 I think you shouldn't be reading service design books. What skills do great service designers possess? It's a question that I've asked to over 50 guests on the service design show. None of them said that you need to learn how to create stakeholder maps, personas, or service blueprints. If you'd like to know which skills you need to develop to become a better service designer, stay tuned because that's what this episode is all about. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. The show that helps you to design services that have a positive impact on people and business. One of the reasons that I started the show is that I want to help service designers to live up to the full potential. To be able to do that, you need to be great at what you do. A challenge that a lot of service designers face is the question if they should go deep or broad with regards to the skills. Due to the holistic nature of service design, it sometimes feels that you literally need to know everything. It's easy to get overwhelmed and there's just so much info out there that you could literally spend all day studying and learning. But if you spend your scarce time learning new skills, it will be comforting to know that you're learning the things that really matter and will make you a better service designer in the long run. And like I said in the beginning, if you're just reading books on service design, you're going to miss out on some really key skills. Over the years, I've found that there are at least five skills that separate the good from the great service designers. And these five universal skills transcend service design in many ways. And you really need to look beyond service design to actually become a better service designer. Now before I continue and talk about these skills, I'm really curious what do you see as the key skills for a service designer? Share your perspective down below in the comment and let's see what you all think. I read all the comments and try to reply to as many people as I can, so every comment is really appreciated. And if this is your first time here on this channel and you'd like to see more videos that help you to design great services with more ease, don't forget to subscribe and click that bell icon so you'll be notified when new videos come out. I've seen a dozen of design portfolios and a lot of them tend to overemphasize skills that are not that important and forget to highlight qualities that really matter. Because let's be honest, eventually everybody can make a pretty decent customer journey map. That's not what's going to define you as a designer. So what are these key skills? Well, the first skill is communication. Being a great communicator is a cornerstone in service design to actually get things done. Just think about how often you interact with coworkers, with users, with employees and of course with clients during a project. And being able to get a message across in a fast and appealing way really makes all the difference. There are many ways you can actually improve your communication skills. But I'd say a good starting point for instance is to study the art of storytelling. Another key skill in service design is facilitation. And probably the first word you think about when you hear facilitation is workshops. Yes, workshops are an important part of our work but it doesn't stop there. For me, facilitation is all about being able to handle and use group dynamics to get a team to achieve the best possible outcome in as little time as possible. What I know about facilitation today, I mostly learned through the work of David Sibbet. You can check the show notes for some links. But as with all the skills that we're discussing here and it's especially true for facilitation, it's a skill that you only truly master by practicing it. A lot. A skill that is somewhat related to facilitation is improvisation. The people who know me know that I'm the type that expects the best but always prepares for the worst. I tend to put a lot of time and effort in preparing myself for the things to come. Meetings, workshops, presentations, you know what I'm talking about. And in the early days of my career I reached a point where this planning and preparation was really holding me back. Because during those meetings, workshops and presentations I wasn't really in the moment. I was often disconnected with the situation and context. This led to suboptimal results where we managed to get through the plan but didn't get the best possible outcome. For me, improvisation is all about knowing and feeling when you have to let go of your initial plan and act accordingly to what the moment and context needs. And this skill is in all of us. Some of us just need to rediscover it and learn to trust it again. I know I did. In hindsight what really helped me to develop the skills was that I took some improv theater classes. At that time I took the classes because I enjoyed having fun. Only later to discover that the techniques and skills that I acquired or rediscovered there and the confidence to improvise was extremely useful beyond the stage of a theater. Okay, let's move on to the next skill that I think every service designer needs to master. And that is empathizing. I hope that this one doesn't surprise you. I guess it's true that some people have more empathy by nature than others. But this doesn't mean that it's not a skill that you can't actively develop. My background as a software engineer didn't require for a lot of empathy. Again, this is a skill that I only came to value later on in my career. And I had to work really hard to develop this skill but I enjoyed every step of the process. Because learning to see and understand the world from the perspective of someone else and being able to deeply connect with them is a skill that yields great results way beyond your professional life. To be honest, I'm not quite sure how I actually developed my empathizing skills. I think it comes down to learning how to become a more active listener, being patient and deferring judgment. The final skill that I want to address is curiousness. This might sound like a strange skill but bear with me for a moment. So what curiosity is all about for me is enjoying exploration and getting pleasure out of finding interest in questions. You might have heard that a great service designer needs to have a beginner's mind. I'd like to go one step further and say that a great service designer needs to prepare for surprise to happen. Being curious is not a passive skill. It's an extremely active one. Of course, people that are highly curious will benefit from it in their research stages of service design. But as with all the other skills we've discussed so far, it's also something that you'll benefit from in all the other aspects of service design as well. Now, you might wonder, how do I become more curious? Well, as Steve Portagall mentioned in his recent appearance on the service design show, a great way to develop your own curiosity is to practice noticing. Becoming a great service designer isn't just about learning the tools and methods. It's also, and I'd say it's much more about developing your communication, facilitation, improvisation, empathizing and curiousness skills. But this isn't a complete list by any means. I'm sure you'll also have some ideas about what skills make up a great service designer. And I'd really love to hear them. So leave a comment down below and write down which skill do you think a great service designer needs. And don't forget that more people like you are watching these episodes and your comment might just be the thing that inspires someone to set out on his or her next learning journey. If you know someone who might be interested in the things that we've just discussed, grab the link and make sure to share this video with them. If this is your first time here on this channel and you'd like to see more videos that help to take your service design skills to the next level, I'd love to have you to subscribe. Thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.