 In this episode you'll learn how you can drive better and faster decision making using less words. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Adam and this is the service design show episode 178. Hi, my name is Mark Fontijn and welcome back to the service design show. On this show we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are those hidden and invisible things that make all the difference between success and failure all to help you make great services that have a positive impact on people, business and our planet. Our guest in this episode is no one less than Adam Lawrence. You might know Adam as the co-author of the books This Is Service Design Doing and This Is Service Design Thinking or you might know Adam as the co-organizer of the global service jam or the co-creation school. So today we're going to talk about the things that can't be expressed through words. I know this is going to be an interesting one. Okay, think about this for a second and see if you recognize it. Even though design is known and celebrated for using other more rich forms of communication like visuals, Lego and even role play. When we are in a business context, we still often revert to words as our primary way of communicating. I'll give you an example. When we try to capture the moment of waiting in a customer journey, what do we do? Well, very often in our effort to be short, snappy and efficient, we just write the word waiting on a sticky note and get on with the rest of the work. Okay, you probably already noticed, but just think about all the clues, all the nuances that you are leaving out when you just write the word waiting on a sticky note. There is a reason, of course, why we draw a sad or an angry emoji on a sticky note or maybe even add a photo. These elements all just add additional details and richness to that moment. Why is this important? Well, your role as a service design professional is to help drive decision making. And as we know in some situations, making better and faster decisions requires more nuanced and rich information. So if that's the case, when we know that using other forms of communication beyond just words help us to do a better job, what's holding us back from bringing a more designally way of working into our day to day? Well, that's exactly what we're going to explore in today's episode. If you stick around till the end of this episode, you'll know how to grow the appreciation for visuals in a company culture that's ruled by numbers. How to create the space for experimentation in a context where everybody is risk averse. And finally, maybe most importantly, how do you get your colleagues to knock on your door rather than you having to sell your way of working to them? I hope this got you just excited as I am about the conversation that's coming up. So sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Adam Lawrence. Welcome back to the show, Adam. I'm good to be back. It's been a long time. It's been a long time. It's been way overdue. Yeah, I haven't looked it up, but I think you were one of the first 10 episodes, something like that. Yeah, it was really the beginning. I've had a few other contacts in between, of course, and several things around the jam when you accompanied the jam a few times. Thanks for that. Yeah, that's true. Always great to see you. Yeah, so this is the sort of the official interview, the second interview, but you've been on the show before. Adam, nevertheless, for the people who have been living under a rock and haven't heard about you and what you do, maybe it would be good to start with a brief intro about who you are and what you do these days. Sure. My name is Adam. Adam Lawrence. I'm German, grew up in the UK, and I've been working in, I guess you can call it, service design since the mid 2000s. I'm best known for two things, I guess. One of them is the global service jam, which is the world's biggest service design event in which everybody who listens to this show should get involved in because it's great fun, it's a great place to learn and connect and get better if you're good already. The other one is the book This Is Service Design Doing, This Is Service Design Methods, which I co-wrote with Mark Stick, Dawn Jakob Schneider, and Marcus Hormes, and 301 other amazing people. So generally, I'm working with large organizations helping them change the way they approach value creation, help them to do things differently, to be more down to earth, to be more evidence based, and so on. And a lot of folks call that service design. We call it whatever our clients call it. Sounds like a very good strategy. I have a question about your name, Adam Lawrence. But when I look in your email signature, there is a Saint John in there. What's up with that? Yeah, it's pronounced St. John. People who've seen the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, I remember a scene where Robin Atkinson, Mr. Bean gets very confused about pronouncing that name. But it's just a middle name, but I use it now and again because there are quite a few Adam Lawrence's out there, including an excellent photographer in New York and John Travolta character from a movie. So if I don't want to get confused with those, then I put in the Saint John in between. And my Twitter handle is AdamsonJohn. Well, happy that we have that on record. Adam, the last time you appeared on the show, we didn't have a lightning round, which we do have right now. I have five questions for you. Goals to get to know you a bit better as a person next to the professional, just the first thing that comes to your mind. Are you ready? Yeah, sure. All right. What did you want to become when you were a kid? A vet. A vet. I didn't end up studying zoology, but didn't take you any further than that. What's always in your fridge? Always in my fridge is oat milk. Oat milk. Got it. This is going to be a good one for you. What is your go-to karaoke song? My go-to karaoke song. Oh, that's a really hard one. I like doing duets, so a good classic duet like from Greece or from the islands in the stream or something like that. But if I'm alone, maybe it's going to be a Tom Jones number or rhinestone cowboy. All right. Thank you. What is your hidden talent, which won't be hidden after you announce it here? I am absolutely amazing at packing cars. I once had a car that was full to the roof. Friends told me that nothing else could fit in there, and I managed to repack it to add a bed and two armchairs. There you go. And fifth and final question, which people might actually be super interested about is, do you recall the first moment you sort of heard about service design? I do. In the mid-2000s, I was writing a blog around where I saw theater, everything around theater in the world of commerce and business and services and so on. And some people popped up on the blog being very generous with support and comments and suggestions. Among them were Joe Pine of the experience economy and Birgit Marga of the service design network. And they started using words around me like experience design, service design and so on. At the same time, my colleague Marcus bumped into the live work guys in a conference in India at John Thacker's Doors of Perception Conference. And he came back from the summer and I came out of my sort of blog frenzy and we said to each other, what we do has a name and that name is service design. If we go back down memory lane, I think I remember how I got in touch with you in the first place. You were writing on WorkPlayExperience.com, right? Was that the title? Yeah, that was the name of the blog. It's now the company name. I think it was on blogspot back in the day. And you were starting a series of, it felt like the start of a book. You had like chapter one and two ready, something right? Yeah, I did. I still have that somewhere as a PDF. It was about the very basics of theatricality in our work. So things like lighting and costume, but also things like dramatic structure and timing and status and role and things like this. So yeah, I plan to do more on that. It ended up, I guess, weaving into the other books that I've written. I haven't come back to that one directly. Yeah, and I think I signed up to get chapter three and four, which never materialized. I'm a disappointment, I know that. Well, you superseded them with other works, but I think that's the way how our paths crossed. I think so, yeah. So, Adam, we agreed to do sort of exploratory chat today, maybe verbal prototyping. We'll see where this takes us. And as far as I'm concerned, if we end up walking away with better questions than we started with, then our mission will be a success. And the topic or the theme that we want to unpack is implicit versus explicit design? Yes, something like that, because something like that. This is really we're at the crux of the matter immediately about things that don't go into words really well. I come from a background of theater mostly. I've been a theater maker for almost three decades as an actor and director and stuff like this. And in theater and in design, we do lots of things and we deal with lots of things that are really important that don't fit into words or numbers very well. They're very hard to express in those traditional channels, but they can be expressed in other ways and communicated in other ways. So they're implicit, they're between the lines, they're in the space between what we do. And then we try and put these things on post-its. We try and put them into research reports and things like that. And it's really, really hard. And I think there are some very interesting issues around that about who it includes and who it excludes and how we can work better with these really, really important concepts that don't really fit into language. Just in case folks are confused, I live down the road here from two great sport fashion manufacturers here in Germany. You can guess who they are. And things that they do need to be, for example, cool. Yeah. Define cool for me on a post. You can't do that. You have to see something and then you know it's cool or it was cool and maybe it will be cool soon. They have to work using prototyping and so on, using mood boards and so on to express things which don't fit into words. And that's really tricky for other folks to get their head around sometimes. Yeah. So trying to capture things that are hard to capture in language. And when I was thinking about that, I was thinking if there's anyone who can do this, it should be the design community. We pride ourselves to use a lot of visual language to, like you said, prototyping, maybe enacting. And still, you somehow feel that words and verbal communication are sort of predominant, holding us back. What's scratched the itch for you? It's like an ongoing frustration. We are good at this. We're much better than most industries at this. At least some of us are. But also one of the causes of friction that we have with our counterparts in organizations, with our sponsors, with quote unquote non-designers, yeah, is that they like things in black and white. They don't like ambiguity, yeah. And some of us find that frustrating as well. They like things short and sweet. They don't want to spend time understanding something. And the way that as a species that we've evolved to express things in a short and sweet way, in a concise way, is to use language to do that. I mean, the notes on a post-it, the single quote from a user. These are the classic things. The user stories, all that kind of stuff. They're fabulous tools. They're just brilliant. And they miss a lot of the really, really important stuff. Back in the 80s, I was working in the automotive industry. I had a great boss who was very classic. This was the time of TQM. I was actually at their competitor, Honda. But this is that time and everything was very, very results driven and so on. And he once said to me, Adam, if you can't put a number on it, it's not real. Which I think I've heard many, many times. And at some point, I got a bit grumpy with him. And I said, how much do you love your kids? Yeah. And I said, put a number on it. And he said, I can't. I said, but is it important? He said, of course, it drives my life. So that was the beginning of this thought that there are gaps. There are things there which you can't put down like this. I mean, if you saw this person around his kids, you could see how much he loved them. And I guess you can express these things in words, if it's a song or if it's a novel or if it's a play, but getting it down to that sort of business reports, nugget type tweet context is so, so hard. And I think it does hold us back. Yeah. So what do you see happening? Like, you've been in a million different situations, worked with a million different companies. What's what's happening? What are they missing by sort of sticking to this way of communicating this way of working? I think you're missing a couple of things. One of the first ones, which may not be so important in terms of business and so on, but I think it actually is, but it's certainly important in terms of maybe justice, is that when we work strongly using words and other, let's say abstractions of reality, then we exclude quite a lot of people. There are people who don't have the typical literacy skills or abstraction skills or presentation skills or something that we take for granted in most, let's say, professional contexts. But in service design, especially, we're supposed to be co-designing. We're supposed to be working with people, not for people. And so when we bring those people into rooms and they're not confident, for example, picking up a Sharpie and writing something on a post it, we're missing their input. We're excluding them from that. Now, there are ways to do this. I've seen people like Snoke, for example, do this really, really well and use, let's say, paper formats with those people. But generally, I find it's much easier to say to someone, show me or walk me through that or let's do it together or let's build something that is much more accessible to many, many people. But I think the main thing that we're missing with this in terms of, let's say, design output is we're just missing nuances. We're missing opportunities to create value. We're missing whole avenues that could be developed. A short story. As I said, I come from theater and many designers that I work with come from graphic or UX or product design. So posters and toasters, you might say. And so when those folks think, they think with a pen, which is great. And visualizations, non-word visualizations are very accessible. But often there's writing in there as well and so on and that's fine. But I come from theater. So I think with my body, I stand up and I try stuff. And that's what we try and do in our work. And I was working with a bunch of quite senior, let's say, IT folks. This was in a large organization. And we were doing some wireframing. We had a great tool, wireframing, sketching out pages of an app, putting on the buttons, labeling the buttons, stuff like that. And they were doing this. It's part of a training context. It wasn't a real project. I want to make that very clear. But they did this great wireframe sequence. They were really fast. It looked really good. They didn't forget the back buttons. My goodness, I mean, you know, this kind of stuff. And they're like, we're done. We're ready. I want to go for lunch. And I said, we've got actually 15 minutes more before the lunch break. Can I ask you to try something else? And they were like, I said, please. And they said, okay, they were nice people. And I said, do you want to just act it out instead? Do you want to just forget the wireframe, forget the, let's say, transactional side of that? Because that's what it mostly is. There's an emotional layer over that. And do you want to just act it out? Have one of you be the app, one of you be the user in what's sometimes called concierge prototyping or genie in a bottle prototyping, I like to call it. And they said, okay. And they tried this. And they were just blown away. They were just blown away how they were discovering whole avenues of value that they'd not seen before. And these things they were discovering were in the in between. They were in the spaces in the pauses in the gaps in when somebody hesitated or somebody cocked an eyebrow, as we say. And then the person playing the app would say, I see you're hesitating. What are you worried about? You know, this whole level of complexity of nuance, which is very missing. I mean, very missing when we try and get things in black and white on paper. For them, it was an absolute highlight of the whole project, discovering this other way of, of, let's say, thinking by doing rather than thinking by scratching a pen on a piece of paper. I love this example. And I'm curious, what's there? Did you see this impact? How did this impact them? Like, did they change their behavior? Or was it more like a recognition? Okay, there is something more beyond the buttons and the screens. Well, it's interesting to hear that those I did, I did follow that company a bit after this, because we had a long going relationship with them, those individuals sort of drifted away, but I saw what was happening in the organization. And I saw this was being used quite a lot. And the reason it was being used is interesting, because the reason that they chose to, let's say, sell this, the way they sold this in the organization was by saying, it's faster. Which it is, this is way, way faster than wireframing. So you get iterating earlier, which is great. But it's interesting that the way they sold it was through the way, which is easy to put into a word. It's faster. You heard me grasping beforehand to say, well, there were more nuances and there were moments and there were looks. And that's really hard to explain. It's much easier to say it's faster. Years and years ago, when I was when the rocks were still soft, there was a thing called compact discs, which came out and replaced vinyl. And there were all kinds of advantages to this portability and so on. And it actually sounded better than most rubbish vinyl players did at the time. Today, vinyl is high end. Back then it was cheap and cheerful, often sounded awful. But they couldn't play it to people on the radio or on the TV and show this better, this better quality, because you wouldn't hear it through your TV speakers. So they sold it by saying, you can't scratch it, which is patently untrue. You can scratch a CD, but it's much harder to scratch than a vinyl record is. So that was the thing that was easy to say. And that was the thing that became the dominant message. And I think that happens to us quite a lot. That's that's interesting. Yeah, like, how do you translate the benefits of the unspoken word in between to something that is accepted and valued by people who usually aren't used to this way of working? And transmissible as well. You know, what do you mean? The channels that we use, you know, I can send an email around the organization. That's words. That's easy. I can make a voice note on WhatsApp or something. That's easy. It's much harder for me to send a prototype to you if it's a physical thing or to put you into an experience as well. So I do acknowledge this is more work in some cases. The fidelity is different. It's much higher fidelity. And you're using way more sensory information. More channels. More channels. Yeah. And that makes it more ambiguous. One story. I don't know if it's true. I think it is. You probably also have heard it by IDO where they were doing something around the hospital. And one of the things that they did was actually a walkthrough through the emergency room. And they lay on a bed with a camera, like they enter the emergency room. And the scene that always stuck with me is that in the movie that they played back is you see, I think it was like 30 minutes somebody staring at the ceiling, laying in the bed. And on a journey map, there will be a sticky note called waiting. How do you capture that 30 minutes of anxiety, of stress, of uncertainty? You don't, right? It's not captured in the word waiting. And I think that's also what you're hinting at. Yeah. And I'm one of the people who really pushes when I'm doing journey mapping, people to add visuals. That's the first step towards that. A very high level map, I guess you might use like an icon of a clock to show waiting, the classic egg timer, the sand clock in there. But I push people to, if it's appropriate, to actually show the situation because waiting in a business class lounge at the airport is very different from waiting at a bus stop in the rain when all the seats are full and you have to stand outside the bus stop. They're very different experiences. And it's hard. Yeah. I think it's useful in these situations to move first of all to that kind of visualization, to show as well as you can what's going on there. Again, if that's honest, you can cheat with this stuff. If it's a very high level map, then waiting might be a very generic concept. But if it's a specific user instance, then it's appropriate to show the nose dripping water in the rain or whatever it is. And that's the first step and it's getting much easier as we can, we have AI added into mapping now and so on. So it's getting much easier to do things like that. But even that has the problem if you've not experienced that yourself. You know, if I don't know as a man what it's like to be a woman waiting at the bus stop in the dark city at night. Yeah. That's a very different thing. So what are ways that can help me appreciate if not experience that more? I'm thinking here is I'm sort of split between two thoughts and feelings. On the one hand, I'm thinking like, okay, we're using a lot of words because we're trying to empathize with a lot of the people around us inside an organization who are used to verbal communication. They are comfortable with that. So we're doing them a favor we're trying to accommodate their culture, their things that they are comfortable with. At the same time, we also want to empathize with our users and bring the experience layer into this. So can we make an argument that using words and verbal communication is actually a good thing because it allows the rest of the organization who might see the creatives doing creative things now be more approachable and accessible and less scary to work with? I don't know. How do you see this? This is a huge one, isn't it? Because this is that constant tension that designers have between if you like accepting people as they are and serving them as they are but also knowing that some changes would be useful in organizations. I've been working quite a lot around organizational evolution recently or thinking about it a lot. There's a the most famous book is a book called Really Inventing Organizations by Fredrik Lalu talking about the evolution of organizations. He uses different colors from sort of red, wolf pack, criminal gang organizations through very static pyramidal feudal organizations to the current metaphor for most orgs which is the machine metaphor where all the words input, output, performance, efficiency all come from engineering and beyond that towards models that are more like family based like maybe Ben and Jerry's something like this or what he calls organic models like Patagonia and so on where you might design your own job and choose your own salary and what's interesting in these is a kind of an evolution that you see towards more freedom and towards more ambiguity and towards more flexibility in some things. That's really, really important. I often play, I do lots of improv, I use lots of improv exercises in my work and I often play activities with people I was going to say play games I might not call it that you know that's the improv language to show them different types of co-creation. If we just throw a ball around for something or tell a story together and you say what helped that work really well and they say well just letting go and just trying stuff and just not taking it too seriously you know not worrying about the rules they make that kind of co-creation flow really well and that's the opposite of what organizations usually do. They don't want to let go of the rules and that's fine if building nuclear power stations you should follow the rules they don't want to just try something they want to worry about quality all the time. So I think it's important in organizations to understand that there are two sides to this there is a side where we need to be careful be cautious be precise and sometimes words are a good way to do that not always and there are times we need to be experimental be open be be playful and be ambiguous and sometimes non-word channels are better at that so it's knowing when to use which one and to come back to your question about organizations and what they want I usually have my first like crack the champagne moment in projects you know the metaphorically pull out a big cigar and smoke it you know when I get the feeling that the client organization is starting to understand there's more than one type of problem that you can't solve everything with the same behavior yeah but that behavior that you've learned in a certain context is great in that context but a new context might need new behavior running the business changing the business they need different behaviors exploitation exploration they need different behaviors and this is part of that I think yeah so creating that recognition and understanding what is the challenge that we're facing is it an optimization or an efficiency challenge or is it a like if the solution is already known probably there are although there are existing ways you should utilize and do them better faster cheaper if this solution is yet to be discovered you need other ways to do that and I can imagine that that first creating that understanding and appreciation like and this is coming back to your example about how much do you love your kid like can we actually can we can we solve that challenge using math most likely most likely not right so we need other ways um do you do that actively like helping people to sort of see what kind of challenge they're facing yeah certainly so using theatrical methods I guess our most our most basic work form is what we call investigative rehearsal or just rehearsal or just show me you know people talk about service walkthroughs or body storming is a similar technique where we get folks to I'm cautious to use the word act but to recreate a situation here yeah so they might take a prototype and play it through by acting it out in the room or they might get some stories from their everyday life and act them out and it's one thing is really really striking um and that is that when if people look at a journey map for example yeah and they see problems there they approach those problems on a on a logical level now they they go this this is not this is not good I understand people are annoyed at this point yeah so they're talking about emotion but their their voices are cool and calm and collected yeah when they start acting these things out people like start punching their their hands or you know or slapping the desk and saying this is nuts you know getting getting genuinely angry or upset about things and that shows me that we're on to something there that we are that we are starting to get closer to to the human yeah which is not just a brain but is our is a whole organism and getting away from that intellectual logical level you know it's a spock and and bones I guess in the old Star Trek episodes you know this we have this logical self and we have this emotional self and the truth is somewhere in between them and but our organizations serve one of them much more than the other I think our role within organizations and around these challenges is to help drive decision making right we're helping to drive people forward what a general organization wants is objectivity and that's the opposite of what you've just described like the human connection like they don't want subjectivity they want to look at something and say if I exclude myself as an individual what what do the facts tell me they're looking for facts how do we deal with this situation where people are looking for facts and you're advocating for we don't want we don't want facts we want I don't know circumstantial evidence yeah well they want both I think and it's really interesting that point isn't it because we we talk about customer experience user experience employee experience the words you often hear in service design and those are utterly subjective things they are utterly subjective that's the definition of them is their subjective we have MPS scores exactly so you get things like one of the things like MPS oh goodness which come along and and try to put a a number around that and that's great because it tells you we have this common this common say viewpoint now we can all talk about it the same way and we say there's something to be done here but famously the number of the NPS doesn't tell you what's to be done doesn't tell you what's wrong yeah the listening stations and so on for that but you need to do qualitative research to figure that stuff out not just quantitative and just like we always need qualitative and quantitative research together yeah I think we also always need to make sure that we have explicit and implicit together because they both do things that the other does not do and simply there's a story that um Eric Roscombe Abbing and Damien Kernahan tell they published it so I can I can talk about it they told it to me at a conference once about working with a big telco yeah in Australia and this telco was not doing well on the customer experience front and Eric and Damien were trying to get them to do that and they tried lots and lots of types of logical persuasion with the numbers and the charts and obviously that's important that's part of the pre-work to get the decision but what actually made the decision was playing them a recording of one phone call between one user and one hotline employee which ended up with both of them in tears and it wasn't the words in that because all the information in there was already known yeah it was what was between the words it was the catches in the breath it was the sobbing it was the the empathy which comes from that which actually led this telco to say okay here's the millions go and go and do that and I think again we know at least all the psychology I've ever read I used to be a my study psychology many years ago um implies that decisions are emotional so we use this the non-emotional we use the logical the the the the quantitative and so on to just to post justify emotional decisions and that implies to our users as well so if we want to examine what our users are experiencing how they're making decisions we also need to step inside that we need to say I'm gonna be I'm gonna experience this subjectively as well as objectively and have both sides of that to which extent uh does the problem lie with us as a community as a practice and let me explain so you've written books on this topic and uh people learn from these books we share examples we share stories but most of them are verbal unwritten things so I'm I'm I'm curious about your opinion to which extent do you see that the design community actually sees the value of the unspoken word themselves so because we can of course point to our business counterparts and say it's it's them like they want words but do we as a community appreciate the value enough of focusing on the unspoken word what's your take on this I think we're pretty good compared to many places that I've been I mean you'll see for example that the portfolio is a really important thing in even in services I know I don't really grasp how that could be the way but you know because in a portfolio you can read between the lines you can you can you get impressions from that which you can't get from someone's cv their their their resume or from an interview with them you know you you see their work and people in design industry are using things like the global service jam or other hack events as recruiting events to see what it's like to work alongside somebody before they employ them and so on we do use prototyping we do use visualization so we're pretty pretty good at this then comes the interface to the to the decision makers and at that's the point where I think we might serve ourselves better to not only give them what they want which is a three word summary yeah but to help them to experience what's really going on and the story I just shared about about Derrick Damian Eric's project there was a good example of that to actually give decision makers subjective experiences of of service safaris walk-alongs you know watch the testing stuff like this I think that's useful and I think we could be doing more of that and I think we would get more attention if we did more of that precisely because it's a little bit uncomfortable so then the big question becomes either what's holding us back or reframed how can we accelerate this I think there's no one answer I think this is a design question I mean I think it was you said this first but you say it wasn't the application of design is a design challenge you know or the the the spreading persuading people to be more designally is a design challenge and so we need to understand what struggles those decision makers are facing and and support them in solving those so if we do give someone an immersive experience which persuades them and let them understand things we have to understand that they have an interface as well to their next colleague or to their their boss or whomever and they're still gonna need to feed that person the information so it might be around helping them to to craft a thing which then fits the next let's say language need beyond them what's stopping us I think I think generally we're stuck in this in this tension between wanting to serve people how they are and having a feeling that's not always the best way you know that things could be easier if if people make decisions differently if they work little differently but not usually being mandated to do that we're mandated to change this user experience and we know well if you guys approached users generally differently or if you approached how you create value differently this kind of stuff wouldn't happen but we're not being paid to change the organization we're being changed to paid to I don't know fix the check-in or something like that so that's just a tension of scoping isn't it and one of courage is reaching beyond the scope and courage is one of those subjective things like how do you grow confidence how do you grow courage step by step I guess maybe if you sort of think back about all the examples and scenarios that you've been in have you seen conditions in the environment that maybe increased the likelihood that people excerpt this behavior like are there certain things patterns that you've seen across the years I think there are I think there are industries which are more fundamentally hands-on more practical if you think about hospitality industries you know hotels restaurants and things like this tourism these industries in my experience are much better at trying stuff I mean hotel managers they walk around the hotel every day they just do that that's that's part of their job yeah not many CEOs do that in their organization yeah never mind going walk around their customer sites on a daily basis yeah it's partly accessibility but it's partly understanding I think that what we're what's going on here is a million tiny things it's not one thing and and walking through the hotel and smelling something funny in a corridor yeah because I don't know because the paint's not dry or whatever is really important and again really hard to write on a post-it okay weird smell but what kind of weird smell yeah so I think those organizations which are kind of the the get up and try thing organizations are better at this I mean theater show business show business is a very important industry people don't realize how big it is I think in in Germany which is known as industrial country I think the entertainment industry comes somewhere between chemicals and steel like in terms of actual turnover each year so it's a really big thing we're good at that you know you really see in the rehearsal room in theater people don't discuss very much of course there's lots of lots of talking but the chairs are uncomfortable you know the the coffee's bad so there's much more sort of show me show me another version show me another version and we don't even always try and verbalize what we've seen so that was that was interesting there was interesting stuff in that can you give me more of the middle yeah and then people will understand from having done it what is meant rather than it being expressed into words so those kind of industries I think are good at this other ones where people are used to very cerebral work yeah to to working with with PowerPoint and Visio and and whiteboards all the time you know those folks find it harder to imagine there are other ways to experience or express the truth maybe here it's it's really a matter of changing behavior and changing habits and doing this on an ongoing basis I have to think about my days back at the studio where my my colleague and co-founder Marcel had a poster behind us no prototype no meeting and I think it's maybe simple quotes and simple nudges like that that can help shift behavior so I'm thinking somebody's listening to this and nudging yeah yeah agreeing with everything we're saying and then they get back into the office and then like okay I'm still stuck in the same old environment and how do I change this and maybe it's it's small things like just bring a prototype to every meeting you're in regardless if that's a physical prototype or you have a mirror or my reward in your next zoo meeting just show up and show things and people will get curious about how did you do that why are you doing this why are you always bringing stuff to the meetings right maybe it's it's just these small steps in behavior in the rituals and and leading by example through small things I think you're very right and I think oh that's one of my favorite posters often quote that poster I love it so much when we're asking folks to change you know it's often been said people don't like to be changed they don't mind changing so much if they see a need to do that yeah then Paul seems to work more than push for me so it's about two things it's about making something interesting and then making it accessible so there's there's two levels to this what you're talking about bringing the prototyping along that's really good that gets a different kind of conversation people see things in the prototype but you get the boundary object effect the different people see different things in there that that they understand things about what's being it couldn't be said before they see it manifested in that prototype but then do they have the capacity and the tools to make prototypes themselves you know that that that's the next step to to enable this I mentioned the sport fashion companies down the road from us and one of them has a really interesting prototyping space which is available to anybody for work and non-work projects you can do what you like in there I think that's really really important it's not just for the designers to do cool designy stuff anybody can go down there and I don't know work on a model for their hobby or 3d print or not or something like this yeah and that's very interesting because it gives people not just the interest but also the capacity to try this kind of stuff I like theatrical tools for this because the capacity is you you know you have your you have your your your voice in your body and that's all you need to do this you stand up and you try things you act things out for other things there sometimes is a technical or at least a permission barrier between wanting to do it and being able to do it so yes small starts but the small starts have to be not just in terms of doing it but also enabling others to do it there's maybe where the pull factor comes in if you start out doing it for yourself because you see the value of going through the experience capturing it creating I don't know a prototype or making a diagram visualizing something showing it to people they if they see the value they will come to you and ask you like can you help me create came I also want to do this I also want to have a visual or diagram or live through this experience so just start by doing it for yourself probably and and share it with others and create that pull factor but people will recognize the value you don't have you don't have to sell it maybe that's the thing that I'm trying to communicate here yeah I think yes and no I mean what actually folks they experience my methods they some of them enjoy them some of them hate them that's fine you know but they come they come to me afterwards and they don't usually say how do I do this because it's usually pretty basic there's stuff that kids do all the time you play you play things through you act them out you you build a thing you know they say how do I get my colleagues to do this that that's the most common question I hear so there is a degree of maybe selling is the wrong word but a degree of communication persuasion that has to happen and this is again where we get to those sort of two sides of the coin you know the the the explicit and the implicit thing I find that when you're selling something new using the word selling carefully when you're trying to ask people to do something new it is good to ask them in old words now to use the existing paradigm of the organization to make a case for a new paradigm so for example when I work yes I have rubber chickens in my pocket but I wear a suit at work usually because that gets me taken seriously and I don't pull out the rubber chicken straight away you know I talk in let's say traditional models and languages first before I say let's try something and then shift towards a more a less verbal way of working yeah you start with the common ground and the common understanding and from there on you build upon that and yeah that makes complete sense when you say people love it or hate it like what's um what's maybe the biggest object objection that you hear or some misconceptions that people have about this way of working which is a very broad term but I don't know there's a lot of boss blaming my boss won't get this I won't understand this and then when you meet the boss you find they're fine with it you know but that that's that's a general thing in organizations is that people lower down if I can use those terms in the organization see the upper levels as being very prescriptive and very fixed in what they do when you get the chance to experience this upper levels are often very flexible and very very interested in weirdness yeah um but I think there's we're finding some things here so if I take my my particular toolset the theatrical one yeah um that is misunderstood as a a a presentation a facade of fakeness yeah that we're trying to pretend to be things that we're not and it's also often very closely related to a word which I try not to use which is role play uh which is used very badly in many training situations that people have been burned by that yeah so people have often been embarrassed using these kind of these kind of tools before yeah because they've been judged or not given time to prepare I mean the situation with role play usually is that you're in a training course and someone says this is your role this is your role now do it you get no safe space you get no warm up you get no chance to mess up and then we'd spend a couple of hours telling you how crap you are at that yeah so I know people this is not a joke who literally have in their employment contract I will not be required to do role play and that's more than one person I know as an employment contract because these tools have been used to embarrass people before so when we need to do new things with people a lot of the time investment that we have is making that safe space that makes it possible to do this after a while it just goes because it's faster it's easier people start doing it automatically but at the beginning we need to make people feel safe that's a very helpful insight here because I think what maybe people see the value but probably the thing that's keeping most people back is in an organizational environment you don't want to look silly you don't want to look stupid so obviously it's these environments are very risk averse so you're not going to experiment you're not going to try new things even though they might have value you'd rather like yeah taking the risk of being embarrassed is probably holding you back and this this applies to design in general if you think how early we show things you know we we shown sketches we show notes we show quote shitty first drafts unquote yeah we show very early prototypes and that's not common in organizations you know I work with people sometimes and we're doing like a journey map you know and it's we try to make our templates look very sketchy to really encourage scribbling but people will still prepare the journey map first in their notebook and then transfer it onto this you know template before they show it to people and you can know that the template is is your workspace it's okay to mess it up oh I don't want to make mistakes yeah and the problem is that we apply design usually to changing situations situations that have changed with a new value to be created and in those situations we have to experiment and if you are only going to do experiments which get positive results you're not really experimenting yeah you're doing what you already know so again this is one of those situational questions are we now running the business or are we changing the business and in that context embarrassment is appropriate there's that famous saying if you're not embarrassed by your prototype you showed it too late and I think that's very very true when people go to design school one of the things that they hate most of all at the beginning of the crit sessions where people come and criticize their work and say this was you know missed that here this derivative or whatever you get all kinds of feedback later on they love that because they understand how valuable it is but they have to get through that wave of embarrassment or shame even um at first my mother is a was a primary school teacher a teacher for young children she probably hate this this um this comparison but the basic model of primary education is the teacher sets a task there's one correct answer you solve it in your best handwriting yeah and that's kind of the model that most of us have taken into our work you know there's there's a right way of doing this maybe different colors of that but it's there's a right way of doing it and there are many wrong ways and I do it in my best handwriting and that's the opposite of design yeah first of design it's first of all we question the question where's this question come from teacher why not different question yeah it was behind your question I mean I'm curious and then we say there's obviously not one answer there could be a hundred answers how about I give you 10 15 sketchy ones and you see which ones you like and we develop that you know that is that's design it seems ridiculous again there are a lot of loops and and uh cycling back to other parts of our conversation here first recognizing the type of challenge that you're dealing with and also understanding if the people around you recognize the the same thing um because if they they see that there is a single truth and we just need to optimize the existing situation it will be very hard for you to create a safe space for experiments when everybody's focused on there is a single truth uh truth uh you have to be the expert come up with the the right answer um that's not an environment where design in general is going to flourish right it's really hard and this is why yeah organizations often have found some success in in separating out a kind of experimental function this is a skunk works model you know where you you put some weirdos in a building at the end of the campus and get them blow things up you know that is interesting and with the breadth of the things that we're looking at in service design we're not just just doing technical innovation we're doing things that affect all the employees effect you know millions of customers and so on that doesn't work so well because it's it's so it's so much of a mutual responsibility across the organization that rather than having a special place where we experiment it seems to me to be more useful to have a kind of a flip flop head yeah where you say i'm in experimental mode now now i'm in in optimization mode yeah i'm i'm exploring i'm exploiting whatever other metaphors that you use and encourage people to to see this is that kind of context and now it's changing back towards that kind of context and this makes a lot of sense because the challenges that organizations are dealing with aren't as static as they maybe used to be we every every challenge an organization faces almost always has some unknown to it right and there is it's not just a matter of exploitation there is always something new something like whether it's the needs and desires of your customers that are always evolving maybe it's new technology so having a very rigid and linear mindset towards problem solving it's like you're probably that that's not going to get you to the results that you're looking for i think that's very very true and this is what people like la lune so and talk about in this kind of writing about the evolution of organizations is that that dominant model of organizations as machines with input output efficiency and performance all these words yeah that is a an industrialization model yeah that's come from the age of the factory yeah and that age is still very much around we still use manufactured technology all the time and so on and other things but in an information economy and a knowledge economy and a change economy and so on that's not the only way to do things and if you look at even go back to the 1920s and look at shumpeter and it's 20s or 30s i forget the the cycles of of change yeah of of of um inventions yeah and how how they how they degrade uh over time that seems to be accelerating so it does seem things are changing the 21st century seems to be a faster moving century than the 20th century was in the 19th century before that so i think speed and the the the importance of change is really a big part of that because these behaviors that feel risky because they are ambiguous because they they look between the lines they feel risky no it's risky not to do this it's risky to believe that you understand the problem and that you can solve it with your own tools that's risky in a changing world in a static world it's great in a changing world doing the same thing you did last year is dangerous and then we need to follow up with another episode where we dive into organizational design and how we create incentives for people to actually uh excerpt this behavior but that's that's for another episode adam i want to close off our conversation here with maybe a call to action so if you could master the service design show community to do something after hearing the story what would your call to action be for them i would suggest that you take a situation that you face at work regularly yeah one between maybe between colleagues yeah we have to persuade somebody or explain something to somebody and try to find a way to do it which uses fewer words so maybe you move towards visualization maybe you go for a walk and experience the thing together maybe you build a thing together there will still be words in there i'm not i'm not suggesting that we will become muscle muscle yeah but i'm saying can you enrich that verbal channel with other channels and see where that takes you want to practice that check out the global service channel i second and recommend that as well well that brings us to the end of this conversation adam thanks for coming on again and having this exploratory conversation with me we talked a lot about not using words so that's quite interesting i hope we were able to paint a picture it was challenging it was challenging you i felt us groping at times because we're trying to talk about not talking and that's interesting in itself that is that is for sure i hope we we managed somehow any who thanks again for sharing your wisdom and having a peek inside what's going on and keeping you busy at these days thank you very much what's your biggest takeaway from our conversation with adam today leave a comment down below and let's learn from each other i hope that adam stories encourage you to embrace a designer way of working even more you have a lot to offer even though it might take some time for others to see and recognize that but don't let that stop you or doubt the value that you bring if you enjoyed this conversation please do me a quick favor and click the like button on this video this lets me know whether or not we're on the right track by addressing topics like this my name is mark von dyne and i want to thank you for spending a small part of your day with me please keep making a positive impact i'll look forward to see you very soon in the next video