 In this episode, you'll learn how you can make service design stick inside your organization. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hello, I'm Marcus Holt and this is the service design show episode number 147. Hi, my name is Marc Fontijn and welcome back to a brand new episode of the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are some of those hidden things that make all the difference between success and failure all to help you make great services happen that have a positive impact on people, business and our planet. Starting out as a product designer, Marcus Holt has been on a journey that took him to become the global head of service design at JP Morgan. Before moving into this in-house role, Marcus gained a lot of experience working on the agency side. Having both the experience from working on the inside and the outside, Marcus in this episode shares some key insight on what it takes to make service design work inside an organization. We talk about signs of success and how you know that you're making progress. We discuss the three key elements of design that you really need to double down on and finally how to make sure that you don't get stuck working on the small and incremental things. As you'll hear, all the experience that Marcus brings to the table helps to quickly cut through the noise. So if I had to pick one word to describe this episode and what you'll walk away with after listening to it till the end would be clarity. If you'd like to keep on growing as a service design professional and enjoy conversations like this, make sure you subscribe to the channel and click the bell icon because we bring a new episode like this every week or so here on this channel. So that about wraps it up for the intro and now it's time to jump into the conversation with Marcus Holt. Welcome to the show Marcus. Hi Mark, glad to be on the show. It's a real pleasure to talk to you. Yeah awesome to have you on. You've got some super interesting experience background that I think a lot of service design professionals will be able to benefit from. So looking forward to our chat in a second. But Marcus for the people who haven't looked you up on Google, LinkedIn or any of the other social media profiles, could you give a brief introduction what you do these days? Yes, so right now I'm the head of service design for JP Morgan and it's a B2B bank. So I've got a team of about 12 people that help a team of 160 designers map and design services across the B2B bank. Awesome. We'll get into that for sure in a second like I said. Marcus, I'm not sure if you know but we have a rapid fire question round. I have five questions for you. Your goal is to answer them as quickly as possible. The first thing that comes to your mind. Okay. You ready? I'm ready, yes. All right. If you could be an animal, which animal would you like to be? Wolf sounds good. Social. All right. If you could recommend one book, which one would you pick? I think sapience. Very fundamental for how humans tick. Hmm. If you could work in anywhere around the world, which place would you pick? Difficult choosing between London, Berlin. One of those. Okay. London, Berlin. What was your first job? First job was as a you mean as a kid or as a designer? As a kid. The kid delivering newspapers age 14. Okay. And final question is, do you remember the first time you got in touch with service design? Yes, I was at a conference in Milan and they made you, they introduced this journey mapping thing. It was totally mind blowing. And I thought, hang on a minute, there's a different way of looking at things. That's more of what you do with a thing. Okay. So DMI conference, actually. Remember which year it was? When was that? I think about 10 years ago. Okay. Okay. And the rest is history. Actually not. No. Listen, I read an article by a guy called Oliver King from Engine first in 1999. And he talked about going upstream with design. We were frustrated. He designed beautiful things and then have a go anywhere. So he said, well, you have to go upstream and design the company. And this is how it goes. So wow, this is very interesting. That was 1999. It wasn't even called service design then. Yep. Absolutely pioneers. Marcus, let's dive into the topic of today. If I look at what we prepared, then one of the summaries I had written down is like the difference between doing service design inside an organization and outside the organization. You've done both. So you have an interesting perspective on what it means, what the challenges are, and maybe how their approach should differ. I think that's super valuable for a lot of people. So that's the topic we'll be diving into. But to start off, maybe you could share a little bit about your journey and how you got to the place where you are today. I had some pivotal moment in my career as a designer. I started as a product designer and then I got into telecoms, designing mobile phones. And I was at Telefonica in the UK, company called O2. And we designed this amazing proposition. It was like for the family. That was 90. It was 2007. It had, you know, the moment families have their calendars on the kitchen, everybody writes their stuff in or nowadays maybe Google at the time was paper. So we thought, let's have a digital solution where each family member can book for each other who picks up the kits from ballet and goes out on a drink. So I had a Google calendar before Google calendar. We had an iPad that we've made that thick before iPad existed. And we had a tariff that goes for the whole family. And it was beautiful, but way too advanced for us. So it totally crashed because everybody designed their own little thing, right? The device people, their thing, the calendar people, their thing. So massive failure for the business, unfortunately, spent millions on a TV campaign. It was beautiful, very visionary. I thought it's no good designing pretty things. You have to design the company first, right? And that's how I actually got into saying, hold on a minute, let's stop designing stuff, be that digital or physical. How should we work? Let's work like designers do. Let's, you know, work together from day one. Let's work in little sprints and agile. Let's make prototypes and check if that's what the user wanted. You know, we had things like, there was no browser button on there because we thought we wanted people to buy our apps. So it was literally done without design thinking. And that's how I got into design thinking. And thought, look, I need to pause designing things and start designing, you know, how we do stuff and introduce this sort of double diamond kind of thing as a system to O2 in the day. So that was a change for me how I got into more of a service kind of world. And from there, so you started out with a product heritage, product design heritage. You saw that it's not enough to design products. You actually need to design maybe the environment. What did you do after that? Like, how did you, how did it manifest in your life? Well, I think what happened was this DMI conference I went to and there were some people from Swisscom who were quite visionary and what they did and I thought, hang on, this is exactly what we need. You need to have a lab and a way of training everybody how to work like designers a little bit, work together, build prototypes, interview users, understand what they need. And they'd rolled that out across their Swisscom, Swiss telecoms area. So literally went to Swisscom like three times, met them, wrote everything down. Okay, gave to go to my people in O2 and got them to agree to a company-wide program to set up this way of working for all our consumer products. So that was kind of how you start moving from designing the thing to designing the company. It was new to me as well, but because of this failure we had, we had suddenly people listening. I think you sometimes, I only get our service design contributions when the old way doesn't work. Oh yeah, we know what we're doing. We have an idea, we just build that, it'll be fine, trust me. And they've done that three times, same in JP Morgan. If that doesn't work, then people start thinking, hang on, we're missing a trick. How else could we work? So that's usually how you get in as a service designer when the pure jumping to solutions doesn't work. That's already an insight that people can take away from this. Sometimes it's very hard to sell the future. People find it hard to make it tangible, like what's the potential benefit? If you can tie it to failures or where the existing system breaks down, it's much easier. Like people get it much faster. Yeah, because it's counterintuitive, right? It's easy. I think we all want to do, to admire things and buy things. As a service designer, you're selling a service. You're selling your way of working really. And they don't know what that is. They said nodding when you present. I've seen that so many times about hundreds of pictures running a service design agency. And you can't blame them if you haven't done it before. It's really hard. So rather than a thing, here's your website. Here's your app, which is very tangible. How many lines of code? How many screens do I get? You have to buy into an approach. Very hard to sell. Super hard to sell. You mentioned something about your time at the agency. So when was that in this journey? I spent half of my career, roughly an agency and half in house. So I had my own product design agency for like seven years. And then I ran a London-based service design agency for two years. And fast-forwarding to today, your role at Barclays? No, JP Morgan, the other one. How would you describe that? What is your day-to-day activity? What is your responsibility? Well, one of the jumps I made, it's hard as an agency to do service design, right? Because you're not doing a thing. You're not delivering something. Here's your app or here's your banner or whatever it is. You have to, you know, a service design goes across all these silos, right? In order to impact that, you either have to be on some sort of retainer and be in the company working with people. But you can't do that as a sort of flashy three-month sprint. Here's your beautiful blueprints and your personas. It doesn't go anywhere. Somebody called it the most expensive bookshelf stopper, bookstopper at the CEO's shelf, right? And that's true. So, you know, if you want to do service design, you have to have that role where you're embedded with the product team to guide them through all the obstacles that you're trying to do and doing that in-house. Actually, I saw what, when I started after the agency to help out some friends and JP Morgan, I saw, wow, look, you're inside. You can't talk to these people. It takes some time, but that's what we do now. And yeah, go for it. Yeah. And yeah, what's your responsibility? Like, do you have, what are your KPIs? Oh, KPIs. We often get up. For a personal, yeah. A KPIs. So it has changed a little bit. We came in thinking, okay, we just designed your service, but, you know, that doesn't work as we know, because people say they understand. And one episode is quite interesting. We ran a lab to start with. Great endeavor. We set it all up in sort of four month sprints. And after the third project, every time we do it, I do, we do a little design thinking training module. This is what design, we call it design thinking because service design might be a little bit too abstract. And everybody has heard of design thinking. So it's a little bit of a door opener. Every time we do this training and then not, after the third time, one year later, the guy was running the program said, Marcus, you know, your presentation this time, design thinking that was spot on. You should have done that the first time around. I said, Tom, it was the same presentation because it was the same presentation. It just shows how people have to learn, you know, it's a bit like us in the bank stuff. It's so complex. You have to hear multiple times before it really sinks in. So that that's one of these of eye openness of what we do, which is literally a lot of facilitation. So the three things we do is we do customer first because a lot of things are driven brilliant technology. So a lot of things are driven from tech. There's lots of shiny tools out there of data and AI or from the business side. So we bring in the customer kind of angle, right? Start with the customer first. And again, that sometimes only happens after they try the product approach and didn't go anywhere. And I said, okay, what are we missing here? Shall we try with the customer? Okay, give that a go. Second thing you need is co-create, right? In an old fashioned kind of organization, you have a lot of silos. So somebody writes down the requirements on a piece of paper and then hands it over. It's literally a word document. And everybody interprets that in a different way. It's a bit like if you're an architect and you say, look, can you design the house and you write it as a word document, right? Window in the top corner. When you make a model, you suddenly see what's going on, which the third element is that we make prototypes early on, right? Traditionally, even, you know, some of it is agile, some of it is not agile, stuff gets built, engineers need to want to finish it, need to show people what how great it is. Let's finish it first. And then it doesn't work. So we introduce these three things. Customer first perspective, co-creating together with the people from day one and building quick and dirty prototypes. And that's more of a facilitation game, right? We can't just go in and say, we're designing your, you know, asset servicing or agency lending services. They're so complicated, we don't understand half the stuff, literally, you know, that these people have been doing these very specialized B2B services for like 15 years. Very hard to understand. So the service designer in my company now is very much a facilitator on bringing the people together and provide that framework and that freedom to think and create. What's encouraging about what you're describing is that it's not complex. Like these three things are, I think, dear to many service designers. I hope they are dear to every service design professional out there. And we sometimes feel that it's not enough that it needs to be more fancy or more advanced, but like the human perspective, co-creation and prototyping, like if you bring that in, that already is that adds tremendous value. So that's already encouraging. The question I had, yeah. Yeah, also, I was going to say the labels, what is service design? So you go to the US and their service design is not as unknown as here, right? Trying to recruit service designers in the US and you can't find any. After they go by the labels of user researcher or experienced designer or design strategist actually is quite big over there. So we had the choice, are we the design thinking team here or the service design team? Because everybody's heard of design thinking, right? You have an easier game because are you the guys who think like designers and some like customers? But then it's very much about thinking. So we wanted to design as a doing, not thinking. And also wanted to emphasize service perspective because a lot of companies, they're running on product, my thing, my product, product, product, product. So we said, no, no, the service around the product needs to be designed. You're selling financial services. It's literally if we're living in the service economy 80, 85, 89 percent, whatever, services that we ship. So that's an interesting debate we're having in service design, certainly in the US where it's more called experience strategy, for instance, in our sister company Chase. If I look at the recent services that I've been doing with the salary report and the career track report, I think 40% of the people who participate in those survey don't have the title service designer or but still associate themselves with the field, which is totally fine. So yeah, that labels. It's more important, like you said, that you sort of grasp that it's about services. And I think we still have a lot of development to do there as a field as well. Like, what are services truly? If we look at service design, books and literature and courses, like, they aren't really about educating you what a service is. They are about educating you about the process, but not so much about the service. But that's that's different rabbit hole. I don't want to go into right now. What I'm curious about is based on what you described like your team is mostly sort of facilitating or has the orchestrating role. How what does success look like for you? Because it's it's hard to take ownership of like the tangible product that maybe a product design again. So what does success look like for you? Yes, tricky one, because we had a few sort of failures, right? We turned up and we had oh, we need to have we can help people with wicked, big, big complex problems. And they say, oh, we've got a big one. We're trying to wrestle up for 10 years on boarding and financial services is very complicated, right? You have to do all this due diligence. There's no money laundering. It's quite complex if you're on boarding, say an asset manager fund or something like that. Oops, hang on phone going. Turn it on to silent. So so we went to like agency style go in with a researcher service designer and the BA you mapped it all out, and it didn't go anywhere. I mean, hang on, what have we missed, right? And it was going back to the roots. We weren't plugged in. So success factors are if you are you need to be plugged into the team, right? You need to sit at the table. It's not an agency kind of gig where you are the person over here doing service design. It doesn't go anywhere. And you know, when you're winning when they they put you on the table, you also know when you're winning when they are sharing your work. So when they get really excited and you work with them, a lot of people do get service design or design thinking. It's just it's been educated out of us as Ken Robertson set from school. So by the time you hit 25, certainly in banking, you're sort of left with the left part of your brain really. So you bring out this right hand side of the brain and people and they're flourished. I love it, right? Everybody likes drawing and just bring that back. So people tend to embrace that and then they tell your story and they do a better job, because it's them telling but also they have the slight vocabulary. We still sometimes struggle as designers, you know, in terms of talking the way we talk that that gets translated in the right kind of lingo that the senior people in the bank want to see. So presenting they present your work. That's a great success. Another success for us is if we get funding for more, you know, we have now a way of going in as another way to succeed, I think is don't do big projects. All right, we have to learn the hard way. We spent six months, built everything. We now again say, look, we don't quite know what this is. We sort of do same for them. They think serve sign sounds great, but I don't really know what it is. So let's do a sprint, you know, six to eight weeks, maybe 10. And we make sure we come out with a little prototype. We do the whole little double diamond research. What is the problem need to agree on the problem fast, because if people don't agree on the problem, everybody's got a different view what the solution should be, right? So you need to say, look, this is the current journey map. We mapped it out. These are pain points. Everybody agree with them. And once they have that, you can then work on a future prototype or blueprint. So that little sprint is good. You don't blow all your money in one go. That means there is a bit money left for the next. Also, you know, companies do have six weeks to give you a benefit of doubt to see what you can do. And also for you good, because you're not like going off and boiling the ocean over here when it isn't really what they need it. Because sometimes they don't actually know what they need either. So these little sprints are good in order to say, look, we're doing this little sprint and that is safe for everybody as a trial. And what often happens, you then frame the problem. You've just basically gone back and said, what is the real problem? Example, right? We get asked, we need another dashboard. I need to know what's going on. We got hundreds of dashboards. So yeah, okay, let's look at it. And then you start thinking, why, you know, why, when you need a dashboard, why you need to find that way. So it's the five times why and gradually get to what is the real problem they're trying to solve. And that you can do that in six weeks all the way down to a little prototype of here's some screens or here's as a roleplay storyboard of what that new service could look like. And everybody goes, yep, we created that together. We have thought of the user and our little prototype show the boss and say, hey, we've done this in six weeks, right? Can we have some more money now to actually implement some of these things? So that's the third one when you get know you're winning if you do get budget to continue either on the engagement or in our company, they have to put money in for next year's, you know, tech, tech development goes on an annual cycle. Super interesting stuff and good to know that those are like the success indicators. I want to cycle back to something that you said at the start is you mentioned it doesn't go anywhere and you sort of skimmed over that. What do you mean with that? I have been doing design engagement as an agency, as a freelancer. We had agencies come in and do the same thing because the company doesn't know sometimes what they're buying. You go in, you do all this great work, but you haven't either got all the senior stakeholders on board 100%. You deliver the beautiful blueprint. Everybody's in awe about this thing, but you know, it's like a masterpiece. Don't don't touch it, right? Even if we're doing blueprints in excel, we started doing them in excel in the bank still don't touch it because they'll don't touch it because they'll use excel. It's their bread and butter tool, but the whole concept of this blueprint and these prototypes, it's a very sort of designally way of thinking. So you can't come in with these sort of necessarily the great artifacts if they're not plugged in. What I mean is when you now come in, we do not always do a blueprint. We do a framework. It might be a just little diagram of how we change the way they're answering customer service calls, for instance, but you need to do these little things together with them. That's what I'm saying. If you just come in and deliver a thing like you would for a website or an app, perfect, right? Here's your website, here's your app, totally legitimate, or designing a physical item. In service design, it is a service which is lived by the people in the company in multiple silos and has to be built with these silos because often you get hired by one person who's got one silo and they can't impact the bits on the other silos. So what do you do? Either you help this guy just improve the person, improve this one silo, but you still really have to sort out the thing further up front. In order to do that, you need to bring people together. You need to invite them into the workshops, hear their opinions, so they're on board and that takes time, right? But that's how you then win and that's not a big ta-da reveal. Here's your blueprint and 15 personas journey maps and a click through prototype. Whilst that's nice and beautiful artifacts to make, it's often the success is in meetings when they agree. Yeah, we want to work with these people now, go forward. First time we're talking to technology actually in years and that's the win, right? So is it about when you mentioned it doesn't go anywhere? Like the ultimate success factor is that people are ready to take the next step in the process, whatever that is. Yes, I mean, it's probably exaggerated, it doesn't go anywhere. What does happen, people start thinking, oh, that's an interesting approach, right? But don't literally take your blueprint and build that because it's a big piece. It's five years way to work. So yeah, you need to take these sort of in small pieces and then pivot or also, you know, when you present your small piece, what would make them tick, right? If you have to look out and when you see them say, look, thank you for your blueprint, but that more that thing over here, that is what we need. And you wouldn't have known that at the beginning. So yeah, the sort of the purpose of the game, of the goal of the game is to keep playing. Rather than delivering the, you could almost say like in service design, maybe there isn't a final end product, which there isn't. If it is successful, you keep going. That's actually a success indicator on this on-boarding project. You're still at it three years later because you're making progress. Exactly. And I think that's totally true because like in service design, I've defined it often as you cannot deliver the best service, which you can do is you can work towards better services because they are always evolving, the world is evolving, customers are evolving. So that's different mindset compared to like delivering a tangible outcome. It's like almost a hygiene factor. Like you can't keep on, you should, you need to keep on working at it. Yeah. And as you say, it's totally ephemeral, right? It's not a thing which is so difficult to sell. If you're designing a product, a car or a chair, at some point you're cutting steel and making plastic pieces by the millions. You know, you have to have a cutoff time. If you do digital, you do, you know, you lay down code and at some point that thing goes live. The service, it's, yes, you do change, basically two things we change is usually the orc model, how people do something and who does what, and then the tech underneath, right? What other platforms and services they use for that. And as you say, they go in, they go in ping pong, they go in small bits here and then a bit there. So it's kind of messy service design. When it works though, it's amazing, right? Because that's what I'm saying, the people element is there. You know, we have people who are doing crazy tasks because the work volume is going up in operations and you're eliminating these tasks and you made them talk. Everybody talked together for the first time in onboarding. We met and have four people talk together and work together, which haven't been talking together properly or not working in the same way before. And that is, that is satisfying. It's a sort of like, it's not a thing. It's an enlightenment thing. When these people start saying, thanks for the services that we know what we're doing. Thanks for introducing us. That's what you've done with your journey map. Yeah. Yeah, it's a means to an end to actually get to other stuff and get the organization working in a different way. And that's one of the reasons I think we need to use metaphors to explain what we do. And there are tons of metaphors, like the one that's coming up to me right now, again, is like the garden, the organization is a garden. The garden isn't finished. Like there's always work to do in the garden. And I don't know. Metaphors, garden probably wouldn't in the bank that bit hard nose. We try gardens and things like iceberg work well, right? We've got this iceberg thing where he's saying services are icebergs. So a lot of stuff happens under the surface, you know, this beautiful picture of iceberg, people spinning very busy. A lot of them don't have a view of what the customer sees, right? So you need to we bring in that view above the water level, what the customer sees and what really matters to them. And a lot of people spinning with all sorts of features developed down under their water surface, not relevant, right? So that's a good metaphor I found works in business. The other one is a double diamond process. You know, I know it's not perfect because it's it's linear and all that stuff. I do like infinity loop and things like that. But the guys we work with in banking the logic of first time agree on the problem, you know, diverge converges all quite logical. And that I found that a good way of selling your design approach, at least in financial services. Hmm. Related to this, you mentioned something about the six weeks or eight weeks. They give you the benefit of the doubt. I'm really curious to that because when you're in house, I can imagine that you sort of have some credibility and some sort of what is it? Goodwill that people are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. When you're coming in externally as an agency or consultancy, usually you get hired to deliver very hard results, hard outcomes. How do you how do you see this thing? So we call in the agency, we called it the whisperer, right? You need a whisperer because we came across one person. She won in Ireland. She was amazing because she was the key for us to get traction. She had, she was the connection inside to a translate what we're talking about to the business in banking language. And we worked with her both at the Bank of Ireland and the sort of waitrose equivalent island called Super Value. So she translated the language, but also she sort of guided us just a little thing. I need something tangible. Can you do me some wire friends about we don't know yet what is going to be? You know, I mean, it's that sort of stuff that where you stumble as a service designer. So we did that and that translator that whisperer between back and forth. She guided us through the process. You need to have that, or it's super helpful if you have an internal person who understands what service design is because it's difficult to buy and manage for many people in companies. And what is the biggest maybe mistake that you see clients making when buying service design? Well, we've bought that sort of design from agencies even in JP Morgan. And I think people buy digital assets from digital agencies, they know they're going to get so many wireframes and pages and app. So they think service design is a similar thing, right? You deliver me my blueprint and my storyboards and whatnot. Maybe even a role play. But you know, that's not it doesn't cut it because you can't do anything with it. The work only starts once you've done that. Then the real work starts actually building that it comes back to the thing. We're not we're not having a thing that we can hand over and say here it is and this. Oh, I switch on my service and then it runs. That service is run by their people. So you need to get all these people on board. And I think that's the misconception they buy stuff from agencies three months, then a hundred to $300,000, whatever. And then you expect it to be done. So it's painful for the agency in a way. We had better agency connections. What success? If you get yourself hired again and again in little jobs, that's what I'm saying do a little sprint. And then they get come back, come back, come back. So that's why we have the agency in there for two years. We have worked with live work for two years because it's in little pieces, but you need to as an agency is hard to sell yourself in. Okay, I can do this service for you, but it's going to take two years. Is that all right? And they got what right? It comes back to the whisperer who's the person who can explain that to the boss. Yeah, exactly. And this is like the catch 22 because you do want to come in because you know you can help them. But it's the classic you need to give them what they want and then give them what they need sort of. So you sell them the blueprint or you sell them the customer journey map in order to actually get access to do the things that they need. Have you seen similar things? We have. But as I say, you often then blow the whole budget. The agency spends that budget on that on that three month engagement. And it's a sort of mega fancy blueprint with loads of fancy looking cool stuff, which is great work, but they can't stomach that. It's a three year amounts of work that they have. So you better off as an agency just spend like some of the money first and say, let's do a little sprint to see in eight weeks, six weeks, depending on the size of the company. The startup, you can do that in four weeks. If it's a company like JPMorgan, everything takes ages, it's safe to count more like 12 weeks. But what you do is you show them a the methodology and be a tangible output like a little prototype for a service to get an idea. And then I say, oh, that's great. Okay, now we've got better idea what we actually now need. Thank you, right? But the money's been spent if you're not careful. So I know it's tempting as an agency, got big fat job, $300,000, let's just do it, right? But I think after that, you're out, right? Yeah, so you're out and sort of the all the effort is gone. The maybe the challenge that I also see is it's tempting to deliver that tangible and shiny output because it's something that people can take inside the organization and sort of say, look, this is where we spent the money on. If you if you do a six week project and you come up with a paper product, I think that's the right approach. But how do you then somebody needs to sell it internally, somebody is going to need to take accountability that this is their way we need to go? Yes, that's the whisper. And that's, that's not easy to get. I mean, one way is you do this blueprint, but as again, not spend maybe all the money, but also have have the blueprint and then build one little thing tangible little prototype that they they can show everybody this is how it goes click through, right? On the back of the blueprint, one item of it, because the blueprint usually has multiple items on it, just to show, you know, what would come next so they can see it. And the blueprints, you can make a nice blueprint, you don't spend, you know, these really good ones spent a lot of effort on the whole concept of a journey map is still new to many clients, right? They don't think of their service or whatever their product do in a journey kind of format or a life cycle. That alone, if you did it in a week is already sometimes a news to them. So, yeah. So, and this is one of the I've been out of the agency world for a few years right now. But one of the last things that I was doing there was when we did a project, always at the end of the delivery, I would show them some kind of a roadmap and may usually always also halfway through like, okay, we've done this project. But look at all the other steps that need to come like you're paying for this right now just now that this isn't the end. And I think let's stick with the journey metaphor, because we like that in service design. You also should present that journey to your clients rather than a one off thing. And I found that that really helps to help get clients to take the next step to see, okay, I understand how this piece fits into the the road that we're heading into. And it's our role, I think to show that roadmap. Yeah, totally agree. I mean, we often do this horizon one to three planning, you know, you do a lot of prioritization matrix impact versus effort, for instance, that helps. And then it's a horizon one to three, because sometimes, you know, you come in and say, look, I know you've all these problems. But if you just keep fixing yesterday's problems, how you're ever going to compete and leapfrog, let's look at the future. And then, you know, that's tricky if they end up with something that is five years away, nothing in between. So what you do is you do the future very exciting. You know, this is the maker make a video how the future onboarding would look like great. But then step back, okay, that's horizon three or two. What could you do next year? What could you do now? And the beautiful service design is it doesn't have to be tech spend. A lot of these things are the relying, you know, digital design on on building it in code. A lot of the elements you could do right now, it's a different workflow, the different way of people working together costs nothing, you could do it straight away, don't have to wait for on tech money. So you know, these are the little things you can sometimes do again, sketch them out the roadmap alongside maybe these, I think we call it key service moments when we do blueprint, we do blueprint, that's fine. But then we pull out the key service moments, right? And then illustrate them. So this is what happens here when a new person, custom service agents gets called, this is the systems they use these are the people and how they work. And that brings it to life. You can sell that one here. We could do that now, right? Yeah. Yeah. So and I think that's that is a really strong point that maybe is overlooked often. If you do the small stuff, which should because it's easier to digest for organizations, don't forget to show the bigger stuff as well. Yeah. Like then, then you're probably going in the right direction. And giving people confidence that it's not just a small thing that you're working on, not just a small tweak here. But by by turning this wheel, you're contributing to actually turning the entire ship. That's you're right. Yeah. And also that the big stuff is is also the kind of it's exciting, but it also gives people this license to think bigger and, you know, have a have a view forward because they're doing a lot of practical problem solving every day anyway. So that combination, as you say, of 50,000 feet and 500 feet is is where service design is really strong. Yeah. And I haven't been using that in my practice because it wasn't so popular then back then yet. But I think frameworks like the OKR framework, like objectives and key results, strategy maps, anything that helps you as a service designer to connect your activities to the biggest strategy, that's a tremendous help. And the stories I've been hearing is that often, like your clients don't even have a view on the actual strategy. So that's a very valuable conversation to have at the start as well. But learn about strategy, like learn about objectives of the organization and tie your efforts into into that. I think that's totally is because we try we try we push for doing the metrics every time we do a blueprint is called instrumented journey. Because number one, you want to know you're winning what we're actually trying to achieve here, right? And we use Google's framework from outcomes to signals to metrics, because otherwise metrics, you tend to sometimes find that people measure was easy to measure not what should be measured, right? Because the stuff you should be measuring actually really hard to measure. So it needs to be a bit of both, right? And then we have the blueprint, and we say, okay, what's the outcome for the clients, and then the metrics and the signals, and what's the outcome for the business on the backstage, and you can put that into every blueprint. So that helps you're right, you know, but also you get you get pushed, you get the scope moves in services and why you uncovering all these problems. And then you get sidetrack on one part service over here, you need to be really careful, certainly also as an agency that you're not just delivering the wrong thing. Oh, you said you do this, yeah, but you asked me to do that. So I think metrics and outcomes and okay, ask can really help say, okay, right beginning, what are we trying to achieve here? How do we know we're winning? What are the top three that we could track? They might change, but it's good discipline, you're totally right. Now, you're in house right now. And you've apparently learned a lot what works and what doesn't and what are some indicators of success. I'm still curious about what you're currently still experiencing as some of the biggest hurdles that still need to be taken in order to be successful. Yeah, I think I think we're battling still a little bit with understanding at senior management, because that if you really do a service, you go at quite a sort of high level, a meaning you have to have multiple silos, that means you have quite high in organization terms for the decision makers, decision makers who could decide and open up that gate. So the silo man hires you a woman, but they can't impact the other ones. So you do need to go go up and that that's tough, right? I mean, we've been working with some of those senior managers is great, but it's a lot of convincing. They've got many things on their on their agenda. But if you need to have actually the ear of the board, either a C suite or the CEO on that, when we've done that as an agency with Bank of Ireland, it works because they are the guys who can open the doors. And so they don't tell anybody don't say, Oh, you must be doing the service. No, they just give permission. It's all about empowering because you get often hired as a protagonist who knows what design thinking isn't something elsewhere. But they hit the ceiling when their bosses or CEO doesn't know what you what it is and what you need money and so on. And where's the thing that you're delivering. So it's more the permission thing that you need if the CEO knows what it is. So we just understood I'm thinking training at 02 with the board and the CEO. And it was very successful because that's not doing it, but they see what's coming up and say, Yeah, okay. So that's what we need in order to do that. And I've had this conversation often. And it's, it can be a bit discouraging, right? Because when you say that like every service design project needs to have the CEO, CEO vouch for it, like the almost stops every project. It does. And you can't we have gotten the CEO's ears for this stuff. It's a massive place. But I think we get enough traction with the middle level people, the protagonists, right? That we can show stuff. So I think it does work. It's a challenge. I agree on, especially on the really big projects. But you do have to work bottom up. And it does work because in the end, they're running the service. And but you get even within that level, you have to convince the operations people have to convince the tech people before you can get to the client. So another challenge in banking, talking to clients is super hard. Right, because they're very protective, especially in businesses, right? They're either super wealthy customers, or they're big corporations. And in banking, it's always we need to develop the stuff before we can show it as it's, it's tech some leap of faith, you know, like in retail, they know you talk to the customer, you have to say, I don't know, you know, exactly what we're doing, we want to do the next generation of X. In B2B banking, that's still a new concept. So yeah, some way to go in that. So, and I think banking is, if it works in banking, then it works anywhere. That's a good thing. I think healthcare is similarly tricky. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now, just a quick question related to this is, are you seeing any patterns of things that actually do give clients stakeholders the confidence to adopt this way of working? So if you're working your way up, like what are some of the things that you see them going, aha, okay, now we can move forward? Again, it comes down to the thing thing thing. If you do have tangible prototypes, for instance, that opens doors, because again, there's a secret sort of superpower of designers is visualization, right? Don't underestimate that. They just write BRDs and lists of text, we come in, we can visualize this stuff fairly easy. So that is actually quite powerful tool. I have to say, if you visualize what this thing might look like that service or thing that you're talking about, and that then gets shown, obviously, you know, the proof is the pudding, how would you build that, where the roadmap comes in, you can work with technology to build a part and get some real data, pick a slice of this with some real data and show it in action. I think that's how you win people over, build a real piece with some real functionality behind it. We've done interesting self-designed prototype for a bank, retail bank, where we designed a whole new way of opening a bank account for consumers and island. And then we did something called concept lab. So we took over the headquarter branch and Belfast, moved all the furniture around in the evening and made paper prototypes and all sorts of props, got some customers hired in and showed them, you know, simulated the service, if you like, and then iterated overnight and tried it again next day. And that was also interesting because the CEO was in the building, came down to have a quick look. He stayed for two hours. He talked to the customers waiting in the, the users were recruited in the waiting area. These guys don't talk to users. They're busy people. Unless you work with John Lewis, you might have to do two days a week or a year on the shop floor. It's so interesting talking to the users. Great project. You never know how you win hearts and minds, right? But it's demonstrating, showing staff. It's exciting. Designers can do it and it's very tangible. With everything that you're saying, like, we just should and need to double down on the things that make design design, right? And it's great and it's important to sort of understand the way people on the, quote unquote, other side think, how they talk so that we can close the gap. But then we should translate that and stay true to our design nature, not become Excel ninjas or, right, do the visualization, do the prototyping, get them to interact. So you have a lot of experience. One final question I have about agencies. You're now in-house. You have both perspectives. What is the future of agencies, do you think? Whoa, big question. There's always a need, I think, even in-house. We sort of somewhat, sometimes we're an agency, the expert come in, right? So we had a project where we said, look, I've telling these people, she was one of these whisperer people who knew how design works, but I've been telling them for three years, they're not listening to me anymore. Can you come in as the experts with some researchers with PhD title? And you know, you come, I'm just holding up the mirror to you, right? And saying, this is what we find, you know, we can help you do the next stage, but it's just very neutral. That's a role, I think, an outside person or an agency could do very well, right? Sometimes you adopt that role on an inside. And then I think agencies do work. I mean, some of the big consultancies, they're in there for years, you know, Accenture or McKinsey, because they work with people. I think as an agency, if you find that yourself, you get a seat at the table to advise strategically on design, how could we do next? What next after this? And how should we design? How should we over here? You know, no job too small. You know, that's that kind of approach. I've worked very successfully with agencies on that, but you have to be an inside, rather than the Tada three months, everything done thing, which in service design is tough. Yeah. And we sort of have to battle the heritage of the word design and the notion that people have around depth as it's delivering. It's tough, isn't it? If you drop the design, then you're in with other consultants and tech and so on. There's always a question, you drop design because people think you're just doing chairs. You shouldn't. Well, on the other hand, it is, you know, if you can show a little bit what design can do, that is something magic about design as in creating something. So yeah, I know what you're saying. It's a tricky discussion about is it designed? Should we stop calling ourselves designers because they think we're designing just wireframes or chairs? I don't think so, but I also think that we don't need to sort of keep shouting it from the roofs. We need to wait for the right moment to introduce design. I think that it's about timing. So, Margaret, we talked a lot about a lot of things. That's the thing I wanted to say. If you look back on the last 45, 50 minutes, if you had to summarize our conversation, what's the thing that you hope will sort of stick with somebody who's listening right now? I think one of my biggest lines is service design works only if you're working in partnership with the people. I find it hard otherwise. So, you know, go in-house, either you work in-house or you develop that relationship in small pieces where you help them gradually along the journey. Any job I would look at literally if it goes well as a two-year engagement. I know you can't always say that. That's going to be two years, but in-house, some people do know it's going to take two years or a year. I think make the time, you know, that's one of those things. I think time is in our favor. Things get more and more complex. People need more and more help with complex stuff. Service design design, I think it can really help here. So, I think we're sailing on a wind behind us, tailwind on that. So, I think, you know, don't lose hope. I think design is going up further and further the strategic road, I find. Which new challenges for the designers having to cope with business models and camera's and as you say, roadmaps, you know, can't just design your nice little thing. Be careful what you ask for, but do your craft, do it really well. I think that's what we try to do and you'll succeed. So, that's one of the lessons learned. Thank you. And one final question, because it inspired me so much. You've been doing this in-house with JP Morgan for three years. What do you hope you'll be in the next three years? I know it's a glass, the magic glass ball question, but if everything works out, what do you hope you'll have? I don't know. There's always new areas you think when your glass is greener, right? I think B2B banking is fascinating, it's super complicated. I've had no idea about the financial world, what goes on there. It is truly fascinating, but also sometimes think solving more like, you know, either bigger problems like sustainability and global warming, that'd be fascinating too. Because it's a super complex problem, right? So, designers should be able to tackle that, just having to, you know, find the right engagement for that. Or working with loads and loads of consumers, working for, you know, somewhere in the government or working for India or what I know, somewhere where you're literally touching 100 million people with your little improvement. That's maybe something that's also fascinating. Sounds like a great, what is it, flag in the distance? No, that's not the right English saying like. Yeah, yeah. I think I know what you mean. We know what we mean. Anyway, Marcus, it was a joy talking to you. Time flew by in this episode. Thanks for having me. It was really interesting. Yeah, thank you for coming on. No, it was great. And I'm always happy to talk to anybody who's interested in, you know, pushing our common cause here of like service design. It's a small group, but I think it's fascinating and it's got a lot of big future. But we're not there yet, unlike UX, for instance, which started almost 20 years before us. Like you said, don't lose hope. It's great that you're one of the people who makes it all the way to the end of this episode. I really hope that you enjoyed it and got something useful out of it. If you haven't done so already, click that subscribe button to get notified when new episodes come out. Thanks so much for watching and I'll catch you very soon in the next video.