing yourself at this surface and not really undervaluing your own skills and the amount of practice that you needed to get to this level. Now before we continue, let me know down below in the comments if you ever got the request from a client to learn them how to do service design by running a project with them. Did you ever get that request? And if you did, how did you respond? So with 31 Faults, I've worked on many projects where part of the brief was not only to solve a challenge but also to educate our clients through this project, educate them in service design. So the project, the challenge was actually a case study to show them how service design works. And to be honest, I often found these projects to be really difficult to deliver upon the expectations of the client. And maybe the biggest learning I got out of doing these projects was that we really need to be more deliberate and more skilled at articulating our skills as professionals because service design from the outside looks a lot of fun and juggling post-its around how hard can it be and doing interviews, doing user research is just talking to people, right? We can do that. How hard can that be? So from the outside, service design looks really easy but as we all know, it's much harder than it looks. And I think we really need to be much more deliberate and much better at articulating what it is that experienced service design professional is able to bring to the table compared to somebody who has just gone through a training or has just done one project. At some point, I started to explain what it means to be a professional service designer by comparing it, for instance, to a plumber. So I talked to my clients about if they think they can become a plumber with just two days of training. So yeah, with two days of training, you'll probably be able to fix your leaking sink if you've got the basic tools and the basic skills if somebody explained that to you. You'll probably be able to fix that sink. But the thing is, as soon as a new challenge arises where the conditions are different, so for instance, your sink isn't made out of plastic but the piping is made out of copper and that hasn't been in your training. You'll really quickly realize why you're not a professional plumber. And this might sound a little bit funny, but there are a lot of examples you can use to actually express the difference between somebody who's able to understand what it is, the basic concepts, and a pro, like the fact that we can probably all read and write doesn't make us best-selling authors. And the fact that we can somewhat cook doesn't make us a Michelin star chef. And for me, the same is true for service design. So to further explain the professional service design, I made an overview some years ago to show a client the difference or how he can spot the difference between a professional and an amateur service designer. And I did this by looking at the different stages in the service design process and naming the differences between a pro and an amateur. So for instance, in the research phase, a pro will deliver you actionable insights and an amateur, when he does research, will probably come back with just facts without context. And I did this for all the stages in the design process and showed this to the client and this really helped to build the appreciation of the true practice of service design. So let me know in the comments if you're interested to see more of this overview. Maybe I'll make a separate video on that. Now having said this, I also want to emphasize that it's so important to look beyond the skills of a service designer if you truly want to adopt and learn service design as an organization because the skills are just a part of it. If you're still organized in departments as an organization rather than multidisciplinary teams, you'll still have a challenge actually doing service design work. So learning service design isn't just about the skills. It's also about how you're organized. It's also about the culture. It's also about the mindset. So it's really important that we also express this and explain this to our clients. So coming back to the question, do I think organizations can learn service design? Well, if they want to learn it in order to save money by not having to hire consultancies and agencies, well, probably not. If they want to learn service design because it helps them to achieve a long-term ambition, well, when enough time and patience, their answer is probably yes. So these days when I get the question about can you learn our service design, my answer is often I can learn you a lot of things. I can learn you how to... I can learn you to understand the vocabulary of service design. I can learn you how to participate, how to optimally participate in the design process. I can learn you how to identify people with the right skills. I can even learn you how to craft the optimal service design brief. But if your goal is to design and deliver great services that your customers value, you will always need really experienced professionals. You will always need experts. And it doesn't matter if they come from an external agency or if you have them in-house. But having experienced professionals, you won't, you just need that. So what do you think? Are organizations able to learn service design in order to do it on their own? And if you know some good examples, please share them down below in the comments. And if you got inspired by this video and know somebody who might benefit from what we've just discussed, don't forget to share it with them. And finally, if you want to learn how to explain service design to your clients, don't forget to check out the free course that I've got over here. Thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.