 In this episode, we'll be talking about why you need to build service design communities. We'll be talking about how to build service design capacity. And finally, we'll also share the secret to getting organizational leadership on board of service design projects. And here are the guests of this episode. Hello, I'm Hezer. Hello, I'm Mike. And welcome to the Service Design Show. Hi guys, my name is Marc Fontaine and welcome to a brand new episode of the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to build more human-centered services. And we know that this is important but also can be a bit of a struggle sometimes. So the way we do it on the show is by listening to some of the world's best service designers and studying their success. We talk about topics ranging from design thinking and customer experience to organizational change and creative leadership. If these are the topics you're interested in, know that we bring a fresh new episode every two weeks on Thursday. If you don't want to miss anything, click that subscribe button. And if you enjoyed this episode, click that like button. And it lets me know that the things we do here on the show are appreciated by people like you. My guests in this episode are two service design pioneers. Hazel White and Mike Press. Hazel and Mike run a design consultancy firm called Open Change which is based in Dundee, Scotland. For the next 30 minutes or so, Hazel and Mike will be talking about three topics. Why you need to build service design communities, how to effectively build service design capacity in organizations and the secret to getting organizational leadership on board of service design projects. If you want to fast forward to one of these topics, check out the episode guide down below in the description or just stick around and enjoy the whole episode. For now, let's jump right in. Welcome to the show, Mike and Hazel. Hi. Hi there. Awesome to have you on the show from Dundee, right, in your new studio. Yes, great to be here. Thanks for inviting us. Yes, fantastic. And yeah, we're here in this new studio right in the centre of the city. So we're kind of excited about that and we're very excited about being on the show. Super excited to have you. So I'm going to ask you the question that I've been asking for over 30 episodes and that is the first time you met with service design. Do you remember that moment? Yes. It's interesting as to whether you call it service design. I used to run a design course, a master's design course. And the world began to change in about 2006. And I read a paper from the Design Council in the UK called Transformation Design by Colin Burns and others. And also the book in the bubble by John Thacker and it presented this whole different way of how design could interact with the world. And so for me, although it wasn't called service design, I didn't know it was service design. That was the beginning of thinking how instead of just designing products, graphics, et cetera, we could use design for good. So yeah, 2006 for me. 1993 for me. And I could almost remember the day that I came across it. A book had come out. I was teaching design management actually in the University of England. And this book had come out called Token Design by Bill and Jill Hollins, managing design in the service sector. And I thought, this is fascinating. You know, I know about design management in consumer electronics or product design and environment, et cetera, et cetera. Service sector. Interesting. So I got the book and then I was fortunate enough to meet Bill about 18 months later at the conference and just found the conversations that we had fascinating. And then that idea lay a little dormant for a few years and then we started doing work on design against crime. And that was looking at how you design around social policy and service design. But especially the thing that really kickstarted it is when Hazel had that encounter with that whole literature around service design, then the two of us started thinking a lot more seriously about it. Interesting. 1993, that goes a long way back. Yeah, yeah. But a really important thing about it was the students who were on the master's course, I was teaching in design, they were getting interested in this. So it was people like Lauren Curry who were beginning to explore themselves into service design that actually began to teach us about that. And I think that's a real privilege actually as a teacher is when you start to learn things and get introduced to new things by your students. That was the first time when I asked a student a question which was, you know, what do you want to do in the future? And Lauren said, well, I want to be a service designer. And I thought, that's a new one, that's a new one. I've not heard that before. Of course, she goes on with Sarah Drummond to start this really exciting consultancy. That was the great thing actually about being teachers is that all the time you're being inspired not only by the books that you read and the ideas around you, but also what the students are doing and achieving and what their dreams and aspirations are. So there was something happening in Dundee from about 2006-2007 when lots of different things came together. So an exciting time. I remember Lauren actually being, I think, here in Utrecht on the Netherlands for her graduation project. So she visited us back then. It must have been 2006-2007, something like that. Awesome. Let's move on to the topics that you shared with me and use the time that we have to talk about them. I'll use them in a random order. So I'll surprise you a bit, right? A big sheet of paper. Let's start with this one. I'll pick the first topic and the first topic is community. Do you have a question starter that goes along with this one? Okay. Why do we need to build communities in service design? A good question, Hager. Why do we need to build communities in service design? Because that's how you get things done. That's how you make connections and that's how you bring a whole group of people together and make change happen. And actually, it can be quite random how that community starts. Let me give you an example. One person who is actually fortunate enough to have as an associate of ours, Rob Manton, is a consultant surgeon, an Ian knows and throat surgeon at the local hospital. He deals with throat cancer. That's his special thing. I remember meeting Rob over a coffee one afternoon and someone had said, you've probably got a lot in common. And we had this fascinating conversation about innovation, about design, about what was happening in healthcare, what was happening in hospitals. And we thought there's something here, there's something that we could do. So we did an experimental event one evening in a local bar because that's always a good place to kick things off. We hired this bar for two hours. We attracted about 40 people, all kinds of people. Some were students, some were doctors, some were business people, et cetera, et cetera. And basically, we were trying to get people to redesign health services. And so that was really kind of how the thing kicked off. That went very well. We did a second event. Then Rob said to the two of us, well, why don't you come into the hospital and do a one-day event? Can you share your expertise, your service design expertise with my colleagues? So we had about 35, 40 people, quite a mixed bag. You had consultant surgeons, you had nurses, the hospital administrators and managers, a couple of medical students, et cetera. And we were getting the medics really to walk in the shoes of patients, to walk around the hospital, to go into parts of the hospital that they weren't familiar with. So you get pediatricians to walk into the fracture clinic, for example. And to look at what was going on from patient point of view and to try and understand and analyze that experience and bring them back and introduce them to a range of service design methods to get them to think differently. And since then, we've done a whole range of other things. And we built up, I think, this kind of design, literal, inquiring, critical community of health and social care workers. And just to build on that, one of the people who came along to that event, who's a health service manager, has taken that work forward and has done hospital walk-arounds herself with taking adult learners and shadowing them around the hospital to see where the barriers and what the issues are for them. So people actually building their own community of service design, literate people within the health service. And that's really important so that it begins to get joined up and people are using the same language and it grows. So that's a really important part of having the community there. So are communities in your eyes essential for making service design sustainable? I think absolutely because otherwise it becomes here's some new people come in, a different bunch of consultants with new ideas and they came in and they did something and it seemed quite interesting at the time and then they left and actually we don't really know what happened. I think it's absolutely crucial that you build capacity for people to be able to continue working in that way themselves for it to be sustainable. So one question, Mike, on this topic. If you had to give us advice on one or two things that will help us to build communities, one or two things, what would you say? I think provide opportunities for people to randomly meet up. I mean we're very fortunate in Dundee because we've got people who are absolutely committed to building communities and putting on events and sharing their expertise and so forth. And we've said this in other contexts. You can do big things. You can make big changes in a small city. You can make big changes in a small country. We're a small city in a small country and service design is beginning actually to have quite a significant impact not just in Dundee but also in Scotland. And I think the size is an important thing here. So figuring out how do you pull people together and how do you provide them with opportunities that are engaging that give them things to do but also are not parochial. We don't want to see just change happening in Dundee in isolation from elsewhere. One of the most powerful things that we've done over the last year and it was an experiment. We didn't know whether we'd not never done it before. We'd never been involved in it before. We didn't know it would work. We decided to work with colleagues in developing GovChan. Adam and Marcus's Global GovChan will do it in Dundee. We'll see who turns up. That's our handbook for it and the branding for it. 80 people turned up. 80 people from all over the place from different councils from health boards, educators, business people, people who worked at social enterprise. Big under. The number of things that have spun out of GovChan, the number of things we've been asked to do, the number of autonomous projects that have come out have been remarkable. I think Adam was very surprised when we were the biggest attended GovChan on the planet and, you know, okay, it's not our competition but we are a small city in a small country and it made us very proud that you can actually do things but the important thing was that we were twinned with Istanbul. We made links with Berlin and people could see they were part of something bigger. Immunity is important on a local level but especially as Adam and Marcus have demonstrated it has to be global as well. Right. We're moving on to the second topic because there is so much to discuss. Communities, awesome. I love that one. I think the second topic, I'll make it easy for you. This one probably builds upon the community topic and this is capacity building. We have a question starter that goes along with this one. Okay, the question, I'm going to ask Hazel this question, how can we build capacity? Okay, well that takes me back to thinking about when we ran the Masters course because in the two years that we actually called it a design for services Masters course we had these fantastic students that came from all over the world. And in fact, it was so fantastic it had its own use paper. Awesome. Yeah, Lina who now works in Riyadh. So these students come from all over the world and in two years we had 35 students who came and did the course, one year Masters course and we always did live projects with businesses with local government, with healthcare, with education with social enterprises and they all went off to do really, really interesting things but the organisations that we've been working with we've come back to us and say we need service designers to work with us and these students were all over the globe by now and I realise that actually a more efficient way of helping organisations around us to build capacity was actually to go in and work with people who were in the organisations already so doctors and nurses in the NHS people who are running local government people who are running social enterprises who understood their organisational context they didn't need to have to try and understand how the National Health Service runs or how local government operates, they know that to an extent, they don't know the whole thing but to teach them tools and methods of service design is relatively quick and they can go in and make change happen really, really quickly so that's what I decided to do so I set up Open Change to do exactly that and I would reckon in the first two years of setting it up in contrast to the 35 students I'd had in two years of MasterCourt I think we've probably reached 2,000 people in the next two years, I mean we teach 120 people a year on the Queen's Young Leaders programme that we run through Cambridge University and that's young people from all over the world from Canada to Vanuatu who are using service design techniques on their own local projects so actually, it's flipping the system a bit so that actually you are taking service design to people that need it or service design training to people that need it rather than asking them to come to you for a long period of time so that seems a really important way of building capacity and then lately... Well actually, if we look a little bit harassed and tired it's because next Friday we're doing a session with 400 people which is quite a big gig for us, quite honestly but we've actually figured out there is a way of taking 400 people in one day exposing them to a range of different methods giving them an immersive experience challenging and changing their mindsets well, we'll tell you at the end of next Friday whether it works or not but it's that thing about doing things differently not educating people over a 12 month period in a fairly relaxed way but doing things in a much more intensive and engaging way so for example, one of the recent things that we did which was with, in fact, our City Council here at Dundee they set up something called the City of Design Academy we are the UK's first UNESCO City of Design and they decided that service design should infuse everything that the council does that design is defined in Dundee isn't just about objects or environments important though there's our own design but it's how do you, in a challenging post-industrial city how do you make design work for all the people and that's what the council is trying to do so the first thing we've got to make sure is that all the necessary people in the council understand what design is and begin to use it in their work so we've been doing a series of pilot workshops and projects with people we started off looking at the quite specific challenge of how do schools communicate with parents and you had a range of about 20 people from different council departments, different school departments people who were language support staff in schools all working together, working across departments learning the basic methods of service design and addressing these very specific problems but really importantly going out and actually finding out what the real problems are because the communication between schools and parents it can sometimes be the simplest thing so for example if a school, you know if a school wants to get in contact with a family because their child's not attending school it comes up when the parent's phone has a number withheld you know you can't see who's phoning so they don't know whether it's a marketing agency trying to phone them and actually getting that change so as it says that it's coming from the school means that the parent's more likely to answer the phone because they'll not get the calls back so really simple things to more complex system-wide things but getting the people who are actually going to be delivering those things involved in the solutions as well So one question about this topic if we look back at how you were building capacity five years ago that was maybe getting people in a one-year master programme training them now you're going out to the people to the place where they actually need service design how do you see this progressing in the next three to five years will it be any different or is this something you will continue to do the same way? We've got a cunning plan and this came out of a collaboration with the local further education college Dundee and Angus College who asked us to do the several things in the city council could you come in train our staff in service design we want to improve the student journey improve the quality of the experience of students etc so we did that and then they said the service design thing is fascinating it's great and why don't we as a college begin to offer this to other people so Dundee and Angus College together with Open Change we have a collaborative project called the Service Design Academy which is sda.ac.uk and from this October we will be providing accredited short courses in service design that will be provided online and basically we see this evolving over the course of the next three years to begin with it will be kind of some degree level there's lots and lots of people who maybe just want to have a qualification to go alongside whatever qualification they have to help their promotion at work to help them do their jobs better and that's what we're going to kick off doing then maybe some people actually will postgraduate qualification to build on skills that they already have so we see this is evolving but also it's an opportunity for us to do the events so it's not all going to be online there's going to be a kind of whole mix of different stuff so in a sense you know watch the space we're really excited about how we can work with this college and provide something in service design training and education that has not been provided anywhere else and we're just really excited about that prospect Interesting also in this space you know about the service design academy that you're doing and it just follows along with the idea that I've been having for the service design show university and I think more and more knowledge transfer will be done online or in a blended learning environment so it's really cool to see what the results will be in a year I think those of us across the world who have an interest in this we need to collaborate we need to share content we need to see how we're starting off with something that is very tailored and very specific and I know that there are people in the Netherlands in the United States elsewhere meeting the needs of other markets so we've got to work together and figure out a whole range of diverse, flexible different kinds of experiences and modes of delivering the super wide range of students So essentially we're service designing as we go along but it will adapt to what people actually what people need Topic number three and maybe most interesting one we'll see it's called leadership Okay, so Mike what if leadership was different? What if leadership was different? Part of what we're trying to do in Open Change is to get leadership in organizations to think about that differently We were talking to you earlier about the City of Design Academy we've been running with the City Council and that came out to another event that we did where we were asked to spend a whole day with around 60 to 70 senior managers in the City Council and introduce them to service design and also to get them to think about how they can begin to design the services that they provide to citizens differently So we spent very nice couple of hours with a couple of guest speakers in and we took them through a basic introduction to service design It was a day in June outside it was raining and then we said to everyone okay, you've got an hour we want you to go out there onto the streets of Dundee and talk to people talk to people on the streets about their life, their experiences and their experience in particular of City Council services and you can see all the blood drained from their faces because they're senior policy makers they don't get out much because there's this a desk is a really dangerous place to understand the world and I think all organisations are like this we tend to sit behind desks and we try and look at the world through our laptops and through meetings with people that we're familiar with so most people are not experienced with going out and talking to people so anyway, they all went out we were kind of dreading what it was going to be like when they came back an hour later with smiles on their faces one of the senior directors in the council she left the building she walked across the road to the railway station she saw a homeless man sitting on the pavement on the sidewalk and sat down next to him and got his life story found out what happened to him, where things got wrong why was he there what were his hopes and aspirations for the future what would make his life better what did he think about the city council what did he see in terms of the future for Dundee when she came back, she told his story and that story then fed into other work that they did it's about changing people's mindsets it's about trying to get leaders to think in different ways to get closer to the people that they work with and closer to the people that they serve and that's actually infused itself throughout the council and I'm sitting around the city because one of the things that's actually been a big catalyst in the city as well as the UNESCO City of Design is the Victorian Albert Museum are building a massive new iconic building in Dundee so everybody's kind of thinking about what is design and what can it be so these leaders are thinking about it from a social aspect how can it change so someone else from local government in Dundee asked us to work with them about how do we develop the young workforce what are the barriers and the difficulties for young people who haven't perhaps got academic qualifications or not intending to go to college or further education to get into work with organisations and so we ran a series of events for them where we brought in young people who were on their journey to work or who had just recently got modern apprenticeships and got the council staff to interview them about their experiences, how did they find out about positions what was the selection process like and they found out really quickly that they were using processes and systems that they were using for graduates to interview people who weren't graduates and so they weren't able to demonstrate their strengths, it was off-putting even how they found out about these opportunities often by chance because schools weren't promoting these opportunities and so the young people then worked with the council staff to co-design how that could work better but going back to our previous topic about leadership, one of the really important things was we had the very senior people from the council in the room with these young people and after one of them had interviewed one of the young people and heard the issues and the barriers that he'd had working with his organisation he got out of his chair and he walked out of his room and said I'm going to sort that out now so it's having people that make change happen but is that also the secret sauce that changing minds only happens when people go through experiences yeah I think so I think so because you can hear people's stories, you can watch stories on video, you can see the statistics of something but sitting down with someone who is flesh and blood right opposite you and hearing their story is just a visceral human experience and it makes you want to make change happen awesome, awesome this is your chance to ask the people who are watching or listening this episode and that number is growing I'm really happy with that it's your chance to ask them a question or maybe two I suppose we've mentioned the service design academy that we're getting off the ground we've done in Angus College a bit earlier, as Hazel said it's an experiment and we're designing it as we go so what could the SDA do for you what would you want in terms of education and training in service design what could you be provided with but you're not being provided with at the moment that's my question and my question would be because a lot of what we do is front end the inspirational piece going into organisations and saying this is the value that service design can give you, connecting you with your users I'd like to ask the audience what is the thing that would help you inspire people and help them understand what the value of service design is to their organisations what could we do to help with that so how can we help other people understand the value and the benefits of service design how can we inspire them how can we make them curious, maybe curiosity for me is the right word here our time has flown by it's time to wrap up this episode so thanks for your time Mike and Hazel it was an honor to have you on the show it's been an absolute pleasure thanks for having us thank you, it's been a pleasure so what is your biggest insight based on the things we just discussed with Mike and Hazel share your thoughts and ideas in the comments and remember more people like you are watching these episodes in your comment but just be the thing that helps someone else if you are interested in learning more check out some of the past episodes or head over to learn.servicesignshow.com where we offer courses 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