 A major frustration amongst many service design professionals is that they feel that the work doesn't have the impact they feel it should. Often because the organization they work in isn't set up to deliver services. But there's good news. You already have everything you need to make your organization more service oriented. And you'll learn in this episode how to do it. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, this is Kate. This is the service design show, episode 181. Hi, my name is Mark 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 the hidden and invisible things that make all the difference between success and failure. All to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and our planet. Our guest in this episode is Kate Tarling. Kate is an advisor, consultant and author who's helping organizations change the way they work to result in better services. Kate recently wrote the book titled The Service Organization, a guide on how to lead and deliver successful services sustainably. The book is making big waves currently in our service design community, so I'm really excited that Kate is with us for a conversation on the show today. There's a weird thing in our field, which I'm sure you're already familiar with, because even though every organization out there is already a service organization, most of them weren't built to deliver services. No, if anything, they were built like a factory based on an assembly line model. You, as a service design professional, experience the friction this creates each and every day. To our frustration, we find that it's hard and sometimes even impossible to design great service experiences when our funding models, decision-making structures and workflows are organized around individual departments rather than the end-to-end experience of our customers. So if we want to make sure we don't get stuck running in circles and into the same challenges each and every time, we need to redesign the operating model of our organizations. There's just no other way around it. And how hard can that be, right? Well, that's where Kate's book comes in. This book helps you to turn this hairy, audacious goal of making your organization more service-oriented into tangible activities you can do on a day-to-day basis to make this dream a reality. So if you stick around till the end of this episode, you'll have learned how to get the buy-in from leadership to drive this change. Where to find the time and resources to redesign the organization when it's not part of your job description. And finally, which simple steps you can take to start aligning everyone around the services you deliver as an organization. That about wraps it up for the intro. So let's jump straight into the conversation with Kate Tarling. Welcome to the show, Kate. Thank you. Thank you. Good to be here. Yeah, really looking forward to our conversation about the topic that's, I think, very dear to your heart at this moment because you wrote a book about it. I see a lot of chatter on LinkedIn in my social media bubble, which the algorithms have put me in. I'm really looking forward to diving into this. But before we do so, Kate, I'm sure that there is a lot to say about your career and how you've got to where you are. But could you give us a brief summary of what you do these days? Yeah, let's start with that. What do you do these days? At the moment, I have the pleasure of working with large organizations in the public sector and the private sector. I have a consultancy and we help those organizations to change their internal conditions to result in better services. So looking at how they work that contributes to the performance of their services that they provide to people. And I also do training and workshops and doing a lot of speaking about the book, which is great too. I can imagine. Yeah, the roadshow that comes after you publish a book. So, Kate, another tradition here on the show is that we do a quick lightning round to get to know you as a person just a bit better and actually professional five questions, which you hopefully haven't prepared for because you don't know which ones are coming. Are you ready? Yes, ready. All right. What is your favorite food? Don't say either chili. I'll just go with chili, in fact. Noted that one. So speaking about books, if you could recommend a book for us to read during our summer break holiday, if you're in the northern hemisphere, which book would you recommend? Right now. I'm really enjoying Jen Parker's book, Recoding America. And it's not, it's very applicable to Europe, to UK, to many, many other countries too. So it's really interesting. It's about how it's full of stories about bringing the implementation of policy closer together and what happens if you don't do that. So there's lots of entertaining, interesting and useful stories in our work, I think. Recoding America. That's going on my to-do-to-read list, for sure, next to all the other one, all the other good recommendations. Kate, next question is, what is your go-to karaoke song? I refuse to do karaoke, so I don't have one. I'm a listener. I'm a listener of karaoke rather than a doer. A spectator. Sounds good. What did you want to become when you were a kid? A train driver. I'm not there yet, but I enjoyed trains. I was interested in how they work. I liked travelling. I thought that would be a good, and it was also a contrast to many other people in my class who wanted to be a nurse, and I don't like the sight of blood, so I knew that wasn't for me. Those are the two career choices I could think of at the time. Cool. Not sure that we had that one before, so that might be a first. And the fifth and final question which you may already know and be familiar with is, do you recall the first time you heard about service design? I think we were in the middle of a project and somebody said, oh, that's a service blueprint. And then I had to look at, what do you mean by blueprint, because I didn't think it was a blueprint as far as I understood it. That was some time ago, yes. So, yes, it would have been around then and it was tangential to the project I was working on at the time, I think, which is funny because I had been working on services and in services and doing services for some decades. Fascinating. That's a very common story of how people stumble upon service design somehow or have stumbled upon it. Thank you. Thank you for sharing these details. Very interesting to know. So, Kate, now it's time to unpack the topic of today and we were looking for what is the design challenge that we might address. And you phrased it as, at least that's my interpretation of how you phrased it, designing the organization rather than the service. That was my summary of the design challenge. Now, I think it's good to start with the book, the service organization, and see how our conversation evolves from there. Why did you decide to write a book? That's always an interesting question. So, I had been writing blog posts each time I found myself saying the same thing a few times or finding a way to explain a problem or noticing a problem that I couldn't find existing writing about. I'd be writing a blog post and, in fact, I was asked to write a book. I hadn't planned on writing a book, but it was because of sharing blog posts to individual issues, which I was uncovering as I went. And they were all around a similar theme, which was it's all very well to know how to follow a good service design process. It's really important, do really good work. But when you're doing it inside a very, very large organization, you are hit by how that organization works, which does not go along with that process that you followed. And in fact, unless you have an understanding about that and how to work with the organization, you can only go so far in terms of having real impact. So the book is really about if you find yourself inside a large organization or as a consultant working with them, here are the things to think about in terms of doing good service design work, making successful services, more than just a design process. That's regular listeners of the show will know that I host a community for in-house service design professionals. And I think the stories that I hear, I have to be really honest, I haven't had the opportunity to read a book yet. So I don't know what the content is, but I'm assuming that a lot of their stories and struggles will be aligned with what's in the book. What's your target audience when you were writing this? Good question, because I didn't necessarily have one particular discipline in mind. So it's not necessarily a book for service designers per se, but it's a book that I hoped would find its way into anybody that's involved in services. So that might well be people working in operational areas in front line. It could be people working in policy. It might be more traditional IT folk, some of the architects that work in large organizations, product managers, all the people that are involved. Plus, I thought I might well be saying things service designers are familiar with as well. So if it's useful for them, then that's great. But it's hopefully a book that transcends any one particular profession. All right. So one of the things you mentioned and that I've been hearing a lot as well is that it seems that the service design approach isn't very compatible with how organizations are set up these days. Do you recognize that? And if so, why is that? What is your perspective on that? So people have sort of different interpretations of what kind of service design is and how it works. But if we say that we mean you come in, you've got customers and users in mind particularly, or at least as a starting point, you do a sort of discovery or exploration piece that involves user research to understand what's going on. You generate interesting ideas that you hopefully then test and iterate and learn as you go. And then you figure out how to improve a service. And that's born of how a lot of consultancies work. It's really sensible to give you a really fun fresh perspective into something. When you're doing it often, continuously in a domain that you've gotten to know quite well, and on services that are incredibly complicated and involve operations, strategy, technology, and so on, it just, it doesn't work quite the same way because of the volume of people involved, the teams involved, the complexity involved, the way funding and money works, and the fact that organizations aren't designed in a way that mirrors the services they provide. They're soft and separated into different functional areas instead, like just a separate technology team, an operational team, a policy team, a strategy team, a leadership team is all separate. So the process that we kind of bring in then hits this world that doesn't quite understand, doesn't quite work in the same way. And it then causes questions like, well, what do you do about that? Where do you, what do you change about that? So, and we'll get to that in a second because I think that's going to be super interesting. But if we look a bit at the history and heritage of organizations, there must be reasonable explanations why they are set up the way they are. Apparently it has served them, and it's maybe even to this day, serving them to operate in the way that they are currently operating, which isn't fully aligned with maybe delivering services. So what have you found around that? So, classically, they're organized in terms of economies of scale. So they group together to specialize. So you can carve off the people that know about running a contact center, you can carve off the people that know about processing casework and files of paper. And, you know, that makes sense. I think you always need some centralized capability that's thinking on behalf of the whole or that can specialize in some way. I think the problem is when that state exists for some time, you start to lose the relationship between those things. So you become focused on the success or the strategy of your one bit. And that affects how you think about what good looks like, how you think about, is it kind of moving one case from here to here rather than sort of the quality of how well we've solved the problem or how quickly we've been able to do it overall or the fact that you might have caused problems later on for a compliance regime or something, but you wouldn't necessarily see that. So I think over time you lose that communications, the visibility, the relationship, the connection, and that's the problem. So it's not necessarily the problem is the economy to scale and some sort of separation figuring out how to do that is more when you only have that, that there's that the issue arises. Yeah, you're missing the layer that's in that's keeping the interconnection between all the layers. Wouldn't that be like, I would assume that that's a typical role for senior leadership, senior management strategy? Isn't it? It could be. I think it could be. It could be a role for leadership. One of the things that I find in my experience is that leadership tends to, over time, mimic the same structures within the organization. So you might have people working quite hard to help that organization think about cross cutting services. But at the same time, if you look up the makeup of the executive directors, you might have one person for each of those individual functional areas, in which case it's very difficult for them to then sort of do away with their role and commitment and then think about how they work together as a team. But it does represent a shift at that level, a sort of shift in thinking towards, sort of away from ownership of one group and work that that group does and whether how its strategy works and how well technology supports that one area in favor of more kind of guardianship working as a team for the good of the whole. It's a real shift. And so yes, I think it does stem from leadership, certainly, but it's not necessarily the way that it's structured isn't conducive to that necessarily. That makes a lot of sense. And I'm not sure how far this analogy goes and where it breaks down. But one thing I'm thinking about is you if you look at a soccer team, like you have all these individual players, but you need someone, multiple people that help them to win as a collective, rather than being successful as an individual player. And maybe that's, I don't know, does that work as an analogy in this case? I think it does to an extent, in fact, in terms of how well they operate as a team, and that they know it's not just relying on one or usually not just relying on one person to score the goals. The difference, I think, is that it has very clear shared idea about what good looks like. You have, you know the rules of the game, you know what you're aiming for. It's absolutely a cut and everybody has that and holds that. That's not the case in the large organizations. And that's, again, some of the issue is not only structure. It's that lack of shared agreement, cohesion, shared ideas about what we're doing here that helps us work together that's often really missing. And those is sort of, you know, it's interesting, a sort of conceptual way, but it's actually like hugely valuable. There are millions, if not billions of pounds of investment being made and spread without that necessarily clarity of understanding, which makes it a really valuable opportunity to talk about. Departments have their own perspective of what good looks like, what winning looks like. They have their own indicators. They're playing different games. They're playing different games. That's interesting. And winning in one area might result in the whole system or organization losing as an entire entity. Yeah, this sounds maybe we're staying on a quite conceptual level and strategic, but now we have service design coming in and seeing sort of the opportunity of connecting everything, connecting everyone, like cutting across silos, that's all the things we always mentioned. As you said, that's a great idea. That's a great concept. But you come into a system that's where there isn't a clear incentive to actually implement it. So neither on the operational level nor on the strategic level. If you look at how leadership is organized, that's going to create some friction, right? It can create friction. I think there's a few things to say about that. I think there is a huge incentive. I think that incentive is hidden. So the problems the situation creates aren't necessarily visible to everybody. Otherwise, you're right. If it's such a good idea, why wouldn't everyone just change it and do it then? Why wouldn't it just work that way? And I think because of that structure, it hides the financial opportunity of doing it. It hides the opportunity of how it feels to go to work knowing you can kind of bring your best, you're supported around doing a really good job. It hides the opportunity of delivering more successful services, whether that means people are happier or have better livelihoods, better outcomes, or revenue or whatever your goal is. So I think there is incentive there. I think part of the job is revealing that and making the case for it. But you're also right. It's not just like, can't just be like one person's job, you just can't go in and single-handedly change an organization overnight. Neither is it entirely the job of service design. So service design is noticed it because of the way in which they're focused in terms of their work. There are many other individuals across an organization who already see it, either because that's the way that they're inclined or because their discipline is also focused on looking across technical leads, operational leads, like other people like that are also looking across. So one is never alone in thinking that organizations can be more connected. I think what's helpful is having the practical tools, examples, templates, things that you can bring to it so that people can actually make progress towards it to move it from just kind of conceptual to actually doing something. What can we do this week about it, which is my interest and focus and hopefully what the book centers onto. Let's jump into some of those practical examples because I think that's the thing where people sort of get stuck moving from this great idea and seeing this opportunity of what would happen when people, processes, systems are more aligned, how that will create better services, better outcomes and then more revenue, less cost. There is a business case to be made for there even though it's often very hard. Take us through some of your favorite ways to put this into practice as a service design team, service design practitioner. What do you see happening? One easier and good starting point is becoming aware of what the services are that your organization provides generally. Sometimes we're brought in to work on one service, but it's really helpful exercise. Anytime you join somewhere new, even if it's just by yourself, just writing down what the services actually are. If you just think about external customers and users, there's a sort of reframe of what the remit of this organization is. That's useful. Not all services are as important as each other. One good place to start is to visualize the service, like an important one, one that would touch quite a lot of people across the organization, but not just in any way and not just driven by a service designer. Getting the right group of people together from operations, from policy, from strategy, from wherever they are and then setting out in abstract how that service roughly works and very much doing it together, so kind of losing the idea that its service designers are here and you've been doing it wrong and let me show you the way because that doesn't work so well when working with other people, but being the person can help identify the right people, find the right people and start to build a picture of how that service should be working. From there it starts opening out other opportunities and things and that's just a way in. There's much more to say about how governance works, how decisions are made, how funding works, the flow of work through an organization. These are all fascinating and good and useful things to look at to then start to influence how they work in order that they're more conducive to continuous improvement of services that the organization provides. Alright, so this one is already very interesting and I recall a conversation with Marcia from LiveWorks some time ago here on the service design show where she also said that one of the first things that they did in a project was to actually visualize the services that their client is offering and this sounds so banal, like you would expect an organization knows which services they are offering. It's so obvious that you don't even get to this idea, for me at least, doesn't even arise. So I'm curious like how and where have you seen that this need is actually there and that it's helpful? It's more useful I think when there are large, very large organizations and they've gone beyond the size where any one person can kind of hold in their heads all work that goes on. So that's definitely one way, like people might be really quite familiar with one or two of the things they work on but not the breadth of them. I think it's also listeners will know this but people's understanding of what we mean by service varies a lot. So I think for some people they might well think of the organization as providing technology. So they will think in terms of big chunks of technology as the service, whether that's a case working system that's the first service for the organization or some other product that they sell. So that's definitely another sort of things masquerading as services or policy examples of policy schemes that might not make sense individually to people on the outside but they would list off the different areas of policy or the different strategy perhaps that the organization provides and assume that those are the services. So partly in big organizations it's chaotic, it's confusing, just bringing this sort of simple list is quite helpful but I think it very quickly doing that exercise with people reveals that people have very different ideas about what's going on. What they're actually doing. Yeah, indeed and you know even if you say quite clearly like I'm just looking at, in fact it's important to say we're just capturing here the services that external people outside the organization would use would benefit from. I've also people saying well we've got the staff canteen, we've got the facilities that look after the toilet blocks like these are all services. Well they are in that they're an important way of keeping the organization going but in terms of the things we provide to customers the ration raise on debt for our organization then they're a sort of enabler they're not the actual service so I think there's lots of reasons why it sounds so common sense and once you do it won't you're like oh my god why did we never have this but it also doesn't exist necessarily. Yeah and like you said there are many different perspectives and ideas about what services are and bringing in that shared vocabulary and that shared image which obviously that's going to help to align people in first place and I was thinking like okay so how are we going to find the common understanding of what a service is and then I realized there's a other very good book out there called good services which provides a pretty good starting point to define what a service is and how you should write that down and what you should write down so okay yeah let's let's imagine we have a map or some kind of visual that tells us this is what we are providing our reason the threat as an organization helpful useful bring people on the same page what's next or what other useful practices can we bring in to start transforming our organization and I would think of it into two layers at once so one is the conversation you want to be having with leadership with leads across the different functions and domains that are involved in services those are the sorts of people that you want to be involving at like not an abstract level but a sort of across the organization this is how we do this this is how we can visualize a service this is how we might measure impact this is why it's useful because across the portfolio we've got a lot of work happening but there's nothing directing it like bringing to life why is useful at an organizational level to think like that that doesn't change any individual service it's an important conversation to have as an important strand of work to be pushing meantime you need to be bringing this to bear in actual tangible ways for one two three service or service areas and that looks like getting a good team together including leadership and a genuinely multidisciplinary team so not just your digital disciplines but the people involved in running the service the people involved in bigger technology change the people driving some of the strategy or policy change behind it and then working really closely as a team to kind of go against the culture of separation of handovers of predetermining the answer and really take pains to set up a genuinely sort of learning testing iterating function where you don't go too far without being able to kind of test and de-risk your approach and then you've got something tangible to point to about how this works differently alongside having the and here's how we scale it across the organization and this is why it's a compelling business reason business case to do so I have two questions regarding money here one has to do with as a service design professional or team you rarely get the brief to for instance map the services of the organization you're very often put into a specific box already and work on that specific area of the organization so I'm curious like who's funding this where where is the budget coming from to actually do this cross department cross silo work that's one question the other question okay let's imagine that we've done it as you said bringing a multidisciplinary team to get it to work on improving a specific service the funding models of most organizations to my knowledge are very linked to specific areas marketing has their budget it has their budget there aren't budgets to work on service x so again two questions I'm curious again to hear your thoughts on this because these are all like very important enabling factors that usually are not in place to do this yeah really really important questions um interestingly there have been a few examples of teams being funded to think about services across I can think of like a few areas of the UK government where that's happened but I agree it's not the rule and it certainly wasn't the case in some of the situations when I was involved like working in the house to do that um so I don't think um I think there were there are practical steps and things you can take without creating a sort of entire funded project um depending on how you see your role so if you find yourself in a sort of lead or a head of role I think you have you have a choice and we're all busy so I'm not suggesting that everybody takes on loads of work here really clear about that however you have a choice of whether you see yourself as entirely focused on your professional discipline so let's say you're ahead of service design are you entirely focused on your team of service designers and professional standards and quality of work and resourcing and so on and hiring and that's often more than a full-time job so it's entirely me some other people like yes I am and I've got too much to do another way to look at it or a portion of your role should probably be looking at how service design is thought of and scaled across the organization and on that basis that gives you license to be having the right conversations to be pushing the agenda to sort of have a an outside in perspective on your own professional discipline um and I think that's where finding those hours a week to kind of meet as a group or to network or to find out who the right people are to talk about is completely legitimately within those sorts of roles or any individual can still find ways to do that related to your second question though um absolutely the way funding and budgets work is often mimics those same organizational structures which don't run across services there are some examples now where entire service areas have their own budgets but it's because they've worked over the years to kind of get to that point if you're not there um there is money that transcends those verticals it's usually in the shape of programs of work so a program of transformation or a program of uh technology refresh or a program of some other kind of thing they're not necessarily shaped around services or full services but they're absolutely doing work that's impacting those services for could be for bad could be for have the potential for success and so it's really important to understand I think the flow of money and particularly that that's leading to change because that's some of the important material you have to work with um and it's usually the bigger prize so you know you can write write your own business cases to come up with a sort of service design project initiative to do that but it's not being driven by the service I'm fresh and there's already in large organizations buckets of money being used that you could help to be spent more wisely and that's usually the bigger prize so it's a case of finding the way in to be helpful in the conversations around those existing programs or in the shape of new programs I think is a big opportunity that's um two very helpful insights regarding the first one um where do you get the time and resources to do that cross functional organizational work a few things that have been said on the show as well is initially you have to do it almost as a byproduct of your current work so you do your current work and as a by product you start mapping the services of the organization and then uh you get both benefits your work direct work benefits but you're also creating stuff that can impact their larger organization so I absolutely uh encourage that as well with regards to the other point finding programs and again I'm I'm happy that you sort of highlight this there is always money you just have to find the right pockets and what the agenda is of senior management what they are pushing for if it's digital transformation you can probably make a good argument a good case to get a chunk of that money to work on cross inter siloed department initiatives right the the money is there you just have to find a way to frame it so that it aligns with proven customer experience for instance and in a in a sort of in a genuine way I think um if you spend time reading for example some organizations will have something called like a project or a program initiation document or something that sets out all the you know the original business case um it's a really good starting point to get hold of those documents though people will have them available um it's okay to ask for them to read them and it gives you good insight into what the goals are and usually there's some stuff which you would think oh gosh that's predetermining an answer and that looks incredibly risky to me from what I understand in my experience but in other bits it's like oh okay that's what you're trying to get to it's not like it's hardly ever separate to um to kind of making things work better overall like it's entirely conducive so I think it's about seeing how you can bring your skills and experience and knowledge into those places to help them achieve their goals in better ways you're not necessarily trying to sort of carve off a bit of the money for something else necessarily but to make it kind of a cohesive part of that story and it's really often that those programs need to get refactored and re-changed and re-budgeted anyway um because something will be behind or something will change so there's often even if you know all the money's tied up in existing programs there's often ways and moments and opportunities to kind of re-enter and then look at kind of re-changing some of how this is working or what it's for or how it's being used okay imposter syndrome but I don't want to go there like the question is is it our job or what is holding us back from having looking into these documents having these conversations because what I'm seeing is that there's a lot of fashion and um wanting to do good for customers or patients or organizations so people we work with and for so we we are very excited to do this work but I don't see people being very excited about going into these documents getting involved with politics but what are the gaps that uh well let's talk about gaps what are the gaps that you see within service design that would need to be bridged to help us accelerate our agenda well it's not our agenda again it's like a shared it's a shared agenda doesn't it and I don't think it falls to service designers in particular and sometimes it it comes down to I guess like an individual of like how far do you want to go and define that stuff interesting and are you interested in kind of sources of power and leverage by instinct or are you not would you know it's not necessary for everybody but there are some gaps so how could it be that you know I spent a portion of my career being not super aware of how um from a sort of regulatory perspective uh corporations particularly in the UK operate uh so if we say that inevitably our workers service designers is related to organization design because usually we're looking at how teams might change how work might happen and so on then just as people might say well to be a good service designer you have to know how to sign services you have to understand technology you have to understand enough of people and so on I add to that you've got to understand enough about how these organizations work um and by that specifically I mean get to know ways to understand how work moves through an organization how funding works the roles of boards and committees and um how kind of groups of executive directors work and the difference between different levels of directors that ideally is available information it should probably be a part of education but not everybody goes through sort of service design education in those ways um but it's definitely really valuable and part of your knowledge set is understanding the context in which an organization operates and if you can do your job being completely unaware of that um it's just that you will probably find yourself within one delivery team you'll wonder why work is predetermined up front I mean you can't bring your skills to bear you will wonder why the great ideas that you have don't necessarily result in anything and after a while you will either find yourself frustrated or the organization will consider you less relevant because you're not in the middle of where the big money or the big changes um so that's motivating enough if it's not inherently interesting to learn about anyway I hope there is a gap absolutely like understanding the organization that you're going to be part of like one of the things again that has been mentioned here on the show is that the organization is your design material and there are material properties that you can learn about understand start to understand how you can shape them it's just that we we as a design community haven't spent a lot of time and attention to actually have a conversation about these things big I don't know maybe because we find it more interesting to do user research and to prototype and to work on those actual services and sort of being ignorant about the bigger picture that we're part of I don't know I don't want to sound negative but uh it's probably not the thing that draws us into the profession is it like I would love to know about how executive director and boards and committees work therefore I'll be a service designer like it's not it's not obviously and the thing that is often missing in organizations is that bringing in a real emphasis on what's happening to people outside the organization customers users people communities groups minorities like that is often missing not missing is there is people have that recognition but you're often working against the busyness of your function your day job and so on so I think intentionally focusing on that and holding it as not just as important but like a forgotten part is the same side it's a different side of the same coin it isn't different from the success of the company it's part of the same thing so I think the fact that that is the incentive to enter our profession is really important it should be protected it's just that after a while you realize that okay there's more to do this like you can have the best well crafted ideas but to have influence to have credibility to have power to have leverage you either need to think about the organization and get to know it enough yourself it's also a lot to ask for and it's you know for incredibly busy people so the other way around is finding the people within the organizations that are very good at navigating it at working things out who've already been there who already know it and then working closely with them and I can think of a plenty of example where that's the case so that and leaves you to focus on your craft and your profession and what you do and work alongside someone who we let right we need to talk to this person first and that person first and this program is there and that money's there and how we'll do this is da da da da and if you're a consultancy ideally the person sort of sponsoring your work is in that position but often that's not the case and you don't necessarily know that but finding those people across the organization is really valuable and then hopefully you can share skills and knowledge so one learns more about managing their way through bureaucracy the other one learns more about sort of modern skills of product service development and so on so it makes for good pairing I don't know a lot about the product design world or the industrial design world but I can imagine that we can draw a parallel here where I as an individual can design something in 3d make it on a 3d printer locally here at home and it might serve as a very useful tool for me but when I want to bring my creation to the rest of the world because I see how it could help a specific use case I need to understand about manufacturing process I need to understand about logistics I need to understand about go-to-market all those things that didn't initially draw me to creating something that's going to be helpful for I don't know elderly and now I need to understand all these other aspects that seem like a byproduct of having to deliver this but like if you don't you're going to be stuck with this one idea I can imagine that that's that that's parallel to how service design operates at this moment and where we need to go to and why we need to go there yeah that's a good it's a good point and it's probably part of you know if you think of that's sort of a timeline where you kind of start working in some ways sort of maybe grow from consultancy there's many more in-house people working now in a service design capacity which is absolutely awesome then after some years of doing that you realize all hang on like the rest of the organization hasn't changed or maybe it's us that needs to change whichever way round it is something feels like there's a big missed opportunity and now it's okay now how do we think about becoming an integral part of how the organization works rather than an agitator from the sides which has you know it's in a really important role but after a while you then need to become just part of default this is how we work we make decisions we learn from evidence we do user research we you know that that's just now how the organization works by yeah it's the new operating model or the updated operating model to fit the society and the culture of today so again if we go back to the book for a second and I can imagine after writing this and sort of putting your thoughts in order and creating some structure and creating coherent story did any new questions arise during that process yes plenty and and it's you know it represents a moment in time I think we are all on a bit of a learning journey about how this works certainly questions around particularly around sort of corporate governance processes leadership structures ways of organizing corporations at a higher level like I have some like real questions about like what are some of the good ways in which we can organize those practices that exist for important reasons in a world where we are more focused on being service led across the organization and I think it would be partly I do in my work increasingly but working with chief financial officers working with um sort of uh legal counsel um compliance and audit regimes um the some of the corporate enablers around people who sort of run overall kind of governance were like what is the best way to work with them and engage their creative skills knowledge experience to help address some and unlock some of the value of thinking in more horizontal ways across services and they will know better about how for example finance teams can be and funding flows can be organized to better support that there's a really great example of people working with financial committees to unlock budget in different ways to lead to continuous improvement so I think that is raises a whole load of questions in terms of how do we embed this in how corporations and public sector organizations work in different countries in a much more integrated officialized way of doing this learning towards of how do we test learn and iterate using all of the tools at our disposal where it makes sense to to not just doing it for its sake do you feel are there have you come across operational models that you think we can use as inspiration maybe outside of the public sector or the private sector so a silly example this probably won't work but the operation model of a football team or I don't know have you come across some examples that you think might be might serve as a as an inspiration here um so I have some hesitancy about operating models in general um particularly where they and I think it's partly because of of how they're used um you know that's you know they've you've got five different template options to choose from and each one is sort of a different arrangement of rectangles on a on a slide and you pick the one and then a big consultancy kind of helps you implement it but over two years and then halfway through you've forgotten what the point is or why you were doing it or what you were trying to change from and to because that was never clear so my hesitancy isn't around the fact that you you know there is a model of how you operate is inherent but it's about sort of choosing operating model to follow um I don't know that I can think of a sort of tangential example particularly um but is a principle any that you know maybe there are some within sort of sports but the idea that you have some sort of clear direction you want to move in and you find ways to not have to make those big leaps and big decisions upfront that then tie you into the wrong thing later so about organizing to be able to see what's happening to be able to make changes relatively quickly where you can um and to be able to sort of heading roughly all together in the same direction so if you're choosing about you know where to locate a team do we set up a contact center in this place or that place is it okay that we have a contact center separate from operations in for this service is it okay that we have 18 services being run from the same team or are there some downsides of that like there are ways in which you can pilot try out do it small learn by doing it with real cases before you purchase an entirely new facility and then are locked into that decision so I think any example you might know some from football I don't know where that kind of the model of learning as you go you've got to make some calls but you can usually triangulate information before you do that rather than sort of sitting in a room and upfront designing it all and then rolling it out or picking one of the rectangle shapes from a template I think that's where I'm currently at on operating models interesting let's hope our community listens to this and comes up with the examples that they have seen it would be a good way to to crowd source some information here Kate um sort of heading towards the wrap up of our chat here what is the one thing you hope somebody will remember after this conversation based on everything we've discussed so far and we just scratched the surface of what we could have discussed but what is the one thing you hope that they will walk away with I think uh if not already a recognition of all of the opportunity to do really valuable work in your organization um isn't just from your craft it's from how you show up in your organization how you work across it how you get to know there's such valuable things that you can bring and do and that you don't necessarily need to be the CEO to do it wherever you are whatever your role is whatever level in your career there's always something that you can do to learn about that will help support you in the work that you do and there are always allies like you are not alone there are allies in your organizations you work with who are wanting the same things and if there really isn't then there'll be peers in similar organizations you can find and talk to so um yeah to always take away that there is something you can do even if you're working in quite challenging places I would say where can we learn more about the book and maybe other useful resources what's the go-to place um so the book is on the internet at all major booksellers the service organization um the service org.com is its website um I'm on the internet in various places so you can find me there and ask me questions um but for details of training and workshops and other things um and various blog posts and articles um go to that site and this can sign up for a newsletter um and I'm also on LinkedIn okay the service org.com that's uh at least one of the places you need to be and I'll also make sure to add all these links in the show notes Kate thanks so much this is all that we have time for today uh very interesting I think very much needed to have a more frequent and open dialogue about these challenges and see it just as the next frontier for our profession I think it's if we frame it right it's just another design challenge which we can get a lot of energy and excitement from so I hope that people will see it in that way and that this book also contributes to that so again thanks again for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us thanks it's been a real pleasure thank you are you planning to read the service organization leave a comment down below and let us know why and if you've already read it what was your biggest takeaway I'd love to hear from you if you've made it all the way here and enjoy the conversation please do me a quick favor if you haven't done so already click that like button not to feed the algorithm but just to let me know whether or not we're on the right track by addressing topics like this my name is Marc Fontaine and I want to thank you for spending a small part of your day with me it was an absolute honor and pleasure and I hope to see you very soon in the next video