 Have you ever been in a project that didn't go as smooth as you hoped just because your way of thinking and working was different than the way your client is used to working? Well, this kind of tension happens a lot and in this episode we'll talk about how you can actually use this tension to turn clients into a lifetime partnerships. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Sarah and 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 Sarah Schumann. Sarah is the founder of In-Width Forward, which is a social design organization that helps to make human services more human. In this episode, we'll be addressing some really big topics. The work Sarah does involves a lot of ethical questions and asking questions like who will actually suffer from the things we're designing. We need to be asking bigger and more important questions and the way to do that is something that we'll be discussing on this episode. We'll also discuss how it impacts the relationship you have with your client. What kind of level of trust do you need to have in order to actually ask these kind of questions and how do you get to that level of trust? If this is your first time here and you enjoy these conversations, make sure that you hit that subscribe button because we try to bring you a new video that helps to level up your service design skill at least once a week here on this channel. So without any further ado, let's jump straight into the conversation with Sarah. Welcome to the show, Sarah. Hi, Mark. Good to have you on. Again, somebody from Canada. I'm sort of on a Canada tour in the recent weeks. Sarah, for the people who don't know who you are, could you give like a brief introduction? Sure. So my name is Sarah Schulman, and I have the privilege of running in with forward. We're a small social design shop based in Vancouver and Toronto, Canada. And our mission is to try and turn our social safety nets into trampolines. So we work, you know, from the ground up with marginalized communities to really understand their perspective, doing deep research and ethnography, and then co-designing all sorts of new kinds of support models in the disability space, in the homelessness and addiction space, in the newcomer and immigration space. And really we're working in partnership with lots of different nonprofits and government agencies to try and create this new kind of welfare state. And for the people who are watching the video right now, we're seeing early morning traffic in Toronto, right? In Vancouver. So 7.30 am traffic right outside. This is East Hastings, which is actually the poorest postal code in all of Canada. And yeah, we're in the epicenter really of, it's a beautiful and vibrant community that also happens to have a really high homelessness and addiction rate. For the people who are listening to the podcast, please go to YouTube and check it out. You'll see some livelihood. Sarah, this is the service design show and I know that you haven't prepared for this question, but do you remember the first time you got in touch with the term service design? Cool. I do actually. It was in 2006 and it was in a bookstore in Oxford in the UK, where I was doing my PhD at the time and escaping from the realities of all the research. And I went to Blackwell's bookstore. I had the good fortune of living right above Blackwell's. And so I could waste as much time as I wanted. And I went to a section that I'd never gone to before, which was on design. And there was a book there about service design and particularly how design was being used in a public sector context in the UK. And I wrote the author of that chapter the evening of reading it. And so began my journey into service design and bringing the social sciences into it and away from the academic track that I had been on. And of course, everybody's curious now, what was the book? The book was called Public Matters. And it was a compilation of essays about how to reform the public sector and design was one of the methods that they introduced. Cool, cool. Sarah, you gave me some interesting topics. And I always say that, but it's true. It's always true. Every guest has a new and own perspective. So I gave you the question starters. Are you ready to do some classic interviews? I'm ready as ready as I'm going to be, I think. Okay, good. Let's see where this is going to lead us today. Because the first topic is called partnerships. And I invite you to the question starters. How can we enable great partnerships? Well, partnerships between who and who and what makes a partnership great. So I'm going to build upon your question. So, you know, one of our big lessons in our work over the past decade, and we've worked in lots of different contexts in the UK, in the Netherlands, in Australia, and now in Canada has been, you know, how do we find partners that share our same values and our same tendency towards disruption? You know, we cannot tip over the welfare state on our own. We are tiny. And so, you know, while we have a lot of energy and ideas, we also don't have a lot of know how and expertise in the contexts in which we're trying to change. And so partnering with, you know, institutions and organizations, groups and associations that have that deep understanding of the field that we're working in has been really essential to trying to make change. But we've also learned the hard way that not all organizations, institutions, groups and associations have the same ambitions or vision. And nor do they necessarily have the capacity to be able to work in disruptive and provocative kinds of ways. And so, you know, really our most enduring lesson has been how do we test out our partnerships? How do we determine whether it's a good fit? And we really liken it to dating. And, you know, it's not unlike trying to find a partner that you want to settle down with. And, you know, over our last five years in Canada, we've tried out probably 25 or 30 different partnerships. And we do short pieces of ethnographic work for about a month at a time. And we found that that work is one of the best platforms to test each other out. So, you know, five years ago, we moved into a social housing complex here in Burnaby, British Columbia. And, you know, alongside three large disability service providers really began to get to know all of our neighbors in that social housing complex and use that research to test, you know, 10 different ideas, two of which have now gone on to see the light of day. But in those early days, we were really trying to learn, you know, it was their space for this partnership to be able to hold some of this, you know, some of these insights. And, you know, we found that the answer was yes, that there was a big appetite, that there was a willingness to wrestle with some of the big questions that are deep and immersive ethnographic work kind of surfaced. And that's not always the case. We've worked with other organizations for whom when we do this kind of deep ethnographic research, the response is one of defensiveness or the response is one of, well, we don't have time or capacity to take this on. There's not that readiness or willingness to begin to contend with some of the, you know, the really profound questions that doing this work entails. And so our best partners are ones that want to get philosophical and pragmatic, that have, you know, both a short term willingness to roll up their sleeves as well as a long term vision and being able to hold the space for all of those things has been have been really important ingredients to good partnership work. And do you think you're now able to spot good partnerships earlier in the phase than you were five years ago? And so what are sort of the key? What gives it away? You know, I'm not sure we are. I think, you know, I'm surprised at how challenging it can be to really find that match. Although maybe I shouldn't be surprised when we think about the odds in the dating world. You know, it often is a numbers game, one has to go through many different people and many different styles in order to find that best match. And, you know, every time we've tried to shortchange our partnership finding process, we've learned the hard way that that's not the way to build trust and the way to build trust is by, you know, doing something difficult together, like asking a research question, getting on the ground, learning it, seeing how we all respond to it, seeing if there is, you know, the leadership and the courage to be able to, to, you know, honestly contend with the things that emerge. And I think the thing that, you know, is very true in the social sector and perhaps any sector is short term demands, the demands of just delivering services to people can often, you know, is often prioritized more than being able to stand back and look at what we're doing and ask questions like, are we doing harm? And for whom are we creating good outcomes? And for whom are we not? And so it's, it's really quite a small number of organizations that have the bandwidth and the leadership and the moral fortitude, I think to ask some of those really big questions. And that those questions are the heart and soul of our work. And so if it's an organization that's not willing or able to do that, it often ends up being a really challenging and tricky and tough set of relationships. And, and we just learned that even this month. So five years into, into our Canadian experience, we continuously relearned that. Many questions around this topic, but we have other topics which are interesting as well. So Sarah, let's, we'll get probably into partnerships later on, but let's explore topic number two, which has the title ethical implications. And maybe that also involves partnerships. Maybe I'll go for why should we consider ethical implications? Well, that's a really good question. You know, the work of, of service design broadly, which I think is, you know, how do we design great experiences within four people? And then in social design in particular, which is how do we design experiences that are actually transformative that can actually create change within four people are both questions that are profoundly ethical. They're questions about figuring out what is good for whom in what circumstances, under what conditions. And they're, they're inherently questions that involve preferences and interpretations about the very nature of what constitutes a positive outcome. And so, you know, they deserve to be, you know, I think I've used the word wrestled with a few times this morning, but, but they deserve to have that sense of deep and profound engagement with, with those concepts. And, you know, our work in particular is, is even another step deeper, which is we're working with folks that are traditionally marginalized, working with folks that might be experiencing homelessness or addiction or mental health challenges or who might be new to the country and whose voices often haven't been heard in traditional processes and whose interests can often be manipulated politically quite easily. And so in a, in a context in which historically we've done very poorly by these folks, the ways in which we listen to people, the ways in which we represent people, the ways in which we partner and build relationships with people, the kinds of expectations we have with folks are all questions that are deeply ethical and require us to look at the gray zone, not just the black and white, not just get caught up in the trend of design or innovation and not see design and innovation as neutral, as inherently good things. They have a shadow side and I see the shadow side more often than not. Like what? Can you again, shadow size like what? Well, you know, I see a lot of quite unsophisticated design that inadvertently reinforces the status quo rather than challenges it. And so, you know, the trend these days is, you know, digital services or the trend is coordinated data sharing, all of, both of which for many folks on the margins can lead them worse off who gets to read their data. We assume that getting social workers and, you know, housing workers and all of the constellation of people on the same page is a good thing. But actually that reinforces the notion that professionals have a lot of power. It doesn't contend with the history of professionalization as something that might be quite negative for folks on the margins. Same with digital services, the notion that just putting things online or an app or a smooth service journey flow in that medium is the best way to really address some of the structural reasons why folks on the margins are on the margins is quite superficial thinking. And so I think in the, you know, we can spend a lot of money and a lot of time on jazzing up old versions of things and making the old appear new rather than actually sitting to unpick and unpack what are the core ideas and assumptions that are animating our current services. And if we really want a different kind of welfare state for folks, we have to start with different ideas and assumptions, not just nicer products and services. Those are big questions and I wonder how do you actually put this into practice? Do you have like a framework to address ethical questions or does it happen spontaneously? How do you approach this? Yeah, great question. I think, you know, for us, having some team routines and some space to be able to ask big questions is one piece of the puzzle. We have a Monday huddle where we identified priorities and also inspiration from other sources to help us read and pull apart some of these big ideas. Then we have a Friday reflection session every week for two hours where we pose some questions that are on our mind. We do some writing, we do some group conversation and discussion. We have a resident philosopher we call him who is the director of innovation for one of our large organization's possibilities and who often comes to the table with some of these big questions or provocations or prompts. We do a lot of reading and part of my role on the team as the kind of lead social scientist is to bring to the table articles and books and, you know, some of the latest science and thinking out there. And so in each piece of work we do, we start by, you know, developing a bit of a literature review, going to what's out there and, you know, as much as we can writing about it. And I think writing has been an important part of our practice. It's not one that all of our designers love. But, you know, taking the time to not just create beautiful things, but also to deconstruct and analyze and that kind of analytic and creative thinking you need to go side by side. So those are some things we try. Well, that's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So basically what I'm hearing you say is having the time to reflect and also actively provoking a discussion and writing for me is it's almost never about writing itself, but it's about the process of thinking what to write and then the words are just an expression of thinking. So you are really deliberate and you are creating the conditions in which at least you increase the chance that you'll have a conversation about the implications, right? That's the hope. And, you know, I think as any of us that have sillyly done a PhD will tell you, you know, there's all you could always spend more time reading. There is always more provocation and prompts that could spark, you know, better thoughts. And so we do what we can in the context of, you know, quite busy project work. And how you're deeply involved into ethical implications because you're dealing with minorities, for instance. Is there a lesson we could bring into the regular service design practice, which would be a first step into having more of these conversations? If so, what would that be? Yeah. I mean, I think taking the time to ask better questions. And, you know, when I look at a lot of the briefs that service design colleagues or when I go to service design conferences, I see like a starting point, they deserve a more robust critique from not just the starting point of pragmatics or business model, but from, you know, let's take an ethical lens to it. So, you know, in the policy world for those that have some familiarity with it, you know, often we take a particular lens when we're analyzing a policy, we take a gender lens, and we might do something called the gender analysis, where we read the policy from the perspective of how might this policy impact on gender and sexuality. And, you know, there are many different kind of marginalized groups that's a common practice in the policy world is to kind of try and think from that perspective and at least anticipate some of the questions. And, you know, I think that that would be a good practice for designers to get into as well as every time there's a brief is to ask things from multiple perspectives and ask like what is the shadow side? You know, I think we're seeing this right now with social media, for instance, and, you know, large scale ventures like Facebook and Twitter who, you know, seem astounded that there is a shadow side that that wasn't something that was at least part of the discourse, of course, or predicted 10, 15 years ago. So, you know, I think we've got to get better at from the start of things asking the really tough and uncomfortable questions about what harm can also be created. How do we do research on the harm at the same time that we're doing research on the possible opportunity space? I'm thinking about the question at the start of a briefing like who will suffer and who will benefit from the thing where so if if I would have to start somewhere that would probably be one of the questions that I would like to ask myself like usually the benefit is quite obvious but who will who will suffer from the thing we are designing might be might be something interesting to explore. We're moving fast. Let's move on into topic number three and now we'll have more time for this one as well. We're just you gave me topics that again, nobody else came up with tension. I don't think we've had this one. We've had over 250 topics and tension hasn't been one of them. Okay, there we go. So yeah, how can we recognize that tension is an inherent part of creativity? What kind of tension are we talking about here? Well, you know, this goes back full circle to our conversation at the start about partnerships, which is, you know, when we're bringing different stakeholders and groups together, tension is an inherent part of the relationship. We've got different interests. We have different preferences and how do we hold the space for both rather than either or and so increasingly in our practice, you know, we're using, you know, yes and yes, how can we acknowledge that the current service system is one that, you know, is built on a sense of certainty, a sense of accountability, a sense of structure and rules and how do we create the space for emergence, for, you know, agility, for, you know, the gray zone rather than the black or white. And so, you know, in our best partnership work, we are taking the time to acknowledge and identify and name the tensions and rather than swing too far from one side to the other, try and find the space in between. And, you know, we've found that by simply giving these sorts of things a language and not, you know, not the implicit judgment that we've created, you know, a much more fertile ground for us to be generative. I think in the old days there was an implicit, you know, we would be very judgy of like, oh, this is an organization and they just don't get it. They don't get that we need, you know, a playground. They don't get that the rules are confining. They don't get that we can't be certain about anything and we have to allow ourselves to just experiment without an outcome in mind. And that judginess would go both ways. They would look at us and say they're amateurs. They don't understand the gravity of what they're working with. And that judgment would be beneath the surface, but it would affect all of our conversations and it would create a sense of doubt and mistrust between the other side. And so taking the time to bring all those doubts to the surface and say it's not that emergence is better than structure and it's not that structure is better than emergence, it's that there is a time and place for both. And how do we make, how do we figure out what time this is? And, you know, how do we be intentional and deliberate at figuring that out rather than just swinging from one side to the other? I think, sorry, the tension is, well, at least the way you're describing tension is probably something that a lot of service designers experience because just the way of working the mindset, their approach is usually different than our clients are used to. So there is a natural tension, but it's often unspoken. It's often, like you said, under the surface. I was trying to, you said like giving it a language. Could you be more explicit? What did you mean with that? How do you give this tension a language? Is it by creating new briefing statements or what happens? Yeah, I mean, I think in our case, Gordon Tellak, who's the director of innovation of possibilities and myself have collaborated on writing a book that will be out this year that has given, you know, some words to all of this. We've named the top tensions that we have seen in our work together over the last five years. And by calling it something, so, you know, the structure emergence tension, every time we see it, we can talk about it. And this is a common practice in narrative therapy and in many other schools of thought about team working, which is that when you can say, oh, that's this, or that's that, when you can spot it and get good at spotting it, it becomes a shorthand for you. And it's like, ah, that's what we're feeling right now. Actually, this whole hour that we're debating about, you know, whether you'd use your HR process or my HR process is actually a debate about structure and emergence. What can we learn about that? And so it kind of deflates the conflict. And instead of trying to shut down the conflict, it kind of opens up it into a new space. And I think, you know, what I've seen, particularly in the social sector, although I think this is true in most sectors, is that, you know, we assume that anytime there's a disagreement or conflict, it's bad. And we try and get rid of the conflict. We try and fix the conflict by making a decision. And generally, the decision is on one side or the other side. We're going to use your rules, not ours, rather than saying yes and we're going to use your rules in these circumstances. And we're going to use our rules or lack of rules in these circumstances. And then we're going to experiment and we're going to come back and talk about it. And so, you know, I think, again, it's not a magic recipe in any way, but it is taking the time to give the space we need for both polarities for both sides. And, you know, I think, as a team practice, finding your own language for it is a really great thing to do. So, you know, at the beginning of partnerships, you know, how can you sit in a room and name what are all the tensions that you imagine happening between, between, you know, your different organizations or stakeholder groups. And, you know, we use, you know, we tried all sorts of metaphors as well from like rubber bands and nails, where we kind of literally make a board, a pegboard, where we show what the tensions are. And then at each meeting, we can kind of come back to it and say, how, you know, how wide do we think this tension is now or how taught or, you know, is it so tense that it's about to break the rubber band or, you know, can we find the middle ground position? So, you know, these are all things that then become part of the discourse or part of the water supply. And I think, you know, so much of teamwork and partnership working in relationship building falls down because we just don't have the right conversation. And like you said, like you said about partnerships, it's all about trust and being able to address these kind of topics is I think super important. And what I was thinking about you said, we try to avoid conflicts, we sort of pick a side would be really interesting if there were playful ways to address. I was thinking about tension, but to actually address opposite views and maybe, maybe using humor or something like that, like more in a playful way rather than bumping each other's heads. I don't know, that's not right. Well, and, you know, the terminology of yes and rather than either work from improv theater. And so, you know, certainly, you know, our team did, you know, an improv course, you know, a couple years ago, and that the notion of kind of being able to be creative with things that seem quite opposing or diametrically different to one another is something that we've been really inspired by. So I think, you know, you certainly can get better at, you know, here's two situations and they seem like, whoa, how the hell can they go together? But rather than treat them as that like, let's find the yes and that can connect them. So yeah. It requires a certain kind of clients that are open to actually explore these kind of tensions, right? Yeah. And that see it as worthy of one's time to be able to do this. It doesn't seem productive. We spend a whole day just talking about tension rather than talking about a project plan or strategy. And again, that's another, for me, a litmus test of whether they're going to be the right kind of partner to do disruptive and transformative work because they recognize that actually, you know, ideas aren't moving forward on just the idea itself. They move forward on whether they have the right substrate or the right growing conditions and the right growing conditions is, it's going to be really tough. Getting any new concept to live in this world is really freaking hard. And so we have to be able just like you're raising a child in a relationship to talk about all the really uncomfortable stuff, the stuff that, you know, requires us to be courageous and to listen to stuff that we might not agree with and, you know, to muddle our way through a different way of doing things. I have deep respect for you in the way you're approaching this and how selective you are in the sort of people you're, well, I can imagine that you're turning down a lot of potential projects just because there isn't a match or... Down knots, I think is the important part of this as well as both ways. You know, we're certainly not everybody's cup of tea and then I say right away, if you're looking for a consultant, if you're looking to make better services, we're not for you. There's many other organizations that would be a better fit for what your aims and objectives are. If you're looking to disrupt the status quo, if you're looking to redistribute power, if you're looking to re-envision what social support and welfare might look like five or ten years from now, we'd love to get together and see if our values align. And so it does mean that we're quite a niche organization. We will always, I suspect, be quite small. And, you know, I think we're okay with that because for us, the mission is what's most important rather than the method or the approach or growth. And so it's, you know, having to accept the limitations that come with being a bit of a selective or picky partner. Yeah. Yeah. And at some point, your reputation starts to follow you. Like people, you start to become the A-thing. Right? You'll become... The more niche you are, the more specialized you can become in a certain field. And then I guess people will search and respect that. Yeah, hopefully. Sarah, hopefully. Yeah. I'm sure I think you're doing a great job. For the people who are listening and watching the service design show, is there a question that you would like to ask us that we can ponder upon? Ah. Great question. Well, yeah. I mean, I guess, you know, the question that I wake up with every morning, which is like, what does it mean to do purposeful and meaningful work in this context? Not just what does it mean to tick off my to-do list, but really where does purpose and fulfillment come from? What kinds of interactions can you make happen that can, you know, legitimately bridge a divide or create something that feels good? And so, you know, I think that's always my challenge. So I would challenge folks out there as well, you know, to try and write and consider, you know, how does one move in a more purposeful space rather than a reactive space? You know, how does one take the time to consider, you know, our ambitions or outcomes? Are those the right ones? According to whom? And, you know, is there a voice that's missing? Who else do we need to be really considering and taking the time to listen to as we craft our way forward? I recommend people listening to this episode to go outside for a walk, take an hour, because there's a lot of a lot to process and to think about energy or false. People too much to think about on Mondays. Those are good questions, important questions as well. Anything else if people want to connect with you? What's the best way to do so? You know, we www.inwithforward.com is where we put much of our writing and thinking. And then you're welcome to email or, you know, tweet us or all methods lead back to us, but we certainly welcome conversation. We're also always looking for fabulous fellows to come and add their spark to our team. And we also have an open role at the moment for a design director. So if you're named Vancouver or is it in Toronto? Which one? It's based in Vancouver. Okay. Well, if you're listening to this, who knows? Awesome. Sarah, thanks so much for addressing these topics. I think it's really important that we have these conversations. So once again, thanks. So what is your take on Sarah's question? Join the conversation, leave a comment down below. And who knows, your comment might just be the thing that sparks an insight with somebody else. I hope you found this episode helpful and inspiring. And if you did, make sure to grab the link and share it with just one other person today. That way, you'll help to grow the service design community and help me to invite more guests like Sarah here on the show. Thanks for watching. And I'll see you in the next episode, which you can find over here. See you.