 In this episode, we'll be talking about what it takes to design highly impactful design teams, we'll talk about how leadership has to evolve to support these design teams and we'll talk about why we've been thinking about employee experience in a completely wrong way all the time. Here's the guests for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I am Bernardo and this is the Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to design and deliver services that have a positive impact on people and are good for business. My guest in this episode is the founder of a strategic design studio called Earn Common and he's the co-founder of a Mascall company. His name is Bernardo Torres. In this episode, Bernardo and I will be addressing a really interesting theme and that is how to design highly impactful design teams because as more and more design teams are built in-house within large organizations, the question becomes how do you structure these design teams? How do you not take the soul away and still keep that, but sort of create new standards and structures and processes that allow these teams to be more impactful, not only in vision, but also to be more impactful and do their work faster and better. So the question is that we'll be addressing in this episode. How do you design highly impactful design teams? If this is your first time here on this channel, don't forget that we bring new videos every week. So if you want to level up your service design skills, click that subscribe button and that bell icon so you'll be notified when new videos are out. And I also have a free training on how to explain service design in plain English. The link is down below in the show notes. So if that's what you're looking for, check the show notes down below. That's all for the introduction and now let's quickly jump into the interview with Bernardo. Welcome to the show, Bernardo. Hi, thanks for having me. Really awesome to have you on the show all the way from Madrid today, right? Yes, I'm in Madrid right now. Although I live in Mexico City by the way. Exactly, so that was my first question for the people who don't know who Bernardo is. Give us a really short introduction about yourself. Well, I am the founder and director of Uncommon Design Strategy, a boutique design strategy firm that was originally founded in Mexico City. And that operates in Madrid, Buenos Aires, and starting 2019 Bogotá too. Alright, you also told me something interesting about side project that you do, right? Yes, I am a partner at the Mezcal company which has nothing to do with design strategy for now. And it's really interesting to be living like in the world of innovation, technology and stuff. And on the other side be in the world of the soil, the plants, the families, the traditions, you know. So where everyone is making craft beer, you just went into Tequila and Mezcal. I also had my craft beer face. It was like seven years ago. Bernardo, do you remember the very first time you heard about service design? Yes, it actually kind of completely shifted my career actually. What happened? When was that? I was working for this big Spanish insurance company. I was in charge of developing like the new business model regarding direct sales, everything I had to do with e-commerce and digital presence and stuff. And I don't know, this was maybe 2009 and I got into service design in the understanding that it would be like the best approach in terms of developing this new project. And I kind of got like really into it and eventually I studied a master's degree around it and eventually I resigned from the insurance company and started my own. And do you remember who gave you the first hint about service design? Who got you fired eventually? I don't remember the exact person. Well, at that time this insurance company that I was working for was developing a spin-off in Spain. That was being developed through design methodologies. And there was this big service design innovation firm behind the work. But I don't remember if there was a person in particular or I was just involved in the project conceptually and I got excited. I can't remember a couple of names, maybe the digital director of this insurance company, Jose Luis and a good friend of mine that works in a pharmaceutical company, Rogelio. They were like the first that I talked about design, service design like maybe nine, ten years ago. And the rest is history. Yes. Bernardo, you had some really interesting topics to talk about in preparation. So I gave you a few question starters. Those are in Madrid right now. I have your topics here. Are you ready to start? Are you ready to do some interview jazz? Yes. All right. I'm going to pick your first topic. No, I'm going to pick your second topic. We're doing interview jazz. So all right. The first topic for this episode is design ops. What is your question starter? Why? That's an easy one. No, that's an easy one, but I think it's like the most interesting one. Tell us. You know, I come from a big company that it's like that was completely all around processes and operations and performance and stuff. And then I eventually got into the completely other side, which is like design and creativity and the sensitivity of the designers. So I think that design ops are like super important, but at the same time, and I don't want to like hurt anyone's feelings here, but I think design ops is just a sexy name for process oriented work. You know, I think it's super important. I think technology and developers have been doing it for years. And I just think that designers needed to find a way to work more efficiently. And it's cool. So what is design ops for you? What does the term behold? I'm probably going to just reduce it into terms of how I see it for now. It might be broader than that. I'm interested in your perspective. Like design ops is this understanding on how to systematize. I don't know if that's the correct word teams in order to make design more efficient and to make design more goal oriented and to make design teams more collaborative. And I think one of the most important things around like process oriented work is to have standards and to be able to measure standards on the way teams and people develop their work. You know, and I think that's something that has always been difficult for designers and design ops is trying to understand how to, I don't know, like make a bridge in between how big corporations are understanding and are capitalizing design. And this seems like a really interesting topic for large companies. But do you also, are you applying this way of thinking in your own business? Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. How? That's why I think it's, the thing is that when we started the company nearly five years ago, like we had this hippie heart around the work we were going to do, you know. Like, okay, for every challenge, we're going to, I don't know, create a small team to our three designers. And then a couple of mentors are going to work around this team and eventually we're going to help organizations transform and impact the world. And that's still something that we want to achieve. The thing is that we found ourselves, depending a lot on what different designers and different teams understood around the work they had to do. You know, so we've been developing our own operation model, you know, our own, our own process oriented design approach that it's important in terms not just only of the end result, but particularly important in terms of what are the standards and the expectations of the designers working through this project, you know. We eventually got to a point where we needed operations in terms of... Why did you need operations? Because it was inefficient? It's not only about inefficiency, because I think sometimes design needs to be inefficient in terms of creating something. But I think especially it was important in terms of people. People needed to, designers needed to know what was expected of them, what were more or less the time, the methods, the moments, the standards they needed to achieve in terms of the work that they were doing. And not everyone can be like this Eureka designer that eventually developed something. Most of us need standards and need a process and need something and someone to more or less guide us around the work that we're doing, you know. And this is particularly relevant in terms of design strategy because it kind of sounds like we're going the other way, but it's not. We have to understand what's a super flexible process, but at the same time a process that sets standards, you know. So what is the place, industry or sector that we can sort of get inspiration from regarding operationalizing, structuring, standardizing design? Where do you look for inspiration on this topic? I guess like the immediate references that come to mind are the like native digital startups from Silicon Valley, especially those that eventually scaled up a lot of that started out as hybrid teams of designers and developers, you know. So most of the small design companies, particularly the ones that focus on digital products, they just kind of work chaotically around how to develop and how to design. And growth eventually needed processes and operations. So I would say that I would look at companies maybe like Spotify, Airbnb. These companies that are actually also like posting their processes and their philosophy behind how designer and technologist should work in terms of being more efficient and not efficient in terms of money and time, but efficient in terms of impact. Yeah, exactly. It's about being more impactful. I totally agree. This is a topic that hasn't been on the show a lot. And I think it's super interesting. So I hope more guests will touch upon this. We're in the meantime moving on to a second topic that sort of relates to this one. And it's the topic of design and leadership. Once again, the question. Do you have a question starter? Don't cheat. Don't cheat. I'm cheating actually. That's really close to my heart right now. I'm supposed to develop a question right now, right? Yes. Pick one. How can we? The question that has been running in my mind quite oftenly. How can we? Design or redesign leadership on terms of. New talent, you know. And the only way to talk about this is from my own personal experience. I come from a very traditional background in terms of the companies that I was working at. And eventually I developed my own company and I found myself having certain behaviors that. And I challenged when I was with those kind of leaders, you know. So I think leadership particularly has to be redesigned on terms of how organizations are being redesigned, you know. We're actually jumping on the way that people get together in terms of a purpose. Into new paradigms and new values that we cannot understand yet, you know. We're like jumping from the organizations focused only on growth, on money, on exponential everything, on technology. And that needs a certain type of leadership. It's a leadership that I would like to say. It's not that I like, but I might say like more maybe paternalists, more ambitious, you know. And that kind of leadership, it's linked to a particular set of values, you know. And right now we are emerging into a new kind of organization, organizations that are understanding how this impact that we were talking about before. It's relevant not only to the growth of the company, but for the well-being of a society or a country or the world now that we're in this type of big world challenges. And I think that leadership has to completely be reimagined. For starters, most of the people that manage teams tend to have strong egos, you know. And I myself, I am in that group of people and it's super tough to understand that you have to break your own values and that you have to reimagine yourself and to reimagine what really ego means in terms of developing people that trust that the work that you're doing is going to be linked to their set of values. So leadership on terms of design and redesign in leadership, I think it has to be in terms of understanding the real and emerging values of people and understanding where you see gaps and as a leader being able to develop disabilities that you still find missing in terms of eventually creating organizations that can be self-managed, that can be totally horizontal, that can be impactful, you know. I think I maybe got all over the place in the topic, but I'm going to try to synthesize. I think redesign in leadership means that most of the people that are in charge of teams have to start by out-of-evaluating and redesigning themselves and the way they see the world and that they have to become more mentors and researchers of what the talent needs and is missing in terms to help them become the people that will develop the new set of values for new companies. I already feel that this is a topic that is super dear to your heart and you already said, I can only refer to my personal experience. You're leading a studio, you're leading teams, how has your perspective or maybe your style of leadership changed in the last five years? And how is it changing? How do you hope that it will change in the next five years? Wow, I don't know. Your personal style. I'm a super-energic person, so energetic. So I have a lot of energy and that can be represented in the way I talk, in the way I move, in how I manage the room, you know. And not everyone can get involved with this kind of energy in terms of work. When I used to work closely with, I don't know, the first team I had in common when we were five or six people, it was, I'm going to say, easy. Because I had the time to get involved with everyone in terms of understanding the gaps that they had in terms of ability of what we as a group wanted to achieve. But eventually we got to 15. And then it wasn't easy for me to get involved with everyone. And then eventually we got to nearly 30. And it's completely, it's almost impossible for me to get involved with 30 people every day. What I missed is that I had to develop other leaders. So eventually it was like the company was a big army with no direction, you know, like going everywhere. And we're actually working on developing new leaders and on setting these standards and these processes in terms of how people interact with each other, how people interact with managers and leaders. And I guess what I would like to see of myself in the future is being more of a mentor in terms of how to drive people to become better leaders instead of telling people what to do. And it's a two-way street. How is it a two-way street? I think that also people that are starting to work in this type of companies have to understand the responsibility, the accountability in terms of what is expected of them in a company with no direct guidelines or bosses or people telling you what to do. So it's rough because most of the people in my experience for now need others to tell them what to do. So we have to change in these both ways. People have to change in terms of, okay, now you're here, you know what the purpose is. If you don't know, ask and get yourself involved and then go make some questions and look for answers. But now people kind of expect for you to tell them exactly what to do in every step. So is leadership becoming more distributed? I don't know if that's the right word, but of course it's changing. But is it also becoming more distributed? Totally. That's the thing. I've been reading around this book from Ferdig La Lou that is called Re-eventing Organizations. And he actually at the beginning of the book he talks about the evolution of consciousness of people. And the step that people, the Homo sapiens is getting into the evolution of the consciousness has to do with distributed everything. And I think it's quite cool. But at the same time, I think that we have triggers in our lives that kind of shift our consciousness. If you're on a situation of being, I don't know, a violent situation, let's say a car is like almost going to hit you. You react in terms of different levels of consciousness. You get much more aggressive. So it's not that we're eventually going to evolve and everything is going to be like flowers and rainbows. Yeah, exactly. But I think, particularly in organizations, small or big, there has to be a great set of tools, norms on how people should interact. And this is going to help distribute leadership, distribute work and make everything more horizontal. It's not just about making your hierarchy instead of ten levels, just three. It's in terms of how you distribute how people make choices. Yeah, exactly. And this ties in, I think, to your third and final topic really well. Because, I don't know if you remember, of course you do. Your third and final topic is about employee experience and you know the drill. That's the jazz. Give me a question starter. Okay. How can we push or incentivize employee experience? I'm actually in Madrid because last week I made a small course around employee experience. I would say maybe a kind of new topic, but at the same time for service designers, it's not new because we've been executing more or less the same mindset and the same process in terms of how we interact, how companies interact with their customers. And this is the mindset that employee experience needs to get from the line of duty inside. The thing is that you're not going to particularly look for product or for channels to interact or the emotions of the customer. You're going to have to understand what are the stages around how a person gets involved in the work. And most companies like modern companies are measuring employee satisfaction in terms of something that it's called engagement. An engagement mostly means if you're satisfied and happy at work. But this actually means that you have to divide yourself in what is your work and what is your life. And I think that's something that I've been discovering lately is that there's not really a division around that. We are the people we are when we're at work and when we're not at work. And we take our work to our house at least in our minds and we take our personal self to work. So employee experience, what supposed to be focused on is understanding employees as persons, as humans. Instead of employees. Exactly. Instead of this transactional understanding, making it a little bit extreme, like, hello Mark, welcome to your new job. Here's your hammer, here are the nails and I need you to, you know, that's the super utility oriented work. And now most of the work that we do, it's creative, not only for designers, for everyone. Everyone is imagining new ways of doing stuff, everything that cannot be done through creativity and imagination and supposed to be automated in a really short term, you know. And it really explains what it's focused on is understanding how to evolve from this transactional interaction or from this utility-driven interaction into something that drives people to take their whole selves to work. So what does this mean for organizations that are interested in providing a better employee experience? Or should we let the term employee experience go? I don't think that we have to let it go. It's like if we said that we should let the service design concept go because every organization should design every interaction. It's already serviced. But I think that companies should be much more sensitive to what people are looking behind the job and why is it that people are getting involved with an organization, not just in terms of money or in terms of a career but in terms of the impact they're looking for, their values. And this is something that it's going to continue to grow. We're living in this world where there are different generations more or less serving the workplace but eventually the new generations are starting to get much more involved in the impact positive or negative that organizations are driving. And this is going to be a serious characteristic of the type of job that you are going to be willing to do in the future, you know. And is this sort of related to, this is the thing that comes to my mind, obviously the why of a company, is it like? Yeah, totally. The purpose. Why are we on earth, yeah. The thing is that we even did that why thing in on common and we eventually understood that the why thing that we did was like kind of impossible, you know. So I guess the why might be this north that we set our minds to. But in terms of employees, the concept that I like is like the employer vision. How is this purpose translated into the actions that an organization makes in terms of making the people that interact with them, their employees, the best version of themselves, you know. Sounds complicated. What do you can you explain? Like, for example, let's say that you as an organization want to make a positive impact in the world in terms of, let's say, reducing your carbon emissions as an organization. We want to be the cleanest company in the world and to make the world the cleanest place on the galaxy. I'm just fiction here. So what is it that you need in terms of doing that? You need people that get engaged with that. And how is it that you can make people get engaged with that you have to develop that kind of sensitivity. So your employer vision must be we're going to develop employees with the cleanest minds in the world, like with or with the cleanest sensitivity. And this is important because if you are inviting someone to join your company and your purpose is to be the cleanest organization in the world and to make the world the cleanest place. And this person outside is like throwing garbage into the streets. You know, you as an organization have to be congruent in terms of how you can change that person or maybe how that person doesn't really fit your purpose. So your employer vision has to be a much more actionable way of pushing your employees to serve the same purpose as the organization is trying to serve. That's really interesting because that actionable part is really the hard part. It's sort of it's not easy, I would say, but it's it is easy to formulate a vision or go or why, you know, and then operationalizing it and making it actionable. That's that's really the challenging part, I think, in a lot of cases. Yeah. Totally. But if we cross this with like, for example, let's say design ops, like the more traditional. The more traditional process oriented work has this really big component in terms of how you measure people and you measure people in terms of a set of values or abilities. And once a value or an ability is integrated into a person, you stop measuring it. And then you go for another one, you know, that let's say people need to be like 100% assertive with the way they communicate. You have to measure that at first because you want to develop that ability. But once you have evidence that this ability is completely integrated in everyone in your team, you stop measuring that and you go for something else. This is why it's something that is going to be evolving and emerging consistently. Bernardo, super interesting, but we're running out of time in this episode. So there's one final thing I want to ask you and I think you didn't prepare this one. So this is really jazz. And that is, is there a question you have for us, the viewers and the listeners of the service design show? Is there anything on your mind that you would like to ask us where we can think about comment on? What would I ask like the community? Yeah. What would you like to ask us? Okay. How can we service designers, strategic designers create more impact or deliver more impact? All right. Is it just more experience? Is it more academic background? Is it more critical thinking? And if it is critical thinking, how can we develop more critical thinking around the world? I'm going to reframe or reformulate that question because I think it's really interesting again. I would sort of like to reformulate your question to what is preventing you right now from making more impact or reaching your full potential as a service designer? How's that? Wow, that's a tough one. Well, we don't have to answer that. We'll leave it up to the community to answer that. Bernardo, it has become dark in Madrid. It's already dark in Utrecht for a while. It was really fun to have you on. I really appreciate that you took the time. Thank you so much. It's super nice to make the connection. And here, what's on your mind? Because I think these topics are really the future of service design. So thanks again for sharing, Bernardo. Thank you. This is mezcal, by the way. This is why I was talking so much. Thanks again, man. So getting back to Bernardo's question. What's the thing that's holding you back from being more impactful as a service designer? Leave a comment down below and join the conversation. And if you enjoyed this episode, I'd really appreciate it if you grab the link and share it with someone who might benefit from it as well. And don't forget that you can also sign up for my free course on how to explain service design in plain English. The link is over here. Thanks again for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.