 In this episode you'll learn how you can break free from those organizational silos and unleash the full potential of design. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hello, this is Naomi Stanford. This is episode 141 of the service design show. Hi, I'm Mark Fontijn and welcome back to the service design show. On this show we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are those hidden things that make the difference between success and failure all to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people and business? Our guest in this episode is Naomi Stanford. She's a recognized authority in the field of organization design. She's published eight books on this topic and dozens of articles. A major challenge that many service design professionals face is that the existing organizational structure doesn't align well with the work that is required to design great services. It's hard to design beyond the boundaries of departments when you're directly reporting to the IT or sales director. This situation also limits the opportunities for collaboration with other designers who are spread out across the organization. And all this means that the organization and its customers aren't benefiting from the full potential of design. So in this episode Naomi and I explore what you can do to still make progress even when you're faced with this suboptimal organizational structure. Our conversation takes us to discuss the role of leadership and heritage. We look into the power of bottom up movements and organizational rebels and of course which lessons we can take on this topic from gardening. There's a lot in this conversation and I hope that you'll enjoy it as much as I did. If you want to grow as a service design professional and enjoy exploring topics like this make sure you subscribe to the channel and click that bell icon so you won't miss any future episodes. Now like I said there's a lot in this episode so make sure you sit back relax and enjoy the conversation with Naomi Stanford. Welcome to the show Naomi. Thank you. It's great to be here. It's nice to be on the show. Awesome to have you on. We're going to talk about a topic which is I think super interesting. It hasn't been covered on the show a lot and I think I know why but before we give too much away let's first get to know you a little bit better. You don't have a typical service design background but maybe you can share a little bit about briefly your background and what you do these days. Oh yes no I don't have a service design background in the sense I think you're talking about it. I do have a background in what's called organization design which I've been working in for about 25 years now which is basically thinking about organizations as a whole system and then working out how elements of the system can work together more effectively to create the delivery of the strategy. Now before that I originally trained to be a teacher and then I worked for multinational corporations for governments and so on in various other aspects of organizational sort of theory development learning and growing etc. So I've always been in that field of what are organizations doing why are they doing it how can they do it better and so it meshes a variety of disciplines but mine is predominantly around the harder elements of an organizational enterprise. Super interesting I think there's so much overlap between your work and what's happening inside service design and somehow I don't see that overlap being exploited yet or utilized to the full potential so let's hope this episode contributes a little bit to that. You shared that you've been doing this for 25 years you've written a lot of books in the meantime right? Yeah just over the course of the years I think the first one came out in 2010 I've just finished the eighth book and that's being published on the 13th of January and it's called organization it's called designing organizations quiet matters and ways to do it well and it's it's an interesting title because I had a conversation with the publisher who wanted to call it designing organizations we both agreed on that bit but the publisher wanted to put and ways how to do it well and I said it's not a how-to book there are multiple ways of designing organizations we don't want to prescription and I think that's where the interplay and the interdependence with other disciplines in the design field start to come into play there are ways of doing things there isn't a specific how to design an organization yeah that's that's going that there's a lot to impact there so we'll we'll dig into that in a second Naomi I'm not sure if you are familiar with this but we have a 60 second question rapid fire round where I ask you five questions and your goal is to answer them as quickly as possible and that way we'll get to know you even better are you ready yes but I'm always hopeless at these sorts of things just the first thing that comes to your mind and the first question I have for you is what's always in your fridge in my fridge well usually hummus yogurt and I currently soya milk I am a vegetarian all right now you've written a lot of books but I'm curious which books are you reading at this moment if any well that's a very good question because I'm reading the every by Dave Eggers which is fascinating on I don't know if you've read the circle by him or seen the film it's basically a social philosophy what have you commentary on Amazon on the major tech companies Amazon Google thing but as an incredibly gripping novel cool yeah I'm already excited about that one I'll add the link in the show notes down below you mentioned that you were trained as a teacher but I'm curious what was your very first job my very first job well it was babysitting neighbors children when I was 14 and then I had a Saturday job in a chemist as a sales assistant when I was sort of 15 I think 15 was the earliest you could work in a shop in those days and then for about three years I worked in a chain store on Saturdays while I was still at high school called Woolworths which you may know and in old UK money got seven and six a day which is less than one euro in current denomination times change yeah um what did you want to become when you were a kid well that's a good question I don't know remember what I ever wanted to become but I remember being very struck by my daughter who wanted to become a circus clown and I thought that was that's was quite a good thing to want to be when you're a child to be a circus clown I don't actually remember what I wanted to be okay fair enough and the final question although you wouldn't typically say that you have a service design background but you are familiar with service design and I think quite well do you remember the very first time you heard about the term or got in touch with it yeah that's another good question yeah I do because I got involved in a large government department on a massive business transformation project and and I was working there for the very first time with an entire team of service designers and UX experience and you know that whole cadre of people who I knew about but had never worked with side by side essentially and that was that was about maybe eight years or nine years ago now and that's that's when I got that linkage between the different forms of design awesome so good to know that you're familiar definitely very familiar with the vocabulary now we might dig into organization design today but that's actually not the topic that we're going to unravel we're going to discuss what you suggested and got me really excited is the siloed nature of design right yes it is very siloed then in fact as I was getting ready for this this morning I I began to think about it you know in a slightly different context what what I've come across in organizations is a lot of people have the word design in their job titles so you can think of a whole range of them graphic designers UX experience designers service designers enterprise designers or enterprise architects and they come in sort of all short sorts of backgrounds and and disciplines design experience people what's interesting in an organizational sense is they're often in different reporting lines so some will report into it and or digital some will report into strategy some will report into marketing and communications some will report into PR if they're communications designers etc or brand designers you know logos and what have you and so the nature of organizational charts or structures essentially puts these designers into silos yet when you look at the methodologies they're they're all very similar in the not necessarily language but their concepts of know who the customer is work out what they want test and prototype all that sort of thing so just holding that in your head for a second in the alongside this I'm now doing a horticulture course garden design and plants and one of the things that the way they classify plants is through the genus which is the larger family and then the species and then so I was thinking about actually of a future blog of supposing we thought of instead of saying service designers organization designers we began with designer or design as the genus and then the species underneath that would be designer service designer customer experience designer organization designer something and so at the higher level you've got that much closer interplay and then in organizational terms if you then your organization chart was organized around the genus and not the species then you could have a very different view of how design operated throughout the organization yeah sounds really fascinating and I can follow your way of thinking I'm thinking with the analogy to management so management is an overarching discipline and then you have like these sub divisions of product management and I'm not too familiar with manage but yeah I see well please comment on that okay I don't think that management is a discipline an overarching discipline okay um and that's been one of my frustrations through all my years in organization and I think it's a very great pity because um in order to progress in most organizations you go say you are a service designer to to get up the promotion ladder you then become a manager of service designers now then we've lost your technical expertise as a service designer and you may be hopeless at management but it's only to get the promotion and for years and years and I have succeeded in a couple of organizations I've argued that management could be its own discipline as you say but not an overarching one and then you have a group of professional managers and then you have a group of people who progress through through technical disciplines whatever it is on the same level of organizational status value parity pay grade etc as the people designated managers and you do see threads of that in but particularly the legal profession because their legal practices certainly in the UK are organized by legal discipline civil rights or whatever and then they employ professional managers to manage the practice it's exactly the same with medical practices in the UK the gps don't necessarily become managers of other gps they carry up on their medical discipline and if more organizations could drop the idea that promotion is through a manager route we'd have I think much higher career satisfaction because people would be able to maintain their technical expertise and we'd have much better managers because people who wanted a promotion but weren't good at management wouldn't be foisted into that role now I'm going to move away from all the questions that I have air in front of me because there's already so many things that are coming up spontaneously in my mind so one of the um yeah you mentioned that it would be great if uh design was the genesis uh that's how you call it the genus so um isn't like what I'm seeing with organizations is that they they are organized the way they are because they strive to achieve a certain outcome and that is to do things cheaper faster more efficient and uh then silos and sort of uh division of labor becomes very interesting while design is there to solve in in essence different types of challenges now do you also recognize that and if so um how do we reconcile these two things you ask great questions the um what what I think there's a long-standing idea that organizations that a chart represents an organization's functionality so it's an organization chart you can actually imagine the hierarchy that is fundamentally not correct because if you start to think about how work gets done it isn't by every day you're looking at the chart saying oh this is just been then you once you've joined an organization you don't really look at the chart again except to maybe find out someone's job title or something but so there's a a disability in organizations to think we're not interested in how people are structured into hierarchies when we're redesigning or designing just yet we need to look at that how the work actually flows through the organization and and you can think about it in all sorts of ways but that was where I got interested in service design because that's much more about what is the work of the service what service are we trying to offer end to end and then you start thinking the service we want to offer end to end goes like this so you've got it all laid out now where do we need people to do the activities that contribute to the work or or do we need people could it be automated or could it be outsourced or whatever so you're looking at the work to deliver the service before you ever start to think about the hierarchy of organizing them and then then you can start to get a much better linkage of do these or essentially the chart is the last thing that comes out of an organization design not the first thing you think of but the challenge we have here and I would totally again agree with you the challenge we have here is that organizations have heritage at least most of them right so and I think that that is one of the the critical issues which I think about a lot because in organizational theory there's well in manage or systems theory as a theory of path dependence you can only deviate from the path of your heritage by a certain amount so so amazon could never totally convert to a bricks and mortar only company because it's already been set up as an online company and it's very interesting that they're making experiments into bricks and mortar but I don't know how successful that they'll be because they haven't got that heritage whereas something like Mark's and Spencer which is a originally a bricks and mortar company is having a huge difficulty becoming an online company because its path is bricks and mortar and so you that concept of heritage I think is really important and people don't think about it enough because if you think in your own life of what are you inheriting from your grandparents or something and you can think of physical things but also emotional attributes and what have you now some of them you have to keep like your emotional attitudes you can try and change but it's difficult but you don't have to keep the wardrobe that they bequeathed you in their will you can get rid of it and we we don't sufficiently think about that heritage in order to consciously decide what we want to keep and what we don't want to keep in an organisation going forward and and although that sounds like a time intensive thing to do it might give more flexibility in thinking well why are we doing it like this why why don't we abandon some of our heritage do we have to keep doing it and I did write a blog ages ago which is it was very fun to write called horse holding and and that's worth looking at because it's about that heritage because it's a it's an interesting short story but basically people firing a cannon in a war before they fired the cannon they stood to attention like this and someone said why are you standing to attention and they said well we've always done that and so the questioner said well let me go and find out why you do that because it seems completely unnecessary and it turned out that they were standing to attention because years before the sort of mechanical the sort of electrical version of cannon they had to hold a horse like this still so the horse wouldn't jump off that have been pulling the cannon to the right place and now the horse is gone and still that and the behavior is still there yeah yeah there are fascinating experiments around that so yeah heritage let's let's try to cycle back to the question like organizations are organized in a certain way and this means that service design is organized around species so that the UX designer the service designer the org designer um maybe we haven't answered the question yet or explore the question so what like if if they've been doing it for ages like this organizing organizing themselves in this way maybe it works or it doesn't like where's what's the consequence for design of being organized in this way well yeah that it does work up to a point I don't think it maximizes the possible benefits and value to anyone to the organization to the individuals etc and is also very confusing to employees and I've seen that and potentially customers but they don't see the back end working so much but I've seen it and it reflects in the in the vocabulary in the language of the different species essentially so you may be talking about exactly the same type of thing I remember when I first came across product designers and service designers I couldn't understand the difference between a product and a service in the way that they were talking about it and the fact you're talking about essentially it's not necessarily exactly the same thing but there isn't a common language to describe what it is you're doing that each species understands then you haven't got something across the whole organization that is could is replicable and that replicability is is quite important to maximize efficiency the sort of plug and play units if you've designed your plug and play unit in a slightly different language it doesn't necessarily plug and play into someone else's language and I think a lot I don't know how much of it because I haven't examined it in a great deal is about linguistic protocols and how much of it is is actually necessary to differentiate the types of work that the different designers do now yeah and to maybe link to that is I'm thinking you mentioned like sometimes design is put into the line of marketing or communication or HR or whatever there are different incentives in those areas and so next to having a different language there's a different incentive towards a different kind of output which I can assume also doesn't contribute to collaboration and efficiency across the board I think that's right and and I was thinking about you know some specific examples on that and I did some very interesting work on on in fact a service design it was actually began with with customer experience it was on on prisoners who moved from going to being apprehended by the police to being released from jail how many government departments are involved in that journey and and where are they those department personnel located in their organizations and that journey across a very large number in the in the sort of around 40 different government departments with different IT systems with different modes of categorizing a specific customer with different ways of incentivizing the employees who worked on that prisoner customer journey etc and and each one and you can see things coming into play like parts of it were outsourced the logos were different on uniform right the way through it was very very difficult to see a clear journey for that person that was of benefit to well the person the prisoner but also all the organizations involved in that journey because it was desperately frustrating for people to try and find who they were looking for in a system that didn't accommodate that yeah there's friction everywhere correct and and inefficiency and we as customers we experience this daily like this is very nearby we experience this like by being a customer of a bank of any that's exactly right yeah I collect those sorts of experiences and there are plenty yeah our work isn't done yet for a long time so like if if most organizations aren't organized in the way around basically a service or journey and they are still organized around in my mindset a factory line an assembly line which is like that transition seems to be like a very large leap they need to make are there and I'm sure there are ways to to progress to make smaller steps to to transition into this without having to ask for that major leap right away well yes um I think there are a number of mistakes that people make that they're right because most people recognize that they need to make a major leap but then they think oh we'll make a major leap and we'll copy Spotify but that is absolutely not possible going back to your heritage point you can't just pick up something and and do it there's there's understandably at some level too little reflection critical thinking time to think through what we need to change and too much pressure to um do things differently immediately without having the upfront conversations and discussions and reflections on you know what is it that we're looking at how much do we need to change over what time period is it actually feasible you know we don't want to I mean people love jumping on the latest bandwagon which is again it's sort of understandable but frustrating and um your question are there small steps yes yes there are if if we could encourage people to be more reflective less impatient and you can see some very good examples higher the white goods chinese company if you look at their progression from 1985 through to now it's a classic slow progression from a traditional hierarchy pyramidic hierarchy to what they're now calling I think the term is a modular ecosystem of self-managing teams around specific products and services incredibly well done over decades but the when I kept thinking to myself why is this they've had the same chief executive all that time taking it very slowly having a clear view responding carefully and then looking at various other organizations once I noticed that that longevity of CEO the ones who are good at it of making those huge transformational journeys not leaps are the ones who've had very long serving but very imaginative CEOs yeah that's another one I came across the Best Buy guy I think he's called Hugh Jolly who I just noticed yesterday um I hadn't known I know Best Buy but he's just written a book and then Paul Pullman Unilever has taken that organization through there are some very good examples but you'll see that it's a lot of it is down to a CEO who can manage if they need to the the shareholders who get incredibly impatient look at Danone that recent thing um I don't if you know about Danone French Dairy Foods Company the CEO was in on a sustainability journey moving Danone into being net zero whatever the sustainability part they were on the shareholders got impatient and ousted him he wasn't getting enough profitability quickly enough yeah and and um I think like if that's the core issue we could almost throw our hands up in the air and say well there's nothing we can change here like it's up to leadership and to the CEO and we are in a capitalist environment where profit a short-term profit uh rules all so should we just uh accept that this is the situation and wait uh till the right CEO is appointed right sometimes I think that and then I think no don't think that I did write my blog this week it's called the right word on how do we encourage well the word in the blog is a question about the word rebel and there are two interesting organizations um corporate rebels and rebels at work which are asking sort of those questions and there may be others those are two that I know about that but they both use the word rebel and last week I was with a group of leaders or the week before I think um a group of leaders senior leaders and I said if you and they were then you'll see it in the river fact in the log they were sort of frustrated by all these things you're talking about and I said well you are the leaders what what are you going to do and they said are you inciting us to rebellion and and I thought well I'm not really I'm just asking them if they're the leaders and they're frustrated what is their responsibility and what actions are they going to take to relieve their frustration and benefit the organization and I'm still I the blog starts to ask that question and a couple of people have thrown in comments I still don't know the answer to that um but the probably there isn't like an answer in any event but the I think there's a lot of societal pressure and organizations are very good at trying to encourage people to conform to what they think is a good corporate citizen and so as soon as they see someone who's outside of that mold no matter how many times they say we want diversity inclusion and equality there's a massive disconnect you know diversity and inclusion doesn't necessarily include the people you don't want in the organization it's very very interesting um I don't I think there's quite a lot of hope in the smaller seed organizations I'm doing some work currently with tech startups and and how they're setting about things I think there are ways of changing things I don't need to feel utterly despondent the whole time but it is a quite a heavy challenge and what you mentioned there is might might be the thing where we can find the most hope that you have to take into account the heritage of your organization and the type of your organization so if you are a service designer and you are stuck in the IT department and their organization is 70 000 people big don't expect that things will be different next year or in two years or in three years well if you're at a small startup or a family run business you might be able to actually create significant change and change the situation in a much shorter time so I think you mentioned reflection it also also comes down to what do you want as a professional and how patient are you that's exactly right yes it's your patience and again many years ago but I was heavily influenced by it I read a book called The Tempered Radical and it's about how a one person in an organization can make a huge difference if they are very patient and just keep nibbling away at it and don't get spat out by the organization and aren't too vocal from their from their own job and and it takes a certain amount of bravery but one of the examples in the in the book was this was eight years ago so you know be aware of this example there was one black guy who was a recruiter and he was the only black guy at that time in the HR department and he noticed it's a very white organization and he made it his mess his sort of mission as a recruiter to get more people black people into the organization and just by dint of from his job selecting types of people who gave a better mix he managed to show the dive increase the diversity and then people started to notice what he was doing and because of that time by that stage there was a sort of beginning to be a groundswell of we must be more diverse he was able to capitalize on that wave and now he's very senior in you know the diversity and recruitment of different individuals and inclusion and what have you and and so your method of changing the organization and which is picked up in the every which is why this is such an incredibly interesting book the Dave Eggers one I mentioned the bit I'm out now I'm not finished yet is shall I be an internal rebel and try and bring down the organization from the inside or shall I be an external politician and try and bring it down from external forces and because what she's trying to do the prototype main protagonist is bring down this massive tech firm for various reasons which are well explained in the book but that is the kind of dilemma if you want to change things what is your method of doing it and in fact the discussion I was I was reading in the book yesterday was she's talking to a fellow sort of rebel she's very impatient he said shall we just take more time over this and and you've got that wonderful discussion of how you become a rebel in an organization in all as a all as a well-told fiction although my guess is I don't know where Dave Eggers has worked is he has seen this all in day-to-day operation in every lot organization yeah um I want to circle back quickly to you mentioned groundswell and I think that's an interesting term and something that I've also been seeing within organization so if you focus on the people who are trying to change things things from the inside you you see things like people starting a movement like forming bonds slowly but surely creating a groundswell I'm interested in your take on what I what I've seen is that those groundswells reach a certain level that they reach a certain passion people who with the same energy find each other and then they reach a level where the organization starts to the organization starts to pull them back into what is the equilibrium that's the moment I think leadership needs to step in or I'm curious what your experience is with with with those kind of situations yes I completely agree with you and I have a nice little slide written a graphic developed by a woman called a Margaret Hager who runs open law blog and she's trying to change the way the legal profession is designed or open law she writes a blog and and she's got a very compelling case for building a movement as you said and then getting a mandate and you need both you need a combination of mandate and movement and what's in the book that I've just is going to be published in January I've got a small case study of Google and I think also Amazon of and their relationship to union organization in their organizations and in both those cases there's been a movement towards unionization or labor you know collectivity but in both cases they couldn't get the organizational leadership mandate however they then got external legal representation and what have you both organizations are Google has already now got it's not a union but it is a labor collective which management is recognizing and Amazon the case is I think still going through but they're very very close now to getting union recognition from the mandate so they've over time you can get the mandate because leaders do eventually see they may have to change their minds and then if you can get one or two leaders who are supportive and then work with that and that's in the Odeal blog that you mentioned that I'm writing that's one of the pieces I've taken up with we're building a movement we need to get the mandate and in the last the blog three the two leaders who she thinks you'll get the mandate from are mentioned so the question is now I'm writing the fourth blog is does she get the mandate or not well what yeah the question is what happens usually and I think it's not that easy because again if we come back to incentives most leadership doesn't have the incentive to create change most leadership isn't about leadership at all and I'm generalizing here I'm sorry for the leaders or the managers who are leaders but most leaders are managers not leaders and then you come into taking things about courage bravery like you mentioned but it is about finding those right leaders within your organization and one more thing to add to this I think the message I'm getting out of this story is you have to do it like if you're a service designer feeling isolated or feeling siloed the change has to start with you don't wait or don't hope till that CEO with a vision and a longevity within the organization comes in it start it has to start with you I think that's a very powerful message and I completely believe it and that's what I am always urging people to do what are you going to do and you can see it I mean in my street there's a lot of litter and so I'm going out every day with my litter picker and picking it up and and the neighbors are saying oh good for you you're picking up litter and I think well why aren't they picking up litter too them who knows whether the other one's dropping it but but each action does begin with somebody having that will essentially and sometimes it takes courage but sometimes it's just I take responsibility to make a small difference and it can be very small but I also believe that a small difference can have huge unknown implications into the future it's sort of like throwing you know the ripple effect or the butterfly wing or any of those things you don't necessarily see the response immediately and but it does take a the will and be a certain amount of organizational courage because in an organization if you're worried about losing your job if you're worried about what your co-workers will say about you if you're worried that you'll get a poor performance review etc then it's going to be much harder for you and you need to form some form of support group I did write another blogger called Brave Design about how you could actually get in your point about incentives is really well made the right incentives to encourage measured bravery not mad risk taking but the you know sensible bravery that is is challenging and respected and there are forums for it and so on I'm thinking while you're sharing this so if we go back to the situation you're a service designer you're too isolated you see that you need to connect with other design disciplines other disciplines within the organization to work from a service perspective rather than a product perspective and you see the opportunity to I don't know create a community of practice or create bonds one you should do it but two I think you should have the conversation with your direct report which will be a boss manager wherever you're reporting to and have the conversation about where you share I'm thinking about starting this community I think this will benefit the organization would I be appreciated when I do that because coming back to the incentives you want people to recognize that this is the right step for the organization rather than it's something that it's a passion project for you so I think the conversation is is key I think that's a really good point and coaching the conversation in a way that shows the organizational benefits not the benefits to you and one of the one of the successes I had in one of the organizations I was in we at that point employed a lot of external consultants and I felt that the to-do design work they were all using different languages and methodologies and models and all the rest of it and I said I think we need to encourage the consultants to meet even though they were from different organizations you know the big five consulting organization and that met and have the discussion about why are they using different languages would it be beneficial for them to use the same language could they know what each other was doing in the organization without compromising their competitive position because it would we were paying them it would benefit the organization and that meant that met with huge resistance they said you can't get competitor firms in the same room discussing the same topic blah blah blah and I said well we're going to lose a lot of benefit if we don't let me just try it once and we'll see what happened anyway to cut a long story short because that took ages and ages to kind of get the go ahead um we had all the consultants in the room different organizations from the big five consulting companies outlined the problem they all loved the discussion they could immediately see the benefit if they started to work without compromising their competitiveness or giving away any secrets or anything into the same language and methodology and what have you and it would benefit not just them but us as the clients and the upshot of that was that we had written into subsequent service level agreements with these consulting companies that they must use the same language and terminology and methodologies and I think if you can prove which saved a lot of money then and a lot of confusion and what have you I think that if you can prove an organizational benefit you know and all service designers have a kind of giant benefits list or project managers what benefits are we going to realize if you couch that in your I want to start a movement here are the organizational benefits you might well get support the the thing is what you then hit is so long as it doesn't take any time off the job um and that that can also be a bit of a stumbling block but it doesn't need to take time off the job because you can have the conversations kind of within the job it doesn't need to be hugely and initially intensive while you're just sounding things out and particularly now we're all on Slack or Teams or any of these collaborative things and I the the objection of the fact that we that operation needs to keep running that's that's like the classic one and I don't think we'll have enough time to dig into that today but one thing that inspired me while you were sharing the story about the big five is with every step you take to nudge the organization in a different direction I think you should also be thinking about how to embed this into the existing structure so that's something actually sticks if you're gone and I think that's often overseen and I'm curious if you also see the need for that so if we start a movement if we start a community or even a selection all that's quite organic and there's a lot of passion and energy for it but it's also very prone to evaporate and disappear over the next day if it's not captured in some form of organizational structure that is correct and I have seen that happen and I've also seen it not happen and continue and that's where I think there's a good intersect between the informal movement element to sort of informality and then how do you know when to formalize something and you see it that's a completely different context but in startups you know they begin with 10 people all doing everything and then they suddenly when they reach 15 they think oh maybe we need to formalize some of this stuff and that question about when you try and start to formalize it becomes quite important and I think that's one of the things I'm going to pick up in the final episode of the Odeal blog that I'm writing the fourth episode of what is a good point to formalize something that is organic and informal and then how do you formalize it is it through incentives is it through a role is it through a taxonomy is it through policies there are all sorts of possibilities for formalizing something which which have longevity or you know longer than the being invested in the person which is another reason when I'm doing organization design work I have a mantra of design for the role not the person you can't ever assume the person is going to stay you can make a bit of an assumption that the role will persist in some way but even that doesn't always happen so thinking about if you want to keep the movement and what have you going what needs to what part of it needs to keep going is it is it the formal elements or is it the informal get-togethers and what have you and often it's different things you know you need you might need a policy to formalize something and that policy works without the informal elements supporting it then so it depends on the context but I think there are ways of doing it and if I look at myself I wouldn't have the vocabulary or the toolkit or the methods to formalize things those are just things that haven't crossed my mind and I'm sure that there are many resources out there that might be helpful for this to be honest I feel that we are scratching the surface in this conversation and there we we've touched on so many different topics that would deserve their own episode and maybe we'll need to make a sequel for this but now I mean to sort of start wrapping up I'm curious if you had to recommend a few resources for people who want to dig into this topic a little bit more what would be a few that are top of your mind well of course I did recommend my book which is coming out as I said in January but they I wrote a blog called the toolkit of toolkits which is a sort of compendium I think there are 23 toolkits mentioned in it and it depends on what your background is but but what I'm I think is a kind of consistent thing that service designers any person in design field would benefit from is a short course on systems thinking how do you think about an organization as a whole system and what is the value of systems and that is beginning to merge but it's a bit more complex than that is complexity thinking about emergence and so if you've got a grounding in systems thinking and you've got massive curiosity and keep asking questions then you can go quite a long way and also if you don't box yourself in you don't need to think of yourself as a service designer you could think of yourself as a designer and if you just cast your eye down the list of other designers in your organization and meet them for coffee and say what do you design and how do you design it and there's a vast plethora of information around design thinking which sort of expands the field of service design and and thinking of your own specificity which is of your own specific discipline is of immense value so don't lose that but if you see it in a broader landscape you might get more personal benefit and be able to extend your own range a bit. I would totally agree and I've got some ideas around that that I'll be sharing in the coming weeks. Naomi just a final question before we wrap off because I know you have other things to do as well how would you summarize this conversation? That's a good question. Well it's been a very nice reflection for me of some of the aspects of my career which I found intriguing and curious and a very good guidance and thank you for that of some fascinating questions which I agree you know are constantly on the top of my mind and are not immediately solvable with easy answers. I'll take that one. Thank you for coming on thank you for bringing in your perspective your experience over the last years. I wish we could continue like I said maybe we'll try to do a sequel for now again thank you for coming to the service design community hopefully many people will be inspired by this episode and look up some of those resources that you recommended. Okay thanks very much I've really enjoyed it myself. What's your biggest takeaway from this conversation? I'd love to know so make sure you leave a comment down below and if you don't want to miss any future episodes make sure to click that subscribe button. Thanks so much for tuning in to the service design show and I'll see you in the next video.