 You feel it, you experience it, but you can't see it. It's the dark matter of management that makes your life as a service designer so hard whenever you try to bring design into organizations. In this episode, you'll learn what these dark forces actually are, and of course how you can effectively deal with them. Because when you do, your life will not only get easier, but design will also be able to live up to its promise of making organizations more human-centered. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hello, I'm Marzia. This is a service design show, episode number 129. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design, what are the hidden 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. Our guest in this episode is somebody who lives at the intersection of design, business and organizational psychology. She's the design director at LiveWork. Her name is Marzia Arrico. Let's face it, the reality is that in most organizations, the current way of working is conflicting with design. For you as a service designer, it might be challenging to deliver the impact that you'd like. This begs the question, what is the best way to bring design into organizations that don't have an established design practice yet and sometimes might even be hostile to this new way of working? If you stick around till the end of the episode, you'll learn how you can be of more value to the people around you and just have more fun in your work so you don't get stressed out. If you enjoy conversations like this, know that we bring a new conversation every two weeks. So if you haven't done so already, click that subscribe button and that bell icon to be notified when a new conversation comes out. That's all for the intro, and now let's jump into the conversation with Marzia. Welcome to the show, Marzia. Ciao, Marc. Good to see you again. The last time we met was in... Budapest. It was a long time ago, unfortunately. It was at the Doors conference. Yeah, legendary conference. It was like 500 people, so many people in a room. Yeah, you were on stage. I was on stage there, and we didn't get a chance to talk a lot after that, but I definitely remembered your presentation, and I thought, well, I need to get her on the show one day. And now we're here. For the people who don't know who you are, could you give a short introduction? Sure. So my name is Marzia. I'm the design director of Liburg Studio. I've been in Liburg for eight years. Seems quite a long time. And I'm a bit of a hybrid. I'm a designer, but with a PhD in organizational studies. So I've always been interested in the combo between design and business. So this is what I do. Yeah, and you're an Italian living in the Netherlands right now. I am. Sicilian living in the Netherlands. Sicilian? Oh, yeah, sorry. We need to be more specific about that. Marzia, to get to know you a little bit better, I've got five questions for you that you need to answer as quickly as possible. A rapid fire question round. Don't overthink them. Just answer with the first thing that comes to your mind. So ready? Yes. All right. What's always in your fridge? The king. Okay. Which book or books are you reading at the moment? Reinventing organizations. Lalu. I will add a link to that down below. Which superpower would you like to have? Flying, for sure. Well, a lot of people. And what did you want to become when you were a kid? An architect, like my father. Okay. And now a question that I'm really curious also about is, what was the first time you learned about service design? During my master degree. Well, actually at the end of my BA, I did a BA in product design. And my final dissertation was on designing the rituals of death. And so the committee was expecting me to create a product while without even knowing it, I designed a service. And they didn't like that. They were like, what is the product? And I was like, you guys, this is way more than a product. It's a service. And they were like, no, this is not a thing. And then I looked around for a master degree that could help me understand the service side. I discovered that there was a whole thing around service design and that was my Eureka moment. Cool. Is that some of your work related to the educational part still online somewhere? I don't think so. It was in Italian. I did my BA in Italian, but I couldn't get it. OK. And you also did a PhD in which topic was it? It was the adoption of service design in organizations. And I decided to do it in a business school because I felt that I wanted to understand better that side of the story. And again, it was incredibly hard. Like, there was no business school that was willing to give me an opportunity to do a PhD there. I guess they were like, you have a design background. Go to a design school. What do you want here? I was like, yeah, I think there is something that we can share and learn from each other. They're like, no, just go do an MBA. And then if you won't come back, I was like, no. So it took me like three years. It took me three years. And at the end, I found Professor Kopenhagen Business School. There was enlightenment and it was seeing the power in the combination and was really interested in exploring the space. And then it gave me a chance. Awesome. I love the topic in the intersection of business and design. We talk a lot about it on the show and I think it's super important. Marcia, what is the topic you want to talk about today? What do we want to share with the community? Well, I was thinking to talk about a topic that I haven't cracked yet. So this could be an opportunity to have a conversation with you and try and find, you know, I guess you would be an opportunity to shed some light on some key questions and then see what others people think. And the topic is the one of dark matter. It's a notion that comes from Dan Healy wrote a book sometime ago, an excellent book I absolutely recommended called Dark Matter Trojan Horses. And he basically talks about this invisible, intangible fluid that makes the culture, the structures and the policies of an organization that makes it incredibly difficult for change to happen, and especially for design to operate in an organization. And I find it incredibly fascinating in the way he talks about it. And very recently it clicked in my mind that actually what he's talking about is very much what I've been researching in my PhD, but I was just calling it differently. You know, I was using institutional theory in my PhD. I was talking about organizational logics, but fundamentally it's the same story. What I discovered in my PhD is that organizations operate through a set of logics. And those logics are fundamentally made by practices, things that are actually visible as well as principles and beliefs that are not. And people walk carrying these logics and they fundamentally define what is legitimate to do in an organization or not. It legitimizes action. And so they are very hard to trace, to be honest, because there is not one place to go look for an organizational logic, as there is not one place to go look for a dark matter, just everywhere. It's everywhere in the way people talk, everywhere in the play, in the way people make decisions, in the way they assign budgets, it's just everywhere. So went through a process of actually trying to dig out to recognize a logic and how you define it. And in one way that hinders, if you like, the introduction of design in any given organization. Yeah, yeah. So if I may interrupt you for a second, I think I definitely experienced this dark matter. Like you said, it's often very hard to grasp and very hard to point at, but you experience it. Like you experience the resistance, you experience the language, you experience sort of the symptoms of what you call the dark matter. And often because design is something different than the existing organizational logic, that sort of the resistance becomes even more experienced, right? Yeah, for sure. But the interesting thing for me is that the moment in which you start really defining the blocks and the elements that make a given logic, and so you start breaking it down, it's way easier to start understanding what are the points of which there is fundamental conflicts that is going to be very difficult to resolve. What are the points that actually there might be some opening? There would be like an opportunity to play a game. For example, one of the logics that I recognized in some of the organizations that are really searched is the digital one. It's the digital first kind of logic and that comes with a concept of speed, comes with agile as main process, right? And although for many aspects, design is in conflict with some of these principles, something like agile and the belief of iterative is fundamentally complementary. So once you start breaking any given logic in pieces, you can start finding what are the plugins, what are the spaces that I can actually use to create a meaningful connection, rather than spending a lot of time trying to change something that is fundamentally incompatible and it's not going to work out. It's just energy draining, right? Yeah, yeah, so maybe also that's sort of the underlying theme is like, how do we bring design into organizations that don't have a strong design heritage? So design usually, I like to talk about design as a medium to achieve a goal, right? So you don't bring design for design's sake, nobody does. You bring design because you're trying to achieve something. And so what I usually say is that design walks on the legs of some other logics and sometimes the logic is the customer logic. You want to become more customer centric. You have a renewed belief in the power to put in the customer at the center of everything you do. And you recognize design is a way to do that. Or you want to become a more sustainable organization, for example. And you discover, believe the design can be a medium for that. It's not the only medium. You can do it in very different ways, but you just choose the design is the way that you want to explore to do that, right? And so the reason why design enters into an organization is already a very important thing to understand because nobody invests in design for design's sake. It's just not a thing. I hope not. Yeah. Right. And so that understanding is fundamental to create the right narrative. I recently, in the last four or five years, just stopped to talk about design with people in organizations during large customer centric transformations, for example. This is not what they're interested in, right? This is not the reason why I'm there. Sure. I can talk about design. I can talk about a million other things. They heard about Lean. They heard about Agile. Now there's somebody talking about design and design thinking. It's not a thing. It's not necessarily useful at this stage when you're entering an organization trying to evangelize and trying to convince people that your way is a better way because what sets your way is a better way. Your way is a way, right? And so what I started to try and really do is to really empathize with the people that are inside the organizational machine. And as designers, they're usually very good at empathizing with the customer, the consumer, and the user, the people that are outside of the organization. But I believe it's really important to spend at least the same energy, if no more, to really understanding what are these people trying to do? What is the reason why they behave the way they behave? What at the end of the day are you, not just measured at the end of the year, but really personally, what are you trying to achieve in this organization? And what is the narrative that you're carrying, right? Once you understand that, that is very easy to translate whatever it is that you're trying to do with design in words that they can understand and appreciate. And that is a job that takes a lot of passion and time. And sometimes it's incredibly energy-driving, but it's incredibly valuable, right? And so, for example, in one of the big banks that I've been working with lately, we had four or five different narratives of why design was there and what we were even trying to do. So for the people that were in the technology department, they had this very big problem of proving, I'm talking here about the senior leaders there, they had this very big problem of proving, what is the return on investment of our X billion technology spend that we have every year? They are no clue, right? And so my story there is to use structures to enable the view to happen, to give you a way to actually start tracking what is the return on investment of your technology spend. And you can do that by design, right? And I don't have to explain you what is the design process to get there. I'm just telling you that these are the things, and I'm going to show you the artifacts that might help you reach that goal, right? The story for a Cha was a completely different one. We were still doing the same program of work, but they were going to experience very different type of value from the program work. Therefore, the story had to be different. And at that point, when you touch the fundamental, you know, motivations of people and needs of people, then everything starts becoming easier. It doesn't become easy, but it's easier. Sure, yeah. I'm wondering, and you already gave a hint about empathizing with the people we work with next to the people we sort of designed for. But how do you get to these narratives? So if we put the narrative of design as the holy grail to solve all the business challenges at a site for a second, how do we create those other narratives? What did you do in practice, actually, to come up with a senior leader narrative, with an HR narrative? Well, a few things. First of all, I want to mention is not just empathizing with the people. It's also empathizing with the things and the organizational structures, right? It's fundamentally understanding why certain things are done this way, which is not necessarily because, you know, people like it, because, you know, most of the people might even hate it. But there is a reason why the machine is organized that way. And so empathizing also with that machine, even if you fundamentally dislike it, you know, because some of these places are fundamentally dehumanizing workers and employees and having an empathy to fundamentally understand that side of the story is also super important. Having said that, there are a few things that any, virtually any service organization on this planet is simply lacking and is at the basis of some of the fundamental problems that some of these organizations have. And one of these big issues that have been, you know, recognizing from one place to the other, at least some of the organizations that I've been seeing working with, is that it's very rarely an understanding of what is the, what are the services that we are delivering to our customers? And in what way are these services coming together? If you ask virtual to any person in the organization that would be able to tell you, they will tell you like a slice of it, right? They will tell you like a few that they know because they're connected to their role. But that is very rarely a one view of all the services that an organization delivers. And on top of that, that is very rarely an understanding of what is that kind of value that that service brings to our own organization. Very few organizations really measure things like that. And therefore it's very hard to decide where to put your money, right? So usually what happens is that, you know, when you see, you know, budget allocated to one thing or another, you ask, you know, how come you go to the point that you have this money to do this thing, random thing, whatever thing it is. And usually it's because, you know, a senior leader woke up, started to notice something and then called and started screaming. And the person is screaming the most and has most power than, you know, budgets all of a sudden get allocated somewhere. But there is no real understanding on, you know, is that actually a priority for us against what and in what way are you evaluating that? Because there is no one view. So it's incredibly hard to actually decide whether, you know, this budget allocated here makes more sense than over there. And so this is usually one of the first things that we try to tackle in programs of this kind of customer-centric programs. And once you know that that is the problem, you cannot just go and explain the thing like that because they would go like, yeah, what is that? What are you talking about? Like, so we basically tend to, knowing that that's the thing that we would like to do as an artifact to bring, to, that could unlock a whole number of different issues. We're trying to connect that to whatever is that the people are trying to achieve. And so that usually when I start a customer transformation program I spend a few months just talking around with people. You know, having coffees, talking to the people that have been there for a long time, people that have been there for a little time, people that have been moving around and trying to understand how things are done here. And so that already gives you quite a flavor. And it's not just me, of course, it's the entire team and that already, and we always ask, you know, who do you think I should speak next? What is the person? And there is always, oh my God, you should speak with Frank that has been here for 25 years and, you know, he knows this and that. And yeah, and then you start basically creating a picture of what are the routines? What are the dynamics? What are the policies that are driving certain behavior? What are the people, principles and values that really drive certain ways of doing things? And so you connect that with the thing that you know is not working with individual motivations of people that you know have the money to unlock certain pieces of the work and you circle it, right? And you try to make all of that work. Awesome. So I can imagine that it's great when you have the opportunity to... Somebody's, I think, called it like being a historian, like understanding the history of the company, digging in an archaeologist, digging up stuff, trying to create... So professional ethnography, I'm sorry. Awesome, even better. How do you... What kind of client does it take? To give you the space and opportunity to spend this time actually charting this first rather than immediately going into a solution mode? What kind of client organization? I don't think there is one type. I can tell you the types that I've been working with and we can see together whether we find a pattern. So in the case of the bank, they have no burning platform. They have a gazillion money, like they don't care, honestly. There is no real need emerging from the market. There is no real need emerging from internally. I think that the real key was individuals inside the organization, in specific line of businesses, the wet dealing with some sort of design, in a way or another, more UX, that really sense the need for a more strategic view of design for an orchestration among the different design disciplines, as well as a better plug-in between design and the rest of the organization. So they learned about service design and they decided to establish a service design practice. And so they came to us saying, we need to establish a service design practice. And I said, okay, there is quite a lot of dark matter to deal with here because this is a 250,000 people organization, I don't know even how many different countries. And so they accepted that we both, from both sides, really need to understand what is the playground here and what is the thing that makes sense to do because fundamentally, you can, historically, the way a lot of these places work is that you decide that that is your goal, it's the thing that you want to achieve and then you create a roadmap that is locked for three years and then off you go. And those stuff just usually don't work. In a few months, the thing is already updated. And so we were very honest at the very beginning saying, here there is a kind of a broad direction that we think we should consider and these are some lines that we should follow, but there are a million unknowns and there are so many dependencies and we need to understand all these different things and how they come together and we need some space to play if you want to do this right. Otherwise, you can do it as a lot of other organizations and just hire 10 people and just throw them there and see what happens. And they hate themselves and the organization and everybody else and they probably, after a while, either quit or change job. So, yeah. So I think that was the bang. Then on another side with Retailer Sports, Brenda we worked with, we were inside Digital Omnichannel and it was a very digitally driven, yeah, of course, unit. They started a quite big agile transformation but very quickly they realized that agile is just a way to make certain processes faster, probably even more iterative, but it's very much looking at humans at a user level. There is very little input from a customer or a consumer level. And so therefore what you end up doing is kind of excuse the French, the same crap, but way faster that at a meaning level for a customer doesn't really change. It's just better usability probably or looks better. So it wasn't really moving what the unit and the organization was trying to achieve and they recognized design as a way to bring that layer, strategic layer. So again, it was an individual. So I guess it's individuals. And what's, okay. But what is the threat or the characteristic or all of these individuals? Because what you're prescribing and I also strongly believe in is that you first want to slow, quote unquote, slow down and know what you're dealing with. Like you said, understand the playground before you actually move forward in the right direction. And that slowing down goes against most organizational logics that I know. So it takes a specific type of person. Yeah, good observation. And you don't slow down. You move on multiple speeds. So what usually happens is that you start a proof project that goes super fast. You know, it's a 16 weeks thing that opens up like a big problem that everybody has had that is alloying in fruits that everybody recognized that it was a problem needs to be fixed. You do it fast. You do well. You do bad research. You throw a whole bunch of very skilled designers especially to show the value of it. And people go, oh, wow, that's useful. And then at the same time, you have a second speed which is the organizational ethnography they're trying to understand. You have another team of people. Some of the people will be the same really trying to understand how you're doing things. You know, you might use some of these projects to do that or not, you know, because you might want to end up in different pockets of the organization. And so you try and move on multiple speeds so that you can feed the monster that needs speed and needs results and things and value for money. And so you feed the monster. We think that undoubtedly are useful it's just not the key, you know, because when you do, you know, usually some of these proof projects are service improvement projects. And, you know, it's not going to cut it. Sure, you can improve that service then good luck implementing it because we know what are the difficulties then to take the thing and make it happen because of the dark matter story because the organization is not set up to work their way. But at least they know they can see what's the value of it. They can see something emerging tangible. And then you have another speed going on and you might have multiple of those, you know, you might have one speed with the design team but you might have another one with a group of senior leaders and you try and orchestrate that work in the right. That makes sense. And using those projects as a way to actually, it's prototyping is not the word but maybe probing the organization like feeling whether your resistance is by doing stuff rather than talking about stuff and then sort of having a second track or maybe a third track where you collect that dark matter and make it tangible, make it into an object you can discuss. I'm also curious like how do you define progress in this process? So progress is really easy when you have that service improvement thing that you're working towards, right? Everybody sees that, everybody feels that, everybody sees the workshops, the outcomes but what is, how do you find progress on that other level? It's when people start talking about other things and that might take a week. Sometimes it takes three years. Do you have an example? Yeah, so there was a moment where we managed after about six months in to create this level zero service architecture that I was mentioning before, right? This one view of all the services coming together and we named these services because they were not named so we named these services in a quite customer-centric way like from a customer perspective what the service was doing for them and we shared this view with a whole bunch of senior leaders and you could really see some of the faces going like, oh, like really clicking and then for that moment on people were referring to services that the organization was delivering with that label that we define collectively as a team with all the other stakeholders as a thing like that became the service and they were talking about it in a very customer-centric way and it was not even a question anymore which just became a thing all of a sudden, right? And so the language started to change because of that labeling that was very customer-centric they were using very customer-centric words and those things stick, right? Then it becomes part of the way you talk and the way you relate to things and the way you start thinking about stuff Yeah, I'm going to interrupt you because my key question here is this is great and when language starts to shift the whole organization starts to shift but what do you feel made made it that this message did stick and so many others didn't? What was it in this specific message? I think it was a very simple one like it was one image very little words, few words there was no big presentation there was no big deck there was no big toasters no a million sticky notes it was just a thing that was honest it was not particularly pretty but it was honest and it was fundamentally touching a pain point that they had that they couldn't even word it because no organization really operates this way very few do and it's not a common thing so I think that is what they were just ready for it and they saw how that connected to that reality and they yeah and there was no fluff around it I guess that's the thing nobody was trying to convince them about anything it was just you know an honest conversation about we think this is useful what do you think and of course for some people didn't work at all they just left the meeting and never showed up again fine, you know Yeah, yeah now well regarding that I can with these things I think we as surf designers are often able to spot these invisible forces and maybe not in a very structured way but name them and articulate them changing them is already harder but when we leave like how do we make it sustainable what did like language is an important part right if the language is there if it's adopted by the organization then even when you leave as an outside consultant that language will stay there but have you found other ways to make this into something that's really part of the organization rather than something external and you here you're talking about that change whatever that is or design well what I'm talking about here is you want to create an environment or logics like you named them that are more compatible with a design approach with a design mindset in order to make sure that design is able to deliver on its promise how do you make sure that those things stay around and how do you embed them I think it's the other way around like you know it has to be designed to adapt to whatever thing is happening here you know because nobody's gonna you know an organization that has been working like that for 150 years whatever they're not gonna adapt to design so the design can flourish nobody can ask so you know I guess the key here is to adapt design so that it's useful and you know and you know the one thing that I keep telling to my team all the time is that good enough is enough it's got to work and so it doesn't matter if it's right within your construct of design you know it's got to work within this context and it might be that you know this is not the thing that you would do in an ideal world but within this context works and that's great and it's just do that and you try till it works for the people around you within the context they are in you know it's a very different story than if you're trying to fundamentally shift the very core the very purpose of an organization right at that point the approach must be different but if you're trying to improve the way for example the level the maturity of customers interested in one organization that has to be the path design has to adapt within the context within which it operates yeah so we've used this word on the show a more often but we have to have maybe have more pragmatic approach to design rather than a theorist or purist approach to design like whatever it takes whatever helps us to get to the outcome that we're aiming for I agree okay well done did you did you identify other moments where things clicked so one moment like you mentioned was when they saw the overview when you gave them the maybe they're not so pretty visual and the language things changed were there other moments where you realized okay now from this moment on things are different at the very beginning of a few of these programs actually this is a recurring thing I usually show up and say we need to think about the operating model for design how is design gonna work within this organization but most of all how design is gonna work with other disciplines what at the end over moments and the plugins and we need to design those because otherwise it's gonna implode in our own hands it's not gonna work out a scale at least you know I can work within limited number of people in limited scope but when you start scaling then it just doesn't work and usually the answer is like now we do have an operating model we don't need to think about that and usually my answer is that okay and we're gonna see you in six months usually Rapids is like just themes become incredibly dysfunctional designers become incredibly unhappy because there is no clarity what is the remit because there is no operating model there is no clarity on the remit there is no clarity on how are they gonna work with other people there is no clarity on what what design ends with technology starts who is the product owner when you start talking about services who is the service owner virtually an organization is a role of a service owner and in a service you will have four or five different products who orchestrates that so questions of this kind the whole part of you know a design operating model and very rarely that stuck at the right time till you know things start breaking yeah and then people start to break down yeah that's the moment when concept of this kind click right because you see it in practice how fundamentally the machine does not work it just cannot scale you just stop breaking at the edges and so that was another moment where when things started to click and you know you got to experience it sometimes it's just fine you know I know it because I've seen it but sometimes you have to let it go make it happen experience how the thing breaks it's not the end of the world and then you start feeling on your own skin what is the need for that specific operating model and how it should look like because again there is no one recipe it's not the you know there is one operating model for design that you know you can just copy paste everywhere this is so recognizable I have been in so many projects in my early service design days where we just could tell at the start of the project we know what's going to happen in six months we've been through many projects we know these are the challenges that we're going to run into it's smart to address them now and usually the answer was we'll see when we get there or we'll fix that later and then like just like you described six months later you're exactly at the point but it's almost impossible to get people to worry about those things early on I'm curious how this topic relates to what you just previously said like nobody cares about design so having that conversation early on about operating models and where the handover is like nobody cares right? they didn't see the part they didn't see the relevance right now exactly so why I have an answer but I'm curious what you would say so why have this conversation at the start anyway? because you know when you let the six months pass the six months that I mentioned the six months that you mentioned that is a human price you know in those six months a few people might burn out leave the design leader might completely lose confidence in his own self right because things start breaking and it's very hard to handle and it's very hard for me to see other and over again these amazing design leaders in some of these organizations really paying a personal price but for themselves and with their own team so I think it is important to mention it and it is important to flag it and I will never stop and you know eventually I'm hoping that somebody will say oh yeah that's a good point let's start thinking about it well I think it adds to your credibility so you don't want to be at the end of six months saying yeah I told you but the next time you sort of come up with an advice or an argument maybe people are more likely to take you up on it so I think it's smart to say that these are probably the things you're going to run into but hey you know next time with regards to scaling design scaling service design the operating models I think a lot of us would already be happy to be in this luxury position where the challenge is to scale like first most of us I think are in the challenge of actually getting it done but let's say we're at the stage that we can scale it what is it that we actually want to scale? that depends as I'm going to say what you want to do okay I don't think well in your example of the sports brand yeah my answer will always be be contextual right in the case of the sports brand I think what they're trying to scale is design capability so you know there are very few service designers very few in ours at a strategic level product teams find it incredibly useful to work with service designers because you know they give them a you know for the whole reasons that we know an end-to-end perspective of what is that the actual product how to prioritize investment within you know their product how to inform the agile teams and in the backlog how to make decisions right for them as managers it seems incredibly useful but there is a bottleneck you know when you start seeing value into these things and you are you then will reach a point from push-to-pull right where you have designers trying to convince some a few product owners around the organization at least in the case of this sports brand that you know design could help you with some of the issues that you have to the point where there are 15 product owners behind the door saying hey I heard that you do service design can we do some too but then you have five designers and so how do you make this work and so I guess that he has to be critical most I mean I guess he has to be you know the work with every single individual to see the value for you again at the beginning you know what I was saying at the beginning of this conversation showing the value to you create something that is useful for you that makes a change in the way you do things and then you know you do it again and again and again you will find in a position where you don't have to do that anymore because people are just coming to you right yeah yeah and then you you sort of demonstrated that value on a local scale and then you can start to expand it now based on what you've seen like what are the two or three most important things that need to be in place in order to in the operating model in order to foster and accelerate and fuel this further adoption multiple sponsors because you know it's already difficult to find one but usually it's not enough so the people that actually are in the position to unlock budgets to unlock money to tell to people okay take 20 percent of your time and try this thing you need a few of those because you know interests change people change jobs and this stuff take years I mean I'm organizing on a transformation of this kind that I'm describing here with the sports brand or the the band these are transformations that take seven to ten years no question there so you can put all your eggs into one basket let's say into one sponsor add into one sponsor forget it so you you need multiple sponsors ideally multiple pockets of the organization so that you have multiple entry points because also one of them will fail so that's what you want the second one is a good solid design team I think you know very often I see organizations going out and just hiring a bunch of junior designers which you know great they are the lot of value junior designers I'm not saying but it cannot just be that you need people that have experience in actually bringing design in an organizational context and they have the passion to do it which is another problem that I've seen you know in teams and teams design teams breaking that they don't necessarily have a passion for it you know there are certain people they just want to do the blueprint they want to do the redesign the customer experience they want to do that side of the thing which is great that it's needed but it's a very different thing and so I think that bringing design organization the politics the talking the relationships like you gotta enjoy it otherwise it's gonna consume you and I've seen many teams just breaking because of that and then you know you start dropping balls you start refusing work you start not you know taking the opportunities that are presented because you don't have that you know energy yeah so and then yeah just to add to to what you just said most likely if you're just junior designer fresh out of college and you want to apply the tools and methods and just get your hands dirty with that more experience with that you'll probably burn out on all the additional you probably won't even notice all the additional conversations that you need to have in order to actually be able to do the work that you want to do so you need people who who have like you mentioned before who have experienced the pain of delivering stuff which isn't being adopted and then thinking I must start designing at a different level in order to get this work out into the world yeah yeah totally true and the third one the third one is you know what we call the change congestion being aware of that you know for sure somewhere else in this organization somebody's doing a similar thing or a parallel thing or an overlapping thing that they might call the same or something similar and and probably that at 35 there's an issue that you're sort of and so being aware of the change that is happening in this organization that the change programs that are happening in this organization for what reason how are they called it's super important because all these different programs will try to you know claim money attention stakeholders time you cannot do everything at once so being aware of you know change how change happens here right now it's a key thing and who are the people that are doing it actually yeah so and this comes back to again what we discussed earlier that organizational ethnography yeah that's that's a key part of our that's a key part now let's try to bring this down into maybe the reality of a smaller team whether internal or external so let's say you are two three four service designers strong what would your advice be in such a situation how do you even start with handling this dark matter stuff a small team in a large corporate a small team yeah yeah because I think that's the reality for most service designers yet we haven't we don't have an established service design practice yet we're still in the early adopters stage where do we start find friends so what I mean with that is that you know you're small and you have limited leverage and most probably you're piled up with work that is not even relevant for you they're just you know throwing it to you whatever they think is you should be doing so my advice is usually you know go around again organizational ethnography find the people that you know ever need the design can solve that they're open to try they want to experiment and make friends with these people create critical mass start making you know small changes small contribution be kind that's the other thing you know be kind for me that is a fundamental thing be kind to people around you don't go you know I absorb it I have the answer you know I know it all because most probably these people know way more than you do about the context of that organization be humble and just be a service that's the point I think that the point is being a service of the people that are around you and really trying to support them to you know use design to make the life better and and and do it in multiple places do it over time and that in itself will create a critical mass and what would you say to people who sort of feel okay I'm doing this I am kind I am trying to be of service but it's just going so slowly or even worse like I feel that the organization is working against me like all the other forces are pushing against what I actually want to try to do what would your advice be to those people transformations of this kind do not happen bottom up I mean in my experience transformation of these kinds either have a strong top down support with a flourishing bottom up initiatives great you know that's the best combination but you cannot have transformation of these kinds just with bottom up initiative so people believing in it from the you know lower ends because unfortunately the organizations that we have today in the way they are set up they're incredible hierarchical concentrating power concentrated decision making and transformation of these kinds fundamentally touched the core of the purpose the reason why the organization is here and the way things are done at large you cannot do it unless you have the kind of support I mean I you I mean I'm being fully honest here and you know I'm reading right now I was mentioning the Rembanting Organizations book from Malalu and I'm loving this book because it's really talking about that it's talking about you know the evolution of organizations the metaphors that really drive certain the structures of our organizations today and in what way they completely chop the lounge out of people and and you know within the structure there is as much as you can do and then you know there are other types of organization that it just finds you know till organizations where you know you have self-managing teams where hierarchy doesn't exist where you know self-defined roles you know those organizations that if you're lucky enough to be in it then sure bottom up which doesn't exist because there is no bottom will flourish and you will see things change for sure your great creating mass with the peers that fundamentally believe in it but if you are in you know bank in a large insurance a large manufacturing telcos utilities are large you know that's not those organizations are not till organizations what it defines orange organizations and that's it yeah to play within that game yeah and I think you have to be realistic about your expectations and that might be disappointing at some times because as service designers we see how things can be better on which scale that they can be better and if we don't have the mandate don't have the influence don't have the decision making power it can be a bit discouraging to sort of work on the small thing over here while we know that the bigger thing needs to be addressed but it's out of our control and you have to be able to put that in perspective and understand your limitations work with in them or find another job yeah anything else that you'd like to mention about this topic that we didn't discuss yet some final thoughts final thoughts I think he's had a very interesting time for design leaders and I've been actually spending a lot of time doing design therapy for design leaders these days I mean officially it's called coaching but what it it turns out to be very quickly it's really sessions where you know these people just share and vent the frustration pain the difficulty you know you really see the energy draining over time and some excellent you know design leaders that have been meeting I don't know I think there is something to be said there I'm not sure what but it's something that I keep seeing on and on and on and on yeah you know what I tend to do is just listen some day and we're like what you want to talk about today just the fact of having somebody out there the notes where your experience they can be a sparing clarity and it usually helps because it's an outsider if you like so so yeah I can fully second death and their experience I've had with the campfire for in-house service designers that's been running for over a year and with the it's it's just eight people getting together sharing stories about we call them sometimes the dirty secrets of service design like not the shiny case studies but really the the challenges and the difficulties and all the the trauma you almost have to go through like just having a place and knowing that other people deal with the same shit already helps like so I can I can absolutely second death and I think well that's maybe my insight from the last year don't try to do it alone like find somebody in a different organization different field maybe who understands what you're going through and who can sort of be your coach mentor whatever you want to call them a sparing partner sparing partner like you don't don't go into that boxing ring without having somebody in that corner like make sure that you have somebody in that corner that's yeah I've seen that with the campfire and it it it it really helps small things like that yeah absolutely good if people remember one thing from our conversation Marcel what do you hope it is think about the stuff that you cannot see because those take 90% of the work and that that makes it difficult the things that we can see but they are there so the dark matter I think the point here is that you know when you start the customer experience you know transformation you know customer-centric transformation this kind 90% is the dark matter management 10% is going to be the design work you know 10% is going to be the blueprints the journeys the personas the improvement the blah the stuff that we know 90% of the work is dark matter management is understanding the system and learning to work with it and and the system changes all the time it's a dynamic thing it's not that you learn about it once and it's just fixed and yeah and and to sort of again add to that like when people ask me how do I become a better service designer which books should I read to become a better service designer I say read any book except about service design because if you read about strategy if you read about behavior or economics like all those things hit on exactly what you said the other 90% like the 10% is important like you need to know that of course it is yeah you're not going to learn that but the change is the real change and the real impact the real difference is made in in that other 90% which you have to embrace Marcia if people want to continue this conversation with you what's a good way to reach out oh um LinkedIn I'm always on LinkedIn or email Marcia at LibrexStudio.com awesome Marcia thanks so much for addressing this topic I'd love to talk more about dark meta in our organization things it's a really catchy term I hope the language will stick and then we'll hear more about it so yeah thanks again for sharing this with the service design show community thank you for having me here it was great what is your biggest takeaway from this conversation about dark meta leave a comment down below and if you've made it all the way here you're apparently enjoying conversations like this so why not subscribe to the channel click that button over here and be notified when new episodes come out thanks a lot for watching and I look forward to see you in the next video