 It's not a secret that a lot of service designers struggle to get their concepts implemented. If you're one of them, keep watching because in this episode we're going to look at what it takes to make service design real. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Lin. This is the Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to design organizations that put people at the heart of their business. The guest in this episode is Lin Wizzard. I'm really excited to have Lin on the show as she has both experience with service design consultancies, working at service design consultancies and also in-house teams. So she knows the struggles from both sides. And one of the struggles is that for service designers it's often challenging to make our work real, to actually get put services into the world that make an impact on customers and on business. Too often our work stays in the conceptual phase. So in this episode we're going to explore some of the roadblocks, what is causing us not to be able to make our work real. And at the end of this episode I hope that you have a different approach and mindset towards implementation which might prove to be more effective. So that's what's coming up. If you enjoy these conversations don't forget that we post at least one new video here on this channel that helps to level up your service design skills. So if you haven't done so already click that subscribe button and of course that bell icon so you'll be notified when new videos come out. So that's all for the intro and now let's quickly jump into the interview with Lin. Welcome to the show Lin. Hi Mark, so stoked to be here. Awesome. Lin for the people who don't know who you are could you give us a short introduction? Yeah for sure. So I'm Lin and I'm an independent service designer based in Toronto. Prior to going independent I worked at consulting companies like Bridgeable and before that usability matters. So I have been in Toronto for about seven years and it's been really interesting to see the service design community grow in that time. It's booming in Canada at this moment. Yeah for sure. It's come such a long way since I first came here and folks really didn't know when I said I want to be a service designer. People hadn't really heard of it. Well a lot can happen. That's probably encouraging for people who are watching or listening and are in a country where they feel that they are the only service designer around. It can change. Yeah for sure and actually I think it can be a really great opportunity to roll up your sleeves and build the community and practice that you want. Of course that can be tough but also fun. Somebody has to do the work. Just as a side note somebody reached out to me on LinkedIn today and said I want to organise the global service gem in the Czech Republic and I said yeah amazing do it. That's the way to start to start. Yeah 100%. So the global service gem is coming up in March I think so this is a quick shout out for the people who still want to join. Maybe we'll do a special on that. Anyway we're getting off track already and this is just to start. Lynn the question I ask everyone how did you get in touch with Serbs Design? Do you recall the moment? I do. So it was 2008-2009 I was studying industrial design my undergrad in Dublin at the National College of Art and Design and we were doing the Royal Society of Arts issues student design briefs every year and I was really curious about a brief that was around redesigning the prison visit experience. This was kind of outside maybe yeah and kind of outside of the industrial design domain in a sense. I was really compelled by this and as I tried to do this project and tackle this brief that was how I came across Serbs Design as I was trying to explore you know how can I express an experience that happens over time? How can I explore the different people and roles that make this experience happen? So that was my first you know I made my first very rudimentary journey map the proposal I made was for redesigning a role within the prison system and that was my first exposure to Serbs Design. 2008 yeah and Scotland also sort of has a I'm talking about Scotland but you mentioned Dublin but sort of that area also has a heritage in Serbs Design right? Sort of I feel that a lot of people coming into Serbs Design sort of have their roots in that area. You mean that part of the world or yeah yeah of course the UK but also Scotland and Dublin a lot has happened there. For sure for sure I mean I remember shortly after I graduated Lauren Curry who was you know one of the founders of Snook came and gave a talk as part of a project I was doing and so for sure I think there was a really interesting kind of nascent exploration happening at that time and some people like Lauren and Sarah Drummond of course who were pioneering Serbs Design work which I found really inspiring and exciting. Both were on the show by the way as well as Mike Press and a lot of people from that area. Cool happy interesting to hear that the prison experience I don't think I've heard that one before. Lynn let's get into the topics you shared with me. Let's do Interview Jazz are you ready? I'm ready let's do it. Okay I don't know if you had a particular order. Should I surprise you or do you want them in the order that you gave me? Let's do them in the order I gave you because I'm hoping we'll have a nice flow. Okay okay I'll be let's see let's see what comes out okay so the first topic that we have over here drum roll is make it real and do you have the famous Serbs Design? So question starters. Yes so the question starter for this one why is it that we seem to have a really hard time making it real in service design or shipping service design is another way I've been thinking about it. Please share what is your vision of shipping Serbs Design making it real what does that mean? Yeah so I think for me it's about is there some kind of meaningful or visible or measurable change that we can draw a line from our work our process what we did kind of to that change so sometimes I think about it did something in the market change did a service is there a new service did a touch point of a service change is the way a service is being delivered has that changed and they think this is one of the things we grapple with is even first of all understanding or defining what making it real means yeah. Yeah so I've in my career as a service designer often got the question like okay so can you tell me about a service that you actually designed like can you point to a service that you actually created and often the answer is well not really and our clients don't really want a new service just as they might want a new website or an app or something like that right that's that's already quite paradoxical. Yeah for sure I mean I think it's really really unusual to be brought in to conceive of or deliver or build or design a service from scratch I think it's much more common that we're working with something that's existing I think notionally people want improvement or change to what's existing and then I think what happens is the reality of making that change happen is really really difficult and sometimes as service designers we're not equipped I think to do that I was reading a bit in preparation to chat with you there was a 10th anniversary edition of touch point which was focused on this issue from design to implementation and there's a statistic quoted in there that only four percent of service design methods are focused on the implementation piece so I think that's a really interesting clue around where our energy has been focused from a methodology perspective. Yeah but I feel that we I've heard that statistic before and for people who don't know what touch point is it's a service design network magazine it's a publication they I think publish every month or something like that every quarter I don't know anyway it's a recorder yeah I'll put a link down in the show notes but what we have to define like what does it mean to implement service design because if we say four percent is focused on implementation like what is it focused at do you have what is your perspective on that? Yeah so again I kind of go back to did something actually change you know in the service that a user a customer a citizen is experiencing you know did it make it out into the real world in some way and that's the way I've been trying to kind of think about it for myself and in my own practice is this going to meaningfully change what's happening in the real world on a day-to-day basis is someone going to be able to experience that right I think you know too often which which is probably to do with the maturity level of the practice but I think a lot of the time service design is being brought in to sort of do art of the possible or blue sky and there's often a tension between wanting to do these very bold visionary you know innovation type projects and there's a tension between that and what's actually realistic in terms of delivery and what it takes to do that delivery on a day-to-day basis so this is something I've definitely been grappling with and I think there's some dialogue in the community about you know work ending up on the concept shelf or in a drawer or you do all this work and it's a blueprint on the wall but that's it yeah and it's a waste of effort it's a waste of energy and it's if we keep doing that kind of work we're sort of putting the reputation of the whole industry on the line right yeah and I think part of it is about what are the conditions that you're walking into is an organization actually ready to make change um do you have whether it's you know senior level executive champions or are you able to build the right relationships in such a way that people are brought along and I think you know we talk a lot about co-creation being a way to do that but I think something that happens a lot is that co-creation gets mixed up with consensus-based decision making so people think that co-creation is going to solve all of the difficult decision making issues that people and organizations are facing um whereas actually it you know it can be a really powerful way to bring people along on the journey but someone still ultimately needs to make decisions or there needs to be a process or structure in place for that decision making to happen I think a lot of the time uh you know concepts or service design projects flounder because that structure isn't really there to enable them to continue or to live on and a lot of that's you know political or relational so can we well yeah yeah and and then if we reflect that question back on to us if it's political or relational can we actually influence that I think so um I think we can influence it I think one of the big challenges for designers is to reconsider or reconceptualize how much control we have so I'm really interested in this idea that as designers who are often you know creative people we're used to having a certain level of direct control over making things right um whether that's being able to sketch or whether it's being able to make with your hands you know we're often kind of makers by nature uh but I think what happens when you start working at something that's at the complexity level of a service um we can no longer have that direct control the kind of material that we're working with we'll maybe touch on this a bit more later we will but the material that we're working with um is no longer sort of as malleable or as directly controllable so I think influence is exactly the right word we can have influence but we may not be able to directly control the outcomes and and that's maybe the frustrating thing right we we can sort of shape the conditions in which this outcome might occur but we cannot enforce it a hundred percent and I think this is very difficult for folks who are maybe traditionally design trained like myself because you're you're setting the expectation that you're going to have a vision that you then go execute on so as an industrial designer you know you're going to bring this chair to life um and I think it is a really different mindset to work at this level of complexity and I think it's often what's very frustrating for people because there are people who are incredibly skilled at the craft elements but keep running into this frustration and like myself included around why are we not delivering why is change not happening in the way I was hoping why are we not making it real why am I struggling to be part of projects that that ship I think we should transition into the second uh topic because um this will sort of be the red threat what what is the red line red thread what a yeah red thread red thread throughout the episode uh so yeah let's move into uh topic number two to continue this conversation and topic number two is about outcomes okay let me see here so for this one I thought we could use this question starter which is how can we how can we expand our understanding of what the outcomes of service design are are is our current understanding limited so I think two things I think one we actually don't talk a lot about outcomes at all which is really interesting um this became a little bit of an obsession for me uh last year I was really trying to explore this this idea of how do we think about the outcomes of our work uh so I think one is we're not really even having that much dialogue or discussion around outcomes we're not framing our work around outcomes um and then two I think when we do uh it often gets a little bit maybe sidetracked or kind of dominated uh with a conversation around metrics and KPIs and measurement so I think we can unpack both of those a little bit more let's go yeah sure go ahead yeah so I think the first piece around you know how are we framing our work are we actually talking about outcomes I think as service designers we love to talk about method process deliverables um and actually none of those things are really outcomes they can lead to outcomes but they're not outcomes in and of themselves and I think historically what's happened is we've asked a lot of our uh stakeholders and teammates and people we work with to sort of assess the quality of design um and almost think about what the outcomes will be through the lens of these deliverables that we're creating you know there's a lot of conversation about we're not sort of speaking always the same language as the people we work with uh and so I think there's a really exciting opportunity to explore more about like what are the outcomes we're actually getting at and I think what becomes very difficult particularly in service design is that a lot of these outcomes are very intangible um so it might be things like convening new relationships or building new capability or skill or enabling people to solve problems with another tool set sure it may also be things like increased value in some sense for the business or it may be things like a new or improved service being delivered yeah or yeah there are a lot of other things that also come to my mind as an an outcome but the problem is I think uh we as a community don't make that explicit but it's also our clients are not per se asking and sort of don't make the connection that if we have this kind of challenge then it's a service designer that we need to call I think that's true um and I think for me it comes back to how are we framing what we do and it's so it's so easy to get caught up in you know I love the design community I love design it's so easy to get caught up in our own little bubble and so you know if we're not effectively communicating the types of outcomes we can help to achieve if we're not even having a dialogue about the types of outcomes of service design how can we expect people to know exactly that's something that a service designer can help with yeah so uh we we've we've had this conversation on the show quite often that we're so in love with what we do uh that we love to talk about what we do rather than talking about the things we try to achieve the outcomes we try to achieve for people and if they're interested we can talk about how we do it but that shouldn't it should be more uh there should be a better balance let let me phrase it that way right yeah for sure and then I think the other piece becomes how do we not get too caught up in this conversation around KPIs and return on investment I think the big aha for me was thinking about the fact that often measurement is really a proxy for outcomes so you know for example if you want to get healthier maybe one of the things you're going to measure is say what you weigh or BMI could be it doesn't have to be but really that number is not the outcome you want the outcome is maybe to feel better to be able to you know run for the bus or whatever it is and I think sometimes we get a bit mixed up because we feel so pulled by the really dominant kind of business values around being able to prove ROI and metrics and so on and so I think they have a place and they can be a helpful way of showing something changed uh because of the work we did I think we need to be careful not to get too sucked into thinking that this is the only way to kind of demonstrate outcomes of service design and I think there are a lot of intangible outcomes to the work we do which is around how people feel um so a little story about a project I did last year um with a public sector client you know I I think one of the things that was most exciting for me was seeing how some of the frontline staff who were really tenured experienced very skilled people in their jobs you could see a sort of renewed sense of excitement and energy at being brought into a different way of doing things and it's very hard to measure but I think it's quite a meaningful outcome and and um I totally agree by the way with you uh how but my question would be how can we uh I sort of feel that we have to convince clients that these are actually meaningful outcomes how and any any do you have the same experience and if so how do we do that or yeah yeah no I think it's true and I think I think one thing is you know you don't want to necessarily lead with some of the things that may seem different or or kind of too out there um but I do believe that a lot of it is about what are you modeling when you show up what does it feel like to work with you or your or the team um so I kind of feel that a lot of this is a bit of a show don't tell it's more about the experience of doing the work together than it is about trying to convince or sell or tell uh that these things matter I think people can feel when it's happening and they and they sort of you know I I sort of framed like this in the talk I gave about this last year I sort of said you know how do you know that you're in love right um it's very intangible it's very much about a feeling uh and I think it's less about convincing people that these things matter because I think we know it as people and it's more about letting people experience it hmm again again I'm of course I'm totally on your side the challenge the I sort of the challenge one of the challenges that I see is when you deliver outcomes that you know are valuable but your client isn't per se valuing then sort of the perception of the value of your work isn't what it should be so right we can create a lot of valuable outcomes like shared understanding or renewed energy but if somebody up front isn't looking for that or it's like they don't know what they don't know then we have created a lot of value but we I don't know what the word is but we should be appreciated for that or credited for that or so I might kind of challenge you there mark and say that you know um are we in it to be appreciated right and I think this comes a little bit back to this idea of sort of what are we expecting out of the work and what type of of humility can we bring to the practice and can we really be in service of in a way that is sort of you know not attached to necessarily getting credit or feeling valued or all of these things I mean I understand that there are some you know realities around business and uh it's not to diminish that but I think there's something really interesting for designers around how can we cultivate a mindset that really is about being of service and acknowledging that if a team or a client doesn't feel that some of these things are valuable outcomes or they're they're not seeking that right now then you know they're not in a place where that's meaningful to them or it's the right thing for them or maybe they're sort of not almost ready in a sense and I think this is a lot to do with um having patience in terms of what the change we're all seeking is a long game not a short game yeah so and that's again a recurring theme in the last few episodes is um it's also about finding the right clients having the skill to find not every client or challenge a project is suited for a service design approach 100% and I think for designers and I'm trying to work on this for myself it's also about readjusting your expectations about how much change can happen how fast um and and what's actually realistic for people you know sometimes you go into a project you think it's one thing you think it's going to be about this you know I don't know big radical service innovation and you know it turns out that actually if you could support people to see the value and in qualitative research that would actually be a good outcome for that whatever it is you know for months six months um and those moments I think you have to really celebrate I had a client last year after you know some resistance to the idea of prototyping and testing and you know just sort of not super excited about this idea and we set up and did some prototyping and testing with folks and the team was so excited and I had someone say to me I'm never doing anything again without testing it with the people who will use it and that's huge like that's an amazing outcome right yeah yeah and we have to sort of be really uh aware that what comes natural to us might not come natural to other people and then celebrating that putting that on a stage if you will is really important exactly and I think we sometimes expect too much too quickly so taking those moments which can seem maybe small and maybe weren't the thing that we thought we were going to be able to achieve at the outset and actually really celebrating those for what they are I'm really excited by these ideas yeah okay we're going to continue transition into the third and final topic shall we let's do it okay it's again one word which is in this case material okay let me get my question starter here okay so I think my question here is what if the material of service design is the organization that's an interesting thought please elaborate okay so this idea of the material of service design is the organization comes from Stephen Taylor at Harmonic Design he wrote a medium post about it I think last year and I found this really fascinating so we were talking a bit earlier about you know designers often learn a craft learn how to work with some kind of material and this really resonated for me around as service designers the material we're working with is the organization I and yeah and in order to kind of achieve the types of outcomes that we want we need to be really skilled actually at working with this material and yeah yeah go ahead so I think there's also a very interesting tension I may be preempting maybe something or I was listening a bit to some of the previous episodes and I know this has been kind of talked about it in various ways you know I think one of the questions that might arise is is this too big of a scope like is it really our job to take on the organization and I understand that at the same time I would sort of say that we can't be effective as service designers without considering the organization and without actually getting skilled at working with organizations and the sort of material they're in and I think that's why we're often struggling to make it real and to ship service design because we're not that skilled or that equipped or we're not calibrated in the right way to work with that material I think I have a video also on the channel where I talk about that one that the design material of service design is the organization and you have to understand the material properties just like in any design discipline another way we could also look at this is if we as service designers are sort of writing the software the hardware is the organization that our software needs to run upon and if we want to make software that actually runs without bugs we need to understand the platform sort of that we're building this on top of right that's that's sort of the metaphor I'm using in my head yeah that's a great metaphor what are so so what what is it that we actually need to do if the organization is at that design material how do we design with the organization yeah great question and definitely not something that's straightforward right um one of the things that was a bit of a light bulb moment for me was coming across some work by Lotta around during her PhD and she was looking at basically organizational theory and this was kind of a light bulb for me so the idea is that we often think about organizations in a very mechanistic kind of systems oriented way and we think that we're going to achieve outcomes by implementing a plan it's sort of a system and we can have a plan and implement it and we hope to get this one is to one result where our plan and the outcome are very closely interlinked and kind of side note historically we've seen the quality of a design process as connected to how closely matched the actualized design or the product that goes to market is to the sort of design vision that's been an indicator of the quality of the process we're able to execute on that and what Lotta's PhD talks about is that the in part is that the latest in organizational theory suggests that we should actually be thinking about organizations as conversations where outcomes happen by coming in and affecting and changing the conversations that are happening so this was really interesting to me because I was like oh yes I have thought that I can just go in and have a plan and sort of implement it and get this outcome or results but actually when you think about organizations as conversations two things happen one we can think about a lot of the design process and design work and design methods as a way of having new conversations or shaping or changing the conversations and also as sort of an invitation to have a different conversation right and two just by being there we're actually changing the conversation and so in this model you can kind of argue that we're implementing simply by being there and changing the conversation I struggle a little bit with this because it feels like a tautology to me right then the question yeah yeah so so then the question for me becomes if by showing up and being part of it and changing the conversation I'm already implementing I'm already creating new outcomes how do we make sure those are intended outcomes that those are intentional again I'm going to reference a video that I made is where I said there is no implementation in service design everything is implementation from the first moment you start interacting with your your client and that that stirred up some debate but it was exactly to sort of counter the notion that we can sort of go through research ideation prototyping and then sort of implement I've never seen that work in in any organization so the implementation mindset I like the way you phrased it of having a conversation from day one and then how do you make it intentional that's about direction and and other stuff right yeah and I think this goes back to what we touched on a bit earlier which is how can we expand what we think of as outcomes so new conversations are in fact an outcome convening new relationships are an outcome they may be less tangible outcomes they may be harder to prove the value of they are how change happens so how do we should we start adopting a new mental model around service design and should we start having a different conversation about service design so to add to that do we have like still the industrial design lens on service design and should we adopt maybe a different lens I don't know which one yet but question mark yeah quite possibly I think that many of the ways that we operate are really rooted in industrial models of the world and you see that now with organizations in some cases struggling to stay relevant and adaptable we've been very used to you know top-down types of control and hierarchy and now we're living in a world that's much more flexible and networked and where things are much more emergent and I think for designers we're sometimes still quite rooted in that industrialized model which makes sense that's where our practice has its origins yeah and and if we go back to one of the things we said in the beginning of the episode where four percent of the methods is focused on implementation this could also sort of relate to that where the methods of implementation are focused on product delivery or the product mindset or industrial design mindset while we might start we might need to build a vocabulary and a tool set of methods that originates more from service delivery lens 100% and I think for me a lot of what this comes back to is where does service design live in this and it comes a bit to where do you sit in the organization you know and there's arguments to be made for all sorts of different setups but I think we need to be really strategic about how work happens and what you said reminds me of this sort of thought around operations I mean operations is in some ways to my mind the kind of oldest form of service design we have it's how things get done and how things happen in organization and how things are delivered and so I think there's a really natural relationship between service design and operations for example yeah so so to continue on what you said what would be the place for service design yeah I think it's a tough one and I think we're still trying to figure that out I think there's a question about you know what should our role be right should we be embedded practitioners within delivery teams you know within product or service lines and of course there's lots of great sort of exploration around this what's it called design ops for design orgs or yeah yeah or I'm not sure if I'm getting that title entirely correct but so there's there's lots of different sort of conversation around where we should sit and there's pros and cons to to either I think unless we're sitting close to or have insight into how things are getting delivered and shipped we're not likely to be able to really trace our work to that end outcome in a very linear way which sometimes might be okay but I think what starts to happen with service design is by nature it's so complex cross-functional there's so many different people involved it's much harder to have a really tight two pizza team that is responsible for delivering and shipping a service and I think that's one of the things we need to really grapple with and Lynn regarding what we've just talked about in the last 30 minutes is there a question that you would like to ask us the viewers and the listeners of the show I do have a question it's not necessarily directly related to everything we've been talking about but I'm curious to hear if any of the listeners have great examples either that they've worked on or they've come across of how organizations have started to kind of routinize or have as part of their ongoing practice service sort of testing and service simulation so you know very aware of all the sorts of methods that you'll come across in lots of the books but curious whether there's examples of service organizations in particular building that into part of their practice and how they're actually continually testing um prototyping and testing services uh in their delivery process um and not just from a digital perspective but exactly yeah yeah because I already see the comments flowing in that people do MVPs and screen AP testing stuff like that that's not what we're aiming at right that's not quite what I'm aiming at I'm aiming at like how do you actually prototype and test on an ongoing basis very complex omni channel services that happen over time and is are there any great examples of organizations that have built some capacity or maturity in continually doing that type of testing in their service delivery would be awesome yeah me too bring a new frontier new frontier I'll make sure to also add this question in the email that I send out to you to the community Lynn final question what's the best way to get in touch with you if people want to reach out yeah I'm fairly active on Twitter usually my handle is at Whitster w i t t s t e r I think we'll link to it um it's an anagram of twitters there you go okay twitter anything else uh people can feel free to connect on linkedin and you can always drop me an email uh my name's fairly unique and fairly googleable so you probably you'll probably get me good well uh there was a lot to process in the coming two weeks before the next episode comes out so uh link thanks for stirring this up yeah you're welcome mark it's a pleasure thank you for having me awesome thanks so coming back to Lynn's question did you have any examples of companies who are able to continuously prototype and test services we would love to hear some examples leave your thoughts ideas in the comments down below if you enjoyed this episode consider sharing it with at least one other person today that way you'll not only help to grow the service design community but you'll also help me to invite more inspiring guests like Lynn if you would like to see more interesting videos more interviews with services on pioneers here's the next video so check that out and i'll see you over there