 In this video you're going to learn about seven really useful metaphors that will help you to explain service design even to the people who have never heard about it. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi everybody, I'm Robert Bough. Welcome to the service design show. This is episode 117. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about empowering you with the most effective skills and strategies so you can design services that win the hearts of people and business. And the guest in this episode is Robert Bough. And if that name sounds familiar, it might very well be because you've seen episode 99 of the service design show where Robert was also a guest. He's a longtime innovation and design thought leader from Chicago, USA. And in this first episode of 2021, we're going to do something different, fun and hopefully useful for you as service design remains a very intangible and abstract concept to a lot of people. Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways to actually explain what it is. And Robert and I came up with the idea to share seven metaphors that will help you to explain service design, make it tangible even to the people who have never heard about the concept. So we're going to talk about and compare service design to jazz performance, mountain climbing, theater and four other things. I really hope that you're going to enjoy this episode. I had a lot of fun with Robert talking about these metaphors and sharing them. I hope that you experienced the power of a good metaphor and that you'll find one that works for you. And if you come up with your own metaphor, make sure to share it in the comments with the rest of the service design community. If you're new to this channel, welcome and I'd love to have you to subscribe because we bring a new video that helps to level up your service design skills at least once a week. So click that subscribe button and that bell icon to be notified when new videos come out. Now it's time to sit back, relax and enjoy this conversation with Robert Bow. Welcome to the show, Robert. Thank you, Mark. How are you today? Good. Good to have you back. And happy new year. Happy new year. Thanks for having me. Yeah, people who are thinking having you back. Well, yeah, you were a guest on episode legendary episode number 99. That's 18 episodes ago. For the people who haven't seen that episode yet or haven't listened to it yet. Could you give a brief introduction who you are? For sure. So I am a innovation and design leader based in Chicago. Nowadays I'm a freelance, so I simply help agencies and clients with strategic guidance, servant leadership, creative direction. Awesome. Things have changed in the last 18 episodes. If people are curious what has changed, they need to check out episode 99. Robert, we're going to create a very special episode today. It's different than the other interviews I've done, and this is going to be a really fun to kick off the new year. So a little short background story on this episode. We started chatting on LinkedIn about what was it again? About metaphors. Yeah, what happened with metaphors? How did we end up there? Yeah, we're trying to back and forth about the power of metaphors. Could you use metaphors to put a spotlight on different aspects of service design? As you know, a metaphor is a powerful way of comparing two things with each other. And by using different metaphors, you're really exploring service sign in different ways. So I think we discussed back and forth, and eventually we came up with a number of metaphors. We came up with seven. There are actually many, many more. We could have squeezed in, but for the sake of this show, we are doing seven metaphors together. And they're fun. This is such a fun way, by the way. Metaphors is such a powerful device. It's a great way to enhance your prose, to write in a bit more vivid, sort of exciting way. But it's also a great way to draw creativity, by the way. I use metaphors all the time in lateral thinking and co-creation sessions. But to the point now for this show, there's also a powerful way to highlight some aspects of service sign, even hidden aspects of service sign. I think I was thinking about why do I find metaphors so useful and so powerful? And it's mainly because you're tapping into an existing mental model. So rather than trying to explain something to somebody from a blank canvas, using metaphors, you're tapping into something that somebody is already familiar with. And that makes explaining something so much easier. And metaphors work great for that. I use them all the time. And like you said, what's interesting also about metaphors, and we should highlight that, is that the intention is never to be complete. Like it's just one perspective, it's one lens. You use a metaphor to shine a light on a specific part of, in this case, service design, and then you need different metaphors to shine a different light on something else, right? Yeah. Any metaphor, by the way, will have its pros and cons in terms of describing such an abstract concept of service design. So with specific metaphors, you're highlighting specific aspects of service sign, but also perhaps neglecting other aspects. That's why it's a good thing to be able to recover seven different metaphors here in this show. So we're definitely giving it 360 view of service sign. Yeah, seven metaphors. I think it's about time to just get into them, share them with the listeners and viewers. And also, I'm already inviting everybody who's listening and viewing to come up with your own metaphor, share them with us. We'd love to know what your take is on service design. Robert, shall we just start? Shall I pick the first one? Please, go ahead. Okay. And I have a cheat sheet. So I'll need to cheat sometimes and look at my, look at my notes. But we're going to start off with an easy one, which I talked about quite often on the show. And that is the service design as a jazz performance. So what I find interesting about the analogy with jazz is that jazz is delivered and sort of implemented in the moment. You cannot store it upfront. You cannot put it on a record and jazz performance happens in the moment. And a jazz performance isn't measured by the quality of a jazz performance isn't measured by how well they stick to the specifications. It's not about management. There are other factors that are much more important. Those are factors like is the band who is playing in tune with the audience of that evening? Do they feel the vibe of the room? So a key skill there is really being in the moment, being able to improvise, having your senses open and understanding what makes, what it takes to make the crowd happy. So for a good jazz performance, what you need to do is you need to prepare and think about which venue you're performing in, who the audience will be, what equipment you have. But then at some point, it just has to happen. You just have to play the music and trust that you've done everything you can in the environment so that your performance is great. Now, stepping into service design, I think what we do as service designers is often preparing the environment. We're thinking about customer needs. We're thinking about business needs. We're thinking about employee needs. Trying to understand that and then setting up the environment in a way that enables the people who need to deliver the service in the moment are equipped to do so. So I think that's the best we can do as service designers. We don't have full control over it. We just have to trust the process eventually and let jazz be jazz. So that's my first metaphor. What do you think? No, I love it. I think jazz is a very powerful metaphor. But also, think about jazz improvisation, for example. So imagine having all these skilled musicians on stage that are lots of experience, a lot of training, of course, but they can improvise in the moment. It's also very powerful. So that's just another dimension to your very powerful metaphor, jazz. Yeah. And jazz really reflects on how services are delivered. I think the analogy between an improvised jazz performance and the delivery of service, I think there's a very strong link between those two. Yeah, totally. I love it. I love the jazz one. Okay, I'm going to take another one. I'm going to talk about the services liner as a mountain guide. So imagine you have this guide who is guiding and assisting a climbing party up and down the mountain in a safe, efficient, and rewarding way. So you have the mountain guide and you have the climbing party. The climbing party probably is pretty inexperienced, relatively speaking, or they don't know that particular terrain that well. So I think it's a powerful metaphor. The services liner as a mountain guide is a direct parallel, of course, that the service liner is a guide and facilitator. You are guiding and facilitating and leading the client and design team all the way from exploration to implementation. So it's a direct parallel there, I feel. Another aspect of course is that the mountain guide is also responsible for the safety of the climbing party. Imagine that the guide is handling complex situations and making life or death decisions under intense pressure. That's powerful stuff, really. There are so many risks involved when you're ascending and descending mountains. You have things like the terrain itself, weather conditions, inexperienced climbers, that might be overconfident or underconfident, performance anxiety, stress, dehydration, fatigue, gear issues, blisters, you name it. So all these risks involved. So a big part of a mountain guide would do is to identify and assess these risks, even prioritize them, and then find ways to mitigate them or at least control them. So risk management is a big, big part of what a mountain guide would do. So that means that the guide is really planning and thinking ahead. So it takes a lot of rigorous planning and preparation, but is also thinking on his or her feet, constantly assessing and reassessing what's happening and making decisions on the fly. So I love that sort of parallel to service line I feel. The service line is also constantly thinking and planning ahead. Are we solving the right problems? Are we finding the right solutions to begin with? What are the intended and unintended consequences of our actions and solutions? Who are we including and excluding with our solutions? What obstacles are standing in our way? How do we overcome these obstacles? How is the team feeling and performing? How can we remove impediments so we can boost performance? How can we streamline and simplify the process? So I feel there's a direct parallel here to what a mountain guide does and what a service vendor should be doing. Also risk, of course, is a big part of any complex service line project. A complex service line project and a fuzzy problem in solutions space is always fraught with a number of risks, both expected and unexpected risks, by the way. So you have all these things like scope creep, cost overruns, solutions that not meet client expectations and so on. So a big part of a service line I would do, I feel, is to manage these risks and try to mitigate them as best as they can. So the interesting parallel I feel, there's also another thing as well, is that the mountain guide is also a problem solver and uses his or her toolbox to solve these problems. So this is a direct parallel I feel to a service designer. It also has a toolkit, obviously, that he or she is dipping into. And also there's a nice thing here I feel that it's about finding solutions for particular problems up in the mountain that might not be an optimal solution at all. Or you might come up with a solution that will create other problems down the road. And there's a direct parallel I feel to service design. There's no such thing as an optimal design solution. And it's all about making compromises sometimes and assessing the pros and cons of the solutions that you do come up with. It's also about using tools properly. So a mountain guide, of course, by tools I mean here that you have climbing gear, you have climbing techniques, you have fall protection systems in place. And there's a direct parallel I feel to a service designer here also has a big extensive toolkit. It's about understanding which tools to use in a particular moment to solve a particular problem. It's also understanding the context. So you might have to use the tools differently. So it's also about understanding how to adapt these tools and combine these tools and synchronize these tools over time to really solve the problem effectively. So nice parallel there I feel. One more thing is worth adding as well around the mountain guide as a metaphor that the mountain guide sees him or herself very much as a client-centric instructor and teacher. I love that aspect actually not a as a business coach. As a business coach is really good at asking powerful questions. So people can sort of come up with the answers themselves. Here's more hands-on instructing and guiding, which I quite like. There's a nice parallel to service design I feel because we are also our job is to make sure that the client team is properly equipped but we're also giving hands-on instructions we needed. So it's not just about asking questions it's actually instructing them and teaching them. So really what we're doing really is transferring our design only ways of thinking, working and making to clients. So it's a big knowledge transfer going on. And finally there's a lot of rigor to be a proper mountain guide. It takes lots of training, lots of practice, a lot of dedication, lots of passion. So it's a direct parallel to service design there I feel. But also you need all these physical skills. You need these technical skills. You need these psychological skills. And I think that's a really powerful parallel to service design as well. And you need also undergo a rigorous certification process in order to become a guide. And then also you need this commitment to lifelong learning if you want to be the best and stay the best. I love that parallel to service design as well. So you know Malcolm Gladwell, he says that it requires 10,000 hours of concentrated practice to become a, to possess a world-class skill. And there's a parallel of field of service design here because I feel to be really good at service design it does take a lot of practice, a lot of training. Especially if you want to tackle these wicked problems and complex challenges on behalf of complex organizations. So what do you think Marcus? There's a powerful metaphor. I haven't come across this one yet, but I love it. There are so many things in it. Like a few things that I really like. It's the humbleness and the being of service as a guide. But also the huge responsibility as you said that comes along with this. It's not just being on the sideline. You actually are responsible for people's lives. And the other thing that I really like is the analogy with the uncertainty about the environment. You're climbing a hill where you don't know what's going to happen next, what's on the next edge. And you sort of have to think on your feet, like you said. And I feel that's exactly what service designers are doing as well. They're navigating uncharted territory. And you need a certain type of skills for that, both mental, physical. Yeah, love it. And you're not just talking for yourself either. You're leading a often at least inexperienced client and design team along the way as well. So I love that aspect of this metaphor. So the only question I would have there is like, where's the leadership? Like if you are a guide in where's the balance between facilitating versus leading people? Because I think having a voice in the design process is also quite important. Yeah. Yeah, great. I think too many service designers, I feel, are simply facilitating and don't actually assert themselves in the process. Just like you said. Yeah. So I think that's important. And I think a mountain guide, it should be, is probably a leader. Well, avoiding people to go to that cliff, because might end up disastrous. Love it. Mountain guide. Shall we move on to the next one? Okay. Go ahead. This is my second one. And then it's one that's also close to my heart. It's going to be a metaphor around a soccer team. So in order to deliver a service, you have to, you cannot do it by yourself. You have to do it as a team. So if you go and look at a sports team, and in this case, a soccer team, there isn't a single team out there who wins games just by one star player. There are many examples where teams have spent millions buying star players and still lose to teams who have a strong strategy. So even though star players can help your team's performance, you cannot solely rely on that. You always need somebody who is making a strategy, who is making the plan on how to work together and make sure that the 11 players on the pitch actually accomplish a goal together. And in this case, in a soccer team, that's a coach. And what's really important is that the coach isn't the boss of the team. He's actually part of the team, even though he's not on the pitch scoring the goals. Without a coach, probably the team wouldn't be able to win any games because everybody would be playing their own game. And the same goes for the coach. If he doesn't have the players on the field working and doing their stuff, delivering the goods, he won't win any games either. So even if he's not on the pitch, he's delivering to the performance. And I think if we look at how service design works, you often see that as a service designer, we're often on the sideline. So we're not the people who are delivering the actual service. We're not the frontline staff. We're usually also not the people who are implementing specific touch points or channels. We're sort of there to help and coordinate, orchestrate the entire process and make sure that everybody is aligned on the same goal. And that is to create happy customers. And what's really important here to note is that as a coach, it helps when you know what a striker needs to do and what a defender needs to do. If you speak their language, otherwise, how are you going to help them to achieve the goal? And I think it's the same for service designers. You will not be an expert in a specific channel or a specific medium or a specific technology, but it really helps if you know a little bit about chatbots. If your service is delivered to a chatbot or you know something about hospitality when you work in a hospitality environment, in order to actually get people working together on a similar performance, you need to know something about the people who are delivering the service. So I think as service designers, we're the coach on the sideline. We're not above the team. We're part of the team and we need to speak each other's language. So service design is a team sport and that's my metaphor. I love it. I'm a big fan of soccer as well, by the way. So for me, it's a perfect metaphor. It's a great one to emphasize the teamwork aspect of it. You could also apply this metaphor to the actual setup of a design team as well. If the manager or the coach is some kind of design director, you know, empowering the team, and then you have different roles on this design team. It could be, you know, playing different parts and working together, of course. The only drawback with sports metaphors, it's very much of a winning mentality. And the question is, what does it mean to win in the service design context? It's about winning hearts of people, of customers. I like that. Okay, there we go. You just nailed it. Winning the hearts and minds of customers, right? For me also, that's the ultimate goal of a sports game as well. And I think winning a game is the head fake. The ultimate goal of a sports team is to win the hearts of its fans. And it can be done through winning games, but that's not the only thing. So I think we're in the same boat as service designers. Great stuff. I love it. This is a powerful metaphor, I would say. You can also imagine other team sports as well, like volleyball and so on, right? But it's a really, really powerful one. Great stuff. Do you have another one? Yeah, I do have another one. I have tons more, or at least two more. I'm going to talk about theater. And that is a very, very rich metaphor in service design. And in service marketing, it's been around for decades, literally. And just think about the service blueprint with the onstage and backstage components of it. That comes directly from using theater as a metaphor. So this has been around since the early 80s. So the very first sort of academics wrote about this back in 1983. So it's been around for a long, long time. And the purpose really was to emphasize the difference between services marketing and product marketing. So if you're a believer in services marketing, then you believe that services are co-produced and co-delivered over time. And there's very tight collaboration between customers and employees. So this metaphor is very apt for high contact, high touch type of services like airports, or airlines, hospitals, and so on. Things like that. So what's the best way not to break this down? I'm going to use the marketing mix, the extended marketing mix for services. Have you heard about the four P's, Mark? Have heard about them. I'm not an expert. Yeah, I think it's something actually, service signage should dip into, by the way, the world of marketing. It's very powerful. We can learn a lot from them actually. And remember also, service marketing came way before a service design. So there's a lot to learn from that field. But remember the classic four P's, right, would be product, place, promotion, and price. I'm going to use seven P's just to explain services. So I would add also physical evidence, process, and people to seven P's. I won't go through all seven P's now, but just use this as a sort of a mental model to explain theater as a metaphor in services sign. So let's start with the product one. So imagine here, we're looking at theater productions, we're looking here at performances in place. So the customer offering really is the play itself, the performance itself, obviously. But also imagine supplementary services wrapped around this performance, anything that will help the audience, the participant to discover, book, pay for, enjoy, and digest the performance itself. So you have the core product performance, but also all these supplementary services wrapped around it. Very apt for service design. And then you take the performance itself, you can divide that into three acts. We're a common way of doing it. Sometimes you see five acts, but typically see three acts. If you talk about theater, right, to talk about the setup, the confrontation, the resolution. While we don't really follow that in services sign and customer experiences, we do tend to divide it into a number of acts, typically three. So I at least talk about the pre-delivery experience, the delivery experience, and the post-delivery experience. Take just take one example of that will be the pre-flight experience, the in-flight experience, and the post-flight experience if you're working for an airline, for example. And sometimes you also see five stage alternatives to this, right? You have, for example, Dublin's 5E model, which is basically dividing the customer experience into five phases. So you have the entice, enter, engage, exit, and extend. So imagine these three acts, and then you can divide each act into a number of scenes. And these scenes would, from a service line point of view, would be these customer activities. So what is the customer doing? For example, maybe doing some research, right, around what flight to take. But it's also about customer-provider interactions. Maybe this customer is booking the flight to line. But it's also about customer-employee interactions. So maybe you're being served a meal on board a flight. So you got the performance itself, you have supplementary services. You can divide the experience into three acts, and each act can be divided into a number of scenes. It's a very apt metaphor, I feel, for service design. If you take another P here, place, obviously in a theater, right, you have the on-stage part and you have the backstage part, very apt for service design. So on-stage, of course, is where the performance takes place. Imagine the importance of set the sign, to show where the play is taking place, right. It sort of helps set the tone, the mood, helps the audience understand. It conveys a sense of place, time, mood, and atmosphere, and so on. And there's a strong parallel here to service line, obviously. We talk about the service environment or the service scape. So imagine designing that environment in which this co-delivery of the service takes place. Then you have the backstage, and that's really how the, in the world of theater, that's where technicians are operating equipment to support the performance happening. So imagine controlling things like lighting, sound, and other aspects of the set. And there's, of course, a parallel here to service design. A lot of things happen backstage that are hidden from the view of the customer. So imagine that you have backstage teams, imagine that you have supporting processes, you have systems and so on, all supporting on-stage employees serving customers. So it's a nice parallel there. In terms of people, there's another P here. In terms of people, there's some strong parallels as well between theater productions and performances and service design. So obviously you have the audience itself. Here maybe is where the metaphor breaks down a bit, because while you can debate this, I would argue that the audience in a theater performance is fairly passive. Of course, the audience is engaged, but nevertheless plays a fairly passive role in theater. In services, service experiences, the audience is highly engaged. Remember the emphasis on co-producing and co-delivering. But then you also have on-stage, you also have actors and performers. There's a direct parallel here to, of course, customers and employees that they take on these roles and they follow scripts. Then you have the artistic director, which plays a really big role for these theater productions. The person who provides the creative vision for the play, someone who interprets the playwright script, someone who hires the right artistic and technical talent, someone who plans to production together with other people like dramaturgs, choreographers, designers, technicians. This person also would run rehearsals and provide critique, and ultimately just coordinates all the elements into the final production. A very, very powerful, creative, but also a strategic role of argument. And the question is, is there a parallel really in the world of services and service experiences? Perhaps a visionary people-centered CX leader could be that person or a CMO or maybe even a CEO. Then, of course, it's also powerful that many other people also involved in planning, designing, staging and supporting live performances. So imagine all these people backstage just helping out in lots of different ways, either before the production or during the production itself. Really powerful. And, of course, it's a parallel to service design here and service experiences. So imagine you would have innovation design teams, you would have cross-functional technology teams, and also you would have cross-functional service delivery teams, all sort of supporting that experience in different ways. So powerful parallel, I feel. Finally, another P that will bring up here is process, super important of course in service design. So imagine these enabling and core processes for producing and delivering the service itself. So there's a drag parallel, obviously, between theater productions and service experiences. A little bit deeper, you have these on-stage and backstage components of it, as I mentioned before. And you also have these roles in scripts so people know what to do in these experiences. That applies not just to employees, by the way, but also to customers. So people are taking on a role and they're following a script. They could also be following social norms and unwritten rules and so on. But nevertheless, imagine this tight interaction, tight collaboration between employees and customers. And then you have some enabling processes as well. So processes that are sort of happened before the service experience itself. And two that are very apt from the world of theater that are directly applicable to services would be casting and rehearsals. Casting, of course, would be that you would be hiring and attracting and hiring the right talents. And then rehearsals is simply the equivalent would be that you would be team building, training, feedback, recognition, incentives and so on. So to motivate and engage employees. So two enabling processes, casting and rehearsals. Then there are some other pieces as well, like promotion and prices on. I will skip that now for the sake of time. But I have written a blog post about this if you want to dig a bit deeper into this particular metaphor. Finally, my final note here really is that there's a classic classic book about experiences by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore called Welcome to the Experience Economy, Work as Theater and Every Business at Stage. They published this in 1999. I remember reading it was so inspired, but never really found the opportunity to apply it. But for them, theater is actually not a metaphor. It's a model. So by that, they mean that workers are on stage and must be directed to act accordingly. So the whole book really is using theater as a model to explain how company stage experiences that will help them become truly competitive. That's it, Mark. What do you think? Yeah. Yeah. I have a few books within arm's reach, literally. And this one is one of them. This is the second edition of the Experience Economy. And I don't know if there is a third edition. And Joe Pine has been on the show, I think episode number 50. There we go. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. A classic. I must read also for any service designer. I love the theater metaphor. There's just so much in there. It's a book-worthy metaphor. Yeah. There are tons of scholars, of course, and also practitioners have made that parallels. So literally what I'm just doing is summarizing other people's thoughts and standing on the shoulders of giants. This is a very rich metaphor. Well, yeah. One of the things that's a bit quirky about this metaphor, and Joe Pine also has mentioned it in his own episode here, is that services are really about time well-saved often, while experiences are really about time well-spent. And a theater is, enters in the realm, I hope, of an experience, entertainment. So the question, what is it that a customer is really paying for is, I think, different in a service context versus a theater context. But yeah, that's just nitpicking here. It does fall apart, in some case. It is a powerful metaphor, but also does fall apart. It's not particularly good, for example, for services that are highly personalized. It's not particularly good to explain services and experiences that are highly automated or would include a big component of self-service. So it does fall apart a bit, but I feel it's really good, though, for these high-contact, high-touch type of services. Yeah. And like you said, you just need different perspectives and different lenses on things to encompass them. What I really find important, what works for me in the theater is really the backstage, the front stage, where the performance happens. That's, for me, the really, really powerful part. It does also fall apart, by the way, in terms of the audience, because I feel the audience had to pass it for me. Yeah. Pine and Gilmore, though, they tried to rectify that by introducing four different types of theater. Exactly. And there are two types of theater where street theater and improv, that would sort of engage more of the audience. Where experiences go created, actually. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We have a few more to go, so let's move on. I'm going to do one more of my favorites, and that is about organizational fitness. So before I start talking about what organizational fitness is, let me start talking about personal fitness. So you could define personal fitness as having healthy habits, eating properly, having enough sleep, exercising often enough. And the benefit of having those healthy habits is something that you usually only really experience at the end of your life, when you have grandkids who want to play soccer with you and you're still strong enough to go outside and do that while you see other people who have had a different lifestyle sitting behind the window, maybe reading a book. So there is a delayed gratification when having healthy habits and having a personal being personally fit. While I do think on short term you also see the benefits, but they are really in the long term the things that benefit you. Now, moving on to organizational fitness. What is organizational fitness? For me, organizational fitness is really about staying relevant to your customers as an organization, creating value to your customers all the time. And that means that you have to understand what your customers need, who they are, what your role in the system is, and also having healthy internal systems. And that means making sure that your employees are happy and satisfied and do the work with passion and pride. So having a healthy organization is really about those things. Being relevant to your customers, having healthy internal systems, and what's the benefit in the long term? It's not that you will be playing soccer with your kids. Now, for an organization or business is that you will outlast your competition. I think that's the big benefit of being fit as an organization. Now, what is the parallel with service design here? For me, this is exactly what service designers contribute to. We help organizations to understand who our customers are, who they are serving, what they need, stay in touch with the outside world, stay in touch with reality, help them to translate those needs into relevant offerings. And that's something you do on a continuous basis. It's not something that you do once and then you're done. Staying healthy and fit is something that you strive towards every day. There is no end goal. Now, there is another interesting parallel in this metaphor. And that's the fact that having the long term perspective in order to invest in your personal or organizational fitness is not something that a lot of people have. And I think this is the day to day struggle that we see us service designers having is like how do you persuade somebody to invest in something that might yield results in a year, five, 10 years down the road while a business is led by a horizon of three months. But again, this is not solely for an organization. Think about your own personal fitness, like how eager are you about your healthy, healthy food choice or your workout schedule, like it's hard to keep that up and think about the long term. So that's a common challenge I think we also face. So organizational fitness, I think that's what we contribute to as service designers. Love it. There's also another aspect by the way, Mark, is organizations that are fit, they're also very lean. And that leads us automatically to lean thinking. Lean startup now, but I mean lean thinking in the sense of identifying sources of waste and dramatically reducing them while maximizing customer value. So there's a nice parallel between fitness and lean thinking. Awesome. Yeah. Otherwise, I love your metaphor. It's super powerful. I'm going to jump to the next one now very, very quickly. This will be a quick one, by the way, and this is about being stuck in the middle as a service designer. And by that, I mean, imagine the spectrum of this almost like bipolar opposite. At one end, you have upstream projects. And the other end, you have downstream projects. And upstream, I mean that you're helping clients see into the future. You're helping develop that north star. You're helping them come up with these strategies for the future and come up with these compelling concepts. So that's upstream work. Downstream work is more about designing, building, piloting, launching solutions. So you're much closer to the market there, obviously, in creating real value. So you have that sort of, not really dichotomy, but you have two opposites almost. And I feel almost like the service designer nowadays is almost like stuck in the middle. So while we're really good at design thinking, human centered design, we understand multi-touch points, seamless experiences. We use our toolbox and our mindset and so on. What we do, we do really well. But we are competing, if you go downstream for a moment, we are competing with other methodologies and other disciplines that are really good at building, designing, piloting solutions and getting customer feedback in real time. So service design is also competing with agile, for example, or lean startup methodologies. And then also upstream, we're also competing with other methodologies that are very useful to help companies see into the future, see the bigger picture. So talking here about systems thinking, for example, or blue ocean strategy, jobs to be done theory, circular economy, you name it, strategic foresight in future. So the other methodologies and other disciplines that are really strategic and helping companies see into the future, identify opportunities and come up with the solutions that will truly disrupt the organization, but also the market they're operating in. And service designers are sometimes a bit lightweight compared to those type of methodologies and disciplines. So I feel if you're not careful, we're sort of stuck in the middle. We're not sort of action oriented enough. So we can sort of compete with, with lean startup and agile type of people. We're not really truly visionary or strategic enough. So we can compete with people that are really good in strategic foresight, futuring systems thinking and so on. So just my personal point of view, there's no right or wrong here, but I feel it's a big risk that we get stuck in the middle between upstream people and downstream people and upstream methodologies and downstream methodologies. Is this the battle between generalists versus specialists? A bit like that, but that said, you know, people that experts in system thinking, futuring, strategic foresight, circular economy, they're, one way they're specialists, but they're also generalists, right? They're really, they're trained to see the bigger picture, see opportunities and so on. I would argue that people that are building products and specific solutions going to market, they might be a bit more socialized, or sorry, specialized, I mean, specialized, a bit more specialized. But so it's not really about generalists versus specialists because, but it's more about the nature of your work and how big you're thinking or how actionable you are in your solutions. Server sign is sort of stuck in the middle of the field from that point of view. How do you, why isn't it appreciated or yeah, why are we lost? Yeah, I think there's a battle, it's not really taking on another metaphor here, but it's a bit of a battleground out there, right? You have different consultancies and different types of consultants all competing for the attention of C-suite. So you can either create that real value by helping executive teams make informed decisions about their future now, or, and of course by doing that, stay competitive, obviously, in the marketplace. Or you can help C-suite create real value by actually bringing solutions to the market. Services signers don't always, sometimes I feel we're not strategic enough and we're definitely not actionable enough, hence the risk of being stuck in the middle and losing our relevance, to be honest. Yeah, that's a big risk. We had a sign at the agency which said strategic doers and that combination still, after all these years, seems to be very hard to accept for a lot of people. Yes, yes, totally. We have one more to go, Robert. It's a fun one. Good, good. I'm going to talk about the mind of a chef cook. So and this metaphor will sort of puncture a big misunderstanding in the service design scene, I think. So let's start by looking at how a chef cook works. Now, if you think about preparing a meal, there is, of course, chronology, chronology, chronology, a recipe that you follow. There is a step-by-step guide on how you do certain things. And a chef does that as well. He doesn't need to have it on paper, but he follows a certain process. But at the same time, while he's preparing a meal, what he's doing is he's tasting, he's adjusting, and he's ideating on the next step. You add a pinch of salt, you taste, and you think, well, is this good enough? Or do I need to change something? That process, and I like to call that modes of operation, or modes of being, like tasting, adjusting, ideating, that's something that happens in a split second. It's not written in the recipe that a chef goes through these modes. So what's actually happening is you go from very raw ingredients to a fully prepared meal, which hopefully tastes great. Now, let's get to service design and the big misconception. When we look at one of the classic models in the service design scene, the double diamond, everybody's seen it and everybody's used it. I think it misrepresents our reality and it hurts us more than it does good in the long term because the double diamond represents progression in time, in stages like research, analysis, insights, ideation, and prototyping, something like that, or a variation of that. But that's not what happens in reality. In reality, as a service designer, you have modes of operation which are doing research, analysis, prototyping. That can happen in a minute. In a minute, you can go through these modes when you're in a workshop and working with customers, you hear something, you see an insight, you see a pattern, and then you sketch or draw something, and that is your prototype. That's what's actually happening. The things that are in the double diamond and represented as the process are actually modes of operation the same way as Chef has. So what is the progression that we have? Because we do have a chronological progression, and that chronological progression is going from low fidelity to high fidelity. We take raw ingredients, user research data, business insights, forecast trends. Those are our raw ingredients, and we work with them to create a great tasty meal. That great tasty meal is an offering that as a service that hopefully customers will love and that is profitable for business. Mind over Chef, what I would like you to pinpoint in this metaphor is think in modes of operation rather than in steps in a recipe. That was good. I love it. It's very powerful as well. I do like the double diamond in one sense, in one regard, that it puts an emphasis on diverging, conversion, thinking, which is so, so powerful, which a lot of, even deciding things actually, but a particular client doesn't always understand or start intuitive for them. I might follow more of a linear step by step process. So I love the focus on exploring something and then you start synthesizing and making decisions and so on. What I usually use double diamond for really is just to show that there's a problem space that needs to be explored and there's a solution space that needs to be explored. Absolutely. I don't like dividing it into these phases that look way to linear to your point. Exactly. Because you can bring in and make a mentality and in research work, in your strategy of element work and so on, or you even should, I would argue. So I agree with you. It's not a linear thing. You go face by face. It's highly iterative and you use actually all the tools you have there to dispose of really, to explore things, make sense of things, ideate and so on. So I agree with you. I just love the fact that it puts focus on diverging, conversion, thinking, which still is worth emphasizing time and time again, not just for non-design as well as super designers that tend to jump to conclusions way too early. As a service designer, I don't like that. That's what you do in Agile. You do jump to conclusions very quickly. You're a solutionizing. That's what I like about service design. We actually take the time, we spend time exploring. Exploring both possible ways of interpreting something, but also possible ways to solve something. And that's what I love with service design. I am bashing on the double diamond, but it has this value as long as it's used in the right order. And I think what you say, the divergent, convergent and problem space versus solution space, double diamond is perfect for that. Just don't add the misleading research ideation, prototyping stages there. They will represent a linear progression, which is there, but it's not the one that's presented. I couldn't agree more, Mark. It was a very good point. Mind over chef, thinking modes of operation, that's what I love. Robert, I think I know for sure I had at least one word that I could share, but we're going to keep it at this for this episode. Maybe we'll do a sequel. I would like to invite everybody again who's listening. Let us know. What's your favorite metaphor? Which one worked for you? Which one didn't? Do you have anything to add? Robert, you wrote an article. I'll make sure to link to it in the show notes, right? Yes. And it's an article about the theater. And is it also about the Mountain Guard? No, but I think I will add another blog post about it, actually. I think it's such a powerful metaphor in itself. It uncovers aspects of service sign. I wasn't even thinking of, really. So that's a power metaphor. Yeah, I love that one as well. So we're at the end of this episode. Robert, thank you for this metaphor rep battle. I hope people enjoyed this new format. And if they did, we might repeat it in the future. So thanks, Robert. Thank you so much for inviting me. Keep up the good work. You're doing a great service for the service sign community. Thank you. So what was your favorite metaphor? Which one resonated the most with you? And if you're already using different metaphors to explain service design, make sure to share them in the comments with the rest of the community. If you know somebody who needs to see this episode, grab the link and share it with them. That way, you'll help to grow the service design show family. And that helps me to invite more inspiring guests like Robert here on the show for you. If you want to keep learning how to design services that win the hearts of people and business, make sure to click this next video because we're going to continue over there. See ya.