 What does it really take to get your service design ideas implemented so that you can show the true impact of your work? That's what you'll learn in this episode. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, this is Simon Mahana and this is the service design show. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you to build organizations that put people at the heart of their business. The guest in this episode is Simon Mahana. Simon is an innovation designer at the moment, which is a design agency based in Toronto. The reason I'm so excited to have Simon on the show is that he recently wrote a piece titled service design is not enough. Once I got over the clickbaity title actually read the piece in depth, Simon makes some really good arguments and questions if we as a service design community are inviting a piece that is too big to chew for us. So at the end of this episode you'll know if we need to do less and be more focused to actually create more impact. That's all for the intro and now let's quickly jump into the chat with Simon. Welcome to the show Simon. Hi Marc. Good to have you on in the introduction. I already gave a short sort of hint on why we are chatting. It's also because the article that you wrote on service design is not enough. We'll get there but for the people who haven't read the article or who don't know who you are could you give like a really brief introduction? Sure. So I'm Simon Mahana. I'm an innovation designer at The Moments. The Moments is an innovation consultancy firm based in Toronto. The practice basically that we do includes different aspects of innovation and service design as a core principle or core aspect of the practice that we do and this was kind of the context in which I was reflecting on where the practice is and how it feels like to be a service designer in Toronto and where the market is at and this is what the reason I wrote the article about service design is not enough and I'm happy to kind of dive a little deeper into that with you today. Yeah when I first saw it I think one of your colleagues hinted me up on that direction. I was like who is this guy and what is this click baby title and then I read the article and you actually have some pretty good points. I'm like sure to link to your article down below so people can form their own opinions and we'll talk about the topics today. Simon the question I ask everybody your first encounter with service design. What was that? It goes back in time. I believe I think my first kind of when I started dabbling in service design it was more from my passion for the design process overall. So just kind of giving you a sense of where I come from in terms of like educational background. So I graduated as from design school. I quickly learned that design in the context it was a few years back was not necessarily what I had in mind for design. It was like really placed in a tiny box that I had more ambition for what I wanted to do as a designer. So I quickly learned for credibility purposes that I needed to go in other areas to kind of get that piece of paper that would give me permission to be at the table where key decisions are being made. So I went into my first master's degree and I did a studies in media and communications and after that I ended up going to business school because business as a strategic aspect was also what I realized needed to be able to join the conversations at key and critical moments of the work. So and that gave me the opportunity to start doing some work. Back then I would think it was more in the like branding and experience design I would say but also it started teaching and bringing more the business mindset into some design courses and that sparked my interest in understanding better the design process and how it applies to solve business problems and that was I would say the early start of design thinking. We didn't call it design thinking back then we didn't really have a name for it. I also had good kind of friends in kind of the social sciences space who were also kind of started to be interested in design so it was kind of that time where human centered design was kind of also starting and there was a lot of confusion back then. There's still a lot of confusion and it continues. Yeah and this is also like what I'm a bit concerned now about services design but and we'll talk about that but I think yeah it allowed me in a way to really use my academic platform to do some research and start publishing a few articles around how the kind of cognitive skills with the mindful kind of thinking can really be embedded in the design process to understand the business challenge but also understand the people and really enable people to collaborate together and I had the opportunity to work with engineers and lawyers and people who don't speak the language of design to really experiment and test some frameworks early on and then I got the opportunity to work with some I would say like European designers where I think in Germany and in Italy and in Amsterdam and other places where service designers started was starting to kind of come together and there are a few programs like in the Netherlands like they started using that language and I was in Lebanon in Beirut and I had the opportunity to collaborate with a few of them on some projects in the not-for-profit space which kind of helped me also kind of build that language around it and when I moved to Canada about six years ago I presented myself as a service designer and that was like very intriguing for people but also they didn't know what to do with it and I would say my recollection of events is people would say and this is interesting it's happening with the ASC, they knew IDEO, they knew of those other firms but the understanding of it and the application of it was not fully adopted in Canada and this is where I met the moments and we started using that language and we worked with big corporations in the service space like from financial institutions to telcos to healthcare to actually build that capability within their groups and really quickly after that the landscape changed and there was a lot of uptake and a lot of excitement about service design here in Toronto and now we feel in a place where we don't really need to define what service design is but I think we are finding challenges and framing the work and presenting the work in a way that people can make the most of it. Right I guess it's no coincidence that Global Conference was in Toronto this year and that I think from the last 10 episodes of the show five people were from Canada so it's good to see that the field is maturing across the other side of the ocean. Simon he gave me some really interesting topics about things related to service design is not enough are you ready to jump in and do some interview jazz? I'm ready Mark are you? I am well yeah I am definitely let's do this so topic number one is going to be called embedding ideas. Okay I'm going to go and I'm gonna go with the why and it's a simple question of like why are we having challenges of really embedding the service design work in the organizations that we are working for or that we're working with them? That's a really good question I have some ideas about it but I'd love to hear what your take is. Yeah so I think we hinted a little bit about kind of the article that I wrote and I think the major point that I was trying to make behind that article is that there's a lot of excitement about service design which is great there is a big appetite to do service design work and we've been working with a lot of interesting projects with various organizations and different industries. The challenge that we are facing is that once we engage in that work and we start working together especially like with the moment because we have this kind of what we call joined up team which is an approach where we really collaborate closely with the teams within the organization to do the work we are realizing that since in some contexts in some organizations we bump into some barriers and these are quite risky if there is no awareness and there is no parallel work that is happening in the organization to enable the work not only to happen but also to go further into the implementation and into the rollout. So what kind of barriers and what is the risk? So the risk that we see is that sometimes people don't really understand why service design so they know there is something that they can do better they engage without understanding the implications and what the service design work can reveal. The other aspect I would say is the organization readiness to make the shift that the service design work will require. So what kind of shift? Shift I would say the shift in behaviors, shift in mindsets, shifts even on a strategic level in the direction that the organization is going. The great value of the service design work is that it's applied, it's tangible, it shows people what it is and what it should be and it gives them the road map to get there but beyond that there is a lot of work that is required by the organization to bring the people kind of on board, bring the leadership team on board and really put that service design work in the strategic context for the organization and when we work on with people on people and we work on with the leadership teams then I think we're really talking about the transformational work that needs to happen. We talk about culture, we talk about infrastructure, all of these other aspects that people don't necessarily have awareness of when they sign on like a project and service Yeah so how do you approach this? Because when a client comes up with a brief and you create a proposal usually they when they don't know what they don't know they don't include like this transformational part in the project brief. What is your approach then? How do you do? Do you just reject the client? Do you help them to reformulate the brief? What do you do? Okay so this is like an interesting question and this is something that we talk a lot about in our practice and in our studio. I think there are different types of clients. There are people who come to us with some level of understanding of the implications. They have the right intentions in place and you can have this conversation early on with them. You can set some conditions for the work to happen but in other cases like knowing that the other transformational work is quite complex, it takes time, it's a big investment for the organization. Sometimes it's a bit scary to kind of talk about it right off the top of the project. So if we sense that there is like the right mindsets are there, the right people are there, we find it usually useful to actually start doing the work and then make the case for it. It gets like really like scary and complex if you start talking about these things without really putting them in the right context for the organization and the work, the project work really reveals what it really looks like for the organization and you can then in a very tangible and clear way surface those barriers, talk about the challenges and create the case for the innovation shift or the transformation. So and that is quite an interesting approach because sometimes you need a first project to sort of fail, to show where the roadblocks are and you'll know upfront that it won't go as far as you might want it to go but you just need to put it out there so that the client sees the roadblocks for themselves. And then you have to pray for the chance to do it to get a second try. Yeah, because obviously failure is still like a big taboo in this space so people like really go out of their way to make it look like it worked no matter what even if it's like a tiny incremental outcome they want to tell a success story. So you really need to hold people accountable to what they set as their goals from the beginning and it requires like I would say it's not easy right so it's like we have a lot of empathy for people who are taking on those challenges in their organizations and we know it's not something that they can change overnight so it is a lot of work and we are there to support them but we need to create a space where we can have an honest and open conversation about it and I think this is like the most critical condition for to set the organization to like really succeed. If it's like there's a lot of politics and things that are happening around the work it really limits the potential of the work and also like I would think our approach makes it a bit easier because we tend to like work on multiple projects so we want to help also the organization achieve that immediate short-term goals. We don't want them to like hold them back and then say hey there's a lot of other things that we need to do before we can really move the work forward so we do it but I think we help them kind of achieve their immediate needs but at the same time we carve out the space to talk about the strategic level and the bigger shifts that also are needed to get them not only to stay relevant short-term in the market but really to like figure out what the future of the organization really looks like. Right so what I hear you say and it has also been restated by your Canadian colleague Sarah Schillman in the previous episode like your relationship you have with a client determines a lot a lot about what you can do as a service designer so if people haven't seen the previous episode check it out with Sarah Schillman. Simon, topic number two because you already mentioned a lot of the work that needs to be done internally so this topic makes a lot of sense because it's called internal skills which question started with you big? I'm going to go with how can the designer's favorite yeah. Yeah so I think it's how can we I'm going to say how can we like build the skills within the organizations to sustain the services line work and their innovation work. Okay. Yeah and I think my take on this is that it's through the work right so this kind of reiterates the what I just said earlier about the importance of taking on real challenges taking on projects with clear goals and clear conditions and really using the projects as a way to probe into what the organization is capable of and putting on the learner mindset I would say and be humble in saying this is what we can achieve these are the gaps that we have and creating a kind of what we call a kind of a learning program in a way where we really assess the capabilities and assess the the organization readiness at multiple like at multiple points through the work to see what's evolving what's changing and what's not and having those kind of reflective moments as part of the process to see what did we learn what else we want to learn and have strategic conversations that are on in terms of like what other projects we need to take on what capabilities do we have but also what capabilities do we need to acquire or invest in building and do you are those reflective moments part of a project or is it like a parallel track I would say both so the project work as you said because it's it's applied it pushes the organization to to show up and in those moments you are able to see if like the practitioners the people within within the organization have what they need or not and sometimes it's a matter of like actual experience or like the skills sometimes it's a matter of like tools but I would say often it's it's a matter of permission right so right permission so we talked about failure we talked about the culture and I think this is where if people are approaching the work with fear if people are approaching the work with like specific goals that they need to hit no matter what insights or what their needs come up out of the research and out of the work like these are signals that the organization context is not ready to do actual innovation work so like what you just said that that aren't specifically the skills so if we focus on skills for a second like what would be like your top three regarding skills that people within an organization need to acquire to actually get this to the next level rather than permission and fear the rather than the culture of stuff right I would say leadership skills and I know like this is like maybe it builds on exactly what we're just saying but a big aspect of the work is really creating a momentum within the organization creating buy-in holding people accountable to what they said they wanted to do and have hard conversations so this this ability to like coach and support people through this work is important and it is a key capability I would say it's key skill that is also evolving and changing in terms of like the nature of it and the the types of tactics and strategies are needed to like actually practice it and put it in place I would say another one would be so this would sound a little bit funny but I think it's like the applied design capability rather than the design thinking yeah yeah so it's about really rolling out your sleeves and getting into like the the quick and dirty aspect of this work of like really prototyping quickly talking to people quickly we see organizations like tend to sit back have like lots of long conversations a lot of meetings a lot of they dream about things and they decide on things without and they make like big decisions in terms of investment of resources and stuff without even like trying anything so I think the design capability of like really taking quickly an idea and running quickly with it to test it and kind of sense of what the customers want what the stakeholders want and like really understanding this in a more tangible way I would say I would say it is a key skill that not a lot of organizations invest in having like designers and designers who are trained in I would say the classic aspect of design the craft yeah yeah it is a craft and the last one I would say it's strategic and future so it's strategic thinking and futures and this is where we see also a lot of organization going in and making those investments or starting projects without stepping back and understanding the why of the project and why this investment and really building a strong business case so that when we we have the outcomes of the services I work we can reflect back and say is this the right thing to do or not and this is also like where we see it's a bit hard without that clarity to create that moment in the process where we can really assess and make some hard decisions sometimes of saying this is not the right outcome or this was not the right project or not the right idea and without that strategic lens I think we don't have the base we don't have the tools to have those conversations I want to move into topic number three because I think a lot of questions that are on my mind will be answered in this third topic regarding internal skills the third topic is called scope yes and do you have a question starter I think I'm gonna go with what if what if and the question I think for me is what if service design is not the catch all kind of term or catch all practice yeah because what you just described like educating people on leadership educating people regarding making tough decisions is that even our job like shouldn't the organization just know when they hire service designers what like what their environment should look like how far should we go until we're until we lose credibility because I think that's the big risk here yeah I think you flag a critical I think early on in the conversation where we're talking about design thinking and human-centered design and the confusion that we still carry on and and and live with and what I'm seeing is also some risk for the service design community to end up kind of similar to what we're design thinking is now where we have we've kind of tried to stretch it to fit everything and then it lost its value in a way and it's not effective or it doesn't work it's just that we don't know what it is and it's diluted it's diluted and it's especially for people who did not like really dive deep into it to understand it it became a term that we use as a label for everything and therefore it's hard to kind of track the impact or the value of absolutely yeah and I think service design is in that place too and the provocation I wanted to kind of articulate in my in my article like out of the service design global conference is that there's great awareness and understanding of all the adjacent and the parallel streams of work that need to be done and we touched on leadership we touched on organization design we touched on culture we touched on right systems and and futures so all of these things are really important aspect of the innovation work in general but they don't necessarily need to live under service design so for me there is a risk when we say the next evolution of service design is systems thinking and change management and this and that because I think it loses the focus and it loses the clarity that it's like really crisp now and we've worked hard to get there and if we now start to kind of pining everything under the umbrella of service design we're just gonna lose that and lose the credibility lose that momentum that's in the market right now yeah so go ahead well yeah I'm thinking about I don't know trying to come up with an analogy on the spot like a baker who knows how to create delicious bread if we would expect him to also be able to build the bakery and build machines to the ovens to bake the bread like how far we don't want we don't want that like we don't expect that from a baker at least I don't I'm not sure why we are trying to expect this from a service designer yeah yeah and that's the thing because also like it just like the scope of work becomes so confusing and people's expectations become so broad that it becomes harder to like really demonstrate value again I like I am a service designer and in many ways it's definitely a core aspect of my practice and I really believe in the value of it and I believe that it's kind of the now that it is understood and valued there is a great way to really push the organizations into like innovation with a big eye it's a great way to reveal all of these different aspects but we don't need this setting need to take it on as part of the services network yeah so so we have other like practitioners we have other practices that are well established to like common board collaborate with the service designers to do this critical and important work and I love the fact that the service design community is like really honest now and through the service design work we are able to start having those conversations because I think that would be a great way to open up those conversations within organizations where innovation still scares them when we talk about transformation or culture change or systems like it's because it's complex because it takes time it's hard people tend to like kind of step back and run away in some cases I love that the fact that service design is creating the platform for this conversation to happen but I would love for the service design work to stay focused on delivering great projects great great like ways of addressing business challenges while flagging those other issues but also letting other people kind of come on board and collaborate and do the work it's interesting that I I'm sort of seeing two streams within service design emerging like there is a stream of people who say we don't need new silos we don't need new boundaries like let's not obsess with definitions while the other stream is more people who say you know this is a craft this this has boundaries it's it makes it easier for people to actually learn what it is makes it makes it easier for people to buy yeah it's interesting and it seems like the gap is widening between these two communities yeah and and I'm not saying that service designers are like they should not be ambitious and and willing to also step out of the service design kind of box to also take on other projects but I think for me it's more about the clarity of the language and being clear that this is where I'm doing service design work and this is where I'm taking on those additional levels or layers of the organization and that clarity and is a big aspect of this industry and we we look at that I think even the way we like when we make agreements with organizations of what the work is and what the deliverables are you need that clarity yeah it's something I feel that gives people within the organization the language and the the tangible aspects that will help them sell the work position the work clearly within their organizations because for people who like still take like who are taking the leap and investing in the service design work and demonstrating leadership by bringing new practices in the organization I think we need to set them up to show the value set them up to succeed so that they can bring the whole organization on board and I think if we start like blowing things out of scope and we start kind of adding all of those different layers just becomes harder for the organization to buy harder for the organization to measure and therefore I think it's going to start kind of fighting back because it's going to be all over the place and from that perspective Simon is there a question that you'd like to ask the people who are watching and listening to the show right now actually I would be like I think I'm going to build on your question of where where people stand in terms of this this kind of those two pathways that we're seeing today and I think my question is really around because we see like service design in very different contexts we see service design being like bought as a vendor service we see service design being embedded in the organization we see service design in the private and the public sector I think the conversation like the question or the conversation that we need to have next is how does it show up really for people in those different contexts and and what aspects I think of this additional layer of work can really be brought under the umbrella of service design and what has to be clearly stated as out of scope so which is a very hard kind of line to draw but I think that's that would be a nice challenge to get people to weigh in on that yeah well I would be interesting if people can comment with a few examples of projects that sort of call themselves service design projects but feel clearly out of scope and if so why like we need I think we need practical examples and this will this will no no doubly start what was the internet meme it will start a rage or something like that anyway leave your comments leave your comments in the comments Simon people want to get in touch with you to continue this conversation what's the best way to do that my link then would be a good place to to connect uh and uh if people are feeling like they want to put the energy in an email it's simon at themoment.is I'm always happy to also read from people who have questions or even have any responses to any of the publications that we put out there to awesome I'm sure to link uh to all the relevant resources so thanks uh Simon for continuing this exploration of what service design is and how we take it to the next levels was quite interesting so what is your take where does service design stop leave a comment down below and I'm really curious where this conversation will take us if you enjoyed this episode make sure to grab the link and share it with just one other person today that way you'll help to grow the service design show community and help me to invite more interesting guests like Simon for now thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video over here bye