 Hey, this is Mike Metzig, and welcome to the Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Marc van Tijn. Welcome to your two-weekly burst of service design inspiration, where you get to learn what some of the world's best service designers are currently doing. We talk about the current state of the industry, exciting new developments, and the challenges up ahead. With the Service Design Show, we help you to become a better service designer, so you can make a bigger impact on the world around us. We bring you a new episode every two weeks on Thursday. So, if you don't want to miss anything, be sure to click that subscribe button. My guest in this episode is Mike Metzig. Mike is one of the co-founders of the customer experience navigators community within Deutsche Telecom, a community focused on spreading design thinking and customer centricity throughout the whole organization. For the next 30 minutes or so, we'll be talking about topics like what is the customer experience navigators community exactly. We'll also talk about how to move from project work to changing a mindset, and finally, how to overcome the hurdle of uncertainty. 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. Welcome to the show, Mike. Hi, welcome. Very happy that you could join actually this morning from Bonn. You are based in Bonn, right? Yeah, that's true. I'm based in Bonn at Deutsche Telecom. You're actually one of the first guests on the show, I think, who is working within a large corporate. Usually, I've had people that are service design practitioners from agencies, so I'm really curious to hear your story today. Okay. Mike, this is the first question I ask all my guests, and it is, do you remember the very first time you actually encountered the term service design or design thinking? Oh yeah, I really, really remember it very well because it was a breaking point in our journey, actually, because Mark Stickton from the guys from Snappley introduced us to not only Snappley, but later on also on the, let's say, framework of design thinking and service design, and that was the point where we saw, okay, this is really that framework and toolbox we need to get the next level in terms of customer experience here at Telecom in Germany, because we started beforehand with customer journey mappings, intensive workshop with customer journey mappings, but at the end it was always that we left the project with some, let's say, pain points from the customers, but didn't really help them to overcome that pain points and to give them a methodology how to improve, and that was something we didn't really think was very good, but then we saw, okay, this is the opportunity we're looking for. So what do you remember, what did Mark say to you, what stuck in your head? It was, I think it was the co-creation part, actually, so really working co-creative with customers directly on the topic and just really get immediately into solutions rather than planning, so that was really the eye-opener for us actually to also change the way we support projects. Interesting, the transitioning from planning to actually doing making solutions, that's a really good one. We have to thank Mark for that. Mike, you gave me three topics and I gave you some question starters and talking about co-creation will be co-creating the topics for the next 30 minutes. So I'll just start with the first topic and I think that's the most logical one to start with because during the introduction I said you were one of the co-founders of the CX navigator community. So this is the first topic CX navigator and is there a question starter? Is there something that matches with that? Why? So it's a why. So the reason why we did it in that way, so I probably have to explain it a little bit more in detail what we are doing. The CX navigators are a community within our company so their volunteers colleagues are volunteering and to do service design, design thinking for projects. So they are based in regular departments, units, sales, finance, marketing, wherever across the whole company and 30% of the time they're spending in other projects doing design thinking as a coach for other projects. So that is the idea and we did it that way because we believe that we need some ambassadors in each department to spread the word of design thinking service design and on the other hand we also would like to have these operational let's say touch so that we don't have these let's say high-flying experts in a separate universe so we would like to have it really more practical and the other thing is we are looking for, let's say our vision is that we transform the mindset in the company and at one point you don't need maybe no need that much of experts, navigators doing that coaching because everybody is thinking in that direction and you may have some special, some let's say deeper experts to support and to coach but at the end you don't need that much of coaches anymore because the mindset has changed completely and the way of working has changed completely. So how has this community evolved from the day that you started up to now? What has happened? Yeah, we started in 2014 actually as part of let's say one of these campus programs so these one big things that every enterprise corporation is doing and at that time there was also a separate stream called customer experience but at the end it was difficult to let's say follow up on these actions we have developed and defined in that program and we said again decided to do it really different now from now on and said okay we are using or we are trying to get some volunteers and get some people involved to just support projects to show what makes the difference in terms of doing customer centric work so that was the starting point and we started with just four navigators and did a few projects in 2014, 5 or 6 or something and then the let's say the importance went up also in Deutsche Telekom because our CEO was in Silicon Valley and so I was at the Stanford University with some of the top leadership team of Deutsche Telekom and they called design thinking in 2015 and from then on they let's say the importance and the acknowledging of design thinking was fast growing up in our company but the good thing was that at that point we already know and knew what to do and how to support projects in a certain way so that was really good and over the time of the last three years we grew up to about 50 navigators now we have trained more so we have about trained 90 in the company and about 25 to 30 are let's say active in terms of the 30% and about another 30 are and let's say not able to provide the 30% amount but also have supporting the community in terms of doing some workshops and good things and also our let's say projects grew up rapidly the number of projects number of projects things we did it was 6 or 7 in 2014 in 2015 it was about 20 I think and last year it was about 60 so it was really a lot of questions that pop to my mind right now but if you look back on the last three years and you could start all over from scratch what would you have done differently? That's a good question I don't think that much different I mean I would probably circumvent some hurdles and challenges or pitfalls we fall into some political stuff and other other things but in general I think and I still believe that this approach is really good I mean it's one of my other topics let's say these uncertainties stuff so we really have to learn or we still have to learn to deal with these agile and let's say sprint approach this is something we all have never learned in our company so that's really one of the biggest issues that we start really with the sprint logic very late so it's not that we started from the beginning so that was maybe something I started to learn now I would change so You must have a dream or vision of where the CX Navigator community is heading so how do you hope it looks in the next three years what have you achieved? I hope that we don't need the community anymore that's really something we are working on so I mean it sounds like a little bit weird but it is like this we are not a department it's really a community of volunteers and we set it up that way because we are approaching that vision to say at one time we don't need that much at Navigators and then they have all their regular work where they can go back still applying design thinking or service design but then in their regular daily work not only in projects and if people want to learn more about how you've implemented this within the company is there some online material or I mean in terms of methodology and training and stuff I guess some people will be watching this episode and thinking well this is cool, I want to do this in my company too, did you write about this or yeah we did a little article in the service design network in the recent issue I think in October it was published and it's called re-inventing from within so it's about the journey of the Navigators and there's also a little bit with regards to training but I have to admit that we don't really set up the trainings but we partner with some of our corporate headquarters departments there are two departments one is the training center in Berlin from the T-Labs starting design thinking I think 10 years ago now and there were the department which have trained us in the first instance so the first wave of navigators were trained by the training center and the second one then was trained by another community and the headquarters called shareground they also won the STN award for implementation of training they are responsible because they are located in the HR department at the telecom AG they are responsible for setting up the let's say enabling formats training design thinking we also let's say co-created these formats so we have also put in our experiences from our project work into the trainings and we do also the we call it boot camps training from our six navigators we do on our own so it's still something we have in our hands or we do by ourselves because we have a little bit different setting because we need them as soon as possible in project after they have interesting topic and I guess let's quickly move on to the second one because I think it closely relates to what you already talked about and you just mentioned the word project and the second topic is from projects from project work to mindset change is there a question starter do you have a question starter laying around yeah okay that's maybe something like this when will so when will we achieve the mindset change running from a project to to the department because you just said we want people to move as fast as they can into a project and now you're talking about mindset change how does that work yeah the thing is maybe I can draw something if it's okay of course yeah just give me a minute not even a minute I'll explain what I'll see in the drawing for the people who are listening to the podcast watching the video you can also subscribe to the podcast on SoundCloud and listen to the show on your daily commute so Mike is frantically drawing yeah so I'm already finished up so if you say okay we are doing CX projects so design thinking, service design in that area so we are doing it for kind of a department like finance or something so they have a different, they have a dedicated challenge they would like to solve by a creative approach but in this environment we work very differently so we use a different methodology we use a different mindset and so on but there are a lot of other projects running in that department as well on a regular methodology or approach management but what we would like to achieve is that this is nothing which is somehow connected to the department but which is part of within so the question is how we transfer the learnings from here to other projects or even other, let's say daily work so because I think or I believe that service design or design thinking is not only a methodology for projects but also a kind of a mindset that you really change your daily work it's the attitudes we often talk about it's a way of working or a way of thinking so and have you found any success? Are you achieving this or is this really hard? It is really hard it is really hard, I mean we have and that's the reason why we did that with the X navigators if you see we have those navigators placed in these departments that's the idea so we have navigators here so they also spread the word in there although they may support a project from another department that's the idea but what we see is that if you have a lot of navigators in one department the demand from that area in terms of CX projects is also increasing so there is a question to okay there are people having a different mindset and also doing it in several projects because that is important not only training but also doing it then afterwards and there is a relation that these departments demand more support in terms of design thinking or social design So taking this learning that where you have the biggest CX community also the most CX work gets done how do you spread that to departments that are less open to this approach Yeah we use that's something we use our sponsors and we do have now sponsors since I think end of 2015 so two board members are supporting our community and they also manage that we get a kind of let's say support from the whole board of management regarding the 30% of the navigators stuff and they take care and support us in terms of that we get into those departments which are not really applying now How important is that? Oh it's really important I mean if you take the chance to read our article to a certain extent it was very okay that nobody really looked at us because we had the chance to learn and to fail in terms of what we do in the projects but as we grew up and we would like to spread more and do it a little bit more sophisticated then it was really important to get this support So it's the moment to scale when you want to scale you need to find support on board level Yeah I think it's helped us a lot especially in our let's say very special setup with these part-time navigators let's put it that way because this is really a challenge I mean the 30% is always a challenge because they are let's say also have responsibilities in the regular work and it's also very hard to plan our demands because projects are coming every now and then and they would like almost they would like to start next week so that's the challenge we are facing I think How did you manage to actually achieve that 30% because I think a lot of organizations would say that's part of the magic if you actually manage to get people to spend 30% of their time on such projects Yeah the thing is we proved that it worked in the beginning so with the start that we said okay we have just a few people and they were volunteering and they said okay I really take that time no matter what and my superior is supporting it so that was also important that we have two or three business leaders so they were on board level but business leaders saying okay I think that idea is kind of smart let's try it and here are some people that you can use for that 30% case and then we proved that it worked that this 30% also is reliable and is also feasible so that you can manage or support a project with this 30% level and now explain us how did you manage to prove that what was the secret and the secret was that it's not really a secret it was just like that the feedback from the project was so tremendous so they said we never have worked that way and we never have had these results that we saw from when we talk about customer perspective and stuff like that so it was really word of mouth from the project because the project said okay it was really really helpful what we did so it was just did you have to prove the result in any did you have to quantify their results or what are really qualitative results now we didn't have had luckily we didn't really were charged to quantify it and sometimes questions came up like this but it's really hard to quantify it because you don't have these A-B testing because you don't do projects in one way and the other way you can't measure but yeah we were involved in projects which are also related to cost savings and other stuff and they achieved their goals of cost savings so it was just because us you don't know how you measure how would you measure that yeah that's the interesting topic within service design Mike let's move on to the third topic and this is a really interesting one and it hasn't been on the show a lot and you called this topic the hurdle of uncertainty is there a question starter that goes along with this one I'm sure there is just pick a random one challenge yourself how we can overcome I think the hurdle of uncertainty and because it's also to us itself I mean we are especially my person itself I'm really a let's say kind of 100% guy so I would like to achieve 100% quality so that's my say DNA let's put it that way so and this is but in service design or design thinking I learned that is more important to really quick and dirty put the ideas to test and to relive to see whether this is feasible or not and that's something I really like on design thinking but it's always a kind of a mindset thing so the gut feeling says feels a little bit uncertain so it's really kind of a let's say thing in the head I believe but what is more important is the project has the same feeling so the project members coming to us say okay we would like to achieve a certain goal to resolve a certain challenge and they are feeling not very comfortable doing that so it's the beginning because we didn't really know how to deal better with that was that we more or less do a kind of a sequential design thinking process so that we take time for exploration doing customer interviews stuff like that then we define IDA prototype and that was always most of the time that was the end of our support in the project so we provide them with ideas or prototypes and then they went off and did whatever they did with the idea but what we see is especially in bigger projects is that the time frame from starting exploration to prototyping was too long so that the people really didn't saw the end so they didn't really saw results in between they experienced a lot and learned a lot but they really saw wow when does it end when do we come to the point so what do we at what moment do you make impact on actual customers or in the business they have things in mind that say okay we need to solve the problem so when do we solve the problem something we experienced especially in bigger programs and bigger projects and we try now more to do really the sprint logic so that we do quick and dirty prototyping to learn from the prototyping and explore around that again to see if that's good or not have you found some sort of sweet spot in the time box how fast do your projects move what did you mean could you explain again I'm really curious if you through prototyping have found well we can take two weeks two months or six months to come to an impact when do people get uncomfortable oh yeah okay that I can tell you we have currently running a really big project which has actually eight sub streams for example so the project team is about 150 people big, 120, 150 and we are now supporting that project for about five months now and we now are in the session of iterative prototyping and we saw and it was just close to Christmas last year that we saw kind of a dip in the motivation of the people because they had three months working really hard on exploration defining and also a little bit ideation but really they saw okay when do we have these let's say speed up so that was our mindset thing where we see okay there's something we need to change in terms especially for those bigger issues or bigger problems so three months from spending three months in the research phase is quite long right? in the ideal situation how fast should it go do you think I think you should probably you have several research phases now so like that now we also tried it already and I think you should spend not more than two or three weeks before you get to the project to at least a certain set of prototypes when you have something to show yeah of course it always depends on that especially also here in our company probably not for enterprises but we usually don't have project teams which are running 100% on the project so we have always to deal with that maybe only the project team can only spend 30% of their time in that specific project so one and a half day a week so that's always the reason why we need to let's say stretch the time for exploration because exploration needs time depends on the size of the challenge but we now try to let's say even if they only spend 30% we already try to have these prototypes in two or three weeks time and that is really difficult because then the feeling of the project team is okay we don't really have understood the challenge of really the area of exploration so we just dig into a certain you cannot do their research for them because it's part of actually doing the research yourself that you understand the issue and understand the problem they have to be involved in their research I guess of course the approach we do because we are not an agency we are coaching a project to get to better results with design thinking so they do the research and that's also the order they need to let's say learn a little bit how to research correctly or get some tips and tricks how to research and yes of course we provide the methodology to say okay do interviews to visits to whatever but at the end they have to also have a learning curve in that because I mean if you're not used to make interviews with customers then the first interviews probably not that good Mike we're heading towards the end of this episode already and the question I always end with is this is your opportunity to ask a question to the viewers and I'm always really curious so what is your big question at this moment what keeps you awake that is really the question about these uncertainties things so how we can make project teams more confident in dealing with these uncertainties that we just dig into certain areas of an exploration area and go for the fast prototypes and then that they have the feeling and the belief that it's still providing them good results so that's one of my that's really the top topic I have in mind for people who are also interested in this one of the quite recent episode Mauricio Manas also mentioned this in embracing ambiguity I think he mentioned so not trying to fit it into a box but having the box open and then embracing that that's I guess same topic I believe Mike the time flew by and I'm really happy that you took the opportunity to share your experiences within a large corporate on the show so thank you again thank you thank you for your time so what are your thoughts about the topics we've just discussed with Mike let us know down below in the comments this show is all about helping you to become a better service designer by sharing the real life stories of people that are currently shaping the service design field if you enjoyed this episode and like to see more check out some of the past episodes and click that subscribe button for now thanks for watching and I'll see you in two weeks time