 In this episode you're going to learn how the small choices you make as a service designer on an individual level have the power to transform entire systems. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi I'm Lauren Cerota and this is the Service Design Show episode 109. Hi I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about empowering you with the most effective skills and strategies so you can design services that win the hearts of people and business. And someone who's been doing that for a very long time is Lauren Cerota. Lauren is the head of service design at the Yomabank in Myanmar. I'm really excited to have Lauren on the show because she's got a lot of experience with putting design to work in really unconventional areas. And we're going to talk about what we can learn as a community from non-designers and how asking better questions leads to more impact. So through this episode you're going to discover how to design solutions that are embraced by the people who are going to use them and by the organization that needs to provide them. So sit back relax and enjoy the conversation with Lauren Cerota. Welcome to the show Lauren. Hey Mark. Hey actually we used to be in a very remote locations or far apart and now we're much closer right? You're almost next door to me. I am much closer yes it's been a crazy year. Yeah so for the people who don't know who you are could you give like a brief introduction and maybe share a little bit about where you've been and where you are today. Sure yeah my name is Lauren Cerota. I'm a designer and a consumer insights research consultant. I am currently in Amsterdam but my home base is still technically Myanmar. I was most recently the head of service design at a company called Yomabank which is a domestic commercial bank in Myanmar and I'm here because of COVID and travel restrictions but it's not a bad place to be stuck and I made the transition back into consulting in about March so it's worked out relatively well to be based here. That must have been a transition from Myanmar to Amsterdam yeah maybe we'll get into that later. Lauren a new element that we've introduced to the show a few episodes ago is a 60 second rapid fire and I don't prepare any of my guests so I didn't do it with you either. So the goal is to answer these questions as quickly as possible are you ready? Yes okay let's do it. What's always in your fridge? In the summer blueberries in the winter whatever's in season in the winter probably like kale or turnips or carrots or something. Okay which book are you reading at the moment if any? I'm glad you asked because I'm very excited about it. It's a collection of short story sci-fi from a bunch of different Chinese authors so it's kind of like an introduction to a bunch of different really well known authors who write both in Mandarin and kind of translate it to English themselves and then the person who put the compilation together translated it the things that weren't translated and it's it's very cool. I highly recommend it. Well link to it in the show notes which superpower would you like to have? I would like to be able to disarm people to get people to to see people's true intent and be able to work with that. What does you want to be when you were a kid? A designer. Well good for you and the final question is what was the first time you sort of learned about service design? Probably early in my career I don't think that I the way that I learned design was a combination of industrial design and interaction design and a lot of the work that I was doing at the time was service design but I wasn't familiar with the term. So I probably started learning about the term and the kind of community of practice around it in like 2007-2008 but still didn't necessarily know that I was practicing it even though I was. I think that's the most common journey a lot of service designers have have gone through. Yeah so again quite a long time. The topic for this chat is going to be quite interesting because we did a little bit of preparation and the conclusion sort of was that we're going to explore the power we have not only as designers but as people and through the choices we make in our designs and both as consumers so let's explore that right? And let me start with a question. So Lauren when you were thinking about this topic what was the thing that that you sort of see into the future what's what's the thing about making choices as consumers people and designers that you think we should be thinking about right now? I think that there's two key things and one of them is that I think some of the challenges that the world's facing right now are so big that they can't really be solved by any one methodology alone and actually they need to be solved by everybody making a little bit of a change or at least being a lot more conscious about the decisions that they make and I see that as a big fight because there are a lot of forces that push people into kind of blind consumption and behaviors where they're not very they don't have a lot of agency over their control even though they might feel like it. So that's kind of one one side of it so I think that it's really imminent when we think about things like climate change or equality and equity that everybody recognizes that they play a role and I think that design is a word something that we'll talk about a lot I think is a challenging word because it has it's so loaded and everybody has like semantically it's just very difficult but there are kind of design attributed activities and mindsets that can really help approach some of the things that could happen to resolve some of these issues on a larger scale. So that sounds really interesting and what always fascinates me is at which moment did you become aware that this is something that you feel like pursuing that this is a topic that you're interested in and want to explore was there a pivotal moment in your life or is this something that grew gradually? Yeah there were a couple and the first one was actually in school when I was learning about interaction design and I realized yeah I thought that I wanted I knew I wanted to be a designer but it's because I liked making things and so I thought that I would be a furniture designer or do something kind of in the built environment which kind of led me to industrial design and in interaction design a lot of the work that we were doing was workflow analysis and and things that interaction designers do and I kept thinking like some of these the breakdown points are like these teeny tiny things that weren't even a decision they're a byproduct of a decision and if we fix them we could actually fix an entire system in some cases so I thought that was really powerful and very cool and the more and more I matured in my career I realized that a lot of times those decisions aren't made by designers and they're made by the compliance people or the risk people or a business person or an engineer or an operations person and so that just got me more and more interested in kind of design concepts playing more of a role in those things and then also acknowledging where people are making decisions that don't involve designers and have their own methodologies and frameworks that maybe designers should be aware of and I would say that opens a rabbit hole because there are a lot of areas where designers still aren't involved and don't have any influence if we took if we take a look at the the bigger picture like what what is at stake now like where are we heading to well yeah I think for designers let me talk about first of all for our industry I think it will I think we're already getting relinquished into this this bucket of the annoying expensive post-it note idealist so I think that there's a risk that it further marginalizes our industry and then puts us back into a place we were prior which was aesthetics which I think was okay official layers yeah yeah and things that people you know we've really fought hard to we've fought hard to change the definition of design from these things and there were people in the 50s and 60s that were designing things differently and it wasn't just about superficiality but it wasn't part of business discussion right it was just something the designers and the engineers did and so I think that there's a risk to to design if we don't start changing and we don't start getting over ourselves honestly and then I think that yeah so we can dive into that because what is the thing that we need to get over like and what is the thing that you feel we need to change in in design I think that one of the most beautiful things about people who go into design is one design gives you an ability to create and that's tremendously powerful right and a lot of people who choose to go into design love to create and get gratification for making things so that power I think can sometimes yeah make people think that they're better than others or give them tools that put them at an advantage above others that don't necessarily have those same skills also design education is a pretty privileged space so people who get access to formal design training are oftentimes coming from a very specific socioeconomic class very very specific racial background and so design just by nature like a lot of fields is just very skewed reselected basically yeah and so the solutions are as well yes and so I think that it's important for designers to not take us personally because if you're a designer that's representative of the majority of designers that's okay you're still or might be a great designer but just recognize the responsibility that you have to listen recognize one that being a designer doesn't make you better than anybody else it doesn't mean your approaches are better than anyone else and then also realize that there are probably other people who might be a better designer than you who are in the room even sometimes but haven't been given the opportunity to learn what it means to think this way or given permission to prototype things so I think there's it's just a bit of a mindset shift for the people who are in those positions now and I actually I think there are a lot of people who are calling this out now but there's also a lot of kind of shaming and I don't think that that's very productive like to call up people's privilege and tell them that they should feel bad about it but I think it's actually powerful if people can flip that and turn it into you know say okay I have a seat at this table I have all of these resources what happens if I sort of saying this is what I think ask a question of somebody who hasn't spoken out so it's at least it sounds to me like creating awareness about these it's it's not yeah maybe there are flaws in the existing design practice and then once you are aware of them you can actually start changing things and one of the things that we can start changing is I sometimes call it the God complex if you are able to create then you feel like you can change everything and you you know everything and a bit more humility in that design practice wouldn't wouldn't be a bad thing right well one of the things I like that you call it that because there are designers who have a lot of humility so I don't want to there are but you're right it does um there's a power in in being able to make things um but one of the things that I always remind my team remind myself is like we need all of the other practices to make our things reality so sure that um and it's always bothered me I think it's changing now but design education doesn't really teach you a lot about business it doesn't teach you about operations it teaches you a little bit about technology right depending on what kind of degree you get or or kind of where you get exposure but but these things and being literate to them I see as being just as important to understanding user needs and so I think that that's um I think it's one thing like I think the ego can sometimes be a good thing because it brings conviction which is necessary for forward momentum especially when you're working in a space of ambiguity or doing something new like that's tremendously important but not if it doesn't put all of those other kind of practices and perspectives um at equal weight to the design perspective for the user perspective I'm um that the one of the metaphors that I've been using lately a lot is like design and especially service design is a practice where you try to coordinate or orchestrate and work together with other disciplines to create something that benefits well the people listening to the to the music and I think if we still look at design education design is very much thought in a way where it's a step in a process rather than something that brings together different perspectives right yeah I agree and I actually think that that's why service design is a term and as a practice is important because it starts to break those things down um but but yeah I think that it's still and this is why the word design I think is so challenging because everyone does have a notion of what it is and service design is similarly challenging I remember for the first six months I was at YOMA people thought I was literally just working on customer service like designing scripts and setting up the call center right um and that was difficult for me because I said yeah that could be something I do if you need it right if it means that we have better outcomes um in terms of the products we put out there and how we serve our customers and so things like um John Mayetta talks about this a lot the emergence of the the equally ambiguous but maybe more appropriate term customer experience right or things that people at least understand because I found that using those words and I'm actually really proud of um I've recently learned that the team at YOMA bank that I used to lead um is now designing customer experience um and the team lead has told me that's already changed the way that the rest of the organization works with them because previously there had to be this long discussion about why she needed to be in the room when there's a discussion you know when they're talking about changing the terms and additions they're like there's no interface here yeah and she said yeah but it impacts the customer experience and so I think that that's um these little changes are really significant I um one of the things again I'm only thinking of metaphors in my head and analogies and one of the um answers that I give to the question like what uh why the rise of service design why service design growing at this moment and one of my answers is that companies are starting to see the business value of customer experience but customer experience isn't a practice it's it's not a field so you need skills and methods and tools to actually work on creating a better customer experience and service design lends itself really well to provide and create a better customer experience so in that sense it makes a lot of sense to talk about what it actually does and sometimes leave that how it does it sort of onto the backstage and and just talk about what is the thing that we're trying to contribute to and and so it makes a lot of sense to talk about customer experience you know what's so tough about that though is that um I think everyone agrees with that right and I think it's beautiful because you can't really have anybody say we don't care about customer experience that's just it unless they they really don't unless you have a business that's purely about efficiency or really um the challenge is where does that where does that practice sit in the organization and how do they engage right and what is the demand management framework for that practice so it's kind of um it's tricky to think about design ops when you have a customer experience practice that is all-encompassing I think that's a tension but it is and yeah and but that doesn't change when you either talk about customer experience or service design that all encompassing the holistic perspective is definitely something that's super hard to or operationalize I'm really curious about your uh I don't like the word war stories or but use the battle scars um how have you uh seen this play out in your own practice do you have some examples where the helping people to make better choices helping uh helping yourself to make better choices as uh as a designer can you share some some examples with us yeah yeah there's a few and and I'll um caveat this by saying there's a lot of other good examples of course from my consulting experience that I wish I could share and I can't but the ones that I'll share with you I think are interesting and they aren't just mine so most of them I would say I had like a nominal role in um but they were still kind of there was a team that I led through executing them for example so the first one is with yomo bank we had a product that we launched within the first six months of me being there that was a micro credit product and in Myanmar the banking sector is very nascent so um at that time fewer than 10 percent of people were actively using bank accounts um fewer than 10 percent of the people in the country and there's a big distribution problem because about 70 percent of the population is rural so they're difficult it's difficult for them to get to a bank branch um they're hard to reach so obviously a huge opportunity for digital services and um and what we wanted to do is convince the bank who was already kind of philosophically on board but didn't necessarily believe it yet we wanted to convince them that there was actually a market to compete with MFI's micro finance institutions and that if we gave people um a little bit more dignity around having to borrow a small amount of money for whatever it might be um but that was a very um significant value proposition in the market so this was a tough thing for people to wrap their heads around and um which which people uh needed to wrap their head around I think um so traditionally banking in me and mar had been for the wealthy and for corporations and they thought you know how are we going to make money as a bank off of you know 80 dollar us micro loans right um and how are people going to access this these people don't have smartphones so there were a lot of these um paradigms kind of yeah yeah that that needed to be tweaked and there was fortunately an openness which is kind of why was there in the first place to explore these things um but how we did it I think was really important and I attribute a lot of this to the former leader of the team that I was working under um this guy mark flaming who um set it up in such a way that we really piloted with the tools that we had so we kind of built our own mini version of it using you know the same thing that most designers will do when they're doing a kind of smoke and mirrors test and gave it three months to run to prove that there was a demand and there were a lot of constraints and we were able to both identify those so we set up a proper pilot we said okay these are the kind of variables that we have to take into account these are the things that might affect the outcomes um and we use that to prove that there was actually a demand in the market tweak the product and then move it into a stage where we developed it into a proper product um but I think most designers go through this process in some shape or form but how we did it was important so yeah from the first day um so first of all something important is to understand is that my team was the design and product team so actually anyone who was working on product at the time so the PO's the BA's um UAT like all of these kind of product roles were also under design so we had that kind of capacity all working with UX and um and some of the other design roles and we brought in like architects really early on even though we didn't really need to change anything in the IT infrastructure we brought in operations people really early on so the first things that we did we didn't say here's what the process is going to be we said you know what should the process be and went through the sometimes kind of difficult and arduous experience of trying to get them more comfortable doing things a little differently um because this was a pretty new thing for the organization so that was um we didn't run this pilot and then kind of hand it off or then invite people in it was really kind of co-created from the beginning with the entire team um that was necessary to own it and run with it afterwards um so I already have a question about this because I think a lot of people will be curious about how you managed to get that first buying because I think we we are eager to co-create with people but everybody is busy and especially when they don't see the value even in the start it's it's hard so was there anything that you did in particular in the process that got you access to these people these resources or was it just somebody at leadership level saying this is what we need to do it was a combination of leadership really supporting it and pushing it and also us being able to tie it back to things like um analogies in the sector you know we were saying here's what micro finance institutions are doing and here's what we're missing from a commercial perspective if we're not playing in this space um also tying it back to people which is always a powerful thing to do and this is something that we did a lot more comprehensively a little bit later on in my um kind of tenure with yoma but it's talking about actual people who have these needs and helping the individuals realize how different they are from these people right and then try to find an acre person like who is somebody that's like this that you know who might use this product right um unfortunately a lot of the team was really excited to do something different um and they were excited to be um trying out things that maybe other banks in the market weren't doing so I think there was also um an attitude and a willingness from um a lot of the people in the organization which again can be attributed to the leadership giving them the space to have that to explore and then also supporting them and exploring it how so one element in this um how important was it that for instance micro finance institutions were already successfully doing this I can imagine that that gives the confidence hey there is something here to explore yeah I think every every single I've worked in a lot of different countries and everybody thinks that their country is different and a lot of times countries are very different from each other like the U.S. is the biggest pain in the butt to design for for example but the um I think it would have been very difficult to say yeah you know this is every other country that's going on the same kind of growth trajectory as me and Mars experiencing this kind of growth in the financial sector would not have been as compelling a story as somebody's eating your cake sure right yeah as people have created a sector and if you don't step on it they're going to occupy it and we won't have any of it for our organization yeah yeah that's a good insight I don't think a lot of designers do the effort to do that sort of market analysis or market research and approach it from that perspective um you were at the moment where you were saying okay we co-created it with a lot of stakeholders got people involved how did that go how they were open to it they they responded and what did you do after the after the pilot um well there were some other things that that my um my boss had done that were really smart like he'd engaged a third party who'd done this before right so there was kind of an expert brought into the mix um we yeah it was pretty easy to prove that it was a successful thing and the good thing was that the organization was pretty behind the concept even before we piloted it so we were able to then say okay this works we can manage it operationally I think actually the biggest hurdle that we faced which I hadn't really thought about until now was everybody saying oh we're not going to be able to manage the operations of it or and so we were able to prove through the pilot that yeah we can so how did you prove it because proof is a big thing uh in design and sort of uh validating uh impact what did you do to prove what was the proof but by just doing it and and saying here's what we need to do you know at this scale we need three people to be doing these types of tasks we need procedures around this we maybe need to build this new piece of technology or make this change to our core banking system and then it becomes manageable so it was actually identifying where the stress points were and what the needs were to to support it if it were real and then how those would need to scale and I think building a little bit of an institutional understanding of regularly revisiting of how you needed to regularly regularly revisit to find these points in the future that the thing that's cool about Myanmar is is people think this way anyway like it's a very iterative culture like there's not um there's some resistance to change um like there is anywhere else but for the most part there's not um there's a lot of kind of problem solving baked into how people work there and and so that made it pretty easy um you know it was there's always the oh we can't do it and then somebody would come and say but what if we did x y z and then eventually we would get there cool um the the proof part and the opera sort of uh mapping the impact on the operations is I think uh one of the big things again we can also learn a lot about like we are pretty good at understanding customer needs and um proving that those needs are valid but then sort of actually uh helping an organization to scale it up to embrace it to embed it that's that's still a quite a challenge what it is and it's surprising that it is because there are so many organizations that still you know I spend a lot of time actually going back and forth with people on twitter with examples of this like that's still run on spreadsheets and if you are using a spreadsheet to run a database for part of your core operation then you need people to be involved in that process right so that that's operations so there's yeah I think that there's this notion that like you make things digital and then they become digital and you just have to do bug fixes and stuff like that but that's very rarely the case with any even like a purely digital service um that a user only experiences through a phone there's still probably tons of operational procedures and edge cases that need to be accounted for um and those all affect the customer experience and so those are all places where the designer needs to have an understanding you know I think you had a second story also in mind right that you could share with us curious to hear about that one yeah so this is um this is a little bit more like so one of the first things that I had done to in Myanmar that kind of established me wanting to work there and people they're liking to work with me was um a project on money practices in rural Myanmar so it was funded by an institution in the U.S. that does a lot of research in markets that are changing in terms of how they're how people deal with money or payments ecosystems are being introduced they try to document these different shifts and then make resources that are available to any you know financial institutions or policymakers or anyone who is playing in that market or needs to be more informed um so they'd funded a project to do work in Myanmar to understand in rural Myanmar how the recent democratization and open elections um was you know try to kind of take a snapshot of a moment in time before things really shifted to being digital to being more connected to having more infrastructure um and so I'd gotten the chance to work on that and found the output of that really powerful um because it was so that there was that there were two different reports that came out there was that one on money practices and then a subsequent one that was funded by us ad and done with proximity designs um these are both done with proximity designs that was on the patty and rice ecosystem and these are I think both examples of resources that were created in order to provide information for anyone who was operating in the market to make better decisions and so the reason I gave it as an example is I actually think that's a tremendously important designed process to actually get to an output where you're providing information to the world so that people can make those better decisions and ask better questions and and it had to do with um the open-mindedness of funders it had to do with the expertise of companies like proximity who were in market um I was working with a company called studio d radio durans and I got in young chipchase at the time and he you know really helped set a lot of these things up and so I see that as a really good example of design at the early stage like the design of these programs to create artifacts that will actually um inspire change in multiple ways to come um and the reason that I think that the the rice the patty to rice one was a good example was um there's someone who I worked with um closely at yoma whom who's a actually a robo bank guy we have a lot of shared resources and team members that go back and forth and I remember him telling me that he read the patty to rice book to prepare himself for going for coming to Myanmar and it really helps him relate agricultural and the Netherlands agricultural financing in the Netherlands to Myanmar and I thought like this is what what a rewarding experience as a designer right to have created this artifact about the opportunity to make a publicly available artifact that looks at things through this kind of human centered lens talks about systems and lays out things in a way that it's actually practical to this person who's the one that's enacting change um so yeah I thought that that was a cool example because of all of the decisions and all of the things that had to come together to make that resource possible so the big question here is what was it about the resource and the process to that resource that made it so effective it's a big how question like the the tactical the operational things what what do you feel yeah I think so one is that you we had funding for it from a a big aid source that was willing to do something different without money than they had done in the past um or willing to because I wouldn't say that you know companies organizations like USAID don't typically invest in report generation that they were willing to invest in a longitudinal qualitative for the most part though we did do a lot of data analysis research study just to create kind of a a snapshot of the entire ecosystem right and we had done it because proximity then wanted to build services and products that helped solve some of those needs because they work in agricultural services development financial services development for the rural sector so I think that that was a pretty progressive step for them to be willing to allocate the funds to this type of a project instead of just execute on drone irrigation and in township x and then I also think it's having I think that perhaps the bigger thing is having people who then scope those projects who have the strategic foresight to do them in a way where they're going to be beneficial long term and and proximity designs is a great example because they are a social enterprise so they get a lot of their funding for their r&d from donors but then they aim to make all of their businesses self-sustainable and so their interest isn't just in themselves they have an obligation to their donors to make things publicly available but that just changes how the work is done like if we were just doing research and writing a report for proximity to only use internally it would be very different right and it wouldn't that impact that I was telling you about that that I feel was so powerful where it actually became a tool that anybody could use and kind of extend upon and so I think that having a business that's able to operate with that kind of a blended business model is also and a willingness to to share resources is also pretty unusual and important what do you take as a designer from this project into projects that follow out or will follow like what's the biggest learning is is it about working for certain types of businesses that have a specific business model or is it something else yeah I think it actually goes back to our initial conversation which is just asking a lot more questions about what what the goal of the work is exactly um and figuring out I personally prefer to work on things that are um I'm happy to actually work on things that just have a commercial objective as long as that's clear in the beginning right if it's not shrouded in you know we're trying to make people's lives better um by improving their efficiency and farming so that we get better yields right so I am I think that that clarity and making sure that there's yeah just transparency and honesty and what the work is being done is important I think really for any designer to be aware of I think a lot of designers go into um what would be kind of classified as impact work or social impact work um thinking that it's good because they're going to help people which is a little dangerous because you need to you know five wise yourself like why is this happening why am I doing it am I the right person to do it um what is actually the outcome of this project could this money be spent better somewhere else so yeah I think these these have given me these types of projects have given me permission to always ask those questions right um and and um yeah it's I would is uh is it being more critical at the start or being critical throughout the the process like challenging yourself and I wouldn't say they are the tough questions but maybe the uncomfortable questions sometimes yeah I would say it's definitely throughout one of the things that I find really challenging is there are a lot of times where I feel like I should be removed like I don't necessarily think that you know and I push myself to take on you know I'll write an SOP if I need to write an SOP or you know I will take on skills to get the work done that needs to be done um but there's not always work that needs to be done that's in my skill set and so um yeah I think that that's one of the toughest things to be critical about is is really what value am I adding um or how can I facilitate somebody else adding more value or having better benefit from this so if we try to tie these two examples back to what we started about and the choices we make the that that the choices we make on an individual level impact the bigger system what are some of the learnings we can take from this and I think the designers at least speaking for myself to for me to feel like I'm a designer that's actually taking seriously you know I don't want to say that I'm making positive change in the world but at least as aware of the change that I'm making um yeah I would say just measuring ourselves not by the output of our creative endeavors but actually the impact that our decisions have or our involvement have on the world or on a business um so I think that that's um something that I think we ought to be a little bit better at and that's where I think it comes back to I measure the the patty to plate book is a success because of my friend Bart saying he he used it and it was helpful right um it's also a really beautiful artifact and we got to do a presentation about it and it's yeah I find it to be a really lovely body of work um which feels cool but that's not how I judge whether or not it was successful and um and so I think that that is an important lens that I've tried to apply to all of my work and I think that if more designers and more anybody who's in a decision-making role thinks that way then they'll start asking more questions and um at least be aware of what the end state is that that their work affects right because we can't always control what actually happens um but we can we can pay attention to it yeah so that that was my question like how do it it seems so challenging often to assess the impact because we're often not in the position where we directly affect people but maybe though we are and we're just not attuned to seeing that fear feeling that hearing that um and and it's about the responses we get uh from people like just one person saying that they found uh there's helpful and help them to do a better job like that's the that that's the confirmation confirmation that's the uh value that we're trying to bring to the world yeah well and why is that good right not just okay this person thought it helpful but why is that good because one of the things that I actually wanted to say that I was thinking about because you asked good questions is that I was actually thinking about the some of the best designers I've ever met and some of them aren't designers they're actually or I they are designers and that they practice design attributed things but they are public servants so they're people who work in mayor's offices um or people who are social workers and these people throughout their career have had to think about like their number one focus is improved outcome of their work um and improving people's livelihoods or giving people more um agency or um you know providing options making something more accessible so that is actually the they're so laser focused on that and and they're trained to think about that so I think that people who call themselves designers ought to be as well I think that that's one of the the biggest things that we're going to have to overcome is that there are a lot of other people who are creative who understand what human centricity is who are capable of doing all the things that designers do capable of learning how to make things um who have a lot of a much sometimes better foundation for understanding the world and how to affect change um and so I think that that's um a really cool challenge oh yeah what so what does that mean for us as a community yeah that we just need to listen more and we need to step back and um realize that almost any space we're participating in is a space that was first owned by someone else and um it's our job to learn from them so that we can try to make a better outcome but know that we might not be able to right um and and that's a tough reality as well like their um our involvement might not yield better results than our absence in some cases if we had to summarize uh this this uh this conversation for me one one thing that really stands out is asking more and better questions about the work you're doing about the value that you bring about uh the thing that you are trying to achieve um anything else that that you'd like to sort of stress yeah just not getting caught up in language and and working really hard to recognize how important communication is and communication of intent is um rather than being dogmatic or trying to identify as something or some particular part of a process okay if people are interested to dig deeper into this there are any recommended resources you have what's a good read or oh yeah i so what i suggest yeah i don't know actually and this is i've always fallen flat here this is one of the reasons that i don't write very well is because i don't i'm not a very good um kind of reference gatherer um i would say not one specific resource but if you're working in an area read things about that area that are things that are not about design i wanted one piece of advice i used to give people who wanted to work a lot of my early career was spent um well and also recent career because i was living in Myanmar working in really interesting places that a lot of people don't think about very often um a lot of people in the west don't think about very often and um you know people would ask me how do you prepare yourself and i said well one most places in the world are pretty similar because people are pretty similar so if you can relate to people as humans then step one two also just there's so many resources find an english translated book um written by a zambian author if you're going to zambia um you know watch some documentaries about a particular market or a particular industry talk to some subject matter experts there so i think that um yeah it's a little bit more specific to an individual but i think that those things can be really powerful because those start opening your mind up to how much is out there i like that because uh becoming a better designer often isn't about learning about design and it's it's usually the things outside of the design that make you a really good and interesting designer um moron if people want to continue this conversation with you is there a way they can reach out sure yeah absolutely um twitter probably is the best yeah um i'm happy for people to email me as well we'll make sure the yeah yeah we'll make sure that they are put them on the end yeah yeah i'll add them to the uh to the show notes i feel that we could continue this conversation for uh quite a long time um i really want to thank you for addressing this and sort of stressing the importance of this uh topic about being more critical being more humble asking more questions i think we sort of all know that and it should be baked in into our identity as designers but it's good that we um keep uh raising our awareness to this and uh yeah having a laser focus like you said on this so thanks lauren thanks mark if you made it all the way till here leave a comment down below with the hashtag commitment because that's what it's all about if you enjoyed this episode and find found it helpful crap the link is shared with just one other person today who might find it useful as well that helps to grow the service designs for community and that helps me to invite more people like lauren here on the show for you if you want to learn more about how to design services that win the hearts of people and business make sure you check out this next video because we're going to continue over there so click here and i'll see you there