 In this episode, you're going to learn how you can effectively deal with the way organizations currently operate and how the design process works. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hello, this is Fritje Wegener and this is the service design show episode 132. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome back to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the service of service design, what are the things that make a difference between success and failure, all to help you make great services happen that have a positive impact on people and business. In this episode, we're going to explore why design often seems incompatible with how organizations currently work. So here are some examples that I'm sure you're familiar with. For one, the emergent nature of the design process where we're totally okay, not knowing at the start what the outcome will be versus how organizations are looking for predictability at the very start. Another classic is that we as designers want to dig deeper and reframe every challenge at the start, while most organizations just value implementation and want to get things done. And here's one more that I'm sure you're familiar with. We as designers embrace failure and want to experiment a way forward. Well, many organizations are there just to optimize things and do things as efficiently as possible with as little mistakes as possible. The good news is that there's already a lot of knowledge about how organizations operate and why they operate the way they do. We as a design community can take this knowledge and use it to our advantage to overcome the challenges we experience every day. So if you sometimes feel a bit frustrated about the seeming incompatibility between design and management-led organizations, this episode will guide you in the right directions where you might be able to find answers. If you enjoy exploring topics like this, don't forget that we publish a new video every week or so here on this channel. So if you want to keep growing as a service design professional, make sure you click that subscribe button and that bell icon to be notified when new episodes come out. So that's all for the intro and now let's jump quickly into the conversation with Fridjolf. Welcome to the show Fridjolf. Hello there. Hey, awesome to have you on. This is going to be a conversation that I know a lot of people will be interested in. It's a topic that has been covered on the show lately quite often and we're going to chat about organizational design and the challenges around organizational design and hopefully also find some better questions and maybe even find some answers. But before we dive into that, I'm really curious if you could give a short introduction about who you are and what you do these days. Absolutely. I'm Fridjolf Wegener. I'm finishing my PhD at the Delphi University of Technology, the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. And I kind of combine my backgrounds in organization studies. So I studied business in Amsterdam Innovation Management in Rotterdam and design. I also studied three years in Delphi and tried to combine these to kind of like have a perspective on organization design and I'm really inspired there by pragmatism. And so I think part of this is about organization design but I think also part of this is a bit about pragmatic design exploring what is a pragmatic approach to design actually. And I think that's kind of like the topics mixed together. That's super interesting. Pragmatic design organizational. You don't have a typical design background but you sort of merge into design. I really like those ingredients for the rest of the conversation. But the listeners know who have been part of the service design show for a long time that before we dive into that we do a rapid fire question round. Five questions and your task is to answer them as quickly as possible so that we get to know you a little bit better as a person before we head into the actual topic. So are you ready for question number one? Absolutely. What's always in your fridge? Oatmeal. Okay that's a popular one. Which books are you reading at this moment if any? I don't know. I'm reading a lot the discord novels for sleeping. Okay well if they are good we'll add a link in the show notes. What superpower would you like to have? Make people see the consequences of the actions far down into the future. Okay great. What did you want to become when you were a kid? Oh that was the usual firefighter, policeman, doctor. I really wanted to become a trauma surgeon on a helicopter but I also wanted to be the helicopter pilot. It's a super common. I haven't heard that one that often. And finally when did you first get in touch with service design? You've been in touch with design in general for quite a few years. Do you recall when you heard about service design? I think for me it was really when I was thinking about okay what's the place that might be most interested in organization design and I was thinking that that should be service designers because they're closest to organization design but they're not yet doing necessarily organization design so that was really the reason. Organizational design and service design are super closely related I think almost not entirely interchangeable but there are a lot of overlaps. What's also good to mention and we didn't do that in the introduction so far. You also run a podcast right? Yeah I'm involved in a podcast talking about organizations so it's a podcast about organization and management and what we do is we kind of like read the classics about organization studies and management but we try to do it in a way that that's also relevant for practitioners. We've been doing that for a couple of years I think it's a really nice way if you don't know yet so much about organizations and about management it's a really nice way to kind of like drop into specific topics. We have a lot of episodes by now so you can really kind of like pick and choose what you're curious about. I'm also a bit involved in the out of the blue podcast of the faculty of the design faculty in Delft. I think that's also a nice way to kind of like explore hey what's the latest research and design doing what's the faculty doing so I think that's both of them are nice ways to kind of like keep in touch on the topics that I'm working on. What's the title of your podcast? These are the two podcasts. So what's the title where can people find them? Oh I'm sorry so one is I think just talking about organizations.com and the other one I think it's on the website but I can just give you the links. We'll drop the link in the show notes. Okay awesome so when we were preparing this chat one of the things that I found really interesting is that you mentioned like organizational is an organizational design isn't new it's just the fact that designers are getting into actual organizational design and that's a good thing because there is a lot of material already that we can sort of study and read and learn from and bring into our practice. Now how did you get on the path of exploring organizational design and especially from a pragmatic perspective? Yeah so I think so the reason why I didn't continue on Delft was there was a moment where I had to calculate how thick a table had to be for a person of 200 kilo to sand on it and then for a person of 200 kilo to jump on it once and then how often would the person have to jump for the table to break and I was like I don't care about that like I care that it doesn't break I don't find this calculation really interesting to do once interesting yeah to figure out how to do it but not not again and what I realized when I was in Delft still was that I was really curious much more around the team processes of the design team I was much more interested in how the designers work together with the business people with the marketers etc but back then I didn't realize that there's a different kind of design that tackles these kind of questions I thought that I was not doing design anymore that I had to do business and organization and that was also one of the reasons why I left here but I somehow I never really came across the term organization design until one of my former supervisors in Amsterdam a fluidic and she she she mentioned organizations and that that's what I was interested in like and then I looked at it was like oh yeah that is actually what I'm interested in and that's kind of like how how how it all started yeah and what's the pragmatic angle because you sort of emphasize that aspect yeah so I think so it at first it was separate from each other because I so while I was doing a master I was working at a big high tech company trying to to combine the practice of innovation management with the theory on innovation management I was really frustrated because I realized like these are really different worlds and they barely have anything to do with each other and so I already had this drive to do research that is practically relevant so that that's there's a pragmatic side and only later did I realize that there's actually a really important person in design namely tonal schoen who also had looked at pragmatism to understand design better so the whole notion of design inquiry but also notions like reframing etc like all of them they can relate back to to pragmatism and so I'm really interested in in this pragmatic approach to design that is quite distinct from from the way that say engineers approach design the way that also say consultants or managers approach organization design as a kind of like top down planning process and really much more highlight the yeah the the aesthetic aspect of design the emergent aspect of design and realizing how often that actually conflicts with with how organizations are now are designed exactly yeah and that's I think sort of the core of the thing that we want to explore the conflicts the roadblocks the incompatibilities between the way organizations work most our organization work these days and how the design process works and rather than getting frustrated and I've been there a lot of times like you want to show the value of the design process you want to show that it really can help progress towards a certain goal but you run into all those organizational challenges and as a designer you often don't fully understand why they are incompatible why they aren't moving in the right direction that you were hoping for and we said there are a few that I think a lot of designers will recognize so let's let's explore them um is there do you have a favorite one one roadblock a challenge that you found a lot of designers run into I think so one one really big issue I mean we have that like anytime we have companies involved in teaching we have we have the same issue that they're kind of like expect to know beforehand what you'll get out at the end that's like a very common thing and I know like when I go to the baker and I I say I want to have a bread then I want to get that bread at the end of that process I don't want them to like re-design the bread as we you know as I'm buying the bread so I get that but what people don't realize is the consequence that you basically you can't design anymore because basically the client already designed something and they're just asking you to implement that right that's not a point yeah this is this is classic right we I think we've all been there uh you you know that the design process is emergent you know that as soon as you sort of engage in the design process you will learn things that will inspire the next step in the design process and that's how you work you will sort of improvise uh and you use the knowledge you gained in the previous step to inform the next step but you are dealing with clients who want to see at the start how the entire process will look like right that's and how do we overcome that how do we deal with that and maybe so I'm jumping ahead of myself why is that why do organizations work in this way where where where is this coming from so in in my research what what I've come across is that there's really there's very different perspectives on design and and I think in that sense like engineers they also design it's just they design in a different way and I think they mean something else with the word design but at the end they also have a design just just like that like designers have um and I think the these ideas around design as planning they have been really influential in the way that we organize and they're the way that we went so uh uh Herb and Simon who actually got his Nobel Prize uh for for the work around these kind of ideas um he pointed out that uh you know people are not sort of say uh perfect the computers that can like uh calculate everything uh that that even though we we we would like to be rational this this rationality is is bounded and so first he applied that to organizations later he applied that to to design uh kind of like developing his perspective on design science but these ideas they've been really crucial in in how a lot of managers have been trained and in how a lot of consultants approach their work and and it's really it comes down to this idea that you can first define the problem uh then you can define the solution and then it's just about implementing that solution exactly any any good designer knows that yeah that that might be be possible for problems that you already kind of understand but for really challenging difficult problems it's it's more complex than that so maybe it has to do with the the nature of the problems organizations had to deal with in the past and to some extent of course today and the nature of the challenges that designers typically want to work at or at least can add value right there's there's a difference there yeah yeah i think that's a difference so that that with with all the all the existing theories on on organization design you can really relate them back to the problems that the companies had in in that period but then if you if you kind of like look at the literature basically since the since the 1980s there hasn't really been a lot of new theory on organization design of course people have worked on organizations but not radically new theories which is before the internet before globalization really really uh hit off so yeah so the and and i think uh this is the thing about organization design uh that we are dealing with a situation where uh there's a structure there's a process there are people who work in a certain way and what we want to do in an organization design perspective is adapt that modify that to fit the challenges that are more uh relevant these days right that's that's the transition and the question is how do we enable that transformation how do we enable that shift so from that angle i'm curious like what have you found in your research that we can offer in this situation so you're dealing with managers who are focused on um planning implementation and and want to have this predictability because that's what they've been thought this is where their kpis are um yeah and then we come in as a designer talking about this emergent process what do we have to offer to these people um so i think one thing that that uh that uh i see a lot uh the student struggling and also the sort of say the professional designers struggling is how do you convince a client of something that isn't there yet because there's there's no amount of data that that can show something that isn't there yet like that's that doesn't really work so the challenge really is is is to to build build a case for something that that is not there yet and that's sort of say what one of the things that i really like about pragmatism and the pragmatic approach to design is really highlighting that it's not it's not about how things are it's not about how things should be but it's about exploring the possibilities it's about about exploring what what maybe and i think that that the the role of design is is really exploring this what what maybe it's it's not that it has to be that uh it's not necessarily what is already but but it is kind of like this this conditional like it this might work uh and then the thing that that really i think gets gets design going but that's really difficult and organization design is experiments so where you don't just think somewhere in the meeting room with all the big heads be that the consultants or the top managers and then you think up a new structure for the organization and then you say and we're going to implement it like this etc etc but uh that you really explore through experiments these possibilities that that you feel out there and and and how to how to go about doing them and i think one of the most important shifts there is kind of like shifting away from let's plan something for the future but instead take a design approach and and kind of like start in the now while imagining how things might be but really explore okay let's let's let's manipulate like experiment let's see how things could be different i get that and at the same time i'm thinking about situation situations i've been in in the room where um like out of the 10 people in the room like one person would be open to this and the rest is um i wouldn't say risk adverse but they um they look for guarantees they look for predictability they aren't that much like their incentives aren't to explore what could be and their their incentives are about let's do the thing that we're doing today just better faster more efficient have you from a pragmatic perspective have you found what can designers do in that situation do you just give up and look for different clients um i think that there's there's always a realistic chance that that you really want to make sure in the beginning when when you're meeting look for the very first coffee for the very first talk that you're kind of trying to understand what kind of organization i'm dealing with here uh and realizing for example that incentives that's part of organization design so in a way what you're looking at here is bad organization design and finding a way to make the client kind of like realize that and so what what i've seen my students do and i thought that was that was quite interesting that they're basically after just a couple of weeks in the company they would just make a presentation and just kind of like give them a mirror and like this is what i see your companies like this or your companies like that and it's not to you know piss anybody off it's not to say uh this is this is i've done research and now i can i can tell you what the truth is no no it's just a way to get the client to kind of like reflect on on who they are as an organization um and i think the the the way that that goes against that is experience show people sort of say what it would mean to to work in a different way so instead of trying to make it right away into a huge project for for several years try to break it down and try to find a way okay let's just let's just try this a week let's let's let's give us a sprint to try let's let's make it really small let's just have the client experience the process because i think at the end the the experience and and the experiments they can they can really do things that that all the talk and all the great slides so it can do they really yeah get people kind of like out of the current current frame and and and allow them to see things differently yeah so it's really hard to quote unquote convince people of this new approach on paper and through words uh going through that experience is much more powerful and but that almost creates a catch 22 like they still have to make a leap into doing something that's different they still have to trust you to try it out even if it's for a week yeah have you seen what helps to help them make that leap even if it's just for a week because if a like i there is also a difference between being an in-house service designer versus a consultancy right there i i understand there's a different dynamic but still what if yeah what i've seen my students do so let me just give you this one example so i had a student who was looking at a high tech company where they were realizing that the technology people and the business people they were not really you know in touch they they were not really getting along and so a lot of ideas from from from the technology side didn't really end up in in a business case didn't really make sense from that side and so there was a feeling we need to bring these people together and and what i read a like with that student was that so the problem manifests itself quite late in the process but he felt the solution should be much more ahead in the process and so he took a a meeting that was quite early in the process and and he redesigned that meeting and i think it took him i don't know like four months or so to get them to just do one experiment with that meeting and then they did i think in the end three three experiments with that meeting and afterwards the client was like you know what i wish we would have done that much earlier i wish we would have done that 15 times and it's really like getting them over this hurdle to try something new for the first time yeah what i'm hearing you say in this story is like you first have to see a problem and you first have to highlight that problem because i've seen so many designers try to advocate design just for the sake of design without actually saying like this is going to help you be a better company by solving the challenge you have there and i think a lot of companies don't realize which challenges they have and if you don't highlight a challenge like then design is a solution to a non-existing challenge and then like it's it's super hard to quote unquote sell it yeah and so one of the things that that i really took from pragmatism that i think is super interesting is the idea that how important doubt is so if your client doesn't doubt the current organization design how can you do organization design and so and and it's something else than selling a solution yeah it's it's really about you you kind of like need to to get them into a conversation that that creates doubt on their side into their their existing ways of working and it might be it might be too difficult at the beginning to get them convinced that if you define beforehand what you get you cannot get anything that's really designed or that's really innovative that might be a difficult sell in the beginning but it's they really need to doubt the current situation they need to doubt the current way of organizing and if they don't doubt then it's going to be really difficult to change anything i have exactly the same experience and it's on my paper over here like one of the best strategies that i found to get people interested in doing something else is by creating doubt about the current way the current approach um how do you create doubts what's the end um so basically it's it has to be on the one hand it's it's uh it would be that people don't know what to do anymore so you you use you you delve into the situation and you kind of like try to get out of the situation the quality that's problematic it's so the the point being that is it's not the problem over here but the situation is problematic but you kind of like try to to to get what is the problematic quality of the situation and more specifically what is keeping say in this case mark uh from being able to do something about the situation so either you are like okay either there's this thing to do or that thing to do i don't know which one to do or you really completely don't know anymore what to do but it's really about the the doubt in the end is about what should i do and that you kind of like get to this point where there's an opportunity and and the space created to explore i don't really know what to do in this situation and i think that in in too many organizations uh people are almost making careers but just right away having an answer and right away knowing what what the problem is and what the solution is and that's kind of like how they how they exhibit power um and acknowledging publicly collectively we don't know is really difficult uh but also really powerful this is i think the quality of uh designers and design in general that we are very skilled at navigating the uncharted territory so the moment somebody says i don't know like my my uh i don't know my eyes lit up and i think okay this is a great opportunity to explore and i have the confidence that we'll arrive at something good at the uh at the other side and i completely recognize what you're saying about uh that solutions and answers are more valued than asking questions right within organizations now related to this another challenge that we sort of spoke about earlier was uh reframing the problem and this is i think also a classic uh challenge within the design process you encounter clients who approach you with um maybe not even already a solution in mind but already answers to the direction where the solution should be going into and in the design process we advocate for well let's let's ask the five wise let's understand why this is the problem before we actually start solving this um but to my experience not every client is open to redefining re-exploring reframing the problem have you found similar challenges uh yeah absolutely maybe that's as always what i say that that's like if you study design it's like one of the first things of course that you learn like whatever the client thinks is the problem and it's a solution it's not the solution or it's not the problem because else they wouldn't be there so and and and how how do you do that and i think it's one thing to hear that in a lecture hall at the beginning of your of your of your design studies it's something else to actually be at a client that is big that could make you a lot of money and then from the very first meeting to kind of like poke them to realize is this actually the problem and really more importantly that to understand that what what is a problem is sort of say a situation where you don't really know what to do next uh so it's it's it's not that there's just a problem out there but the the situation is is the problem and you are part of the situation and i think what what a lot of companies then don't realize is that the the problem is is as much about you as about sort of say the other stuff in in the situation and kind of like that therefore like you need this this reflectivity to to explore so how am i part of this problem how is the way that i relate to this problem how is the way that i look at this problem how is the way that i that i pick out things in the situation that i think are relevant how is that already part of the problem and that that is really difficult and therefore it's it's it's really important as as designers to kind of like understand what what is actually meant with frames and what does it actually mean to reframe and and not just to take it as oh it's just a way to be creative yeah it is it is creative but it's it is deeper than than just having new ideas and then uh you encounter you get like you said in a conversation with our client uh how do you pivot or make them interested or create the space to redefine reframe the actual challenge i think it's it's a big part of this is actually just making them aware of how they currently look at the problem and making them aware of that is only like it's it's it's a way to to look at the problem i'm not saying that it's illegitimate it's not the wrong way but it's just just realize it's one of the ways to look at this and uh i think what's what's really strong here is is metaphors so uh analogies could also work but i think metaphors maybe are a bit looser that that you that you try to to look at the situation from different perspectives so say if you was that person of say if you were that person uh if if if this wasn't a solution of this this wasn't the problem how would you how would you else look at this and so kind of like to to to challenge the the the client to to on the one hand kind of like explore their own experience but also to kind of like challenge them to to come up with a different way of looking at this so i think this relates to what we just said about creating doubt and your client might be right about what the real problem is they might be but the thing that we want to try to do is to show them that there might also be other opportunities other things to explore and see if they are interested enough to explore those other opportunities and i think and i'm curious if you've seen similar things the question i tend to ask clients is how certain are you how much are you willing to gamble that you're right like what if we spend i don't know 10 20 percent of our time exploring the other options and figuring out which one is uh the thing that we actually should be solving versus going all in into your current situation and figuring out that the end that it was not the way forward so i used to have those kind of conversations but have you seen similar approaches to getting getting unstuck like getting a client unstuck and getting them open to reframe i think so one one thing that really works well of course is is storytelling and i think in in in these kind of cases what what can work well is is that you kind of like give the client the stories that show them so i've had clients before where where it worked like this and i think the most drastic thing is that that you can just say hey so you know you're the client i'm i'm i'm the designer if you if you want it like this that's okay but i i would think based on my expertise and my experience over three months we're gonna have a situation like this you know i'm i'm okay with this you're the client that's okay but it's it's just my experience is that this might happen and then you have a very different discussion in three months later when when what what you had predicted is actually happening and and to add to this like i think we should put it even more forward that this is our expertise like you can hire just like you said you can hire us to implement your solution but you're not getting all the value and the added value of hiring a designer because a designer can help you to figure out and to minimize risk that that you do the wrong thing and and if a client isn't interested in that like you should really doubt if this is the person you should be talking to yeah yeah no i think that that's something that is really difficult and it's very easy to say as as someone working in a university and having a relatively secure job in that sense um but i think there's there's really a point for working hard to come to the point where you can start to be a bit more selective of your clients and to be able to say like hey like this is based on my my expertise i i don't see how this would work so finding a way to kind of like put lightly tell the client that i i don't see this working and i think especially when you talk about organization design that's even like the service design really is difficult enough but i think organization design is there's even more politics involved and so if you're if you're trying as an external consultant without the proper buy-in to to to change things that's gonna be really difficult so when you uh say proper buy-in what are we talking about in this case um so i think that that that top management buy-in should be there i think that's obvious in the sense of they they literally buy you in so to say um but also the the buy-in of of not just the the clients external to that company but also the the users in in the in the company so realizing that any service design and any any organization design also touches upon the employee experience and thinking about that experience and thinking about how how can we also design for that experience and how can we how can we sort of say improve both at the same time and and involve the employees in this process and again this to a sort of extent feels like a catch 22 like if you don't have the buy-in from the top um you you won't be able to get this going but to get the buy-in from the top you have to start somewhere right yeah yeah yeah a big question mark around my head yeah yeah um so i i'm at the end of the day of course um i my my my expertise is is uh more around the theory of organizations a bit the theory of of of of of design so at some point i'm also reaching what i what i don't know yet um what i just know in in in what i've what i've done in in my own field work but also what i've done with my students is you need to find the people that that have this curiosity and at the same time they that have the cloud in in the organization i think what what designers also need to learn if the the bigger your projects get is how can i coach a client who's not so good yet at selling internally maybe in selling better and that can be um uh like that that that say the students present themselves i mean that that's that's that's an easy one uh so also when when i was doing my uh my bachelor thesis at at a big uh high tech company i was also in the end the one presenting to to the director of of of that part of the business uh and i think that that creates a lot of space because the students are they just have a different status than say a normal employee but i think it's it's it's really about trying to to find the people that have this openness but i think also the the yeah really the the designers they they they need to not just trust on on the political skills of the person that is kind of like their main contact in the company but also really understand much more into the company what's going on here what what's the playing field so that is partially understanding the organizational design it's also about understanding the organizational cultures understand political games and trying to see how can we help in this situation to to better get this convincing process going yeah and i think this is the second super practical thing i hope people take away from this episode it's like the first thing we said about creating doubt the second one is about helping your client to actually sell these ideas internally this is this is super practical and you can you should become a partner an ally rather than somebody like a client and and someone like it shouldn't be a transaction you should be on the same team and you should understand that your client is probably also somebody who is trying to change things within their organization and you can support them like they need your support and this is a something practical you can do yeah absolutely yeah now the other thing you mentioned was about experiments you mentioned experiments already a few times yeah why do you feel that the role of experimentation and experiments is so crucial so i'm trying not to be db too academic but but really roughly speaking so you have can i have kind of like an a rational approach to things so where you where in your head you you come up with the best way to do things etc and then afterwards you eventually do things you can be really empirical in the sense of you can really look at at current experience and and and try to learn from that so not be too busy with with the great ideas but really see okay how are things actually going but there's a third way that kind of like combines both and that is that's the role of experiments so where you also look at how things are but where you also think about uh sort of say other possibilities but where you really in practice try to see okay how does that actually work and uh pragmatism uh so of course it's it's actually a a big big philosophy um and pragmatism kind of like highlights a different way to approach experiments so when i'm talking about experiments i'm not talking about a lab experiment but i'm much more talking about yeah what what we would call design experiments what others might call more something like field experiments so where you actually out in the field and you try things differently but it's really about sort of say doing things and seeing what reaction comes uh and kind of like comparing that to but how what did i think what what would happen so it's it's a different kind of logic uh of that and that a really important part of experiments is the stakeholders that you design experiments together with the stakeholders that you think beforehand already about okay so let's let's figure this out together so if we were to do this how how would this go and and and especially how how would an experiments and the results out of the experiment actually convince anybody in this in this company um so let me give you an example so i was i was working in a in a head company and and one of the things that happened there is that that clients were complaining about packaging the packaging that that the products were coming in at that moment and so they they spent quite some money on on redesigning the packaging and the the the boss of of that that business unit looked at the packaging didn't like it and basically throughout you know quite a big sum of of design work just because he thought he didn't like it even though they were concrete customer complaints and and and and really the problems also in in in selling the products based on the packaging and for me there was it was an interesting moment in the sense of like okay so there's there's quite a lot going on here there's there's they've done experiments they have have the the the contact with the client and and the customers all of that and still it doesn't really matter in the end if someone at the top can just on a whim decide i don't like this packaging so yeah that's that's part of how organizations work the uh power dynamics the the the politics um and the the way i try to describe experimentation is by thinking with your hands uh and seeing what happens i like uh the metaphors of the improvisation theater you put out a joke you see how the crowd reacts and then you you put out another joke if we go back to what we started this episode with the incompatibility with how organizations currently work like there are there is a lot of incentive on being efficient like doing things the right way uh increasing quality experimentation isn't about efficiency like it's it's it's exactly the opposite how do we how do we deal with this incompatibility yeah i think this is uh the the notion of uh effectiveness versus efficiency and then there's even a third one efficacy which is it's even talked about less and i think it's realizing like just because you're doing something efficiently it doesn't mean that you're doing the right thing and it's it's it's really about that uh and i think so what the way that engineers approach design of course is is is unless they design engineers is optimization and then efficiency so to say is is really close but that doesn't fundamentally change the thing that you're doing it just makes it better but it doesn't like qualitatively it doesn't really change and i think so what i what i find really interesting with with experiments is like it's it's the interesting experiments are not the ones that are successful the interesting experiments are the ones that fail in interesting ways so it's they don't it's not that they're either successful or they fail it's really the the ones that fail in ways where you're like what just happened wait why why why did they do it like this like what's going on here and and really delving into these kind of moments so like in a way what what you're looking for in in design experiments is is this kind of like interesting failure that shows you that certain uh hypothesis certain ideas certain assumptions that that you have are actually not right and and you're trying with experiments are kind of like you're trying to tease that out and try to see okay how things are actually have you um have you seen uh tools methods designers can use to create this space for experimentation and i think one thing i've seen a lot is just don't don't ask for permission just just do something and then see what happens but i'm curious if you've seen in your work if if there's such a strong focus on um doing things better instead of figuring out what the right thing is to do that this creates tension which is in a lot of cases almost it's very hard to overcome but i'm curious if you've seen ways to actually do that i think so i'll answer this a bit differently so um also from from from pragmatism one of the things that i find really interesting is that that pragmatism has a has a perspective also on on on how humans are and basically what pragmatism tries to do is it's it's not really problem solving but let's to make to say simple they try to understand humans through problem solving they try to understand how how humans solve problems and therefore how humans are and the same can be applied to organizations as well so that you look at like how how do people solve problems around here if there's a problem like do they go to someone is there like a committee that that like what's the way that this organization deals with problems and and what's the way that this organization learns and i think it can be helpful to kind of like point out to the organization like so where the new idea is coming from and realizing that also often the expectation is that somewhere in a in a meeting room someone suddenly has seen the lights and and that suddenly knows how to do things and and what i find really interesting to to to find out is that in in japan apparently they they have a way of of that they call it managing by walking around where they highlight that the work is happening on the shop floor so as a manager you better be on the shop floor because that's where the problems are and that's also where the solutions have to be and so don't stay in your meeting rooms don't stay in your office because that's not really where the problems are and that's also not really where the solutions are and so i think in that sense kind of like also making the clients see hey you there's there's a big bit of a gap here about how how you as an organization learn but i think the other thing is is realizing that experiments can be super small as long as you kind of like for yourself have thought about okay what what what do i expect to happen and also maybe maybe quite importantly what would show me that it's not the way that i think so kind of like what what success what's failure here and then kind of like explore okay what what actually happened and and what does that actually mean so this is again super interesting highlighting the gap between the current approach and the deficiencies in the current approach and then this creates an an opportunity to bring in a different approach which which could be more experimentation a challenge that is related to this is you talked about failure in a lot of organizations there isn't a culture to allow failure you mentioned when things fail in an interesting way a lot of people in organizations don't want people don't want things to fail at all this is something also that we have to take into account when we're thinking about redesigning or designing the organization the existing culture yeah so I think one thing that that we have to realize is that a lot of what we think is organization of what's management is just one way to look at this and that a lot of that relates back you know just the way that we talk about school as just a way to to get children to to work in industry in factories it's it's similarly also the way that we organize and manage is still really very much related to kind of like the the industrialization and what what was important there and what was important there was so to say the division of labor the predictability etc so there you really wanted things you know you want the people at the top that that that knew what the control things they knew knew how to predict and plan things but that is of course let that that works well if things are more or less stable of course back then also things were not stable but but maybe they were sort of say instable in in in in less complex ways than than nowadays and if if the environment is changing so quickly and your organization inside is not changing so quickly not so flexible that's a really big problem and so the way that that still organizations are designed and like with organization design also mean the way that we teach managers the way that we educate managers the way that we structure MVAs etc there also these implicit ideas about how to organize how to manage how to design organizations and and and we we really also need to address these things and and where people used to make sort of say a career by by being always right that that we also need to find ways to have people make a career because they acknowledge that they were not right and because they were willing to learn and because they were willing to experiment and and and do things differently and and kind of like as an organization also realize like you need different kinds of people for different kinds of situations and and therefore only picking one type is not going to be beneficial down the line I don't know if that's a question but yeah well what I'm getting from this is that we are currently in a transition phase from a very manufacturing and factory oriented process and an industrial age process still into a different way of working into different challenges and this has been going on for a few decades already and with the transition will probably continue for a few more decades and this like this makes it challenging because unless you're a startup who gets this right from the very first day in many other situations you'll have to deal with heritage as a designer you'll have to facilitate this transition you'll have to accept that you're taking into account ways of working that people have been doing for many years and it's just part of the of the game now I'm heading towards the end of the conversation I'm curious like if we understand that this is part of the game what are some of the things that or what are some of the areas designers could start growing more into to make this transition easier to better facilitate this transition so what is the thing that we now overlook maybe which is like an easy opportunity for us I think I think in a way designers already have lots of what they need to design organizations and I always point to if you if you design a workshop you know how to design organization because a workshop is a mini organization there's maybe not the predefined purpose goal in the sense of the other people might but but at least there is you have people that are collaborating to achieve something that something might emerge out of the workshop might be defined beforehand but but if you know that already then you already know a lot about about collaboration but I think what what designers still really need is is a better understanding of organizations and so where do we find that well so what I found really interesting is so ethnography as as an approach of course I mean it's it's it's busy with with understanding cultures you have designed ethnography you have organizational ethnography and so one of the ideas that I'm that I'm working on is is what about organizational design ethnography so a kind of ethnography that allows you to understand the organization but also gives you the insights that you need to start redesigning that organization and so I've been working quite a lot with with my students on trying to help them find really practical ways to better understand the organization better understand kind of like the in that sense kind of like the matter that they're dealing with if they're trying to to redesign that organization but it's it's really kind of like developing an empathy into the organization that goes beyond just the single people that you see and seeing them only as individuals but starting to see them as as as social as as as a collective as as being tied together so instead of only looking at oh this person is like that and that person doesn't get it that find ways to to see the bigger picture and and I think that's really something that can start from day one that's the worst first time you talk to a client the way that you when you look at their website like all these interactions can give you really rich insights into the organization but you kind of like need to develop a sensitivity to it and I think the other thing is you know the way that that's a you and I we look at a phone or we look at a laptop or we look at whatever I have here and and we see the design in that and the same thing we need to start seeing the current design of an organization and that that's not you know the design is not something necessarily that that you can see but that you kind of like understand okay what are the different parts here and what are the processes and how are the interrelated and and that's really difficult but I think we we need to develop the sensitivity of of where the organization is now and especially also what the organization design is now what I'm what I'm getting from this conversation is that me maybe take too much for granted the ability of our organization to implement and execute on the solutions the outcomes of a design process and we're sort of starting to learn the hard way that if we make that assumption a lot of things out of the design process will fail so it's smarter to actually also start thinking about the delivery of or the environment that needs to execute on the things that come out of the design process rather than just assuming that it will happen yeah but I think what I'm what I'm proposing here is is more radical in the sense of that you cannot have implementation or delivery a delivery later the organization is there it's already there and you're already starting to redesign at the moment that you that you start having different kind of meetings different kind of kind of activities and and see it much more as a continuous process where you're not designing something for over x number of years but where you really starting now and you have an imagination of the future but you really need to start in the now and that requires basically that implementation delivery is like the same moment that that you're designing almost because because you're exploring ongoingly how to do things differently and and that's why I like the for example the theater metaphor like the implementation of the theater is the execution of the theater like of course you have a screenplay you have a script you have those kind of things but the moment people experience the theater is the moment that it's actually performed and I think in especially in service design it's mostly the same you don't do service design you don't upfront and then you execute on it like service design is is the implementation and I think that's one of the major like if I have to make a distinction that's the biggest difference between how organizations work and how the design process works is they used to produce stuff that then gets sold and implemented while designers work in a much more theater oriented way where the thing that it's where the value is coming from is implemented designed at the at the same moment and those two models will need to transition but I think there's there's maybe one distinction that's really important so I think a really effective way to do experiments is role playing so I want you to act in a different way let's explore what's possible I give you a role with that role comes new behavior let's explore that new behavior together but it's still you know it's it's not you're not directly on the shop floor because you're not right away in the production process let's still create a kind of a space called that says with whatever where we can fail in interesting ways so so it should be very close to to implementation actually doing it but I think it's still beneficial to have it in that sense a bits that that you have kind of like the boundaries around it that allow it to to to fail without the rest fading and I think in that sense role playing is is is super powerful because people are kind of like used to oh okay you know oh I'll read this role oh I do that yeah okay I could do that but that gives them kind of like permission to behave in a different way I think there is a still will be for a long time a lot of friction that will experience as designers bringing in a different approach and trying to get people who are used to work in a different way thinking a different way to lean towards this if you had to summarize our conversation what would you say how would you summarize the last 50 minutes I think so I I I'm a bit of stickler with with the word so what I what I really design so organization design is old but the design of organization design is just a metaphor it's just a plan what we're looking at is when does design become organizational and that's organizational design and I think as as designers we have to think much more and realize much more when does our designing change organization and that there's already a lot that we do that's already really powerful with that so it's not that design has to change completely but it's there are certain skills that we need to understand and develop and I think that's understanding the current organization and really understanding the current organization design and being able in a moment with a client where they're behaving in a certain way understand oh that's the organization design talking that's the incentives and that's exactly what we want to deal with and then finding really ways through experiments to to get them out of this reframe them and help them to see things differently if people want to dig deeper into this topic what are some good resources that would get them going I think there's a nice introductory book by Naomi Stanford on organization design she's writing a new edition on it and I think for any kind of designer interested in organization design I think that's a good first read but what you have to realize it's a very distinct perspective on design that might not really feel that design but I think it's a good way to get into that topic I think the work of Donald showed where when he writes about the organizing inquiry can be can be really interesting but that's like 40 years old but I think it's still very relevant it's a very different perspective and there's a book called managing as designing it's also a bit older from 2004 from Stanford but I think there's a lot of really interesting essays in there that can give you a different way to look at this and that's of course academic literature and you can just look online on on into my work that I'm that I'm working on that should also give you a good idea of what what organizational design could be awesome and those are really good things and then we'll add all the relevant links in the show notes and I like books that are 40 years old and are still relevant today I recommend service designers to read books that are not about service design but about other topics so these sound like very good resources I think that's all we have time for in this episode if people want to continue I think I can only refer them to your podcast there are probably a lot of good good material over there also the link will be in the show notes thanks again for addressing this topic I don't feel like we're done but at least we are raising attention to something that needs to that there where there is an opportunity for us as a design community to grow yes exactly and please please reach out with with your question so I'm really trying to do research that is practically relevant but for that I need input from practice for that I need to engage with practitioners so if you have questions about organization design if you struggle with things especially around the topics that I discussed please reach out and let's find a way to engage on this awesome that you made it all the way here I really hope you enjoyed the conversation and if you did make sure to click that subscribe button if you haven't done so already thanks a lot for watching to the service design show if you want more make sure to check out the next video I've got lined up for you see you there