 How can you increase the chance that your work gets adopted by business? You need to facilitate the right conversations. As you'll learn in this episode, as a service designer, you're in a unique position to do that. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Jim Colback. This is the Service Design Show, Episode 121. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design, what other things you don't learn in service design school, but do make a huge difference between success and failure, all to help you design services that have a positive impact on people and business. The guest in this episode is Jim Colback. Jim wrote several books, including the successful mapping experiences and jobs to be done playbook. He's also currently the chief evangelist at Mural. In this episode, we're going to talk about the fact that service design, of course, never happens in isolation. So it's not enough to just be very good at the tools and methods. You'll also need to guide the people you're working with through the process. You need to help them to co-create value. One very effective way to do that is by facilitating the right conversations, conversations that help people in the organization to make better and smarter decisions. Jim is going to share some of his best practices on how to do that and also some pitfalls to avoid. If you want to grow as a service design professional and learn what it takes to make service design work, make sure to subscribe to the channel because we bring a new video at least once a week that will help to level up your skills. So for now, sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Jim Kalbach. Welcome to the show, Jim. Hey, Marc, thanks for having me. Awesome to have you on. Looking forward to the conversation. A lot of people will know your name, will have maybe read some of your books, maybe have seen your LinkedIn profile. But for the people who haven't done that yet, can you give a brief intro about who is Jim? Yeah, sure. Jim Kalbach, I'm the chief evangelist at Mural, one of the leading online whiteboards. I've been with the company for six years and prior to that, I have a background in design, design strategy in various companies and settings. And through that work, I have three books that I've authored. First, Designing Web Navigation in 2007, that kind of reflects my background in information architecture. Then looking into more strategic aspects of design mapping experiences came out in 2016, which I have a second edition out right now too, Marc. And then also in 2020, The Jobs to be Done Playbook came out. So I'm an author as well. Yeah, and the second edition of Mapping Experiences is that the latest book or is the jobs to be done the latest one? Now, that's a good question. In terms of publisher release dates, Mapping Experiences is more current than the Jobs to be Done Playbook, but I actually updated the text before I finished the Jobs to be Done one, so they kind of overlapped that one. I was doing a lot of writing, let's put it that way, in 2019 and 20. I can imagine last year was a good year for writing as well, a lot of spare time. We have a rapid fire question round with five questions that you haven't prepared for and I need to pick them up over here. The goal is to answer these questions as quickly as you can, don't overthink them. So you haven't prepared for this, which is always fun. Question number one is, what's always in your fridge? What's beer? Beer, yeah. Which book are you reading right now? I'm reading a book called The Statue in Stone. It's about jobs to be done philosophy. Oh wow, okay. What superpower would you like to have? Flying. Again, what did you want to become when you were a kid? When I was a kid, a scientist. I was like a researcher in a lab. And final question, what is your first memory of service design? My first memory of service design, that's a really good question. It might have been like Arna van Noster room. I think he gave a talk somewhere that I saw, 10 or 15 years ago, something like that. Yeah, Arna has been on the show, I think episode three or four or something like that, in the wayback machine. Yeah, good. It might have been a service blueprint too. I think I came across the Mary Jo Bittner service blueprint also a while back too. Good to know that Arna was influencing and spreading the community as early as that. So Jim, we're going to talk about things that make design work in organizations. And we're going to sort of try to unravel why, even though you might have good design, whatever that is, it's still not getting absorbed, adopted by the rest of the organization, right? That's sort of the red thread throughout the next 45 minutes. Yeah? Obviously design skills matter, right? You got to know your craft, right? And all the work that Arna and you do to forward the craft, right? Better service blueprints, better service design, just better design in general, that all matters. So we don't want to say that doesn't matter, but there's other parts of the equation to get to something that's delivered, particularly in a commercial context, to actually get that design delivered, right? And I think that's what we want to focus on. I think there's a lot of, has been written about the craft of service design. And now we want to sort of see what, maybe what are the things that enable the craft and let us maximize their, I don't know, the things we get out of the craft. I'm really curious, maybe this is a sidestep, but after writing mapping experiences, what happened next? Because that was in 2016, you came out with an updated version, like what happened in between? Yeah, it's a good question. So mapping experiences came out in 2016, but I had been engaging in that topic in general. I'd been doing a lot of mapping in my own work almost a decade before that and started writing probably about 2014. And the questions that I was getting, if I gave a talk or I used to give a workshop on that, I still do give a workshop on that topic. And the questions that I were getting were things like, what is a customer journey map? What is the difference between a customer journey map and a service blueprint? And how do I create one? 2014-ish, let's say, 2015. Since then, everybody knows what a customer journey map is. And I often do, when I give a talk or a workshop, I ask how many people know what a customer journey map is and everybody raises their hand. And now I'm asking, how many people have worked with customer journey map? If I go to a design conference, it's like almost everybody. So the other side of that too is our stakeholders are asking for things like, I'm just using customer journey map as an example here, but our stakeholders are asking for that by name. Even if you're in an agency, your phone might ring and they say, I want a customer journey map. So that's a good thing. So it's not about what is or how do I create this thing anymore from both our community and from our stakeholders. I think the big question that I've been seeing in the past five years and six years emerge is, how do I make that actionable? And I've gotten people to tell me, yeah, I created a customer journey map. I showed it to my stakeholder and they didn't get it. Nothing happened. There was no impact. They didn't do anything. And my question is, well, how did you facilitate the conversation around it? How did you, together with your team and your stakeholders, how did you make sense of the potential opportunities that the journey map can reveal? And they're like, oh, I didn't. I just sent it as an email. I said, well, okay, that's not enough. You got to facilitate the conversation as well. And that's what I really liked when we were preparing this conversation, sort of the topic of facilitating the right conversations. I think not just conversations, the right conversations and understanding what that is and the importance of that. Yeah, that's what we can try to unravel. You mentioned something in our preparation about design always being a team effort, always playing a part in a bigger context. What's the deal with that? And how does that link to what we just said? Yeah, I mean, I think it's the nature of the discipline, right? It tends to be very public, very visible. Other people in the organization can see it and if they have two eyeballs, they have an opinion about it as well too. Just a contrast with, let's say, coding or development, right? Nobody's looking at a developer's code and saying it looks good or not. Okay, it has to work, right? So if there's a bug in there, it'll come back to you. But as you're developing, nobody's looking at it with their opinion, right? So it's just the nature of the work. I'm not saying it's better or worse, but our work, we have to kind of wear our work on our sleeves, so to speak, and everybody can see it. And I think because of that, as designers, we need to embrace that and make design participatory throughout the whole journey because what you don't wanna do as a designer is get a mission, get a brief upfront. And then a month later, have the big reveal. And I used to do that. And I know as a designer, you like the big reveal. I'm gonna go away and do some research and here's my service blueprint, right? Boom, in here. And then the stakeholders go, yeah, but I don't know where that came from and they start questioning your method and your data and the validity of it and all this kind of stuff. So it's really about engaging people the whole way too. And what if we don't do that? Or what if we don't do that well enough or enough in general? Yeah, well, I mean, you can have successful projects that have an impact. I think the risk of your project becoming derailed increases and derailed by the other people around you because regardless of how high ranking you are as a designer or you're in your organization, there are other concerns. There are commercial concerns, there are business concerns, right? And then there are feasibility and technical concerns as well too. And you have to harmonize all those things. And it's rare that a designer is also the business decider and the technical decider all wrapped into one, right? So just by default, to get something out the door, there has to be a negotiation of those different perspectives in any organization. And I think that's an opportunity for designers to lead that negotiation, right? Yeah, yeah. And if we fail to do that or neglect to do that, the important decisions are being made without taking the design aspects into account, the human aspects into account. The decisions are being driven by financials and by engineering, basically. Exactly. I mean, design happens whether it's intentional by a designer or not because the thing that goes out the door is design. Is that what you wanted is the question? Is that the best for the customer and the user? That's the question, right? We just mentioned things happened between 2014 and 2021. People are asking different questions. Now, how did we get to this point where we need to have a conversation about facilitating the right conversation? Why hasn't that sort of evolved along the way over the years? Why are we here? Well, I mean, yeah, that's a good point. To some degree it has. And I don't want to say designers aren't facilitators or designers aren't facilitating. I think it needs to be anchored as part of our discipline more and almost be formalized. Like you go to design school, you learn the craft. You also have to learn how to facilitate stakeholder conversation. And sometimes they're really tough. I don't know if you've ever been in a room, if you're in software development, you've been in a room full of engineers, that can be tough. Or in front of a bunch of business deciders, that those can be tough conversations and skills that you don't necessarily learn at design school. So, I don't want to say that we haven't been doing that. I think we have to do more of it and it has to become part of the mindset, right? And I think, at least from what I'm seeing, I'm seeing books and articles and shows like this that are talking about this topic. So I think we're addressing it. For me, it's just kind of the next frontier, I believe. Yeah, maybe it's moving up the maturity ladder and then the next level requires new skills, different awareness. Exactly, exactly. And I'm also curious like, sometimes the question comes up to me, like, why the design community? Why isn't the tech industry dealing with the same questions? Are they already in the, is it because we're not in the positions where we have enough influence over decision-making? Are we sort of playing catch-up and need to fix that? Or is there something else going on? No, I think that's part of it, yes. And as designers, we've been pounding our fist on the desk saying, we want to seat at the table for a long time. And I think rightfully so, right? And then you look at books like Maria Judices, The Rise of the Chief Design Officer, or is it design? I forget the abbreviation that she used, but yeah, getting design into leadership positions. And I think that's an awareness of industry and general businesses in general, of the importance of design, that the position that we're in, I think is a symptom of design just being, and you've heard this before too, aesthetics are just the last thing that you do to get it out the door, it's the polish and things like that. Rather than viewing design as a core to what the offer is that you're designing pricing, designing brand, designing the thing, I mean, you can use design in a much broader context. And I think the businesses and the companies that we work for are becoming more and more aware of that as well too. But it's slow, right? Because the mindset has been more around operational efficiency and maximizing profits and things like that. Now I gotta understand how design fits in my equation. So I think we're kind of getting there, but one of the pieces that's missing, and I don't wanna make this sound too pedantic or kind of- Please do. Flat. This is your opportunity. It's the ROI, right? It's the ROI. And if we compare to our friends over in the marketing department, right? Marketing has been really good about showing their value, right? Marketers can say, if you put $1 into my campaign, I'm gonna give you $2 out the other side, right? It's not so easy with design. And yeah, there's lots of studies. I have some here on my computer desktop, right? The Deloitte one that came out last year, and there's all these studies about the ROI of design, they're there, but they're not anchored in the business and the commercial mindset yet. I think we're getting there though. So that's good news. And it's a great time to be in design because of that, right? Yeah, yeah. I just posted a post on LinkedIn. I've been posting a lot around the ROI, these discussion on design. I think we have a lot of education to do and that's sort of the, I don't know, the heritage or where we're coming from, like that's part of the job and that will be for still a very long time. I've been in a service design field for 15 years and they hasn't gone by where I hadn't had to educate people about what it is and the value it brings. So this isn't coming from nowhere for you. I'm sure that you've been in situations where you experienced the lack of facilitation of the right conversation. How did it start for you? When did you, can you give an example, a story? Like when was it missing? Yeah, sure. And it also has to do with my introduction into mapping in general, whether it's customer journey map or service blueprint. I was looking at a range of techniques. This is about, let's say it was 2021, maybe closer to 15 years ago when I was working for a company called Lexus Nexus and they produce solutions for legal professionals, usually around finding information and things like that. But we were talking a lot about workflow back then. We wanna fit into our customer's workflow. And I started to pick up on this idea of workflow mapping. If we wanna fit into our customer's workflow, then we have to not only understand how they come to our product, like how do they find us and buy us and use usability of our products, but how do we fit into their workflow? So I started to kind of zoom out a little bit and look at what workflow meant and mapping was an obvious way to analyze that, right? Oh, they're not just in front of our product all day. They're doing all these other things and they have all kinds of other products around them and trying to kind of piece that together. And guess what? Visualizing it as a diagram was the key way to do that. And this was working with some colleagues and they said, well, you can't just make a nice diagram and not have a conversation around it because that's called wallpaper. And I didn't wanna make wallpaper. You know what I mean? I didn't wanna make pretty pictures that you just hung up on the wall and everybody's like, oh, looks pretty. So I started doing these workshops. At the time I was living in Germany, I was living in Europe and going to the French business unit in the UK, things like that, I even went to Australia so that I started to become known for these workshops that I were doing, not the maps, it was the workshops. It was like, oh, we wanna do a workshop with Jim, a workflow workshop with Jim and that kind of thing. And that really kind of opened my eyes into how you can get those aha moments, right? How you can go from research, okay, here, I did all this research and I put it into a diagram but then you get this, ah, oh, I see. It's not just about us, right? And that kind of outside in view, right? And we're not the center of the universe we view. And you could see it, I could see it on my stakeholder's faces and that's kind of where it's, I didn't recognize it explicitly but I started to realize, oh, it's the conversation. It's not the map, it's the conversation on top of the map that's important. And that's interesting because in our work we do a lot of, probably a lot of workshops, a lot of sessions. Today we do everything remote through tools like Mural, for instance. People might start to question, like what is really our work? Is it, are we facilitators? Are we just facilitators or are we service designers or is there even a distinction? So like what's your take on that? I think you have to have multiple hats and yeah, you have to know the craft of service design and you wear that hat, right? And you do your research and creative service blueprint and all the other great things that we do. But I do think, and again, this is because of the nature of the discipline because it's so open and public and everybody can have opinion on our work. I think you have to open that up and we do have to be facilitators. So you take your hat off of the craft of service design and you put a facilitator hat on and I believe that's part of service design as well too. I would even go further because you can look at some of those workshops that I talked about and say, yeah, but what was the impact? Did it stick? Was there follow through? Did you actually launch something based on that? So I've been trying to extend that conversation as well too and think about what is the commitment from the organization to the insight that we brought to them and are we responsible for that? I think, yeah, actually, we are too. Do you have the time and the research to actually follow through on the concepts that you came up in that workshop? And that's, I think that's a really important thing to note here because if you're just a facilitator, your job ends when sort of the workshop has ended and you've sent the summary to the client or the stakeholders. Your job as a service designer workshop is always a means to an end. Like we're doing something that's bigger. We're trying to improve the lives of people. We're trying to make organizations more profitable. That's, and we need conversations for that, right? That's, I think that's a key distinction here. Yeah, yeah. If we zoom in into your workshop experience, what was, if you look back on it, what were the things in those workshops that sort of worked? What made them so effective and so powerful that people kept asking you back to do them across the globe? Yeah, there's several factors. I think for me, it started with the diagrams and the visualizations. And obviously I write about this in the book that those are compelling artifacts, right? You could go out and do a ton of research. You could interview 20, 30 people. You could do a month worth of research and summarizing it in a very compact diagram becomes compelling then, right? I could also write a 20 page report and send that off and say, hey, read my report. People don't read the report. But if you have that compelling artifact that gives an overview, it draws people in. And it draws people in in a way that multiple people can have a conversation at the same time as well too. So it's not assault. You're not absorbing that insight on your own. You can do it as a team. So setting up the workshop so that the centerpiece, that the center of gravity is the diagram. And that's what we use to hang all the conversations off of. But do that together as a team, right? So the visualization I think is a key part to have that catalyst. But also having a multidisciplinary team. And I can't tell you, Mark, how many times I would do these workshops that I was referring to and even to this day for that matter, where it was the first time that two people on the same team were in the room together. Like the marketing team and the engineering team. It'd be like, let's do introductions. It's like, oh, I've never met the head of engineering before, and then marketing person, right? So then, and this is also an opportunity for design as well too. Because as a designer, I was now bringing perspectives across the organization together as well too with the diagram being that catalyst for that conversation. And then I think the last thing is just being able to have a different mindset and perspective on things, right? Because the marketing person is looking at things in terms of distribution. And the business person is looking at things in terms of optimizing margins. And the technical person is looking at things in terms of feasibility. And you put all that away and say, for the next two, four hours, whatever, we're gonna think about what the customer is experiencing. And you rip all that other stuff off. And because the, and the workshop is structured and the diagram moves from left to right, they have to engage with it, right? And it's that empathy building type of exercise that I think is really important. And it's also foundational as well too. Because people would say, yeah, but Jim, we wanna launch something, we wanna do a workshop and launch something. And I'm like, that's not, it's not about that. It's about what happened six months later or a year later, that person in that workshop has a different understanding of the user. So it's not an input-output equation. It's foundational for the organization to practice a muscle of customer centricity. That's a lot, yeah. And I totally agree. Sorry, but that's a long answer. I'm happy that it's still getting you excited. And this is also, again, worth noting that our work, the value from our work is emergent, rather than it's being, it's not a machine where you have input and output, like you said, which you can isolate. It emerges from creating an environment in which things happen, right? And these conversations contribute to that environment, which is a really tough sell in a lot of organizations if you sort of want to show evidence or prove for the value you're creating for the organization. We don't have to go into that, but yeah. Well, that goes back to the ROI question. Sure. Well, what's the ROI of practicing a customer centric muscle across the organization? I don't know. Here's what I like to ask though. Imagine if your company didn't do that. Imagine if your company, everybody just worked in their cubicles, they had their tasks in Asana and they put their head down and that's all they did. It's like, well, you wouldn't have imagination or innovation or thinking empathy and all those other things. So I like to flip the question around when people say, what's the value of that? I was like, well, imagine if you didn't do that. Exactly. Like what's the alternative? Right, exactly. If the alternative is better, let's go for that. And yeah, the challenge there with flipping it around still is that usually nobody is accountable for actually doing customer centric things. Like at the end of the day, after three months or a year and you have yearly review, two little people in our organization are judged by the fact if they have done stuff that pushes the company to be more customer or human centric. Right. Yeah, exactly. And some of the stories that I was telling earlier on at LexusNexus, I was fortunate enough to come across a stakeholder who was high enough in the organization to kind of push this through and believed in it. He didn't want the ROI calculation because he got kind of what you're talking about. So one of the recommendations I have of, how do I turn my organization around and get this going is try to find that champion who is just gonna understand the value of it without having to have a number attached to it and attach yourself to him or her. That's it. And this is what I would love to go into deeper because finding a champion who believes in it is crucial. Have you found other critical success factors that help to facilitate these conversations? Yeah. A lot of design and some of the techniques we're talking about like workshops and mapping and empathy building and all of those types of things. They're the kind of thing that organizations and the people in those organizations don't know they need until they've seen it or done it. So one of the things to do is also to do a pilot or to get started by just getting started. And I know that sounds redundant or oxymoronic in its logic there. But if you're in design and you already have projects and efforts, can you in a more covert way, can you bring some of these things that we're talking about engaging stakeholders and workshops and thinking through, can you bring that into your existing project so that you have an example? Because what, if you don't know you need something until you see it, then you need to create that thing and say, hey, look what this team did over here to kind of start somewhere small so that you have that example. And then it's like, it's a snowball from there, then everybody wants it and you become in demand. It's exponential growth. I can totally recognize that. And I was having conversations with some in-house service designers and the word experiment or experimentation has arose a lot. Like don't say you're going to do something new for you that you wanna introduce a new methodology. Say that you're going to do an experiment. Let's try this new thing. And then that's usually enough to get started. So how do you get started? Propose an experiment. Agree, yeah, agree. Let's try it out, yeah. And then use that as your case study to show other people. Yeah, and tell them afterwards what you've done. Yeah, exactly, exactly, yeah. And I think that's the value of shows like this of my books and other things like that that are out there is that others now, other designers, Mark, can hold those things up as examples and say, well, maybe we didn't do it here but they're doing it over there. And by the way, that was one thing that got me, my organization motivated earlier on way back when was that there was actually an HBR article, Harvard Business Review article that showed that our competitor was doing some of these things. Oh, that was gold for me. Because fear, fear, look, our competitors are doing it. Right now, okay, let's do the workshop and then suddenly doors open for me when I found out that our competitors were doing this kind of work. Gold, yeah, I've heard this one a few times on the show but it's also good to emphasize this one. Just look at what the market is doing and nobody in the organization wants to be a leger. Like we don't, like you said, it's fear, we don't want to miss out and just showing those HBR articles on the right desks and that is a very effective strategy. Yeah, exactly, I mean, so just find a champion, do a small project in an undercover way, find what other people are doing. These are some of the things that you, and if you do all of those three things, you can kind of get started. I mean, it depends on where your organization is but you can move things along. Yeah, it starts to create momentum. Now, you also mentioned that we are probably already doing parts of this, maybe not conscious, but we are already facilitating conversations to some degree. What do you feel is the thing that's missing the most in the current situation? I think it's the follow through. It's what happens, right? So we said, okay, it's not about the map, it's about the conversation around the map but now we can facilitate conversations. I think it's the next step, right? And I can't tell you how many times more I've ended a workshop with a wall full of sticky notes. I take a photo of it, transcribe those and go back to my stakeholder and say, here, we saved the company. It's in there somewhere, you figure it out. We saved the company with our brainstorming section. That's not enough. You have to then prioritize and get the resources and the time, the resources and the time to do further experiments on those things, right? Because an innocent little sticky note with an idea is not ready to go to market yet. There's a big gap from my sticky note to go to market. There's a gap that we have to start filling. I think that's the next frontier. Does an example or a story come to your mind when you think of when did this occur in your situation? Yeah, it did. It was at my last company that I worked for Citrix and I did a mapping exercise in a workshop. Based on my past experience, I had never even been thinking about this. So rather than saying, we're going to do a brainstorming session and come up with the idea that's going to save the company, which you always do in those workshops. You always think you saved the company, right? I said, we're going to do a workshop and we're not going to come out with ideas. We're going to come out with experiments. So I actually set the expectation that there's no development that's going to happen. You're not going to go from sticky note to development. We're going to go sticky note to experiment. And I actually invited a project manager to the workshop. It was like a little design sprint type thing, right? And I had a project manager there in the workshop for the whole time, whose sole purpose it was to capture everything as experiments so that at the end of the workshop, we didn't have a wall full of sticky notes. We had a project plan for experimentation at the end of the workshop. Classic, super good strategy. I remember that I once sold a project where we said, we're going to provide you with five experiments, but I need to know upfront that you'll have the budget and the time to actually follow up on those experiments because they wanted the customer journey map. And then my question was, what are you going to do with them? And eventually they wanted to become, I don't know, they had business objectives. And we said, we're going to come up with experiments to help you achieve that business objective. But I need to know that you'll be able to take the next step. Otherwise it doesn't make sense to actually engage in this project. And it worked. Like just having that conversation. Yeah, agree. Agreed. Made it happen. What's the follow through? Now I'm going to ask you, Mark, is that part of the design? So now we have to know the craft of design, we have to know facilitation, and now we have to know business experimentation. Is that part of the design? Yes, I think so. And the reason why I think so is because I evaluate the impact of our work by tangible change in the outside world. So did we actually, does somebody experience something different after we're done with our work? And it can take a long time before that's the case. But that's sort of the measure stake that I use to see if we are making progress. What do you think? I agree wholly with you. I couldn't agree more. I think that is, I'm sorry about that, but yeah, it's another hat that designers have to wear. But if we want to have this impact, if we want to have a seat at the table, we have to be able to have those conversations as well too. What is your commitment? What is your follow through? And the commitment to that follow through before I get started with my design research. But I get your question and it's a valid question that I again have seen on social media coming by. Like, I think we as designers feel responsible of actually following through. I think part of this is because we're makers by nature and we want to put things into the world. But sometimes it feels like we're the only ones that care if things actually follow through. And that's a big way to have on our shoulders. What's your experience with that? Yeah, that's the responsibility of design as a discipline. And I think that's where we need to start moving to. And that takes us then into questions around organizational design. And what is the decision making process in an organization? Here's a great question. Can anybody in an organization stop a release or stop launching something because the design is off? And the answer is usually no, that companies are willing to ship things with a compromised design over a good business model and great technology behind it, right? But is there somebody in the organization that can say, guys, we can't launch that, the design's not right and push it back? And very often the answer is no. So we feed our work into this machine, this decision making machine, where there's nobody to pull the brakes or to steer it anymore. And then you cross your fingers and you hope the thing that comes out in the market has to do with what you designed whatever, year earlier sometimes, right? It's a long time in advance sometimes. So that's the current status, but how do we change that? I think it's by continuing to expand our remit, moving from craft to facilitation to business experimentation. Okay, now let's put our remit on, I don't know what the next circle is there, Mark, to be honest with you, but launch health, design health at launch or something like that, right? And thinking about how we can move all the way into that direction as well too. Yeah, yeah. Maybe it's about feeling ownership of making an impact on business and on people. And I don't think maybe we have the feeling of ownership regarding our customers, but not so much the feeling about ownership of helping the company to be successful or at least not explicit enough. I agree, agree. And I think it's the feeling of ownership and being able to take ownership even if you're not a decision maker, which is very hard to do. But I also believe it's ownership of, yeah, you need owners all the way through as well too. I think it's top and bottom. It's bottom up and top down as well too. And I think the, I don't think we're there yet in most organizations, some are there, but most aren't. And I think it's just perseverance and us as a discipline trying to recognize it, first of all, Mark, like, you know, I bring this out. I hope others are benefiting from this conversation. And then thinking about what you can do from the bottom up and the top down at the same time. We've been talking a lot about things we need to start doing, doing more. And like, I already hear people moaning at the other end of the headset, more work, more stuff, more things I need to learn. It's getting bigger and more holistic. Do you think there are things we need to stop doing? Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, it seems to be additive, right? So we have to do this and that other thing now, but what can we take away? Yeah, that's a good question. Maybe not take away, but like less of maybe. I don't know, sometimes I cringe when I hear a, you know, young design team talk about, you know, a discovery phase. We need to go into discovery and, you know, since long, I don't know, it's almost discovery theater at times, you know, to take the theater aspect of what we do away and just get to the meat as quicker, you know, like, because that's what your organization wants as well too. So I think sometimes we have a little bit of ceremony around what we do. How do you experience that ceremony? What does it look like? How does it look like? Yeah, it's, there's a lot of buzzwords and a lot of activities that go into it, persona creation and all these other things and discovery and we have to do more user research and all that stuff. And I'm not saying that's bad. So I'm not saying cut that out, but how can we make that like leaner, right? Cause, you know, instead of having this fat thing up front is like, let's take some of that energy and put it at the other end, like we're talking about now, right? Because that stuff evaporates, but you know, we were talking about kind of this chain, right of from insight to action to actually launching, right? And it's like, let's take some of that energy from up front and put it towards the end, right? You know, that kind of thing. I don't know exactly what you would lose. So I'm not being specific here, but I just feel like there's a lot of energy up front that we need to kind of save kind of marathon. We're running a marathon and not a sprint, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. There was an episode and I don't recall the name. I'm sure it will pop up in a second. Otherwise I'll add it to the show notes where we were talking about leaner service design and the concept that was sort of proposed was do research by creating stuff. So make things that people can test in the real world, whether it's your colleagues, whether it's customers and then get feedback from that and use that to drive momentum rather than going out doing a bunch of interviews. That's again, like you said, that's valuable and important, but it's harder to sell and you have to have more confidence buying recognition that you wanna do that. Yeah, no, that's a great point. And don't get me wrong in everybody listening as well too. I just wrote a book on jobs to be done, which is as upfront as you can get about trying to find that unmet need. And I don't wanna say that's not important, but as you were just saying, you can find the unmet need, but there's also research that you need to do with a thing, with a solution as well too. And you can understand, here's the thing, you can understand the need when you have that thing in your hand as well too. So get quicker to having that thing, whatever that is, right? In fact, there's a lesser known book out there by a friend of mine called Presum, and I don't wanna say, wait, what the heck's the name of it? Yeah, Presumptive Design. I don't know if you know that book, but... No, Frishburg. It's called Presumptive Design, where it basically says, start your design research with a thing. It doesn't matter what it is. Just go into a session or a workshop and pull a thing out and say, our service is like this. Why is our service like this thing, right? And then, yeah. And you start doing research with an artifact. Not with interviews, that kind of thing. There was a poster behind me for a long time which said, no prototype, no meeting, which is a phrase stolen from, again, somebody who I can't recall at this moment. But that thing can be anything, like you said. You have something to talk about and I think getting, closing the cycle between research, creation, right? Being faster with that. Yeah, I think that's the thing. Get to the thing, but here's the point, though. Your research doesn't stop. You're still researching. You're just doing that research, right? You're always researching, exactly, right? So maybe it's instead of being waterfall, being more iterative, right? Let's do all the research, find the unmet need and then bet the farm on the unmet needs. Now, let's get to something really quick and continue the researching. So that's my beef with a double diamond. I have a video on that. And I'll very briefly touch upon this for the people who haven't seen that video. Like it misrepresents often what the design process is. It sort of shows like the research, ideation, I don't know, prototyping and then delivery or something like that. That's not what we do in reality. What we do in reality is within a day, we do research, creation and learning. That happens within a day. And that's what the double diamond, there is progress in the design process, but that progress is from going something which is very low fidelity and very uninformed to something which is high fidelity and more informed. That's the true progress in the design process. I agree. And you know what? One way that I've seen that manifest itself is with the figure eight, just a loop like this, right? IBM Design Thinking has a figure eight. I have it in my Jobs to Be Done book. It's a figure eight. Jeff Gottheilf on the cover of his book has a figure eight. You're not gonna be able to unsee this mark now, but figure eights are all over the place. It used to be three circles, it used to be three circles of a Venn diagram, right? And information architectures at the center. Now everything's a figure eight. And I think why we're seeing all these figure eights out there is exactly what you said is that we're trying to get away from this linearity of a waterfall double diamond approach. And we're trying to talk, this is for ourselves, but also for our stakeholders. We're trying to show that, no, I'm a designer. I'm gonna be doing this. This my day looks like a figure eight. It doesn't look like a one. Exactly, and what you said, your day looks like this. It's not your six months look like this. Well, your day and your week and the month and the project looks like this as well too, right? Yeah, the smallest atomic unit looks like this. And I know people will be commenting like, yeah, the double diamond is about converging diverging. I agree with that. That's a very good purpose of the double diamond, but yeah, adding design stages and phases in there is not smart. I'm curious, how would you know that you're on the right track? Like what is the difference before and after facilitating the right conversations? How do you know? How do you know it's working? Yeah, that's a good question. I think you can answer that question in two ways. One is internal and the other is external, right? And so just focusing internal, because we're kind of talking a little bit about the dynamics of your organization as well too. It's a good question. I should probably come up with a nice list or a blog post on this. But I think there are immediate cues that you get from the session, just the engagement and the leaning in that people do, right? Are people leaning in and participating and engaging in conversations? Or are they like looking at their watch and folding their arms and leaning back? Those are kind of metaphors there, but you, so I don't know the concrete answer. Well, yeah, I mean, they're manifestations of it, but how do you know a group of people is with you and leaning into your concept, right, or not? It's a really good question. I think it's part of facilitation as well too. Having that awareness, is the group with me, right? You know, head nodding, all that kind of stuff, but are they really internalizing it, right? That's a deeper question, right? And it's some of those things, you know, the head nodding, the leaning in, the people engaging, that kind of thing. But here's one of my biggest measures of success, right? When you hear your words, you'll see your map or your persona in somebody else's presentation. And I've had that happen to me, where a business stakeholder almost took my slide deck from my workshop, made it his own and presented it to somebody higher up, right? Didn't give me credit for it, so I could have been offended, but I saw it as victory, right? When our stakeholders are using our words, we win. Awesome, yeah, yeah, totally agree. And when you're, yeah, when they steal and remix the things you've said, yeah, I think two episodes ago, it was also, it was Ryan Rumsey who said, learn the art of having other people have your way. What was it? Yeah, I don't know the exact phrase, but let the, yeah. It's a big measure of success too, because that's that foundational internalization that I was talking about. The effect of this isn't, oh, we do a workshop and we get a feature out of it. We do these sessions and there's this internalization, there's this culture of this and people start regurgitating that. That's a clear sign that you're on the right track. Yeah, are they running with it? Is it you who has to send out the notes and is there a pull or a push factor, right? When you go to pull, when people start nodding you, pulling your arm, when are you ready, when do we have the, whatever, then you know that something good is happening. Agree, agree. What's your, what would you say is your biggest lesson and maybe your biggest mistake when you look back on, yeah, the facilitation of the right conversation. I keep coming back to that. Yeah, I mean, I think it is a little, a naivety that I had and maybe I still have it too about how the organization makes decisions in the end about their business, about go to market. It was actually, actually if I were to pick one thing, it would be go to market, how businesses think about the go to market motions, right? A lot of businesses think about go to market separate from R&D, right? And you have those terms in a balance sheet, right? You'll have, what was our spend on go to market? What was our spend on R&D, right? We're on the R&D side mark, by the way, right? Innovation, product, experience, we create the thing and then other people bring it to market, right? And I think there was a naivety that I had about the go to market decision-making process. To some degree, it was a lack of knowledge and there are lots of other things, there are lots of other concerns, marketing, sales, brand, bottom lines, all kinds of things that go on in the kind of the business side. On the other side of the coin too, particularly now with my position at Murall, much closer to our go to market motions, there's also dysfunction there as well too, that I was naive about, but that dysfunction beats our dysfunction. So the decision-making on the go to market side often trumps decision-making on the R&D side of businesses. So it was kind of that macro understanding of business in general. And then within that, all of the organizational dynamics that take place as well too. That I was kind of naive about that and I really thought I was gonna, you know, and I made this joke earlier in the showmark where I talked about, I saved the company, right? My wall of sticky notes is gonna save the company. And you have that kind of, you know, as a, particularly as a younger designer, when I was a younger designer, that kind of, you know, happiness and delight about, ah, I just said, we got the best idea. No, all I have to do is bring that over and they're gonna go, oh my God, why didn't we think of this before? Let's invest in this and they didn't. And I was like, oh wait, why didn't you do that? So there was a naivety about how the business works and how decisions get made, I think it was my biggest mistake. So that was your biggest mistake and what happened, what did you do to overcome that? Like what's the biggest leap you took to? I mean, I think it's really just pushing, right? Sometimes it's hard, right? Sometimes it's really hard because you feel like you're not making progress, but it's a belief that the things that we're talking about and the things that we believe in, Mark, right? Research, unmet needs, mapping, engaging people in conversations, you have to believe that that's going to make a difference, right? And I always did and I never let anybody tell me otherwise. Even if the big dysfunctional go-to-market decisions were being made, I still held my ground and persevered and just kept going. So it's perseverance is really the only way to kind of get through, I believe. And I guess it must also be curiosity because when sort of you get frustrated, when you see that the ideas that come up don't follow through, don't create the impact that you want, you have to be curious and learn what is going on. What are the dynamics? What can I do the next time to actually increase the chance for success so that it's not just me who wins, but everybody wins? So there must be curiosity in there as well. Absolutely, I think that's a great word and I think you hit the nail on the head. The curiosity feeds the perseverance, right? I did this cycle and it didn't have the impact, it had impact, but not the impact that I wanted. How might I change that in the future and continuing with that curious mindset? Yeah, rather than going into blame mode and saying they don't understand it like, yeah. And so being curious about your own organization and about your own business and about your own team and things like that, I've heard people say things like, if your organization can't change, change your organization. Which is basically saying, if they don't get it, I'm not gonna be curious about how I can change that mindset, right? I always thought, no, that's the challenge is if an organization doesn't, quote unquote, get design at the level that we're talking about it here, why not? Be curious about that. How might you change that? What else can you do? How can you take a method and things that you talk about on your show? How can you take that and make it into the next thing, right? And that's, I think, sort of the essence what we're trying to get across with this show that it's super important to learn the craft, but when you get into an organization, when you get out of service design school, out of service design books, that's way not enough. That's not a right expression, but you will see that there are many missing pieces to the puzzle that you have to learn and you have to get good at it and you have to understand more and more using the reference to, there are other games that need to be played and you need to learn those games, enjoy those games and start playing them to your best ability. I think that's it, it's about embracing that, right? You can either run away from that or you can embrace that as part of your challenge. Yeah, and I hope that we're raising awareness to those games and that people will start googling, learning, watching YouTube videos and how to do that. How would you summarize our last 45, 50 minutes? Yeah, I think we just summarized it actually pretty well is about being curious about all of the problems around you, starting with your craft, but then what are the other problems on why bad design happens, right? Bad design doesn't happen because of a lack of knowledge of design, service design or UX or any of those other things as a craft, right? Bad design happens because there's this other factor in the middle in the equation and it's about being curious about that and embracing it, literally embracing it and not running away from it. Nice. When people wanna reach out to you and continue this conversation, what's the best way to do that? Where can they find you? I think the best way right now is LinkedIn. I'm spending a lot of time on LinkedIn so you can reach out and connect with me there and then you can send messages there too so that's one reason I like LinkedIn. You can say hello through a message but also on Twitter as well too. So it's at JimCallback, no dot, no underline, just JimCallback on Twitter and then you can find me on LinkedIn as well too. I also have a blog, I don't blog too much. I shouldn't even mention the blog. Forget the blog, Mark. Forget the blog. Cut this part out. That's so 2004. It is, yeah, and then you have this blog stress and then at some point in time you just declare bankruptcy. Oh, I haven't blogged in two years. Screw my blog, right? But I have a new website, a new project that's called The Jobs to Be Done Toolkit based on my last book as well too so it's JTBDtoolkit.com and we have some online learning. We also have live workshops and we have some resources there as well too but once a month we have a webinar. In fact, I'm doing a webinar tomorrow so if you go to JTBDtoolkit.com you'll find the webinar. It's basically an open community kind of forum thing where I get on and it's an AMA and we have a discussion there as well too. So there's a little bit of a community feel with the toolkit as well. Cool, I'll make sure to include all the links in the show notes. The webinar, your reference probably won't be tomorrow because we're recording at a different date than we are publishing this video as happens. February 4th. But we do one every month so check it out, check it out and you can stop by and say hello on one of my webinars. Awesome, Tim, no. Jim, thanks so much for this conversation. Yeah, thanks for the passion. Thanks for getting so excited about this and raising awareness to this topic. Well, thanks for having me. I hope folks got something out of the episode. Where did you get out of this conversation with Jim? Leave a comment down below and share your most useful insight. If you know somebody who might enjoy this conversation as well, grab the link and share that with them. If you made it this far, you're apparently enjoying these conversations and if you would like to see more, make sure to click that subscribe button because we bring a new conversation like this once every two weeks so you don't wanna miss out. Thanks so much for watching and I hope to see you in the next video.