 It's no secret that there's a gap between traditional business and design. If you want to increase the chance that your work gets accepted, you need to bridge that gap. How to do that is the theme of this episode, so make sure you stick around. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, this is Chris and you're listening to the service design show episode 134. Hi, I'm Marc Fontaine and welcome back to a new episode of the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design, what are the hidden things that make a huge difference between success and failure, all to help you make great services happen that have a positive impact on people and business. Our guest in this episode is a teacher, a writer and the CEO of a renowned service design agency from Canada. It's Chris Ferguson. Over the past months, Chris has been researching what the common obstacles are for designers to make impact within traditional organizations. In this episode, we're going to dig deeper into some of these obstacles, try to understand what's really going on and where they are coming from. Of course, you'll also hear some interesting ideas about what you can do to overcome these obstacles. For that, we'll talk about return on investment, the willingness to compromise and religion. If you stick around till the end, I'm sure you'll have some new thoughts on what you can do to increase the chance that your work gets adopted by non-designers and do that without losing your design identity, the thing that makes design so valuable in the first place. If you find topics like this interesting, make sure to subscribe to the channel because we bring a new video like this every week or so. So that's all for the intro and now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Chris Ferguson. Welcome to the show, Chris. Hi, Mark. Awesome to have you on. Really looking forward to diving into the topic of today. For the people who are getting sick and tired of their previous episode, yes, we're going to talk about organizations again and how designers fit within organizations. How designers can be more impactful. So if that's not a topic you're interested in, now is your opportunity to sort of leave. But I'm expecting some really interesting conversations today. Chris, again, really excited to have you on. For the people who don't know about your background, could you give a short introduction? Sure. So I'm the founder of a service design studio called Bridgeable that's based in Toronto and Canada. I teach at the University of Toronto. I teach at the Rotman School of Management. I'm also an executive in residence there and I teach at the Law School at the University of Toronto. And the last thing I'm involved in is the helping run the local chapter of the service design network here in Canada. Cool. A lot of teaching and a lot of community work. So that's great. Chris, before we dive into the topic that's definitely on your mind these days, I want to do a rapid fire question around with you. Answer five questions as quickly as possible. Don't overthink them. Just whatever comes up is the first thing that I want to hear. Here we go. What's always in your fridge? Milk. Which books are you reading, if any, at this moment? I'm reading a lot of the New Yorker magazine and I just finished a great book called razor blade tears. We'll add a link to that in the show notes. Next question is, which superpower would you like to have? Fly. Noted. What did you want to become when you were a kid? Depends what age. A younger, maybe a basketball, NBA player and then later a lawyer. Okay. And you ended up being a CEO of a service design agency, which is a quite interesting career. With some different things in between. Maybe we'll get a preview of that. And the final question, which I'm really interested in from your perspective is, when did you get in touch with service design? I first heard about service design from a designer, a Canadian designer friend who's in Copenhagen and it was around the time of the first national or global conference of the service design network and they were talking about it and explaining it and saying, this kind of sounds like what you're talking about that you're doing or trying to do on your projects. So I think it was one of these things that we are trying and working to do. And then it turned out there was a name and codified methods and terms around it. So that's what I thought about it. Yeah. Common story for a lot of people getting into service design. At some point you sort of realize that there's something you can actually Google. And then you start digging into the rabbit hole. Chasing the rabbit hole? No, chasing the rabbit down the hole. What's the saying, Chris? Down the rabbit hole. Down the rabbit hole. Something with rabbits. I knew that it was something with rabbits. So I'm really curious to hear what's on your mind about the topic of today. You're interested in helping service designers be more impactful within traditional organizations. You've done some research into that. Can you give us a little bit of context? How did this topic come to your mind these days? Yeah. So the topic is around the idea of a double bind. And this is these problems or tensions that designers consistently run into when they're trying to do their work within a traditional organization. But there are things that might be below the surface or they're hard to really understand or see right away. And there are the kinds of problems that end up, you know, if projects aren't being implemented, if designers are becoming frustrated or designers are leaving or internal teams are failing, often it's these kinds of things that are the reasons behind them. Where did you get the inspiration from to explore this topic? You know, it's one of these things where I started a long time ago in my practice to every time I was running into a problem, I would start to make notes actually on the idea of enablers and roadblocks. So what's working in this project and what's actually like constantly getting in our way? And I would often have the whole team contribute to this list as a Google doc or something like that. And what's interesting you find as you do that over a project, first of all, is you start to see patterns emerge. And if you do it over multiple, multiple projects, you start to see bigger patterns emerge around particularly the roadblocks, the things that get in your way consistently on these projects. And it was really honestly out of a desire just to want to have projects work to have them be implemented. Yeah, and that's that's the desire we all should have. And I hope we have like getting our work adopted. It's like one of the most common challenges, frustrations within the field of service design that it's so hard to get non designers to support your work to find buy in to stop having to convince people and just be a contributing, a valuable contributing partner. Now, have you found a pattern within the type of organizations? I think in our pre call brief, you mentioned something about traditional organizations. I'm curious if you can say a little bit about what types of organizations are we talking about here? Yeah, yeah, I would say that I define broadly traditional organizations as ones that are really kind of rooted in a 20th century way of working, very focused on the kinds of typical management structures around marketing and marketing communications as being a primary way in which you engage with your customers, often companies that added digital capabilities later that aren't digital native companies. So they don't really have design is kind of embedded from the start, from their inception of their organization. So I often think it's, you know, the vast majority of large organizations where designers are working, telcos, banks, healthcare, for sure. And I think doubly so because of management, but also because of science and science and forms, I think, and government as well. So I think a lot of the places service designers find themselves. Yeah, yeah. And it's places where design doesn't have a strong heritage. Other forces have shaped the organizational structures, culture processes. And now we're sort of dealing with the legacy and trying to play catch up and slowly trying to change the environment in order to be more receptive to design driven approach. Maybe we should just dive in into some of these double binds. I didn't know about their term. So it's new for me, which is great. Is the one that you'd like to highlight one that you've seen as a common pattern? Yeah, we'll say, first of all, that a double bind is something that on the surface, it's like a win-lose scenario. It's the kind of situation where if one stakeholder wins, then the other stakeholder loses. So business wins, design loses and lies versa, at least on the surface. It kind of works that way. And one, I think that's an easier one to observe is the idea of work style. So we've noticed big differences in the way traditional managers and traditional business people work and the way designers and design teams by extension work. So designers like to, they like to visualize and put up their work. They'll have open spaces with boards where they're putting things up on, things they make to think. So they're like making and thinking through processes and iterating and putting things up. They tend to be very flat in how they work. So even if there is hierarchy, they tend to, the way sessions are run, everyone gets a post-it note, everyone has an equal voice. Their work style has a certain way in which it happens. Conversely, when you look at business people, they tend to like hierarchies and respond, maybe not like, but respond to hierarchies, working in a kind of hierarchical fashion. They tend to not like unpredictability or disorder. They like things to be organized and there's a plan and you have the plan before you execute and you figure everything out. And they don't like the sense of unpredictability and mess or even understand why a designer would need that kind of space to work. Very recognizable and I think every designer will feel this tension and friction where maybe design, the design process even is discarded as playful and messing around. And let's get back to doing a real job like those kind of comments. Yeah, one thing we had heard just on that mark, which is a great quote on that, was about an internal design team was, if I need a puppet show, I will go to those guys. That kind of attitude about, because again, the way it shows up, the way they work, the way they show up in the world is very different than button down predictable, which is really again, one of these behind the, like under the surface kind of things that you kind of don't know is a problem almost until it's too late when you're in the situation where there's a problem. I think it's harder when you walk in and when you get the job because often people are using the same terminology that within business and design and saying the same things, yet how it kind of behaves in the world. The underlying attitudes and beliefs are quite different. So we're not going to change beliefs within people who are climbing the corporate letter about hierarchy and rewards incentives and get them to adopt a design approach, design attitude the next day. Where do we even start in helping to maybe not even help them transition into our world, but merging these two worlds? Where do we even start? I think there's a few things that designers can do that will be really helpful for them. One is just be aware that you're actually in a bind and try to get used to seeing these things and see them coming. See it when it's on the horizon before you're kind of in the mess of it. And I think that's part of what we're hoping to do with my co-authors and I and with the interviews we've been doing is to collect stories and examples. I think where these are the things that predictably you're going to run into problems actually have people understand what are those things. I think the second thing with these binds is to bring them up in a neutral way to find a way to like let's have a discussion about this not in a kind of sanctimonious or righteous way like as a designer which I think is easy to default to but in a hey let's talk about these things let's talk about what we're really up to here as an organization where we want to get to in the future and why these things are tensions. And then I think the third thing is actually to aim for some sort of with each project and each time you come across these things it's actually really valuable. Try to make some sort of permanent change. Can we make a change to a policy? Can we make a change to a method that we use all the time some sort of way in which we work the way the teams work together within the organization you know can we actually try to make it so the next person who comes along trying to do similar work wouldn't run into the exact same problems. Do you have an example maybe from your own practice where you were able to establish something permanent after getting into a new situation where your way of working was different than the current way of working? Yeah absolutely yeah we worked in a healthcare organization where we were doing qualitative research kind of design-based research which met with mixed reviews depending on who is in attendance. You know there's a lot of questions because of the scientific method and and positivism and the idea that unless there's a number it's not true. A lot of people simply think that unless I can give it a number it's it's not true. So what we needed to do was talk about the value of taking this kind of approach again in a kind of neutral way doing things like experience mapping and what we were able to do with that organization because they had an aspiration to be more patient-centered or more kind of human-centered was to have journey mapping start to be a permanent part of their annual planning process. So when you go to do planning your strategic planning and budgeting you need to have a journey in order to get money in order to request money to do work within the organization. So that was a way to almost piggyback on the existing system add more of a design-based approach and have it be more kind of a permanent change within the organization which is something they aspire to do which ran but also ran contrary to the logic of the organization. Yeah so knowing that there are annual budgets is for instance already a big win for designers. I know it sounds a bit obvious to point it out but knowing that annual budgets are a running train that you can and should tap into that that's the way organizations work like that's where you can anchor your design practice approach thing. One thing that was going through my mind when you were sharing this is I sometimes feel that with design people first have to go through the experience in order to actually understand what it is all about. I'm hearing you advocate to have better conversation at the start like how do you see that balance between something that people haven't experienced yet and are maybe finding difficult to grasp to fully embody versus just doing stuff and then letting things break. I think that you're right and I've had the same experience where people really tend to get it a lot better when you're actually going and going through the process. What I would say is designers and design teams don't often resource their projects to do that. To think about I'm not just running a design project I'm actually helping transform this organization and in the mindsets of the people that are going through the process they're not thinking about well if that's also part of the job then how might I do this readout differently? How might I do the kickoff differently for this project? Maybe the deliverables if I know that I'm going to be meeting with these kinds of resistance there's an underlying assumptions that are different than my underlying assumptions then how might I treat this project differently? Do you budget for this or is this something that you feel is part of the work of a design or a service design? The question is coming from like do you make this explicit to a client like we're going to allocate time to actually guide this change or is it just we're just going to do design and this is just as much part of our work as doing research? Something we did recently that I think was effective and we've done over the years in different projects is often a client will want socialization assets things to help socialize the project you know like that they can show around the organization to share to talk about the work that's being that's going on with a broader set of stakeholders particularly large transformational projects within organizations what you can do is with those socialization or you know just what are we going to share what's going on in the organization you can build that in throughout a project where you're maybe delivering things after each major phase that can be shared across the organization or maybe a larger artifact at the end of a project that can be used for example we just did a video at the end of a project to explain kind of the new service and how it worked in a way that's super easy for people to get it's a couple of minutes you can watch it's passive so I think actually if you can find a way to to get your client to invest in some socialization which is just going to help them be successful in their projects and actually getting in getting it adopted otherwise you've got to roll up your speaks and do it yeah and what I'm getting from your story here is you it helps when you can figure out what the needs of your clients are can a lot of maybe open doors here but understanding that your your client will benefit if they can sell this project internally to their manager or boss like if you can cater for that by giving them a video that's great like that's a win-win yeah I would say that and at the very least I would say just just understanding what are these double binds and can I see them coming and can I proactively even maybe as part of the deliverable that I was going to do anyway like hey I had to make a readout deck I had to make a research report I needed to make prototypes can I be thoughtful and say okay I know I'm going to run into these kinds of problems how might I maybe change some of the elements of those at the very least again with this with this thing of you know trying to aim for can there be some sort of lasting change even if it's incremental within that organization that makes it easier for future people doing the same kind of work do you where would you recommend to discuss these double binds with clients up front so okay I'm aware that we have we are bringing in a different vibe into the organization it will be more playful it will be more open it will be less hierarchical when do you recommend to to openly discussing this at the start or when should we just go head in head first I think I think right from the initial conversations and one of the binds we found was a business model bind and this is the idea that when designers or or it's maybe first when when business people invest in a design project they expect a return on investment you know they're like and and really there's an underlying idea of maybe value extraction I'm going to be able to take value from the market as a result of my activity where designers will go in often again unconsciously thinking I'm going to create value I'm going to create a new service or a new product or new features that didn't exist before so I'm I'm going to create a bunch of value and I think that for in that example of a business of a business model bind where you have kind of different assumptions what you can do right from the start is start to have and we heard different examples of this from our people we were interviewing you can actually start to have conversations around you know what's the behavioral difference of your customer or the end user after this after we're done our work what's happening differently and if the client says well they're just buying more of our product and the designer could say well they're buying more because it's improved in some way and like no we don't want to improve it we just want to sell more of it then that's a really good thing to that's a good thing to know from the start you know and maybe that's a better job of advertising or or something like that so I think right from the start what's with having conversations around what's the intended outcome of this kind of project I think is a really valuable way to kind of get started so talking about the intended outcome this is also related to maybe being more I don't know if picky is the right word about the type of projects and challenges and clients that you take on but at least doing some due diligence to making sure that there is a right fit otherwise you're not only setting yourself up for failure you're also setting your client up for failure and that will lead to disaster I think that we've seen internal design teams be closed I know from one of our in one of our interviews that a major you know consulting global consulting firm cannot keep designers more than 18 months where they have much longer average 10 years in other positions because they become frustrated and they leave and part of it is their their understanding of what their job is and what they're up to is is again the assumptions are different than the assumptions of the people often setting up these teams like like how what what kind of assumptions then I think it goes back to what it was saying about this underlying idea of value extraction and I think this is a much broader kind of societal movement that's happening where you know you're hearing from global economists you're even hearing from business leaders that there's increased inequity and that what we need is for our economy to be more about rewarding people who are in the value creation business not in the value extraction business right now you you get rewarded if you can extract value not if you can create it so there's actually a rising movement so there's a broader context of people seeing this kind of inequity in the world being worried about it and I would say you know by and large like no one wants to just be an extractor like no one no again regardless of their business you know so I think it's it's just a matter of how okay well design is really great at doing that it's really great at understanding people it's great at creating value how then can designers connect with these broader kind of social desires social movements that are occurring people's kind of assumptions around organizations and the value they'll create uh within their organizations I'm curious what you would say to service designers who are already struggling to explain what it is what they do and are having a hard time finding projects let alone finding the right projects like having a conversation about extracting value creating value they it might scare off a lot of potential clients like again how how do you balance that yeah I mean I wouldn't lead with that honestly I think that these are what these are really meant to be um are more of the the binds or the the roadblocks that get in the way when you're when you're trying to do the work um I think that that they're the things that are maybe you know disempowering but I would say that there's something around um you know I think that the more articulate designers can be around their own expectations of what they would like to contribute to a project where they see their own creation of value and being kind of self-aware enough to know where that might conflict with the stakeholders that they're working with you know I think that that will help them navigate those kinds of conversations um for example one thing we talked about a lot uh in the past and we saw other people doing in our research is talking about shared value saying we're going to do something for the market and they're going to reward us you know that we're which which seems very logical but very sensible but actually saying you know what I know you're used to very traditional marketing uh kind of analytics having data really proving things out beforehand but what we need to do is get out try some things experiment with some different kinds of elements and show how they can create value for our customers if we're able to do that we're going to be better in the competition we're going to get rewarded and make more money you know I think even that kind of thing being able to talk about the the ability for design to create value and that the company will be rewarded is something that maybe designers are not always berated or articulating yeah so we're great at being the user's advocate but maybe we're not thinking enough about the people we're working with and what their incentives are and our incentives should be aligned with their incentives right otherwise um yeah it's it's really hard to to get things adopted um I think the biggest problem you know I really think it's almost like um different people from different cultures or different parts of the world being put into the same office and expecting and doing no explanation no training with these people I'm just expecting them to work seamlessly together and this is why people expand to Asia and they're and they fail because they don't have context they don't understand there's some stuff happening I know it looks like they're just going to work and eating and just like us but there's actually some things happening below the surface they're different I think it's the same with designers and business people they have different histories and backgrounds I think that it's it's great for designers to actually understand a bit more about what's happening here what am I bringing to the table and and what are business people bringing to the table and I think both are part of the problem I don't think it's one sided I think both need to to compromise what I find interesting about this story and again it's a story that we've been hearing a lot in the last few episodes of the show is if we are that good at understanding customers at understanding and users and figuring out what their needs pains desires dreams are why are we having such a hard time connecting with business people yeah it's a great question it's a great question I mean I think that there's a very different history that's not really understood between designers and business people so a lot of business comes from uh and we I talked to Emmanuel Fregniari who's a service design professor in Switzerland and he talked about you know he actually started as a risk analyst in a Swiss bank and then became a service designer because he's like this is a way to be less risky is to actually you know prototype things and so he kind of understands both sides he talked about it coming from the military and the church there's the idea of Taylorism you know which is setting up assembly lines Taylor was you know studying people how do we make the the minimum amount of effort so we can replicate so there's a lot of business logic is about how can I repeat the same thing over and over and how can I scale it how can I make like 10 of these study it and create then you you contrast that with designers designers believe in the idea of craft that often it comes from a tradition an artistic tradition where there'd be a master and an apprentice you would you would work at refining your craft over and over by doing the same thing when it comes to actually understanding the world and what's true designers really rely on more uh no methodological things around well I have to go I have to unless I go and see unless I see somebody using it I don't trust that it's going to work unless I go to the place where the service is being used I don't really understand what's happening where business people believe that positivism that you know unless there's a number it's not true so there's these very different kind of underlying assumptions and logics and beliefs and traditions that inform the practices and then they're just thrown together and expected to get a law yeah and and the challenge we have here is that the business people the people with a management background they have the last few decades on their side like they've been able to grow companies to a pretty significant size they've been very successful and now a bunch of designers come in and say you need to adopt a different way of working uh like there is that the power distribution here is doesn't seem to be very well aligned I think that you know I do think that there's something with designers and I would put myself in this camp of a of an idealism uh that that you seeing the world as you want it to be not as it is you know that I think that's a superpower of designers that you can see how great things could be you look at a you know situation you know it could be so much better but that becomes a problem within these situations because designers often aren't good at dealing with conflict and I think you know conflict is a necessary precursor of change unless you can actually get in there and deal with these conversations um and and come to some sort of compromise change won't happen and I think as a result designers end up being cast as kind of prima donnas and you know wearing fancy glasses and and that's uh um you know it's problematic how do we how do we then learn to uh get better at finding compromises without losing our identity or diluting the craft too much we we wouldn't be the first ones to who want to learn this want to get better at this we need to get better at this where where can we find inspiration well I'm hoping from the book that we're writing on these binds and and I do think that this idea of the you know one of the binds being around epistemology or beliefs that that as I was mentioning different traditions beliefs backgrounds that designers and business people have these different backgrounds I think it's important for designers to understand that in order for them to actually be effective in shaping the world that the way they want to to create more value I think there are a lot of designers and trends have been motivated to do that that they actually need to be better at understanding the belief system of the the culture that they're operating within and be able again to as I was saying deal with it in a neutral way say like hey you know this is how things are playing out it seems like you know one of the examples is um we'll see on projects where information is being obscured from customers in a way that benefits the company and as a designer when you're doing that you're like hey this is you know like people don't like this and that's one you could just go in and say like hey you're being bad you know like they don't like this another is to say let's play this out in the long run how is this going to impact things like trust a lifetime value of your customer actually being able to speak in the language of your of your client a little bit more but I think it requires really understanding that you're in the bind in the first place you know like hey we're having a we're there's a difference there's a fundamental difference in how we're approaching these things um let's have a conversation about it and try to resolve it only only then I think and again thinking about those permanent changes will designers start to be able to actually reshape the organizations that they work within versus the other way around you know there's there's an important question which I think is is business shaping design or is design shaping business what's your take on that I think more often than not business is shaping design what what makes it yeah it's because sorry yeah what makes you come to that uh conclusion because I see designers in these teams getting frustrated and leaving I see designers twisting like pretzels to try to make themselves sound or look like business people by measuring things that aren't meant to be measured or you know contorting themselves into a almost to kind of look like or sound like the thing within that organization but not in a way that actually is detrimental to the work that they're doing where they're sacrificing their what the benefit of what they're doing that's that's what I worry about and that I think in design education and and really in the literature there's a lot of things around methods and tools I don't think there's a lot around thinking critically thinking critically and actually saying what is the situation I'm in what's really happening here and how do I help understand and respond to it and I'm curious to which extent experience plays a role here because like you said when you when you just go out of service design school and you read a few projects and you just made you a few journey maps like that's already a big achievement if you if you if you need to deal with politics power dynamics from day one I can imagine that's that's that's overwhelming that it's it's too much I think that you're right although I do think that there you can benefit from the experience and the problems of others you know uh like you know there's a great book that that inspired me called the hard thing about hard things which is Ben Horowitz and he talks about when when I was you know running bridgeable and growing it there was a lot of great stuff in there and he would say things like you know people think it's hard to find good talent but what's really hard is when you have good talent but they become they get a sense of entitlement or they you know like those are the really hard things about business so you can I think you can understand other people's experiences and leverage those experiences in order to help inform your practice I just what I hope that this the contribution through this is to point to some of these things that again I think there may be a little bit in the background maybe not spoken to as much I'm curious if you if you had to point people like you're teaching what are the things that you're teaching these days that you maybe weren't teaching five years ago what is what what should be added to your curriculum of every service designer out there and the more specific we are the better I guess yeah yeah I mean I I think that um an important thing that I talk about in the framing of my class is this difference between a kind of traditional problem solving approach and a design problem solving approach and I think that's important for people in the state I think a really important another thing is to explain the idea of craft and that design requires mastery and practice and one thing I'll talk to my students about is like does anyone you know play a musical instrument or does anyone play a sport and like how did you get better at that well I got that better because I practiced you know and and you can read books about you know football or tennis you got to get on the court or you're on the you know on the pitch you got to play that's how you get better at it unfortunately that's not how organizations I run they run like factories still they are organized as factories right and this is what I worry about is that when you see how design thinking is taught it's almost like the assembly line version of design it's like actually the the craft doesn't matter the skill of the people doesn't matter we just need to follow these steps and and you can have you can have a robot doing it you know and and that's not true that that that each of these each of the specialties around design requires experience requires craft requires practice I think that's a really important thing that often gets glossed over when design is being taught so who do you need inside traditional organizations that are open to to this story because again I'm I'm often coming back to the fact that the incentives within organizations are not in line with doing things that are uncertain embracing new ideas trying new approaches that the incentives are different so you need to find people who either have other incentives or are just rebels or or something like that I find and it speaks to what you're saying earlier mark about the people with experience and and not and not necessarily design experience but I found that people who have either maybe made things before they've been in jobs where they have to actually go out and make things and they understand that in order to create something new you need to kind of get it in the world it's going to get messy it's going to be iterative or maybe people have done things like sales jobs and they've gone and like hung out with their customers and been in the real world and they know it doesn't matter if I have a bunch of great you know data I got to be able to get in the world and make things happen so I think people who have contextual experiences they're used to actually getting out in the world seeing how things are done I think that makes a huge difference I absolutely agree and you inspired me to think of an example by Dave Gray he talks about liminal thinking and how people create beliefs yes a great 20 minute video on on YouTube and one of the things that always stood by me from that example is that people create beliefs through the experience that they have been through so this connects with your story as if you want to help people to change their beliefs business people who haven't gone through the experience of connecting with customers you have to stage these experience you have to guide them through the process and do it in a way that they are not afraid to make that leap that they actually trust you and maybe do it in a fun and playful way in a safe space but if you if you don't create these experiences if they don't go through these experience there is no reason for them to change their beliefs they will stick with them because that's the thing they've been thought right yeah yeah absolutely absolutely yeah I think that thing of providing kinds of meaningful experiences and and I would add to it reflecting being reflective and thinking about hey what just happened and maybe how is that different than what we did before and what are you know providing opportunities for reflections so people can internalize some ideas and thinking and again I think that the there's such a focus on tactical you know like show me how to do a journey map show me how to you know as opposed to like why are we even journey mapping in the first place so yeah why yeah what's the narrative you have towards potential clients where they approach you with the idea this increase we have a problem we need to solve or we have an ambition that we want to accomplish which is a quite functional request like we have a problem help us to fix this and then you come in and say okay we'll help you to fix this problem but at the same time you you should learn a thing or two about the way we actually solve this problem that's not what they called you for right what's what's your narrative around that I mean the nice thing about service design and what we'll talk about is the idea of understanding people going through the service to improve it but also taking an internal view you know we're going to spend time with your team we're going to understand you know who are the different departments and functions involved in delivering this service how how do they work together where do they see opportunities to improve it and and then we're going to work with customers in order to find opportunities to improve it but but part of the part of the pitch I think is having clients understand we're going to work with you and your team so that they kind of better understand how to react to what's happening with the customer that was maybe the impetus of the problem in the first place so like clearly they're coming because there's a problem there's a revenue opportunity or there's a decline in revenue we can actually help your team get a lot smarter about this we can help you make things but we'll help your your team actually get it so that they're really informed and able to respond and make make it effective change over the long run and that's the thing your client has to be interested in the long run I think that's key here right if if you only have clients who are very much driven by short term and we can discuss what too short is in short term but then it's really hard to find support for the way design works and I think that's one of the conclusions after all my years of doing design is you really need to find people who have a long term perspective and are willing to invest in that and are less scared of short term incentives yep yep I mean I do think there's a lot of work that can be done clearly which is you know in the short run of efficiencies digital migrations things like that that designers can help enable although I think you're right that you know there there's there's kind of a limit to those efficiency projects then it becomes about again what are we up to where do we see value creation in the longer run and how can we deploy these skills to really think about shaping and forming where the organization is going but those are bigger challenges to take on yeah and and that's the challenge there is that you might talk to people where you have to explain that the value that you're creating today might materialize at the moment that they are not within the organization anymore and that's like yep that's that's that can be a tough tough sell I'm curious yeah there is something about having them understand and doing what's appropriate for the client in that time around them understanding where things are going to go I think that the more the more there can be just an understanding and alignment around where do we see an opportunity where do we want to go as an organization and design can be seen as being part of that then I think that goes a long way to positioning design not just as a reactive thing hey let's just make this thing pretty you know or you know you know I've heard about through a research literally people going in for a meeting with a client and presenting work and the client being like I had no idea this is what it was getting and being disappointed because they expected something different right so I think that you you do need to think about what's going to be important to the client it's going to provide value for them but again I think actually thinking about well what are we up to as an organization where do we want to get and how can even if it's a small incremental project how can this be a stepping stone that gets us down the road you know to being that kind of organization yeah making sure that something sticks after you're done that helps to like changing the the organization one small project at a time and the other thing what I like about which you're sort of reiterating is maybe we are also making the false assumption that clients know what they are buying when they're calling us so when when they call us for a project and we might assume that they know what service design is that they think they know what they are getting but that's that's an assumption that I think is quite dangerous and we shouldn't take it for granted. I've even seen and I don't know if you've had this as well where there's they'll say they want you know we want our organization to collaborate better we want to have a customer first attitude we want to work together with their customers you know they'll talk about these things but then they'll have a specific project that they need done right away well what we really need to do is make this process in our organization be cheaper or be less annoying or whatever and and I think that I think that that the interesting thing with the first point around you know hey we want to be focused on our customers we want to actually work better as an organization that a lot of those things are they can kind of be a little bit intangible or harder to measure harder to quantify in a in a culture that celebrates things that are predictable and measurable so so I do think that there is a a difficulty often for clients even who are well intended and want the good stuff about service design to to actually oscillate between the work that needs to be done and that bigger thing and that's why I think it's it kind of has to be both you have to do the work and you have to actually look for opportunities to transform your organization at the same time how are your projects are you structuring your projects in a different way today again than you maybe did three years ago I it's a good question um I mean I would say if anything a big difference that's just been a kind of trend maybe not three years but even more is really using a lot more sprints you know so actually working through short problems and developing very quickly specific you know touch points of an experience versus you know a couple of months and doing a big research phase and a big development phase and um so so a lot more sprint-based work and and um my assumption here is that showing quote-unquote evidence showing tangible progress creates trust and that that trust that you have there helps you to sort of take bigger leaps and um do bigger asks in terms of resources time budgets absolutely yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and and it allows you to a lot of these things we're talking about the experiential elements the hearing from people seeing things that made in the world you can get to that quite quickly so you can say like hey here's the thing we made here's a whole bunch of your customers responding to it and how they reacted and that's kind of industry well people might ask for well I would love to have a bigger and you know bigger uh sample size but you know there is some evidence there for them to contend with this also comes back to that idealism part which you discussed that uh the service design community might sometimes be quite purist about their approach like we can deliver insights in two weeks like we need to study for three months and then do some ideation like and and here's where the compromise comes in sometimes you either do a two-week sprint where you find something or you don't do anything at all because you don't get the support from your clients and and this is yeah this is the trade-off you have to make and see how far you're willing to go and compromise in order to make progress 100% yeah I work for many years with this great designer uh Michelle McEwn and she studied as an industrial designer and she would say you can make a chair in five minutes or you can make a chair in five years you know and and I do think there's a point where the project's just not well resourced to get anything done so there you know there's a point where the ambition the time and budget needs to meet the ambition of the project but I do think that there are ways of working that are much more um quick and iterative that show evidence more quickly yeah um and designers like anybody you get kind of get used to working in a certain way so it's good to shake it up every once in a while what do you hope people will remember from this episode yeah that's a great question I think that these double binds if you're doing work within your organization and you're getting frustrated or projects aren't being implemented that you're running into you're likely running into these double binds and you should try to understand them better and try to actually find ways to to equip yourself to deal with them in the future that if you're if you see yourself running into problems that's that's a big opportunity to learn and to understand what's happening and that you should think about as you see those patterns those clients that you're coming into how might I resource my projects differently how might I act in my projects in a way that's actually going to address them if I really want to deliver value within my organization and recognizing these double binds is already a step very good step in the right direction what I've been seeing is that service designers find it challenging to find patterns because there aren't a lot of peers around who have the similar challenges but we all have these challenges so and this is something that might be useful for people who are listening especially for in-house service designers I'm running these communities called the campfires where eight service designers in-house service designers from across the globe different organizations get together and wonder behold they all talk about the similar challenges like and that's that's key here I think like you might feel a frustration in your practice but you're not the only one and my advice would be recognize it and then connect with others to see how they've been dealing with it and the campfire is one of the ways but there are other ways to do that as well don't try to solve it alone for sure for sure there are patterns going on you know there's a Nelson Mandela quote and he says I never lose I either win or I learn you know and I think that you need to have that attitude when you're doing design work and and I would encourage you know if any of your listeners or through the campfires if people are coming into these things they want to talk to us we're still in the kind of research synthesis and writing phase of our project if they want to share some examples uh would love to hear from them because I think that there are patterns and there are predictable things that are going to be problems for designers and it's really again just about expanding your own awareness seeing it coming on the horizon before you kind of smash it into it and then and then actually you know having the right tools methods approaches that you can apply to it in order to actually make a difference in the long run if people have examples what's the best way to reach out to you uh they can email me uh which uh at chris app at bridgeable.com uh they can maybe I can provide you with other links and content I'm on twitter and linked in for the social media platform so they could connect with me and send me a note that would be great awesome I'll make sure to include everything in the show notes um Chris let's wrap it up uh again a topic about how designers can be more impactful how we can make sure that we get less frustrated and see more adoption of our work super important really looking forward to uh the outcome of your research in the book um and can I give a shout out just my co-authors are dr. David Dunn uh who's runs the MBA programs at the university of victoria has been a professor for a long time uh and and great great writer researcher of design he wrote a book called design thinking at work which studied the incorporation of design at work uh did a bunch of research there and paolo corey who's a health care traditionally was a health care service designer now he's at sunlight um so he's worked on in-house teams uh for a long time uh he's a director now uh of a mapping practice at a big insurance company so uh different kinds of perspectives that we bring to it and and and they they've really contributed a lot to this thinking and work as well awesome for the shout out I hope they uh appreciate that they have been featured on the service design show uh once again uh Chris thanks for addressing this topic thanks for researching it um doing this foundational work for the community and looking forward to seeing when it's published yeah wonderful well thank you for having me let's do a good conversation awesome that you're one of the people who makes it all the way till the end of these conversations now make sure to leave a comment with the double bind that you see between business and design and if you haven't done so already click that subscribe button so you won't miss any future episode if you're looking for more check out the next video that I've got lined up for you see you over there