 Do you ever feel that the problem you're working on can only be solved by changing the underlying infrastructure and system? But how do you actually get the opportunity to do that when everybody's focused on releasing the next app? That's what we're going to find out in this episode. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, this is Penny Hagen. Welcome to the service design show. This is episode 106. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. Here on this show, we want to empower you with the most effective skills and strategies so you can build services that win the hearts of people and business. And somebody who knows how to do that is the guest in this episode. Penny Hagen is currently the director of the co-design lab in Auckland, New Zealand. So Penny has been working on design projects that involve changing the underlying systems, infrastructure and creating the conditions that provide long-term and sustainable change and improvement in society. So in this episode, we'll be talking about things like how do you measure progress when you're just changing the system and you can't actually point to something that is tangible? How do you report to stakeholders who want to see shiny new objects? And how do you balance between having a really open brief where everything is possible versus having two constrained conditions in your brief where you can't actually move out? How do you balance between the long-term vision and short-term results? So after listening and watching to this episode, you'll have a better understanding how you can actually deliver short-term results while at the same time working towards a more systemic and fundamental change of the underlying structure, which gives you better results in the future. If you like what we're doing here on The Service Design Show, consider clicking that subscribe button and that bell icon because that way you'll get notified when we share new videos that help to level up your service design skills. So now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy the show because here's the chat with Benny Hagen. Welcome to the show, Benny. Kia ora, hi Mark. We're on the opposite side of the planet. I say that to the guests who are from Australia, but I think this is even farther away. Yes, I'm in Arturo, New Zealand in Tamaki Makoto, which is Auckland. Yes, it's nice cold and dark here. Benny, somehow your name has always sang around me. I've been in service design since about 2006 and I think even since then your name has been dropped here and there. Like for the people who haven't googled you yet, could you give like a 30-second history or introduction? How did you end up here? Okay, sure thing. So I'm brought up in New Zealand, but I moved quite early on in my career to Australia. I spent 10 years in Sydney and I did my PhD in participatory design and at the same time I was working in social design in Australia. So my PhD was practice-based, bringing in participatory methodologies to involve people in the design of services strategy and policy and a lot of that focused on youth mental health and working with young people to design their own mental health interventions. So co-design or participatory design has been a big theme and the work that I've done as well as well being and then I've continued that work back in Arturo, New Zealand for the last nine years. Benny, the fun thing about being a service design show host is that I can ask you questions which you haven't prepared and we're going to do that right now because we're going to do a 60-second rapid-fire introduction. So I have five questions for you and we have 60 seconds. Are you ready? Okay. Okay. Benny, what's always in your fridge? Nearly always milk, which I'm embarrassed about because that's very unbothering to me. We'll count that one. Which book are you reading or have you read recently? I'm more of an articles person. So I'm making my way through the myriad of different RSA, Dan Hill, states of change type articles that were produced in the last six weeks. Okay. We'll count that one as well. What kind of superpower would you like to have? Maybe pausing time. That's right. When did you want to become when you were a kid? I wanted to work for the UN actually. It's still possible. And final question. Final question. When was the first time you got in touch with service design? I think in the early 2000s, the participatory design space was intersecting with the emerging service design space, which at that stage was pretty academic. There was service design logic. That sort of work, which then obviously became more of a popularized approach to service design in Australia. So we're a little bit behind some of the US developments in that case. Okay. Early 2000. Makes sense. Because again, I've heard your name since the day I started here in the service design field. Benny, I asked you to send me like an outline for what we're going to chat about here on the show. And you almost sent me an entire book, which was super interesting. I can't wait to dive into the topics. So let's just do it. And my first question to you would be, you have a goal or a destination or a destination where you're heading to. Could you share that destination with us? Sure. I guess like most people, there's lots of destinations. The one that I'll focus on this morning is I guess the focus of the work where I am at the moment. So I've been working for the last seven or eight years in more of a systems and place-based social innovation space. So the destination is around shifting our gaze from services and programs as ways of fixing things to a more systemic, holistic view of what's going on and the complexity of the different challenges that we face environmentally and socially and supporting government to take a more complexity informed approach. So we're looking at it as a whole and we're understanding the relationships between different things and the realities of what happens for people on the ground versus what we might intend through policy and building connections there. So it was a more holistic systems-orientated view of how we might support change towards well-being. So how does that world look? How does the final destination look for you? How is the world different than it is today? That's a different question. How does the world look there when we have arrived at your destination? So I think one of the simple ways to articulate the difference is right now, despite some best efforts and intents, we really often see a complex challenge like poverty and we think of budgeting services or we see a complex well-being challenge and we think we need more interventions and programs for people and some of those things are really worthwhile but we're not focusing on how is our environment, how is our border policy and planning contributing to people's well-being. So we tend to think about things or we've designed ourselves. I don't actually think there's lots of more holistic views but in terms of government responses we divvy things up and try and fix people through specific services or interventions or in little boxes. So we kind of see the issues from a government perspective as siloed and I'm not naming challenges that other people aren't very familiar with. So getting more sophisticated about how we respond in ways that see issues as related and in particular if there's a complicated issue like youth mental health then how do we see local government, central government, business, all of us as having a role to play in creating positive environments for young people as opposed to just channeling our investments into specific youth services for example which really only cover small parts of what the challenges are. So I think it's a more nuanced way of investing and enabling as a government to support communities to thrive in ways that work for them. It sounds like a topic that's quite dear to your heart. You've been involved with this for quite a long time. Can you take us back to the moment where you sort of realized that this was something that you deeply cared about? I don't know if it's a moment. I don't know if it's a moment. Yeah so I was always working in like I said spaces where well-being was the kind of focus. So working with different agencies, government departments and organizations where we were trying to support well-being outcomes. And I think one of the things that really showed up for me was that it didn't matter which door you came in, whether you come in through a mental health door or homelessness or family violence, the issues that it would come back to and the complexities are all very similar. So it's like well how come we're not you know if you think about what the protective factors are, what the things are that we can invest in as a community that really help people have good mental health, they help people have good lives across the board, they're not they're the same thing. So if we were investing really actively in protective factors and the things that help people to be well, so social connectedness, positive relationships with environment, those are things that would benefit us across the board. So we don't need to be divvying up the issues, you know safe warm housing, you know that the root of lots of different issues and so but we kept dividing them up and coming at them from the problem space. So I think after a while I felt like we were all the work I was doing was on really similar issues at the end of the day even though they were being described as different things. So starting to look at it as a more connected up system but also in the last 10 years there's been a shift towards more play space work and innovation platform work where your the space has been given thankfully by government and philanthropics to take a more holistic approach. So the job of some of the play space teams here in Australia is much more about building strong communities for example or building capacity for different ways of working rather than saying you have to deliver x or y server. So there has been a shift to allowing teams to try and explore that more systemic perspective. We haven't got it right yet. There's still lots of work to do but there has been a shift in government's understanding to often on if you like about different ways to invest in building capacity for community well-being. Yeah it's interesting that you say for the last 10 years it's a whole decade right so the shift is it's a humongous shift that is happening also you how would you describe sort of the consequence if we either the shift is already going on so there is no turning back but if we don't yeah if we don't if we fail to actually implement this what what is the consequence. Well I think quite often what happens is we think we're doing it and we name it a certain thing but we don't shift any of the conditions within government or the power structures or the reporting mechanisms or the funding mechanisms so we kind of expect people to work differently but then ask them to account for themselves in the same way that that we have always done so certain approaches within different governments and I'm talking across Australia later will want innovation in different ways of working but they will still ask for predefined outcomes and outputs they'll still report and monitor in an upwards way rather than up and down or down and up kind of way so I think our what our challenge is is that we're not quite brave enough we're brave enough to to carve a space but then if that space gets a bit wobbly quickly shut it down or or still say yeah we said innovation but we still really meant 600 outputs of these widgets here that make us feel confident that was something yeah so we're still wavering in the broader conditions I think that really permit us to work differently and and when you say we're not brave enough is is that the biggest thing that is holding us back or because yeah being brave it's hard to say to somebody now you need to be brave and then the system changed so what are those elements that that are preventing us from moving into this desired situation quicker yeah I mean there's lots of things one of them one of them for sure is our commissioning and funding and reporting mechanisms I'm a bit obsessed about the reporting because I think you know what we track is what we value and so if we've got lots and lots of compliance systems running all across government and services where there's a real focus on people reporting did you achieve x output did you achieve x referral then our gaze isn't on whether that made a difference or not so so I've spent quite a long time just trying to support a different kind of conversation about change but then I've shifted I guess to the more like what's really tangible where can we be tangible and measurement is a place or monitoring is a place we can be tangible because it's so one of the small things that we say to look I do quite a lot of workshops across Australasia with government teams and that'll be a mixture of policy advisors policy managers and service managers and we'll talk to them about what questions do you ask your teams so if you just say where's the report that's what they'll focus on getting do you say what have you learned were people involved in defining the success criteria you know like how do you create even in your conversations a suggestion that you you're valuing a bigger picture and I think some of the things that have happened if we've become really habitual about things like reporting so we'll follow the food chain of reporting line from a service and maybe it doesn't go anywhere but people are very invested in making sure that the reporting happens but is it actually feeding any learning is it actually doing anything possibly not we've just got into this habit of kind of compliance there was really strong disruption of that through the lockdown period here where people just stopped doing that and said we're not we don't require that reporting mechanism we're just going to phone you every two days and so some of that show on a spotlight on well how how helpful is this reporting and compliance work if actually you were better off just having some conversations with people about what they needed and how impactful they've been so there is an area that I'm quite focused on because I think it's a really tangible place that we can look at is our reporting actually adding value because maybe we're not looking at the right things so with regards to reporting I think a lot of people struggle with this that we're sort of captured by the old ways of measuring progress measuring success and that we all feel that we need different different kinds of measures but we're not really good at articulating what those new measurements or reporting tools are I'm curious do you have any examples from your own work how you actually managed to try to change this or managed to change this sure yeah so I can talk about um I guess the evolution of this process if you like so because it's got some bits of some learning in it as opposed to getting it right in it sure yeah one of the things that feel that are most often the the interesting ones there was an initiative here that I was involved in a couple of years ago and it's legacy is still here which is awesome and it was a really brave piece of work that was funded by the New Zealand government around youth mental health life pack and it had a very very open brief it was an innovation fund and really the criteria was around technology and young people and there was definitely an expectation at the beginning that apps would be produced that was definitely what the government sort of had in mind but really quickly it was surfaced working with young people and with other people who influence well-being outcomes for young people that it wasn't apps that was going to shift fundamentally young people's experiences to a lot to the disappoints of a lot of people no I mean maybe that you know I'm sure there's good technology to be developed for sure um but as opposed to it being a silver bullet for um addressing youth um youth well-being challenges and instead life hack worked on a range of different um approaches trying and testing lots of things which is very um you know they kind of followed a an established labs approach if you like so lots of lots of testing and prototyping and saying oh that worked or that didn't work and um a real focus on capability building or for those who have influence on young people so not just who we might immediately think of like educators and youth workers but also police policymakers you know local government people that really can set up conditions strongly for young people um so capability working with them different kinds of um design processes in community building community capacity building collaborations and things and lots of really positive outcomes and really strong a really strong network across the country of people who were tapped into and learning um treaty based practice so Treaty of Waitangi here which is our bicultural um platform for how we work in Aotearoa and there's a lot of learning that we need to do about how that is done well so that was embedded into the program along with design skills and different a real cross disciplinary kind of program and we did start to see real benefits from that but we hadn't figured out how to report that early enough so the government was still sort of expecting how many apps and how many young people will have gone through this program and how will their well-being have improved and what we'd started working on was strengthening the well-being system of across the country and building up a new kind of workforce capacity but we we didn't quickly enough articulate or make visible how they should see the value in that and we did eventually build quite a um what I think it was useful was useful for us it's been useful for others a layered um evaluation kind of tool where we where you would um look at an initiative and say these are the benefits for young people that have been switched on these are the changes we can see in the capacity and the environment and these are how they're starting to affect a border policy ecosystem so we did get there but we didn't get there until it was too late and could you zoom in a little bit and give us more just the details about the last part because making those things tangible and actually being able to say something about the impact on young people on how did you do that how does the layered model look how does it work yeah I should have bought a picture for you there's a spiral so I can share that later yeah sure but it's really about naming the different layers of change and so since then we've kind of evolved that model of thinking into the programs that I work on now so we'll we'll look at what are the changes immediately for people that we're working with right now and for the most part we're working with people through a design process so people are building their own capability agency confidence through designing the things that they think are important for their community so we're using design as a as its own capacity building for community and the design process in and of itself will provide a space for organizations and families to work together differently so we'll track that too so people might say oh I'm more connected to organizations in my community than I was before that translates to a different sharing of resources so for example you might have one organization's got access to heaps of transport and the other organization needs to get stuff places so you count that as a as a meaningful outcome that actually resource that already existed in community is now connected up in a way that benefits that community better so there's this sort of layering of understanding of what change looks like and we're working all the time to develop our understanding of what the indicators of change are so a specific example would be an organization might change the way it talks about people so it might have talked about users or customers or clients and then they'll start talking about families or here the word until Mardi is Fano so that that's that's the sort of the base unit of Mardi relationships is Fano at the best English translation although it's not a great one is this family but so the way that organizations talk about young people or families is a real indicator of where they're at in their kind of recognition of those groups is having agency so those are the kinds of things that we've started to track and just a super practical question because I can imagine people listening to this would be interested do you actually go in and listen to phone calls or how do you how do you how do you make it tangible that that the conversations or the topics of the conversations have shifted in the organization yeah some of it's some of it's definitely observations so we would do we have kind of formalized now different levels of learning looks but so teams are doing their internal reflections on a really regular basis so we've been working really hard across this last I'd say five years to integrate developmental evaluation into the social innovation and design process so my my aspiration I guess is that developmental evaluation becomes a skill set of social innovators or designers so we we get external support specialist evaluation support where we need it but it's actually integrated into our practice that people are kind of making those collecting the evidence being rigorous in that way and so we would do weekly internal reflections which is just capturing the data what are you doing one of the one of the downsides about designers that we often don't document very well and we get to the end and we like that's pretty good let's get going to the next thing but that doesn't help us make a contribution to the kind of greater dialogue so much more regular documentation of what we're seeing and observing and then we have more external loops where we go out and we're either you might be observing so if it's an observational opportunity like watching people in a library maybe we've done something in a space where with we would have always done this with families but let's say we're trying to make our space more friendly for children so you can go in and observe there's more kids there and they're using the space in the way that you'd hoped right um but we would also go and interview people and they would tell us how they felt about the space or staff might say might tell a story and you may or may not call out the fact that you've heard them shift their language that maybe something that you um name with them or it may not there might just be an observation that when I heard you guys talking and in a month ago you this was the language and now I'm starting to hear these things so it's slightly dependent on the context but it's intentional to go back and gather that those signals and yeah change and while you were explaining this I was thinking there's a sort of the other side of the coin so collecting the data and making those observations that's one but how do you communicate this to people who are used to getting evaluations and reporting in a completely literally in a different language how do you make them still you can say okay the language has shifted from people to families or whatever that still doesn't mean they see the value of that the is is that a challenge yeah yeah well i'm right yep it's a challenge we're right in the middle of it depends on who we're working with so um we would have some funders who are kind of on that journey with us and we've said at the beginning the things that we're going to count um so this is my like simple simple like heuristic of it is we're going to demonstrate to you what um shifts have happened for families and that that will be through their own language and reflection and observations and and they will have set the value of good themselves will will track for you what we see um the systems changes are and they will be local systems changes as well as macro change so if if you can see that in our um local play space system money's moving differently resources are being allocated differently relationships are different we'll totally describe and name those and um then adding a value to that is a is a different it's a different conversation what's the value of that shift um and we'll also name any macro shifts so in some cases you might get um a bunch of activity that's local but it'll influence the national policy for example so we'll name all those things and then the other things that we say we we are um delivering if you like as value as the strategic learning outcomes that come from that activity so we'll say so you'll learn about what the changes are for families what the changes are in the system and what the strategic learning is about why or why not um systems change has or hasn't occurred so there might be a bunch of things that you think are going to happen and they don't why is that is that because actually the organization didn't end up having the readiness or the capacity that it needed or was it super super keen and heaps of capacity but really constrained by old-school funding mechanisms and we want to feed that learning back into the system too so that then our government and systems partners can potentially come in and make a shift then around funding or something so for some people they're well on board with that's what they're going to hear and learn sometimes you have to remind people remember that this is you know we're in this innovation space we're not giving you widget outputs so we just that's sort of in a way it's educational bring people along and in other cases we have to show that and something that looks a bit more traditional and we're kind of working on both fronts at once so we're like yes it's this and remember this is the bit that we think we should really be caring about in this setting yeah what what I'm hearing in your story and this is nothing new but I think it's good that we repeat it often is we need to have a conversation with the people who are funding us about what success looks like and we need to have that up front and we need to have have that all the time right what does success look like is that is is it the launch of a new app and it's probably not a project that we should embark on I see you're nodding right yeah yeah yeah I mean we talk about silver bullets all the time because that's what people ask for they're like can you fix this problem and it's like well no not really because that's a systemic historic problem that stems from structural racism and ongoing colonization so so we can totally be working on addressing some of that systemic stuff but you're not suddenly going to be able to fix that with one app or one one intervention so let's so it's a boring revolution you know there's the indie joe hard talks about this stuff some of our changes that we're looking for are are quite boring you know like capacity or infrastructure they're not like oh my god yeah I think I haven't released a video yet but I just recorded a video where I talk service design isn't about winning awards like a lot of the things we do are it's just the plumbing it's it's fixing the infrastructure fixing the system it's not visible you know it the only thing you see is less frustration but that's really hard to to quantify and to get get credits for but it's it's the important stuff yeah the grind yeah I think the other side of that too is that often and this is again a conversation they have a lot with our government colleagues is and then we talk about empathy for the system right because most people are here trying to do their best and they're not here trying to perpetuate a oppressive system but it turns out that actually often that is what we're doing and so we quite often look outwards to say oh there's a problem how can we fix this problem in this population or something um but if you go and do any genuine work about where that problem sits it we usually have to look back at ourselves like we're usually perpetuating something we're usually creating a system which is making people more stressed and more sick and you know keep trapping people so often we our immediate thing is to look out and try and find something externally that we could fix but most often the work has to have an internally inside our systems and to to really in a way stop perpetuating the challenges that we've created yeah yeah that's not as exciting sounding when you're pitching that yeah I kind of we we we address the importance of reporting and measuring success in different ways in in your journey towards creating systemic change and addressing creating the right conditions for different kind of behavior is there a different example that comes to your mind where you think oh that that worked really well or that was a complete failure something we can learn from oh another example you're sure yeah if you have one um I think this is a success I guess so um so one might be so also some of these things come around and around so I quite often find that we'll work on a challenge and then three years later it'll come back and we'll be ready to action some of the things that came up so um that's similar for some of this stuff is that you think oh that it really didn't that they really didn't land um and maybe nothing really flies but then five years later there's a there's a appetite at a policy level to pick some stuff up so that that's another thing is that it's a very long game sometimes um one of one of the um initiatives that I was involved on which was a family violence initiative and that's about um supporting communities to lead their own responses and to build protective factors in their communities that reduce violence and protective factors are things like being connected to identity, gender equity, non-violent social norms, they're things that are good for us all the time you know social connectedness, pro-social connectedness um so so if you promote those protective factors in communities everybody benefits from that in lots of different ways um and so the initiative was to say how could we get communities supporting those things and doing those things and so we went out and talked to people about their understanding well what is it that you already do in your community to mobilize and support and contribute and lots of people do that really naturally they're running groups they're doing parenting classes they set stuff up they just you know they want to participate and um the community builders and so we then took to them about how how what they were doing already mapped and contributed to the reduction in family violence that was really motivating for people when they saw the protective factors and understood oh I'm already doing that and now that I know it matters I can also do these other things I hadn't really ever thought about the fact that having boys toys and girls toys actually might set us up for some issues I'll stop doing that um so people could see how they could incorporate that into their daily life and it was um exciting for people that they could do small things to contribute to a really complex issue that mostly people don't want to talk about because it is complicated it's traumatic personal relationships with it and it's really like how can I uh it's too complex how can I possibly help um and this demonstrated that there was really little things that people already doing that they could be even more intentional about the challenge was that community was kind of ready but actually we didn't have um the government infrastructure to support people to do that meaningfully so we could just say oh you go and do it but we didn't if the government also wanted to then monitor that or let's say um reflect those same qualities in our public spaces and our public services then we hadn't thought about how we would do that so we were somehow just handing the challenge to community and going can you guys do all the um good work here oh but what about what we're perpetuating in our own public spaces um about about social connection and how we're excluding people through the choices we make in our public settings and stuff so it met again it was this thing of going out actually community was fully up for it but government hadn't sorted out how it would coordinate itself yet or resource it itself to reflect that back to community and be a reinforcing um capacity for that work so we're still working on that stuff I think it's a maturity thing but it was another example of where we thought we'd go out and kind of try and fix the problem um without aligning ourselves in a way yeah and then the question becomes what kind of example are you setting so if if you're trying trying to um uh stimulate some uh a certain type of values um in a community then uh really quickly they will put up a mirror and probably ask you if you adhere to those same values right yeah and I mean one of the motivating questions for me or when I was like oh yeah a little light bulb moment is we can talk about organization like co-design you know pain slightly about that word because it's been so deeply caught didn't that doesn't really mean anything um but you know ideas of co-designing with young people and doing doing all this great stuff but if you just said okay well look outside if I was a young person and I went walking around my local neighborhood would I feel valued do I see myself reflected in the institutions how would people treat me and look at me well they probably often look at you suspiciously you probably wouldn't be welcome you might even be moved on from public spaces you know like actually institutionally we don't do great by our young people and so those kind of questions I think really help us just think about well we want this thing but over here we're behaving in this other way so we're setting ourselves up to fail so a lot of the work is trying to focus that back on environmentally structurally socially we're not giving we're not setting up the conditions for people to to thrive and to for well-being so I think to me that's a really easy way just to analyze like to think about how well have we done to build the environment in a way that makes people feel like they belong there and they can spend time in those places and stuff it's a good kind of yardstick if you if you could go back and start a project over again or a new project with a similar challenge uh comes by what would you do differently um like in the life hack example that I gave before this was a really good lesson and it's not lost like that the like I say just really want to acknowledge that the people that worked in that and as part of that still continue a really strong network and awesome work so it's important to for me to say that but it really taught us stuff about the balance of tight and loose so I would really um now when we're talking about innovation and place-based work and systems change I would argue that we that you mean you need to have a kind of a direction that's good you can't define how you're going to get there yet because you're working in a particular place with particular people and you need to understand the dynamic and the readiness and um but you do need to get quite and this is why we've been so focused on integrating the developmental evaluation into the practice you do need to be really good at picking up the signals that you're seeing and feeding them back in and then eventually refining down and saying okay we tried 20 things these four have really got um strength here let's keep working on those because our our natural tendency is to keep getting bigger and do different things and it's actually really hard for us to stop stuff and we might go but I love that thing and you're like yeah but and it's fun but it's actually not really making a difference but we're really attached to it because it's got lots of kind of cool people stuff about it or feel good stuff about it and we're really bad at shutting stuff down um so I think that's a thing that we've we've really tried to cultivate is how do you get precision but through doing stuff learning with communities about what matters but then use that to really focus where you're going work with people about how you're going to reduce down because that's hard it's hard to let go of stuff um but what what we might accidentally have done is fallen back into our kind of programmatic um mentality where we're like but this is the best program ever and it's going to change the world and you're like there's an awesome program but it's not going to change the world so we have to now shift our efforts to the systems view again so to me it's the balance between tie and loose direction and specification but don't keep it open the whole time or all you'll do is end up kind of just having a whole lot of cool stuff that doesn't necessarily go anywhere yeah and that's what you mean with uh the tight and loose if it's too loose if it's too open then uh you're probably not accountable and the yeah you almost lose your yeah yeah disorientated yeah you need to tune quite specifically to a direction like we use um we use theory of change which lots of people do um which means you've got to explicitly state how you think change is going to happen but you interrogate that all the time and you're like is that still right we did this thing we learned something and so it's a fluid tool but it does give you a kind of I guess a north otherwise yeah you can get because you're you're working on the ground and you're doing your daily actions with people it's really intense it's really easy to get into this kind of head space yeah you have to be able to look up and like so I do talk about how people get a real sore neck working in the space because you've got to see everything think long but also deal with really intense stuff right now and so that dynamic is quite exhausting so you you do need to have that precision but you can't you can't have that right at the beginning so yeah there's balance between when to tighten and when to loosen when to renegotiate or maybe it turns out that direction wasn't the right direction but you want to be informed in those decisions and intentional yeah and I think um this uh this doesn't happen naturally you actually have to this is work you have to have processes in place you have to have structures in place that help you to zoom in smile to be tied or lose her because it's not something where you think oh well we'll do reflection we do a reflection because it's a natural thing no you really have to dedicate attention time resources to to do that at least that's my experience yeah yeah I would say that our our team is really reflective because if you watch people they'll never do the same thing every single week they're always like oh it didn't work so well last week I'll shift it so that reflective practice is generally inbuilt but the tuning of that to become something kind of precise and rigorous and externalized and is it is it is a discipline that you have to build on top of what you might naturally have kind of from a design um or create a practitioner approach I think so yeah uh you wanted to add something I was just gonna say I was just gonna say that developing people's capacities to work in multiple spaces is one of the biggest challenges I hear people talk about when they're trying to work in a innovation or a um systems change space is that it's it's a shift for people who have come from a background being really passionate about what they do working really closely with people for change when your goal is suddenly so big you can't tell whether you've made a difference at the end of the day that's really challenging because you're like am I am I doing any good am I just wasting my time and so we've we have to find ways I mean part of that evaluation is helping us go we are it is working it is worth it here are the shifts it's just that they're not but it look as tangible as when you're running a youth program when it's really clear that you've um had a great day and you've made a great difference um so that is a challenge that that everybody that I know that works in this space is encountering is how to support people to shift into a space where we're thinking about systems and relationship and process all at the same time yeah I'm curious if you could give one or two tips or suggestions for really on a daily daily practical level for people who are maybe working in the public sector in other countries or maybe within companies where they see the only way we can change this is if we change the the infrastructure the system and it seems so audacious so big how am I going to actually make a dent in the universe here what would you say to those people like what can they do on a daily basis yeah I think there's probably two things that maybe it's the same thing it's not two separate things maybe it's a connected idea um is that people like a classic kind of challenge is there'll be a big problem like housing for example like we've got really poor housing here it's very expensive so it causes lots of issues people get sick from it they have to live on the street from it so you know it's it's like a massive issue but it's nobody's problem so people will go oh why how do we reduce rates of admission to hospital for children you're like build better houses but that's out of scope for so many groups you know and so they're like okay it's out of scope so I'll just scope down to this thing that is the thing that I feel like we can change and I use that example because to be honest it comes up all the time that housing it comes back to housing but nobody seems to be able to kind of hold that but that that thing about out of scope is symptomatic to lots of the challenges that we work with so quite often um design we were taught to scope that's one of the first things you taught is like narrow the scope so that you can have constraints and boundaries and stuff and you use that as a negotiating tactic the whole way you're like oh it's out of scope turns out that it's not a relevant concept I don't think in this you have to unlearn that you're like I will work on this but I have to hold the whole scope so you have to you do two jobs people that it's twice as much work yes it's twice as much work um you're working on the thing that you've been given the chance to work on and you have to be doing everything you can to direct the energy provide the recommendation to build the relationship and it often is relationship so it's often someone said um you know you have to do that and you're like well I don't have a relationship with that group you're like we'll start that relationship don't start the relationship when you have a project because people don't like it when you just come to them when you have a project you're gonna have to build a longer term relationship and basis for change and if you're only ever given a project you're just going to ignore that and work as if you have a platform so to me that idea that oh but I there's no there's no remit for this inside this project it's like too bad if you know that that's a central thing for change you have to work on that outside and eventually you'll get that kind of brought in so to me we're this is a funny shape thing like we're working there and we're working there and so we can't can't um we can't buy that anymore we can't say oh it's out of scope so we won't work on it so it's not good enough and if the scope can't be changed just do both and eventually in my experiences that it actually does widen all the opportunities are there or you can start to feed in a different way of thinking and working that's more relational I don't know if that makes sense does that make sense yeah it makes sense yeah and what was the other thing well I was this idea of it not being out of scope and working on two things at the same time I think so maybe it is the same yeah same idea bundled together yeah and the other thing that we talked about last time was that idea of scaling letting I letting go of the idea of scaling and I think and that's that's been really helpful for people when I work with different teams that we brought on our idea of what scaling looks like because people are often like oh you did this thing and it worked there now can we do a hundred of it across the country yeah yeah and it's not about the what usually it's not the what it's the how and the who and the where so thinking about scaling as being multi-dimensional that might be scaling deep about narrative or principles it might be scaling down like so for us we talked about being biodegradable if it's working and you can get it out of there then that's that's great but as the scaling doesn't have to be a replication so we have to be much more sophisticated about what scaling is and unpack that more so that would be another thing in my mind that's really critical to kind of disrupting some of the patterns that that we're working against in a way I suppose and the pattern we're working against is the notion of scaling as a way to just duplicate more of the maybe the tangible outcomes rather than the way we got there yeah and this idea that it's if we just design the right perfect intervention somehow will fix yeah shows yeah yeah and the and the thing with service design of course is that there is the context culture influences so many things that it's very unlikely that a solution that has worked in situation a will also be exactly the solution that we need in situation b right yeah well that's what I mean about it's not about the what like we've designed this thing and it does x and you like yeah but who implemented it and how did they implement it and they did they implement it with empathy and love and you know hospitality or did they implement it as a regimented criteria based thing and then suddenly it doesn't work so yeah I think that's right context and the how because maybe the principle maybe doesn't matter the what it just matters the how it's delivered with care responsibly you know that it's an interesting debate I think also in the design community on the one hand we're trying to focus on actually create showing impact being impactful and on the other hand we need to focus on the process well that's a different episode we've had many episodes on that Benny how would you summarize our conversation today I mean how would I summarize that from my perspective it's about a shift from thinking I guess at the risk of sounding or repeating overused phrases it's about developing ways of working that are responsive to the complexity of the challenges that's how that's what I feel it is although that could be a bit overused terms like complexity but we know people are complicated we know there's a whole lot of stuff going on environmentally that has lots of dependencies we know that we can't control situations you can't you can't map everything freeze it and then like start making changes what doesn't work like that so how do we evolve our practice and our thinking and our way of working collectively so that we can be responsive learning orientated try stuff stop it when it doesn't work have ways of thinking about tracking what we're doing so to me it's about developing our practice and our thinking from policy to service design to whatever you want to call it that is more responsive and recognizes the complexity and the dynamics of the issues and what it means to actually implement things on the ground versus draw a picture of implement the ground whereas where we've come at things historically is you know we think we can control it or we can prescribe it or we'll fix it with this one thing here and then we'll go over here and fix the other bit with this thing here so it's about trying to create room for more dynamic complexity and form wise of working yeah for me as and then i uh then we're sort of wrapping this episode up but for me it's the mindset shift from maybe be an architect or an engineer to uh being on stage and an improv theater where you need to improvise all the time you like uh you you cannot script upfront what's going to happen you're going to respond to the crowd you're going to respond to your players and the only the most important skill you need to have there is the ability to listen to the situation and improvise so there would be that there will be my kind of thinking here benny i can imagine a lot of people who listen to watch this episode who'd like to get in touch with you and continue this conversation um what's the best way to do that yeah totally i mean people can can email me but maybe jump on twitter and say hi at penny hagan it's a h a g e n um so i'm happy to yeah connect in whatever ways but that's probably the most straightforward yeah i'll make sure the the links are in the show notes of this episode penny cool it yeah thanks for the opportunity to chat it was my pleasure it is my pleasure yeah an early hour for you yeah it was awesome that we made it um thanks again penny for sharing and um have a good day awesome thanks mark have a good night what is your biggest takeaway from this chat with penny what can you use in your day-to-day projects leave a comment down below i'm really curious to know if you enjoyed this episode and think it might be interesting for somebody else grab the link and share it with them that way you'll help to grow the service essential family and that helps me to invite more inspiring guests like penny here on the show for you my goal is to empower you with the most effective skills and strategies so you can build services that win the hearts of people and business and that's exactly what you can learn in this next video so click over there and let's continue the conversation