 In this video, I want to talk about four techniques that you need to master in order to make real impact as a service designer. So stick around if you're interested in that. Let the show begin! Hi, I'm Marc and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to do more work that makes you proud by designing and delivering services that are good for people and business. This episode isn't about journey mapping, personas, or stakeholder maps. No, I've been seeing that service design is being reduced to how-to guides, checklists, and recipes lately. So I don't want to talk about that. What I always find interesting is that I get a lot of questions from people about which tools we use in our service design practice Are you using InDesign, PowerPoints, Map League, Custolence, anything else. You know what? I don't think that really matters. Because tools are usually a personal preference and I think you can learn any tool you want to. And I see this also a lot in resumes where people are listing all the tools they have mastered. And I don't really care about that. Because the focus on tools without first understanding what you're doing leads to mediocre results at best. It stimulates the copy and paste culture where you for instance grab a customer journey mapping template and just start filling in the boxes without actually knowing what you're doing. Now I think service design is much more about attitude, mindset, and techniques. I'm not saying that you shouldn't learn how to create a persona or customer journey map. I think you should and it's really important because it will speed up your process. But it's really important that alongside you also develop the overarching techniques. I call these techniques because you can apply them with any tool. So here are the four techniques I think you should invest your time in in learning. And the first one is interviewing. You might have thought that I would say something like qualitative research. But the truth is that if you master interviewing you have a really solid base for doing other qualitative research stuff that is important in service design. So this is all about making sure that you uncover real insights rather than just collecting data. It's about learning how to listen and how to ask powerful questions. It's about question literacy. Yes, question literacy. If you want to know more about that, check out the episode with Mary Alice Artel who talks about that. The second technique I think you should master is creative workshop facilitation. An average business person would probably call this a meeting and meetings happen a lot. Well, our work is also about collaboration but we don't want to host meetings because meetings are about decision making, making notes and looking important. The meetings we want to host are about sense making, exploration and co-creation. That's why it's so important that you learn this technique. It's about learning how to manage the flow of energy in a session, how to keep people engaged when and how you should lead and finally how you can create a safe space where people feel the freedom to discuss the things that are really important. There are two ways that I learned about creative workshop facilitation. The first one is by reading all the work by David Sibbet. You can find some links down below in the show note and the other way is by just doing it a lot. Just doing a lot of workshop, hosting a lot of workshops and reflecting on that. I think that's the best way to actually master this technique. If you've been following the channel for some time, you probably can guess what the third technique is about and it's about storytelling, both verbal and visual. And this ties back into the fact that service design is so much about collaboration to actually get things done we need to be great communicators. So I would say study the hero's journey, study the dramatic arch, study the history of theater because once you master the basics of storytelling, you'll see that you can apply them anywhere, whether it's in creating a proposal, sharing research results or creating a presentation or a short movie to show a future scenario. Storytelling makes the work of a service designer so much easier in each and every step. And in regards to storytelling, if you want to learn how to tell the story about service design in a way that people actually understand and find interesting, check out the course that I've got for you over here, which will help you to do just that. The fourth and final technique I want to address here is rapid prototyping. Monroe Porcini, who was a guest on the show and is currently the chief design officer at Pepsi, said that prototyping is the thing that sets designers apart. Yes, it's that important. We have the gift to be able to make intangible ideas tangible, whether it's through a visual sketch, a cardboard mockup or maybe even a short movie that you shot with your phone to tell a story, we have the gift to do that and we should use that. So get comfortable with the idea that everything you create is a first shitty draft. In regards to rapid prototyping, I love this quote by Tim Brown who said, make things in order to think rather than thinking what to make. I think that's a great attitude to have. So how do you master this technique? Well, for instance, challenge yourself for the next month to bring a prototype to every meeting you attend. No prototype, no meeting. I can assure you this will work wonders. Which of these four techniques do you think is the most important or which one would you have added to the list? Leave a comment down below and don't forget if you want to master storytelling and how to tell the story about service design, check out the free course over here and if you're looking for more videos that will help to level up your service design skills, here's the playlist with all of them. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.