 In this episode, you're going to learn why it's important that you as a service designer understand strategy and how you can actually use that in your day-to-day work. Here's the guests for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Martin Dijkbaal and this is a service design show episode number 97. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome to the service design show. This show is all about helping you to design organizations that put people at the heart of their business. One thing I keep repeating over and over again is that it's important for service designers to gain more influence on strategy and decision-making. But why and how do you actually do that? Luckily, the guests in this episode knows everything about this topic. Majid Iqbal wrote a book titled Thinking in Services, Encoding and Expressing Strategy through Design. Even if you think you're already a strategic service designer, I can promise you that the conversation with Majid will shine a new light on that. And if this topic interests you, make sure you stick around till the very end of this episode because we're going to give away Majid's book, a signed copy of Majid's book at the end of the episode with a really simple question. If you're new to this channel, make sure you click that subscribe button and that bell icon because we bring a new video to help to level up your service design skills at least once a week, so make sure to do that. That's all for the intro and now let's quickly jump into the chat with Majid. Welcome to the show Majid. Hi Marc, thank you for inviting me. It's a strange situation because you're probably like less than five kilometers away from me. Yeah. We're in the city of Utrecht in the heart of the Netherlands. Everybody's working remote these days, so are we, right? As we must. Yeah, we aren't allowed even to get out of home. Majid, for the people who don't know who you are, like a brief introduction, could you? Sure. Hi, my name is Majid and I'm an advisor and a consultant and my expertise is translating strategies into the designs of services. That's what I do for a living. Presently I'm working at the Dutch Ministry of Defense where I'm leading a team focusing on problems of unusual shape and size. We help create new thinking so policymakers have a chance at approaching these problems in a different way. I also help organizations in the commercial sector attack the challenges of strategy and translating them into designs, the perennial and crossing the gap between these high-level abstractions and where the devil is in the details. That's what I also do. I teach occasionally, I teach a class called Strategic Design for Services. In fact, I just taught 14 people last week, 12 of them in London and we had to do it via Zoom and that was quite fun. That's what I do, part of my missionary zeal, I guess. Next month I also will be teaching at the IU University in Madrid. I'll be teaching a new class on Strategic Design to a group of master students. That's what I do. I wrote a book in 2018. It's called Thinking and Services. The tagline is encoding and expressing strategy through design. That book's been out there and it's getting in the right hands. I think people are getting hold of it and beginning to understand this whole idea called service design from a whole different perspective. That's pretty much it. Other than that, I like to cook and that's another way I keep my creative knives sharpened. Cool. I'm going to put you on the spot because we didn't prepare for this, but shall we do a book giveaway at the end of the episode, a signed copy? Sure. Absolutely. Well, throughout the episode, we'll think of a good question to formulate. Well, the signed book giveaway. Maybe you don't know, but I think I first saw and heard your story. It must have been, when was the service design conference in Amsterdam? 2016? I think so. Yeah, the Vestugas Fabrik. Yeah. I remember seeing your talk and you were presenting like the three by three matrix of four by four, what you were thinking. I was looking into the audience and everybody was blown away. What is this? You probably haven't seen me back then in the audience, but that was my first encounter with you. I do remember you. You were in the front row. I was. You asked me to get my mic correct. So Majid, I'm really curious. How did you get into the service design? When did you first heard about the term? Oh, so I don't know. Like many people, I got into it backwards. I was at Carnegie Mellon University and I wasn't even into the whole world of services back then. My background is in industrial engineering. But back then, I was working for a research group where we are trying to examine why extremely large service contracts fail. And some of these were billions of dollars. And we were trying to approach it from a point of view of where are the costs and risks involved? But as you examine that very quickly, you run into the matter of who designed this and what is even the design here? It became a very interesting question. But even back then, I wasn't really thinking in terms of service design. I was just thinking like, how do we even understand services at a new level? Whenever you're confronted with a new problem, you begin to approach it and say, well, I need to think differently. So that's why I sort of got into this world of services. I was teaching at Carnegie Mellon and a course really back then called Managing Service Organizations. And thus began my journey, my inquiry into this fast and expanding universe of services. And then I must clarify that around this same time, the service design movement formally also, there was some origin story in Carnegie Mellon began with Birgit and Shelly and others, right? Shelly Evanson. But I wasn't involved in that sort of service design, which was more focusing on how do you improve interactions in the front stage through designs in the back stage. I ended up in a completely different parallel part where we're using the same word design, but I'm thinking more in terms of strategy and structure. Whereas what we normally talk about service design is more thought in terms of the blueprints and journey maps where, as we say, the design actually meets reality in terms of touch points and interactions and fail points. So I sort of got into it that way. And ever since, I'm of course aware and I interact with the community. But when I talk about designing services, which is why I try to use that phrase, the designs of services, I'm thinking more in terms of structural terms. What are the parts? How do they interact and why do they fail? We're going to get into that for sure. That must have been back in 2006, 2005? 2003 and 2005? You go way back. Cool. The main topic for today is going to be from strategy to implementation, something that's been on the episode on the show quite frequently lately. And I think that's a good thing, because we actually want to make an impact. We want to see the change that we're trying to create actually materialize. So that's the main topic for today. And you have three angles for this. So we're going to do it, of course, through our well-known interview jazz style format. Are you ready for it, Magid? As ready as it can be. Awesome. Let's start. This will be topic number one. Okay. Challenges. Challenges. Okay. Do we have a question starter and can you show it up to the people watching the video? I guess, what if? So it's not as open as a question as you can get, right? Okay. What if designers are strategists? So they were simply given the role, the requisite authority, responsibility and accountability and saying, for now on, you're going to drive strategy. What might change in their outlook? What they begin to see? Because the mind the eye sees what the mind is prepared to understand. So how prepared are they? And this is actually a question that I start with when I'm teaching strategic design. So I feel if designers assume the role of strategists, they will find themselves thinking fundamentally different and they will find themselves having to climb up and down these ladder of abstraction. They actually find themselves doing something they are actually quite prepared to do, to be able to switch back and forth between the abstract and the concrete. And I think that is something that you have to develop in any field, but particularly in design. I think that's where the idea begins, where you begin to see services through an abstraction, where you begin to see how every service have these fundamental patterns or structures, actually structures and then their patterns among the structures. And I think it will be a very refreshing and a thrilling view that they will see because they will take all this experience they have in looking at services at the detail level interactions, the journeys from the user's perspectives, but now they will also have to see from more perspectives than ever before. In many of the talks and conferences, including at the service design network, I think it was a couple of years ago, was it even in Amsterdam where there was a talk about, how do you focus a little bit more on the backstage? How do you go from design to implementation? Because one way to think of it is that the potential lies in the backstage and it has to emerge as a customer or a user enters a front stage and this is dynamic. And if you're not prepared in the backstage, then there's only so much you can do. I want to interrupt you for a second. What is currently, how does this lack of strategic thinking manifest in service designers at this moment? I'll be cautious with my remarks because one has to stay clear of generalizations. This much is for sure. The very first thing, if you look at the hard work that goes into producing a service blueprint and it fills an entire wall, a lot of research, a lot of talking to users, getting out there in the field, asking questions, spending a lot of time. So you produce that detail and the detail is necessary. But then what happens as you go into the detail, you forget to step back and what's the larger context, right? Your design will fail because of many, many times because factors beyond your control. So which is why one of the key things any strategist has to do. And if you go back to the classical definition of strategy is to climb on top of a hill, see from far and start to see the overall design, the ecosystem, the pattern. And I think that is something that is, I don't think, let me put it this way. We need to put a train people or give them the tools to be able to do that a lot more and also in the course of their normal work to be able to step back and see the overall structure. And I think seeing this overall structure of a service through a construct other than a journey is very important. I think that's where that struggle would be indeed in my own experience when I sometimes have discussions with service designers. One key thing is that's where I see them struggle to be able to, you know, we're all trained to do this. It's just the way it's not any one profession. We are trained to be specialized whether you're a lawyer and accountant, a designer, it does not matter. We have biases and blind spots. So we're very attracted by our biases because they guide them biases come from deep knowledge, but there lies the blind spot. So what happens is that you begin to see things that you're looking for and then you miss out on things that might actually make the service more successful or cause eventual failure. Yeah, so basically, if I'm understanding you correctly, the lack of a strategic perspective decreases the chance that your service will be implemented or that the change that you want to bring to the world will actually be implemented, right? It's one of the failure points, lack of strategic perspective. I think it's more to do with that your service will be implemented, right? Chances are it's a service that's already up and running and you're trying to improve it. What might happen is that as a situation changes gradually or dramatically, take what's going on right now, right? Almost every service provider is having to figure out how to respond to the crisis. Take, for example, Netflix throttling the quality of streaming across Europe because networks are congested, okay? This is a sudden thing. So now suddenly, things you put in place, the strategic choices you made back then either will now help you adjust smoothly or go through incredible pains. So I think that's the essence and I think I just said something which is very important. I think whether it goes back to Michael Porter, strategy is about choices. Choosing to do things, choosing what to do and what not to do and there is parallel in that design is also about choices. Strategy is about constraints at a very high level but design is also about those constraints at lower levels. Which is why I think strategy and design can go hand in hand and it's very important that we talk in terms of professions and disciplines but they're not such hard and fast rules. People can situationally find themselves in the role of a designer or that of a strategist, right? So that's why the focus in our topic is all about translating strategy into design but also sort of looking at design and seeing in it what the strategy is. So I think that's why this topic that will become more and more important. Okay. We're definitely not done with that one but let's move into sort of the second topic because when we were preparing this talk you said to me that there are some fundamental principles of implementing strategy and the second topic is fundamental principles. Do you have a question starter? Can you make something nice out of this? Question starter. Okay. How can we, when will, why, why, who are? I love your question starters. They're wonderful. All right. So maybe how can we? How can we? Yeah. So it's commonplace, it's accepted wisdom that service design in inherently multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, multidisciplinary, however you phrase that, whether you're designing a bike rental service, garbage collection, or emergency healthcare, a lot of different functions and disciplines go into it from operations, infrastructure, software development, and regulatory, whatever it might be, right? The user experience. And as I mentioned, every discipline has its own biases and blind spots and its own languages and formats. Why? Because that's the best, most efficient way for them to express what they're thinking and share their thinking, right? We should not expect them to do it any other way. But then challenge then becomes, if the design has to work and has to translate the strategy, which is at a high level, then suddenly we have a lot of things lost in translation. Okay. How can we bring everybody to the, on the same page? That becomes a key question. And towards this, one of the things we're doing, when I say we, the organizations I work with, we have settled or started using a format called the strategic narrative. The strategic narrative is a, on one hand, it's simply a story, but it's a story of, in a very special format in that it has, it's a fixed length. It has so many sentences and every statement in the sentence is actually an expression or a declaration on some aspect of design. And it's part of a method I've developed called the 16 Next Frame. Think of it as a puzzle with 16 pieces and every piece corresponds to one of the 16 elements of design you find in every service no matter what. And the idea is that you collaboratively solve this puzzle because not everybody, not one function or discipline has all the answers, right? Think of it like a family getting together and solving a puzzle. You turn around and ask for help, right? And someone says, aha, so extend this to this family of functions and disciplines. So by solving this puzzle, by asking simple questions, literally, you know, six types of questions, the prototypical questions, who, why, how, what, when and where. Now interpreting this question, this is a question that anybody can understand, right? By solving this puzzle where every piece is simply a who, why, how or what, and then in the context of when and where, everybody can bring in their perspective, challenge each other. A key aspect in this process is the not just the dialogue, but this argument and counter argument. So what this allows you is that everybody can relax, nobody has to learn this. Oh, I would do this so well if you would just, you know, print me what the contract looks like, say as the lawyer, right? Somebody else might say, show me the blueprint. So I think we can get over that because one thing about, think about a strategic narrative is that apart from expressing the design, the strategic design, it's a narrative form. Nobody needs to be taught how to read or write a story or edit one. So that's one of the fundamental principles and strategic design that inviting multiple perspectives, right, because you're all climbing up at a much higher level of abstraction. At that level, counterintuitive as it might sound, because sometimes people fear the word abstraction, it's too abstract, right? But actually, at a higher level of abstraction, you are actually making things more inclusive, making the participation broader, because you're looking at the same reality, which is the design of a service. And by answering the questions you are interpreting, sort of interpreting those questions, you're giving your own unique perspective. Oh, I think either the user is really the physician and not the patient. Okay, so that answers the who questions or clarifies it, right? Or someone could say, what is the actual outcome? So you can really start discussing this. So I think that's really, in terms of fundamental principles, this is how this is something I would highlight, to use a format, language and format, that is at once broad and inclusive and yet powerful enough to actually create meaningful discussions and output that can be useful at the lower levels of design. Right. So it's creating common ground and it's giving direction. Is that or did I miss something? Yeah, if I could use the expression getting everybody on the same page, literally. Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's one of the things where you see a lot of services break down because people are still very much thinking about their own piece of the service rather than the service as a whole. And this is absolutely right. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. That's one of the reasons, you know, because it like I said, I must clarify, this is this problem is not native to service design, per se, even in healthcare, you know, and MRI may reveal certain things that might be different from what a patient interview can reveal. And that could be different from a blood test. So that's another metaphor for what we mean by a perspective, right? The more perspectives you can bring, the better we are able to, you know, solve the puzzle and focus on the strategic design. And what have you seen is the biggest challenge of creating like this strategic narrative? I can imagine that there are challenges in itself in actually getting this, making this. I think so the biggest challenge is getting past the general discussion of or general notion of the word strategic and narrative and applying it to and how does this apply to the design of a service, right? That's the first challenge because, you know, the world of strategy or teaching strategy or the very idea of, you know, strategic advisory, this is not new. It's one of the oldest professions, right? So strategy is not new, design is not new. The challenge is how do you, how do we, how can we be more imaginative of what we mean by the strategic design for services? Because services are this thing that we all are able to describe, but we all struggle in defining in terms of what are the parts, right? If this were a strategy and it translates into the design of a service, what do I see? So that has been a challenge and that's where my work and my focus has been almost like narrowly in that area in creating a language and format where strategic design can produce some meaningful output. Yeah, so again, I'm going to sort of interrupt you for a second because you basically introduced the third topic and that is, like you said, how does this translate into services, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, continue. You are on a roll. So well, so this goes back to the start of the conversation in my own journey. What is even a service, right? And believe it or not, I had to read a paper from 1966 by James Rathmill in the Journal of Marketing to get my own clarity, right? Because clarity is very important. It's like asking a question, what is salt? You may get different answers around the table. Oh, it's a white substance that is a flavor enhancer. Oh, you can find lots of it in the ocean. So we can have a lot of discussion about salt. But unless, say, if you were to design salt, right, then we have to get into the salt as a molecule, right? We have to arrive at the reality that salt is sodium and chlorine and it's sodium chloride. And then we can go back to the discussion of what kind of salt and all those things. So I think this is what's been missing in service, not missing, but it's gotten over for some reason de-emphasized. If you really go back to one of the seminal papers that a lot of people read in service design, it's the show stack article, right? Designing, gosh, I forget the exact title, but I think everybody knows it. We'll link to it in the show notes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. The designing services that deliver or can't remember, but the way the blueprinting as a concept sort of first emerges. But what's also there in the paper is something called a molecular model, right? And that sort of fell off. And there was this really nice way of analyzing services as a molecule. Well, call it a molecule or call it something else. The point she was making was that every service has structure, parts and how those parts relate to each other. And then she also talks about analysis, variation, the shoe shine example, right? What if the shoe shine... How do I improve profitability while improving the experience? So that's the dynamics, right? What changes? So I think that's been the key challenge in services. And the strategic narrative that I talked to you about, it's possible because it is based on this structural relationship between these parts. In fact, even before this 16-piece puzzle comes an even more fundamental concept called the four promises. So every service is a set of four promises. And just understanding how these four promises relate to each other creates a lot of clarity. And I think... So I encourage everyone... And service design means so many different things in so many different sectors in healthcare, in digital services. That's the... Let's think about it. It's no different than the challenge of a biologist, right? We can talk about life in general, but you have to get into a taxonomy very soon and apply your thinking in particular to the sector that you're applying to. And I think this is the biggest challenge, is going back to abstract and the concrete. You should be able to abstract away and say what even is a service? Oh, they're set of four promises. And these four promises lead to these four questions. And these four questions multiplied by the four promises give me the 16 elements. So think like that, right? This is you designer as a structural engineer or a scientist and yet bring back the detail, right? Begin to see, you know, users and people interacting, struggling, trying to get a job done and other organizations or people stepping up and solving. So to be able to go back from the structural analysis to this rich picture that we paint with something like a service blueprint is what will really empower service designers to be invited in more discussions and have a greater impact on many of these matters. Yeah. So the interesting thing about what you are describing is that it becomes in the most positive way more a science than, well, it complements the art aspect of service design, which is a lot in there right now. A lot of service design feels like art. Well, there's a much bigger science part to services, basically, right? Yeah, yeah, I think so. And let's let's be careful with when we create perhaps this false dichotomy between art and science. I've had my own little education. So yes, I do come from an engineering background. But I have I think what both of us mean is that let's learn what we can from science, but also science itself learns from art. Take, for example, data visualization and how we express data through through meaningful visualizations. That is really learning from art. And if we able to, so with that clarification, in fact, art creates new thinking, right? Art, art informs design, design informs engineering, engineering informs economics. There's this whole discussion about that. So I think I think the the the area of service design has attracting people from various backgrounds, from graphic design to in in my class last week, we had two people with a law degree, one with philosophy, a couple of them for illustrators. And we're all talking services. And I told them right from the beginning of the class, reach into your depth, what you studied in college, rely on those fundamentals, and then bring them to the designs of services. So I think that's that will continue to happen. And I think once we have this common language, then then each all our backgrounds, our trainings, the way we taught 10 years ago, will suddenly at some point on some challenge come to bear. And I think that's that's the fun part of it. And I think, yeah, exactly. And I think it was a few episodes back where, if I'm not mistaken, Joe Bailey said, if we want to get better at designing services, we really have to understand what a service is, like we have to. And it seems that there hasn't been that much attention for that or appetite. But it seems that that's also what you're sort of advocating, like let's deeply understand the structure of a service. And then we know what the boundaries are. If we know what the boundaries are, we can it becomes more fun and probably more productive and effective to design within those boundaries. No, absolutely. And the fun part should not be under emphasize, I always tell people whether I'm teaching them or even my colleagues when we're working on a problem. I say be curious, be imaginative, right? Think in shapes, think in figures, think in numbers, and be you know, childlike about it. But I think Joel is absolutely right. You know, he's a great guy. I still remember his talk from several years ago, where he stood up and said, go deep or go home. I keep teasing him about it, because that's such a good topic. And I think go deep is another way of saying, see the underlying structure, right, beyond the superficial layers. And I think that's part of his message. But also, you're indeed right. There are fantastic excellent books on the design process in general on when it comes to service design. The focus that I have, and some of us are focusing on is making it explaining a little bit more on the services, service part of service design, what is service, what are the patterns, and how can I so that's where my work is, that's where my book also thinking in services focus almost entirely there's very little in it about the actual design process, more of it focuses on what does a designer for service look like to the mind of a strategist. So I think that is essentially why I teach. And I think people are appreciating that many of the people who I'm teaching through the strategic design class are highly experienced service designers, some of them have been doing service design for like 20 years. And it's testimony to the humility as well, right? They're still curious and saying, hey, I want to focus a little bit more on what is this thing called, we call services and how much I see across landscape, you don't know who you're going to help next, right? A local city government trying to set up shelters, or the broader challenge of how do I distribute loans and payments or so I think that's really the dexterity is very, very helpful. And which is why one has to understand services at a level that, especially if you're a design professional, you're the trusted advisor, then it's your job, it's an effort you have to make to understand services much more fundamental level, even though if you may not think and talk about it in your language, you still use the tools and devices that you use day to day, right? Those are very useful, but going back and constantly training yourself at a more fundamental level gives you the depth or as one of my friends, Alok Nandi calls a dynamic shelf, right? From which you, as a designer, almost like a magician, reach into that depth because of your understanding. And I think this, which is why it's important to understand services to be able to have more impact on the field of service design. It's an exciting time to be in service design right now because this knowledge has probably been available for quite some time, but it's now becoming obvious why we need to have like a more fundamental understanding of the thing that we're actually trying to design or design for. And it sort of opens up, like I'm curious, I'm interested, I want to dig into this and it's good to know that there's a lot you can learn, people you can rely upon. So yeah, for me, it's exciting, still an exciting time in service design. I think so, I think so. Yeah, your call for action is good, like get deep into what services are that will help you as a professional and that will help the people you're trying to help. I think so, yeah. We're heading towards the end of the interview, but we have sort of two really important things we need to do. First one is, I want to know from you, if you've got a question for us, the listeners, viewers of the show, is there anything that you'd like us to think about next to the things we've already discussed? To think about in general, is it a question? A question that's on your mind? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. How might we learn from other disciplines that have, for whatever reason, have had 10, 20 or 30 years ahead of us? So for example, we bought a lot of techniques from manufacturing, take something like Kanban, right? This was a technique that was very old and now we're, it's made, got a new life in new domains and disciplines. So, and one of these, and many years ago, 50, 60 years ago, biology went from being the science it always was into informatics when we started to imagine biology as a genetic code. So now, we're coding and now think we have something amazing as CRISPR, right? Where you can literally look at the code and sequence it and edit it. And in fact, so there are examples like these, every discipline makes this big leap, right? It happened even in software development from procedural languages as Xerox Spark, we imagine objects and small talk. So my biggest question is how might we, in the world of service design, make such a fundamental leap? What could it be in the form of, could it be, for example, a pattern library? A lot of people refer to Christopher Alexander's pattern language. But that was an architecture in urban planning. It has usefulness, but we need native knowledge of our own. So how might we make an advance like that? That would be the biggest question that we could think as collectively as in service design. Cool. I like that question. Really curious what people have to say in the comments. Now, the final thing we said at the beginning that we're going to do a book giveaway. We're going to do a contest. So it's up to you to think what a good question would be, where people have to comment on. Huh. Oh. Yeah. I've never done an interview where I haven't been stumped by the question itself. So a contest for, oh yeah. Okay. Good. Whoever. Well, listen. Go ahead. Well, I just realized that I was about to formulate the question, but quickly become a cast member too. I was going to think in terms of, I had a lot of fun writing the book. And in there are several movie references. And I was going to say, I was going to say, okay, maybe that's what it is. Contact someone who has, who has already has the book or reading the book and find three movie references. And the book is yours. There you go. And if there are multiple winners, we'll pick a random one. And if there are multiple people who have the right answer, we'll pick a random one. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Good. You know what to do. People go to the comments section and leave a comment. If people want to get in touch with you to continue this conversation, what's the best way? So there's the design coder slag. It's simply design coders.slag.com. But the easiest way to get in touch with me is via LinkedIn. I'm easy to find and I'm making new connections, meeting new people. And also my Twitter handle is mx iqb al. That's my Twitter handle. And we'll be somewhere here on the screen. Okay. Okay, Majid. I think we're sort of at the end. Stay safe. Stay healthy. Also for everybody who's listening or watching, please stay home. Be healthy. And thanks for sharing your thoughts and ideas, what's on your mind. I think we're entering sort of a really interesting era of service design. So thanks for sharing that, Majid. Thank you so much for inviting me. I really appreciate it. So what do you think will the big lead be in service design? I'm really curious to hear your comments. Leave them down below. And what you also can do down below is to leave your answers to Majid's question regarding the book giveaway contest. So do that down below and we'll draw a random winner who got the answers. Right. If you enjoyed this episode, I hope you did. Make sure you grab the link and share it with just one other person today who might find it interesting as well. That way you'll help to grow the service design show community and help me to invite more guests like Majid here on the show for you. Thanks for watching. And if you want to continue getting inspired by other service designers, click this video over here because we're going to continue over there. Thanks for watching and I'll see you over here.