 In this episode, you'll learn how agencies can work better with institutions to build service design capacity, what is the future role of agencies when everything goes in-house, and finally, where and how can frontline contribute in designing services. And here is the guest for this episode. Hi, I'm Sarah Drummond and this is the Service Design Show. Hey, my name is Marc van Tijn and this is the Service Design Show. If you want to create more impact as a service design and change the world for the better, then you've come to the right place. Because on this show, you'll get the chance to learn from the success of some of the world's best service designers. We talk about topics ranging from design thinking, customer experience, organizational change and creative leadership. If these are the topics you're interested in, be sure to know that we bring you a new episode every two weeks on Thursday. So if you don't want to miss anything, subscribe to the channel. My guest in this episode is Sarah Drummond. Sarah is a managing director of a design and strategy agency called We Are Snoek, which she co-founded back in 2009 with Lauren Kirby, who was also a guest on the show. So for the next 30 minutes, Sarah will be talking about how agencies can work better with institutions to build service design capacity, what is the future role of agencies when everything goes in the house, and finally, where and how can frontline contribute in designing services. So that was it for the introduction and now let's jump straight into the interview with Sarah. Welcome to the show, Sarah. Hi Marc. It's so good to have you here because we had the other co-founder of We Are Snoek. I think in the second or third episode on the show and now we have the other co-founder of Snoek, so happy to have you again, Sarah. I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for having me, Marc. The question that I ask everybody on the show, the first question is, do you actually remember the very first time you met service design? That's such a historical question for me. Yes, it's probably nearly 10 years ago now, I think, and I was studying product design actually, so I met it as a student and I met it in a way that I didn't actually know what it was, so I come from a background of designing lampshades, coat hangers, bicycle stands, drawing, everything. And we were asked when we were at the Glasgow School of Art to come and look at a public body that sits under Scottish government's remit and ask to look at how their business was performing. And we went about it in the same way any designer would that you create a chair or a coat hanger. We interviewed people, we tried to understand their experience. We used a lot of visual language to map how the whole business worked. We prototyped some tested new concepts. They happened to be servicing and we presented it back to the government and it was only really during that process of some extra teaching that someone said this is what service design is and so from then I was hooked and ended up working with them actually over a course of about two years, so that's my first experience. There was a spark or epiphany, the moment of enlightenment. Yes, I think it was really interesting to be a group of product designers traditionally trained at making physical things to come across a new form of material which is people and relationships and other things. Exactly. Cool. Sarah, you gave me some really interesting topics that we're going to discuss in the next 25 minutes and I gave you some question starters and we'll co-create the topics and the questions as we go along, right? Are you ready? I am so ready. Alright, let's start with topic number one and I know you've been thinking a lot about this one so this should be easy for you. Topic number one is building capacity for service design. Which question starter do you have? I'm going with this one is how can we build capacity for service design? So this is really big for me and the reason is that before I started SNCC Florin, I'd been working for a non-departmental public body that is with the Scottish government that I previously mentioned and it was really difficult with different agencies coming in doing the work with us that they would leave and we wouldn't really quite know what to do and the agencies that did do it really well were some really great service design organisations. They left us with I think some capacity to be able to take on their work and their knowledge but most of the time and the work I've seen when I've worked with other agencies now is SNCC. They haven't been given the capabilities to continuously design great services. In fact, they've been left in the dark with the agency or organisation coming in as an expert. So I've really been propelled the whole time to think about with SNCC and with any other work in the industry that really we should be thinking about building the capacity for these organisations and what I mean by that is thinking about how you get people to understand the concept of design to begin with and not even design as service particularly or design as product or interaction but understanding that design for me anyway is about making sure that the form follows the function so it's about usability. So the first thing really about building capacity is that quite simple understanding and then at second level it's about really thinking about in a service design context well what does service mean for us? So building the capacity of a consistent language and understanding of that and then really kind of thirdly is then having the skills and the sustainability strategy really to make that a reality. So training in design skills so that you and it's not about everyone becoming a designer for me it's really about giving everyone the capacity to be able to design moving people from not just they don't have to become design experts but from design basics into design fluency and then making sure that you design ways in which the organisation can create the products that allow design to be scaled and sustained. So that's what I mean and I think it's a really big question for me of the industry now actually that works in service design to be focusing in on this question. So a super relevant topic at this moment and so many questions that go through my head now that you're talking about this and one of the questions is for instance we encountered this a lot in our own projects too and then the question becomes but you're saying we should make everyone understand design we should make everyone understand services but is it really everyone or have you found that there are different groups of people within organisations that are more open to it and are more important to actually train or? Yeah definitely I think I can answer that in about three different ways it depends on the stage of design maturity I think of an organisation and also I think that aligns really relevantly now with their digital maturity as well because services are so often are pretty much centred around the digital capacity and thinking of an organisation whether that's how they deliver their services to how they run them in the back end so one of the things I say first and it's a bit of a hack really if you're introducing design to an organisation is to go and find the team or department within that organisation that can deliver the thing you're going to design so for example most recently we just worked with Cork County Council that we presented with at the service design network conference in Madrid and it was a wonderful presentation because I felt really proud that they knew exactly what they're talking about they're designing and delivering really good services and when we met Cork they actually had a lot of senior buy-in because we worked with them to look at this new customer transformation team that had people who were actually building the digital front end of new services so they were going through a process of digital transformation taking processes that were offline and making them online and we had a bit of an issue and we've laughed about it now that it was originally a lift and shift attitude which was take something that might not be that great offline you just put it online and it might still not be that great and for me the training of those guys was so instrumental to this work because it meant that when we went through the user research and the structuring of what the service should be and the prototyping of it they were able to make it live at the prototyping stage and then take it into a proper live later on so in the first instance who should we train I think for me it's the people who have the ability to shift the product to execute Exactly Or else you end up with a bunch of knowledge that's maybe really interesting but isn't acted upon within the organisation but then I think to that extent you also need an early stage and throughout is a senior buy-in and I think that that won't be new to the show or any particular insight but that senior buy-in needs to be brought along across the whole journey and particularly what we're finding quite difficult actually is to help senior leaders once they've had their first excitement about it they tend to think about the beginning of this work is then to make the right and significant investment at a later stage to think about sustaining and growing those capabilities because it's easy to do it it's easy to do a one-off service design project but it's really hard to keep it going right? Yeah to keep it going but to also see that you have to invest behind the actual design of the service in the products that make the community of people within an organisation come together around design and that's lots of things so that's things like show and tells networks of people interested in design coming together it's platforms in how you analyse the data of how your services are performing the investment into those kind of products so it's a lot of stuff behind the scenes it's difficult to sometimes put an exact number on the efficiency it might create or the impact it might have on the end user What is your biggest question related to building capacity? What would you like to... we're doing this episode in December of 2017 what would you like to better understand in 2018? So for me... Regarding the topic Yeah what I'm really interested in now are the different models in which organisations are using to embed design not necessarily the process that they're going on but how those organisations are structured so for example I've met organisations who have put design completely into their front line have put it into delivery mechanisms and product management roles some of it is in corporate service roles and I don't think there's any definitive answer at all it's what works for each organisation but I'm just interested to know from different people how it's being used and structured within an organisation Super interesting we should do a special episode on that we're going to move on to topic number two and that's a really really important topic because it's about us and about our future and you formulated this topic as our future role Yeah so I'm going to go lucky dip on my questions here but let's see how this works out I think it says how far so how far can our future role go in service design and I brought this topic up because I regularly have an existential crisis about running an organisation and there is a consultancy format and I am in no doubt and please come to me if you want any therapy if you also run a consultancy but there are others out there who probably feel the same so why an existential crisis so for me because I started briefly on the inside I saw the value of having design on the inside of organisations and we built SNCC around building capacity what we were talking about in the first instance really trying to make sure that goes inside organisations existential crisis is because I really believe that yet I run an organisation that sells consultancy as an expert role to the companies so now I'm starting what we've pivoted our work around is that thought what I'm then starting to question and I think other agency leaders might be concerned about is what happens when everyone goes in house what happens when organisations no longer want to pay for consultancy and how far can we take this service design thing before we all realise that ultimately it's better in house or is it? what are your thoughts about that? so my thoughts are that I think there will always be a role for consultancies and part of our job is about doing the next thing so right now what we should be switching on to is making sure that no more massive PowerPoint slide decks are produced that we really craft our practice around the building capacity of organisations I think there's a huge role in training we know from major speakers across government anyway there's a deficit actually in the design talent that is ready to take on these service design roles to take on roles around interaction and more widely the user experience of users really for the services that government and public sector deliver so for me it's a call to arms and then now to organisations to really help those organisations build those capabilities and to be perhaps this is not a concern that I think anyone is right now but to be quite humble actually about what we can do so to remove ourselves from expert role into the training and the skilling up of people to understand and be able to use design is something that is for good user experience and then I think our role in the future is about getting smarter about what we do can we be designing the tools of tomorrow that allow others in the organisation to be able to design so you've seen certain consultancies I think normally recently released a product around being able to design better I think it was better interfaces we see companies building things like their own products that we transfer and I'm not saying that's specific for service design but I think we can be designing tools now that help do the job better we've seen this with people like Mark Stichthorn and the work they do it smartly so we can be getting smarter now actually about helping organisations have the right tools in place by building them for them I don't think we'll be lost really our work is probably going to shift that's what I'm seeing happening already within well I think over the last three to four years it's starting to shift from getting projects to doing projects while you're really learning and helping the organisation to grow and to make yourself obsolete in some way my joke is that we creep away around the back door we start off quite big and quite instrumental and their strategy and the initial training in projects but ultimately that humbleness around creeping away to not be utilised anymore I think that is an immensely important mindset for consultancies going forward yeah and if we manage to actually achieve that we should be really proud of ourselves because it would mean that everybody has adopted their design mindset right? I think so yeah but I think what's interesting though again about this concept of redundancy that can scare people in terms of an agency construct is that there are new problems and new challenges of tomorrow and I think what consultancies need to be able to do is to be able to pivot and move into those new spaces so we should be exploring those now on behalf of our clients who are just at the start you've got fantastic organisations like projectsbyif.everyone who are looking at the future of the internet or user rights data, how information and data is handled and that's sometimes a secondary thing to organisations going on this new journey of design so we can be crafting the knowledge in that space on behalf of our future clients and helping them with that side when it comes to designing in the future really quite complex services I think you're absolutely right and at the same time I also see that there is still so much work to do there are so many organisations especially the smaller SME organisations who haven't touched upon the idea of service design yet that we still have a lot of work to do in that space we won't be out of a job that soon at least not from my perspective and I think what you've said is vitally important is not to forget that I actually have to remind myself sometimes because I like to run away with what's the next big thing and where should we be going and that's my job right that's my job at Snoop anyway is to be trying to take us in the right direction but I meet so many people on a daily basis who are really at the start of their journey and so we have to remember that there's a lot of work to be done and I think for me I said this at the SDN conference but working with guys like Court County Council shows the absolute need particularly in the local government space for this which actually has the ability in a UK construct anyway to make some of the changes happen that we can't currently make at the government level because of certain political things going on right now so I think there's a huge amount of work to be done and be shared amongst everyone You already touched upon the third topic a little bit so let's move into this one and I think you mentioned it in the first topic because it was how can the design can be embedded in front line and the third topic is called front line and system change So let's say we're lucky dipping again okay what if okay what if what if front line staff were in charge of changing the system what does that mean? I'm hugely fascinated by this topic again mostly because of my background and having the very early start in my career working with frontline careers advisors skill development officers people working right at the front line so it's a real passion of mine because often the tacit knowledge around how a service should and could be designed sits with them they don't always have the freedom and the autonomy maybe even the skills to dream big about what that might look like mostly because they haven't had the autonomy but I always knew there was something here and we ran a programme last year and the year before with the Kelly Chase Foundation in London who exist to fund initiatives and organisations who support people with complex needs and to really drive I guess like a more equal society and help those organisations develop research and initiatives around that and so in collaboration with the point people who led the project we ran a programme called Systems Changes and we ran it with 11 frontline staff members who work in organisations who do support people with complex needs and when I say complex needs just for the audience that can mean that you have a variety of things going on in your life it often makes it very difficult to use services that exist because of the way they tend to box people so if you are homeless and you have a drug addiction issue you might be just having left prison you could have relationship issues you could have one, two, three, four a whole number of issues that stop you in your life from living a really fulfilled and happy equal life so we ran this programme with this group of staff some design and service design skills basics and journey mapping prototyping we taught them about systems thinking so looking at more ways to map and visually understand politics, cultural barriers things that exist in a system around the services that they run and we taught them a lot of actually individual things around unconscious bias around how they label people in society and the results were really phenomenal what happened? phenomenal so quite a lot of them I call them like hackers of the system one of them created a new product that helps both staff at the front line and people with complex needs navigating the benefits system with very simple journey maps so you can understand how many minutes you have on the phone until it cuts out what to say on the phone at certain points to make sure that you get put through to the next part of the benefits process and that could be and is hugely vital I think for people so Sarah, I think a lot of people who are watching or listening this episode can empathise with this but I think the big difficulty is it's not really hard to find front line staff who have ideas about how service can be improved the real hard part is I think creating the context or the conditions in which they are able to execute on that to make those ideas happen so why do you think in your example why did it work? I think it worked because we set up the buy-in in the first place from their senior leaders so anyone who yeah what did you do? anyone who came on the program we made sure that the senior leaders actually signed off their involvement that they were fully understanding of the program that they were involved at several points throughout and we taught kind of basic stuff that goes around the design stuff around the presentation skills, communication skills to make sure that those guys could take the things that we're working on back to a board level and show the value of them so we had a few of the staff actually be working because they're in a charity context with their boards and they convinced to sign off new programs of work actually on how they should be moving forwards and in fact one guy last year created a whole new arm of the organization that he now leads up so for me it's about, as you said Mark I think people really understand it's easy to get ideas from people but you then need to look at the more the construction of the right vehicles within an organization in which to enable that thinking about that from the get go really. You sort of have to have someone who understands that from a sort of meta level in the organization I guess right? Yeah completely or help that person who is at the front line and if I'm being very stereotyped about this doesn't have a lot of autonomy to find the people who have the power to make the changes to allow them to do it and so whether it's like you said easy to come up with ideas but very hard to implement them so you've got to really work on helping them understand where and how they can make that idea come to life and that's actually more of the work than it is the design of the thing that they want to happen Exactly Sarah our time is flying but I'm not sure if that's correct English but anyway it's your opportunity to ask the people who are listening and watching this episode a question so what is on your mind what would you like to ask us? The community so I would like to find out if you work inside an organization and you're using design how are you doing it and what has been the commitment or buy-in to that and how are you being measured I'd love to know how you're being measured particularly on the inside of organizations when it comes to an investment in design that's really an interesting topic I have a whole course on investing and selling the value of service design so that's I'm also interested in that leave your comments down below and it's especially for people who are working on the inside because from the agency consultancy perspective we sort of get that Yeah completely I think agencies have done a fantastic job of helping build the service design industry really from the get go and we have to be really good at selling right that's our job and building these processes around it but I'm interested when it gets messy on the inside Yeah the evangelist and the pioneers who take you know for instance we talked a lot about government you have to have some sort of a special mentality to start doing service design within our public sector right you have to have patience and that's a different attitude compared to an agency Yeah completely I think most people will be aware that maybe even quite honestly the remuneration in different kind of roles in comparison to government and maybe private industry is quite different so you have to it's not about money for people it's really about the commitment to want to make people's lives better and I think from my friends and colleagues that work across government I couldn't speak more highly of all of them who are on that journey seeking to do that Sarah Thanks for your time thanks for sharing your ideas the topics I think they are super relevant I hope a lot of people will comment on them and watch the episode so what is your biggest takeaway from this talk with Sarah share your thoughts and ideas down below in the comments and remember more people like you are watching these episodes in your comment might just be the creative spark someone needed if you'd like to learn more check out some of the best episodes or head over to the service design show university at learn.servicedesignshow.com where you'll find courses by leading service design experts that dig deeper into the topics we talk about on the show I'll see you in two weeks time with a brand new episode thanks for watching and I'll see you then