 Have you ever struggled in conversations with clients where you have to quantify or prove the value of your work? Well, it's not uncommon for service designers to have a lot of self-doubt about the value they're adding. Well, in this video, I want to show you how you can overcome that self-doubt and flip the fact that it's hard to quantify the value of our work into a really an amazing strength. So, if you're interested, keep watching because the show is about to begin. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you do more work that makes you proud by designing and delivering services that have a positive impact on people and are good for business. Recently, one of the viewers of the Service Design Show, Rahul, left a comment asking me this. It would be great if you made videos about the usual insecurities and anxieties that budding service designers face with regards to the legitimacy or relevance of design with regards to their own capacity as designers, the confusion people feel with regards to design tools and software. And I don't know if you guys do tutorials or not, but even videos where you can get other designers to talk about these doubts that bother new designers, design students, I would love those videos. Thanks so much for the question, Rahul. And in this video, I want to address the first question you asked with regards to the self-doubt service designers feel with regards to their relevance or legitimacy of design. I know exactly what you're talking about, and I've been there many times. And this especially occurs when you're having conversations with people who have a different mindset and especially people who have a more management oriented mindset. When you're in an environment that focuses on short term results that are tangible and can easily be measured, it is struggling for us as service designers, because as we all know, investing in service design or doing service design is really about the long term benefits. I often use the analogy of service design being like organizational fitness. It's just like your personal fitness and taking good care of your body. Service design helps you to take good care of your business. But that's not something you see the results of immediately, and it takes a while. So how do you deal with that? Well, the way to deal with that is to be very specific in where and how you add value to the business as a service designer. And the truth is most service designers suck at that. And they think the problem is that they need to quantify the value that they're adding. But in reality, it's not about that. It's not about the quantifying the value of our work. It's really about articulating, articulating really clearly where and how we're adding value. So the old way of thinking is that we need to force ourselves into quantifying the value of our work and fit into existing organizational and management paradigms. So we try to say things like we lowered the cost per customer by X percent or through improving the service, we got X number of new customers through the door. And like I've always said and stressed, when you have these numbers, it's really great and use them to your advantage to link them to the business KPIs. But when you don't have these numbers, which is the case in most service design projects, the worst thing you can do is to try to force yourself and fake yourself into providing these numbers. Because when you decide to play a game that is played according to rules that we can't or won't follow, you will always lose. So don't pretend to play the Excel sheet game. You won't be able to beat these people at their own game. So don't do that because you will end up feeling even more depressed and the self-dub will even creep in further. And worst of all is it will lead to you producing even less valuable results. So which question is on your mind? Leave a comment down below just like Rahul did and I'll try to make a video about it. So instead of trying to fit into someone else's game, the thing we need to do is to get people to understand our game and the rules that are part of that game. And this is exactly the part where most service designers really haven't thought about. And that is articulating which game we play and what the rules are. And that's really strange because it's really easy to articulate the game we play. We play the game of innovation and change. Let me repeat that once more. Our game is about innovation and change. That's the game we play. And now comes the question which skills do you have that allows you to dominate this game? Think about it for a second. I'll name a few examples but I challenge you to make this list even longer down below in the comments. The first thing that comes to my mind is think about how fast you can turn ideas into prototypes. How fast do you know if something works or not? Compare that to the regular development cycle and organization goes through. How much time and money are you saving by the fact that you're able to prototype? Another secret skill that you have is that you're able to get stakeholders to collaborate more effectively by using visual techniques. Now think about it. A business plan doesn't need to be 20 sheets of paper. It can be one big poster that aligns people throughout the company. And don't underestimate the value you're adding by visual visualizing things and getting people to collaborate. That can save a lot of time and money again. And sticking with thinking about people, stakeholders, there's one more secret skill that you have and that is to get people excited and engaged in projects. Compare that for instance to all those meetings where people are tucked away behind their laptop just wasting their time. What you're bringing to the table is that people are motivated in their work and that the best talents feel that they have a place where they can excel. That's what you're bringing to the table. Okay, that's the one more just because it's fun. And again, I challenge you to make this list even longer down below. But think about how many opportunities and insights you're able to discover through user research just by talking to your customers. Compare that to what you get out of a survey that you do with a thousand people. That will just, a survey will just validate or invalidate what you already know. What you're bringing to the table is breakthrough insights. So what am I saying here? Don't be tempted to play the game somebody else is playing. Make sure to get them on your court where you'll be able to kick their ass. And if your client is not interested in playing the game that you play, that's not your fault. It's theirs. It doesn't have anything to do with your abilities as a service designer and the value that you're bringing to the table. And please remember the fact that it's hard to quantify the value that you're creating doesn't make it any less valuable. Like Einstein once said, not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted. Well, now it's your turn to think about the unique value that you're bringing to the table as a designer, as a service designer. What is the game that you're playing? What are the rules that we're playing by? Leave a comment down below and let's help each other to build more confidence and have those good conversations with our clients. Once again, I really want to thank Rahul for inspiring me to make this video and if there's something that you'd like to know, leave a comment down below and I'll try to make a video about that topic as well. Speaking about self-doubt and insecurities, if you want to feel more confident explaining what service design is to people around you, make sure you check out the course that I've got for you over here. I hope you enjoyed this video and if this is your first time here on this channel, make sure to click that subscribe button. Thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.