 Many clients want you to deliver short-term results and projects while at the same time helping them to build internal service design capabilities. Is that even realistic? Is that possible? And if so, how do you do that? Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, this is Patrick. This is the Service Design Show episode 115. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about empowering you with the most effective skills and strategies. So you can design services that win the hearts of people and business. And the guest in this episode is nobody less than Patrick Qualerbaum. Patrick is the founder of Harmonic Design. He's the former managing director at Adaptive Pet and you might know him as the author of the book called Orchestrating Experiences. What I'll be discussing with Patrick in this episode is what to do in situations where clients want short-term results through project work and will also want to learn the craft of service design by doing projects. I know that this was a question that I got very often when I was still doing service design on a day-to-day basis. And in theory, it sounds great, but in practice you run into many, many challenges. Patrick is going to share some really inspiring examples from the work they're doing and how they're helping clients to actually achieve this. So if you stick around till the end, you'll know much better how to handle clients want short-term results and learn the craft of service design at the same time. But it's not only external agencies or consultancies who get this challenge. If you're an in-house service designer, this challenge also probably sounds familiar to you. And to be honest, it's probably much harder to you to deal with this question because often you don't have an entire team of professionals and like-minded peers around you who you can ask for advice. Sometimes being an in-house service designer can feel quite lonely. If you're in a similar position, you might consider joining our Campfire Group, which is starting in January. The Campfire Group is a five-week mastermind program where you'll meet other in-house service designers who face the same challenges. You'll get to hear their stories and learn from each other. I know that being an in-house service designer can be overwhelming. There are so many things to do and so many people demanding things from you. It's really hard to stand still, stop and reflect for a second to grow as a professional. Often you don't permit yourself the time to invest in yourself. Now, Campfire is a perfect excuse for that. As one of the previous participants said, if you feel you don't have the time to join the Campfire, you probably need it even more. If you want to be part of the next Campfire Group, check out the details on how to apply at www.ServiceDesignShow.com. At the time of the recording of this video, there are still a few spots left, so head over to www.ServiceDesignShow.com. And now we're going to talk about how to bring service design in-house while delivering great service design projects at the same time. So, sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation with Patrick Qualabaum. Welcome to the show, Patrick. Hi, Mark. Nice to have you on. Looking forward to our chat today. For the people who don't know who you are, could you give a brief introduction? Yeah, hi. I'm Patrick Qualabaum. I'm a service designer in the United States. I'm in Atlanta, Georgia. I own a company called Harmonic Design, and we specialize in service design. It's a new company. We've been around for about two and a half years. Before that, I was head of service design at Capital One, managing director at Adaptive Path. Before that, I was a chief experience officer at a design agency here in Atlanta. Before that, I owned a soccer store or football there in Europe. No way. I've done a lot of things. Wow. You owned a soccer store. We need to get into that story a bit later. Awesome. We're going to do a 60-second rapid-fire round. Five questions. You need to answer them as quickly as possible. Let's do it. Patrick, what's always in your fridge? Always in my fridge. What is always in my fridge here? Which book are you reading, if any? I just finished a book called The Searcher, which is a fiction book, based about Ireland, which I love, The Country of Ireland. But in design-wise, I'm having my entire team read The Trusted Advisor, which is like a classic in consulting, which might be a topic of building trust with clients and people that you work with. We'll link to that down below. Next up. What superpower would you like to have? Superpower I'd like to have. Right now, the ability to be anywhere in the world and not be safe would be amazing right now. Seems like a superpower these days. What did you want to become when you were a kid? I wanted to be an architect, which I think I am in a way. You're just not building buildings? Yeah, exactly. And finally, do you remember or recall your first memory of service design? Well, that gets into what is service design, right? I can remember when I started to associate what I do with service design, because in the United States, we're a little late to using that term compared to other parts of the world. But that was about 2006 when I had won too many projects in which I hired to do a certain part of the experience and realizing that I could do the work to think about the whole thing holistically and beyond just a certain channel like digital and started to find my way to a language in a community that did similar things. Around that time, 2006, 2007, 2008, it's sort of like looking back on it. It's not the rebirth of service design, maybe. It seems like that a lot of happened around those years. Yeah, I mean, in the United States specifically, I mean, definitely this is service design thinking. It was like 2011. Oh, yeah, yeah. The book. Yeah. I think that in the United States, I think started to have people start to understand what those words mean in our culture because we were very heavy user experience in the United States. And there are a lot of people that do service design but call themselves user experience, say strategists or designers. And there's a lot of people who use service design for all sorts of different things in the United States. And still, semantically, it's still kind of confusing for folks. There's a lot of people who actually do elements of it. But I think we're still trying to get into the community, right? Let's not get into too much semantics today. Yeah. We can make an entire show about that. We have a much more important topic to talk about because we're going to address the challenge and figure out if it's a paradox maybe of being able to deliver short-term results, outcomes through service design while at the same time building service design capability within an organization, helping them to transform. I know that when I was still back at the agency, we got this question over and over again. I think 80% of our projects had this kind of element. I definitely have developed a perspective on this, but I'm really curious to learn from you how this works. So first of all, what is your relationship to this topic? Why is it something that's on your mind right now? Well, I think like you, I found it was always part of the gig, right? That I often call service design a team sport, right? And a lot of service designers kind of focus a lot on facilitation. It's a lot more than facilitation, but it definitely is a... You're looking to bring together and orchestrate a lot of different people towards a goal that's bigger than any particular function. And within organizations, this is a common problem. Whether you call it service design or not, just getting different groups to work towards the same goal is very difficult. And so when a lot of times and whether it was specifically asked for when the project was initiated or along the way, it was, wow, we really need to do more of this around here. Can you help us do that more? My mother is a teacher, or was a teacher, she's retired now. My dad was a banker, but he even on the side taught finance to inmates in prison to help them kind of transition back into work, back into society. So I kind of have this... I've been told by some of my clients, I have the heart of a teacher, which I picked right in. And so at this point, I am building our company around like this is part of the... We don't take work unless this is part of what we're doing. Because I really believe that this should be integral to organizations. There's a role for outside companies to help. But if it stays on the outside of organizations, then they won't transform. We won't see the types of experiences we want to see in the world as designers, right? Yeah, yeah. And then when you say it's when it stays outside, when the discipline and the mindset and the attitude of service design stays something that you hire from a consulting agency and don't internalize it, right? That's what you're referring to. And the hard skills, because I think that that's one thing that, you know, from my experience with us, you know, a lot of organizations is there's almost an over focus on mindset, which is foundational. You have to have a mindset. But building expertise and going through the cycles of you can't be certified in a couple of weeks to be a designer. So how do you build those hard skills? And in some cases it's about helping designers expand their toolkit and the impact they can have on organizations. And sometimes it's helping non-designers use elements of design to do better work, regardless of what their role is. And those are different contexts, right, when you're trying to help build those capabilities. And before we dive into how to actually do that, I'm curious if you've seen something similar where like a lot of organizations want to become customer centric. I think they honestly want to deliver better experiences for their employees, for their customers. But somehow even after engaging in many design related human-centered initiatives, sort of the core essence still doesn't change. Is that your experience as well? Yes, I mean, there definitely is. There's been for many years now this kind of commander's intent from the C level in organizations of customer centric, right? A lot of that I think comes from outside pressures rather than internalizing what that really means. Either it's they see the competition saying and thinking they're doing it, or they're attaching that to business strategies like customer value streams and things like that. And they're really trying to get the organization to get leaner and more focused on are the things that we're doing as an organization creating value for customers. And often when they say customer centered in the C suite for business people, that's really what they're talking about. They're not talking about human centered design. And so most of them. And so I think what we're trying to do in the design field is connect to that. That this, you know, a human centered focus focusing on when I was a capital one, you would talk a lot about like focusing on the needs of people like that was like a big kind of foundational piece to transformation, which was, are we really looking at all the humans that are part of these services and products that we're trying to create do we really understand their needs. And can we really embrace making that part of really how do we define success and know we're on the right track. But a lot of organizations stop kind of at the getting the machine of the organization pointed towards a customer outcome, without rewiring the company to really work differently. And there's a lot of other disciplines within organizations that are natural allies in this for trying to change how we work. But I think what designers can really bring is to keep innovating around how do you really go beyond that surface level mindset and really dig it deep into the operating model of the organization. And that I think that's that's my level of architecture, I think, because I do think it's an architectural problem in organizations. We had Peter Merholtz on the show a few episodes ago and we talked about organizational design. And I think that's a very important part of actually making sustainable change or systemic change and making sure that we are able to deliver upon that customer experience. You mentioned, we talked about services, we talked about capabilities. Those are two different things like delivering a service, which people can interact to basically a business offering versus growing capabilities internally. How would you define those? What are those outcomes for you? How do you make them tangible? For the capability building or for both? For both. Where's the difference between the two? Well, there's kind of a short term and a long term, right? Well, I guess there's a long term to be obviously to the surface as well, right? But if you look at the, and part of it is also how the organization works, right? So if there's a project focus in organizations, then you can look at the unit of a project, right? As what are the outcomes this project is creating? And there's a bias within most organizations for what have you done for me lately, right? So while you may be looking at further horizon lines, maybe creating a North Star for something that you need to build to over time, the reality is what value have we created in the near term? And so ensuring that you're always connecting what you're doing to the value it's creating at different points in time is really critical. And to be honest, the same thing is true for capabilities as well when you look at the capability to do design, which is do you see changes within the organization today and how you work and use these approaches to get to better outcomes today, but also are you starting to build new muscles in the organization to drive towards something bigger and better in the future? And especially when you're working with an organization that is going through some sort of transformational effort, that's a very smart thing to connect to. I know that I always found it challenging to actually do that and to get people to adopt this in a long term. Once we were gone after the project that they would continue to work in this way. But I'm really curious to hear your examples. How do we do this? Where do you start? Maybe it's not easy. Yeah, it's not easy, but is it even possible? That's sort of the eventual question we need to get to. But what have you done and what has worked, what hasn't worked? So the first thing, I guess, before getting into some specific examples, I think you also have to think about, you have to approach these things as a long game and that maybe you're not there for the whole game. And so I definitely have seen, I'll give an example in a second, of being at a place trying a lot of different things, leaving, and then finding out later, oh, there was more change than I thought. It didn't feel good at the time. It felt really frustrating, but something broke through, not just because of what I did or what my teams did, but we were just part, you never know. What I always tell people is there's a saying definitely in the U.S. of the last straw, right? It's usually used in a negative form of like, that was the last straw. I got angry or something changed. You never know if you're the last straw. Or if you're the straw before the last straw. But you're part of that journey, right? And especially if you're an outside consultant, it's very rare that you're going to be there the whole transformational journey. So one example of that would be about 10 years ago, I was working with a retailer who was, you know, the form of design being practiced there was mainly user experience within digital, and they were kind of pre-product design, pre-product managers, pre-agile even, and had other design, basically outsourced a lot of design. But anyway, I was working with them on a new service that was one of the top, like four or five initiatives for the organization for five years. So it's a big deal. One of the strategies for it, and then as we were working on it, it had a huge digital component but also connecting to hundreds of stories and changing employee behavior. And the organization was also finally starting to use Agile. So you had this kind of explosion of activity, and on top of that, the marketing team decided what we were working on was like critical to their marketing strategy and accelerated the program by months. And so one of the things that I did on that project and my team did was, and I think this is, you know, you never know exactly what the pathway is to get to building these capabilities and embracing these approaches while driving to the outcome. So we knew we had to launch the service. That wasn't a choice. So we wanted to make it as good as possible, but how do you start to get these approaches? Because when you're starting to have hundreds of people work on something, there are vectors going different directions. So some of the things that I did on it was that started to pull from service design. The first thing I learned was whenever I said service design, it kind of had people shut down because the context of this is 10 years ago in the U.S., that barely meant anything. And they heard service and they heard one thing, and they heard design and they were thinking UI design. So I started to just play with the language and do things like teach people service blueprinting, but I called it experience blueprinting. It's like, okay, you know me, it's helping with the experience. You've got to call it that. And even teaching competitors how to do it. Because they were critical to helping this big project get done. And the more people did these approaches, I was betting on it would get stuck in the culture. The other thing was just being generous. So demonstrating little design methods and meetings that I was just invited in and not facilitating. And just showing how these little approaches that we do as designers can help move the ball forward. Demonstrating the value. And every time we demonstrate the value, they would, the leadership would say, that helps. And they would create roles to do it. You went from what's a service blueprint or an experience blueprint to those are helpful to can we have four people start doing that on the program instead of you running around by yourself. Absolutely. And created them in their. And so it's, you know, that's a large scale project example, but it's all about demonstrating and adapting and customizing consistently. Where I've seen, I have seen consistently in my career of companies providing organizations with uncustomized playbooks of how you do this. And then they, it falls apart. And so it's all about the spoke, customize, figure out the way to get it work in that culture. Keep trying different things. And don't have this pride of, but this is what I call it, or this is what I, the way I think it should be done. If you're too academic or rigid about it, then it will, it will, you know, it consistently will fail in the culture. You've got to make it theirs. So many things to unpack in this story already. When you said I was teaching service blueprinting to the people around me, even even the competitors. One of the questions that I have and that has arisen over the years is, can you actually teach this? And it sounds silly because like you can, you can, everybody can learn the process of journey mapping or service blueprinting. But can you actually teach us in a way that people do it in the way it's supposed to be? Right. Well, there's a couple of challenges there. I mean, blueprinting is a good example. So, you know, because I help organizations with this in kind of two different forms. So there's the project form of it, right, like establishing a new service or maybe reimagining it. And they're using blueprinting as a technique to, to design the service, clarify how it could work and using it as a way to bring together people from different teams that are going to implement different elements of it so they can all get their fingerprints on here's what we're going to make together. And then using it as a touchstone for people to come back to over and over on the project. So in a project context and kind of getting people to participate, start understanding the value of it, teaching other people to help facilitate it. That, that works pretty well. Now, when the project ends, that's the big question, right, is now do they understand, I've got one example of doing it on one project. And there's a desire from organizations that, okay, now we have the recipe. But in reality, you have, you know how to make one dish. And, and every, every project's a little bit different. And so that's where if it's a one and done project scenario, I don't think it's realistic to expect that people learn a technique like that. You have to have repeated experience with it. And what, what, what I found works well is to go through cycles of showing, doing it with being training wills going through a few cycles and, and working with companies to identify. There's a difference between participating in something like blueprinting or journey mapping versus really meeting it and knowing when you should do it and how to do it. And then that takes identifying some key personnel to invest more in to help build their mastery. Exactly. And then they're, then they're fine. And they can then be the master to teach other people, but expecting everyone does have to be blueprinting after a three month project is highly unrealistic. Yeah. And the thing the secret ingredient that you mentioned is experience because that's that's the thing you do not see in a visualization of whatever kind. It's even quite deceptive. It looks really simple. And that's the beauty and the power of it, but you don't see sort of the, the thinking and the reasoning that went into it. And that's the thing that's really hard to teach that is something that you gain by doing it over and over and over. Through experience. Yeah. The director Richard Neuclater who directed boyhood and slacker and a bunch of films, famous director. His student film was called You Can't Learn to Plow by Reading Books. Yeah. And I think of that all the time and talk to my clients about it is you can't go through a training course and suddenly do it. And there's a combination of, of, you know, reading experiential learning, doing it on projects, getting coaching, you know, and then eventually you can build that, build that mastery. And, you know, and it took me years to feel, I mean, I still feel like every time I do it, there's, I'm learning so much because these are complex things that we design. That's why you need these methods. And you're always learning how to do it better and better. So, you know, downloading that into someone's brain in a project or in a classroom is not, again, not realistic. You mentioned something about showing demonstrating value. And I'm curious, like, and we also said in this episode already that sometimes the value is only harvested months or years after you're gone. What have you found to be successful ways to actually show it while, while doing it? Like the short term results, short term value, it's really hard to capture and convey. Is it? Yeah. I mean, in services design, in general, like, if you, if you're doing the work that's pre implementation, right? And if it's, if it's big enough and complicated enough and depending how fast the organization moves, right? It could be months before you see, you see any result. If it's something that exists, then I'm always making part of these projects identifying levers that could be pulled faster, even in parallel to the strategy work. Because a lot of this is strategy work. Because if it's a living, breathing, journey or service, you can, you can, and if you're working a more agile ways, you can make changes to it, even while you're figuring out what to do next. So that's one, one approach I often use is just kind of show the value. The second would be a lot of what we do in services design. I think I hear a lot in organizations, whether it's internal teams or external, is we don't have time for this. That it's adding time to get to the outcomes. So part of showing the value earlier is when you have the opportunity to do this, and it does take time, is building the case and getting the people who are involved in it to say to management, I am set up for success better. I am going to be able to go faster. I have more confidence we're going to do a good job, right? That is valid. Because we're, we build a lot of design is about building confidence, confidence that we can't predict the future, but we feel more confident that we are being intentional about what we're doing. And for something as complex as a service, that I know what's happening to the left and right. And that we're all going to head towards the same destination together. And when you can get those people to say it, not you. And we, our team had a project like this recently where we had the team saying to their management, you know, we have clear requirements that we've ever had before going into participation. We, we have better feedback and confidence from our customers that we're making this for and the people who are going to be part of it. But this is desirable to them. And so they're saying these things, not us and not the other designers. That is value. Value is one thing that I think is overlooked often is it's valuable to have a good day at work. So if people are enjoying themselves, they feel more confident, they feel like they're going to reach their outcomes, then that is a huge impact. And that changes cultures. Yeah, 100% agree. And I think it's really easy to get sucked in into the existing way again, organization measures value. And when you try to do that from a service design perspective, you get stuck really quickly because we have other ways of demonstrating value and experiential value and testimonials. Those are valuable as well. The fact that they're an organization isn't measuring them right now doesn't mean we shouldn't put that forward, right? Correct. Correct. And that's part of the, when you talk about building the capability, I mean part of that mindset is like intellectually. But there's the emotional or humans, there's the emotional part of it as well, right? So I might intellectually have the mindset of this is a great way to work. But emotionally and feeling very passionate and wanting to get more people to do it and work this way. And again, it's how you can change a culture because the logic is that logic and emotion combination that's really important. And again, those things are often measured, HR measures it. So that's a partner as well, right? I mean good HR organizations measure those things. So that is a partner we sometimes look at for this capability building is building towards better outcomes for customers in the business. So we always look at the employee dimension of any service, both in terms of the employees that are part of delivering it or more degrees away from it, right? In terms of the culture of the organization. And that's something that is very critical to, again, making that full value proposition of what we do and why we do it and why more people should adopt these approaches. I want to get back to one more thing that you mentioned as an example of being the ad hoc facilitator or the impromptu facilitator. What I found as a struggle was as designers, as service designers, we have quite a strategic perspective often on the challenges that we're working on. But we also have the skill to be very hands on, very practical. And in my practice, I've seen that once you get practical, once you get your hands dirty, it's really hard to go back to that strategic perspective. So the people in the room don't see you as the working class rather than somebody who's going to guide the strategy. I'm curious if you've seen similar things happening because that's, for me, that was a major challenge. You couldn't facilitate the workshop even if you knew you could because the other people in the room would get a different perspective and see you as a different kind of partner. No, that is a challenge because what you're doing as a practitioner is working in modes, right? I'm in facilitation mode versus detail design mode versus this mode. What I found is, I mean, I can just say what I do, which is I kind of approach it as I'm here as a guide and a consultant, but I show up and I literally roll my sleeves up if I'm wearing a long-sleeved shirt and say, like, this is part of what I'm doing is helping guide and teach you to do these things and being a strategist. But there is no thinkers and makers. I'm both. And I roll my sleeves up and by getting into the details, that is helping me then educate, like, be thinking bigger and better about what we're all doing. And I'm also experiencing the work in different contexts. And so I'm part of the team. And also getting everyone to understand, if you think of yourselves as implementation, we're bringing you in earlier to help shape what we're going to implement. If you are someone who's normally in strategy, we're trying to pull you in a little bit deeper to understand the implications of what you thought versus what is possible. And so in the end, trying to model that behavior, that being said, that's a very unusual way to think and work. That of this kind of hybrid, you know, I'm a big believer in generalism and being able to flex in different ways and that organizations over-specialize. And so, but I've had that same experience that you've had. That's been my technique, you know, to it. I mean, I don't know, when I grew a beard, as it got grayer, I got a little more people listen to me a little bit, which is completely unfair, right? But that's true. People project and have kind of a look at you and assume things just by what they see you doing and who you are. And which is incredibly challenging for people who, if you're trying to change the impact that you can have and break through those biases. 100%, like you don't want to wear a suit because you want to keep the identity of who you are. But at the same time, like sometimes you might need to wear a suit to actually get the credibility or the acknowledgement, the seat at the table in order to create the change that you're looking to create. Yeah, and it's important to remember that because I approach people and approach like not that way at all. So I'm very much of like, I don't know, I'm a hard worker. It's in my DNA from my family. And so I'm like, I don't know, if I put a suit on, it's inhibiting me from like getting busy. But, you know, people, and that's the other thing is, you know, going back to like capabilities and culture and stuff. I mean, that's the thing you have to really, you have to understand when you're engaging with different people. You probably didn't always have that experience. It's certain cultures, an organization has its culture and subcultures, right, that you're trying to navigate. And in the end, if your goal is to help build these capabilities to get more people to do what we believe the service designers is extraordinarily valuable to organizations and changing the world, then you have to figure out, find those levers, adapt, and keep trying to find the pathway to the change you want to see. But that often is, and I as a white male in the United States have it easier than most people. And I know that, and it's something that is a great challenge for people, have amazing talents in trying to break through these biases that we see in society and organizations. What have you seen around capability building being a site project? So starting off with service design, it's a really fun and enjoyable process. People actually like it and enjoy that, especially the process in the beginning. A lot you get to talk to customers, you get to do workshops, you get to ideate on new ideas. That's all fun. And then at some point, things actually need to change physically in the system and the ecosystem. People need to start doing different things, reallocating resources, and then it starts to hurt. And it's also the same with capability building, like it's nice to learn an interview technique or know how to, I don't know, run a workshop. But it starts to hurt when your regular job hasn't changed. Right. It's a lot to unpack there. I mean, that is very true. There is the common journey of someone that goes through this for the first time is confusion. And then they do the get into the research and they go, oh, this feels good. They do the ideation. This feels great. But there actually is a downside, emotional downturn, even before you finish the project. Oh, no. We have to make decisions. Or in a lot of organizations, we're cutting across the grain. You know, I definitely see in organizations like expecting, even if you say it a thousand times, they still think they're getting something different out of the work. Because it is at a level where you're trying to shape your project to create projects to create a lot of work. And so that and then you start to like get intersect with how do we do work around here? How do things get funded? How do you keep these things aligned? And then a lot of people think when you're like, all right, good, we have like a vision and a plan or done. It's like, no, that was like the first step of many steps. And one of the things is finding, when you take people through it, not everyone has to fall in love with that problem. But you have to make sure on the team that you have the right people and some partners that love the problem of, all right, how are we going to get this done? You know, how are we going to navigate this organization to create something that is typically divided up into different functional areas? And they all do their separate parts and it never gets back together again, right? And so I think part of that is like part of the when you're building the team, like making sure you have those people. So my team is working with someone right now, a team right now, one of the people on the team were like three months before we're going to be at that step. And she's already asked what happens then because I want to make sure we start to get ready. And I'm like, all right, that is the right person we need on the team right now because service design is not just the fun part. That's what people see on the outside, right? And that's the superficial layer. Well, that's the theater. We see a lot of that in the United States with design thinking. And I separate those two terms won't get into that. But like there's a lot of things in the U.S. around this theater of either going through the process of like doing some research going outside in identifying some stuff coming up some ideas. And then it kind of fizzles or even going a little bit further. And it feels good to go through the project. And then a few months later, it's like whatever happened to what we were talking about. Yeah. That to me is and this has been tough as mainly work outside of organizations. But I'm very passionate about when I was at that the path we talked about this all the time, like we do not want to be this journey map on the wall. That's I had a company one time with where like they had personas on the wall and they were literally faded. And I asked, what are those? And they were like, oh, I don't know. They've been up on their own the wall. And I'm like, okay, I don't want to do work like that. I don't want that to be the outcome of going through and having a wonderful journey with a client. It felt really good and they loved it. And then you would and then nothing ever happened of it. So that's what I've been working on with my career and trying to build our company to like how keep working getting better and better of not being in that position. It doesn't feel good in the long term. So you can you can get and that's what happens with organizations. They can get they can fall in love with the short burst of activity and then and then when the first lap of a multi lap race, you know, and then lose the plot. Right. I think it was Hartmut Esslinger, the founder of Frog Design was also on the show. He phrased this as corporate entertainment and you mentioned it as a theater. Same thing. Yeah. It's the same thing and it's a lack of accountability for the results that we deliver. And that's that's also, I think, maybe a secret ingredient that we haven't mentioned explicitly yet. But when you want to deliver outcomes, you need to have people who are accountable for those outcomes. Like if nobody cares if that serves actually get gets implemented or if those capabilities really grow, then you're you're fighting a lost battle at the start. Yeah. You have to work it from the bottom up on the top down. Right. So but you will always get the middle and you hear this all the time and organizational change. Right. The middle is the thing. You can have an executive who's like I went, you know, I went to D school at Stanford. I saw design thinking in action. We should be doing this and bring it into the organization, bring in a company to help train people, certify people, all that. You can have people who are doing that and the trenches going, this is great. This opens up my whole world. I never I didn't even know this. I could make money doing this type of stuff. And then there's the middle, which is how you keep score. What are the incentives? What are we doing this quarter? Like that middle part is the long game of change. You can't change that through a project. You can't change that through training. You can't add design to your onboarding of employees and expect that everyone's a designer of your design organization. That's the hard, long work. And so, but I love that. I love that long game that you're trying to play and being part of it. Again, not saying that what I'm doing or my team's doing is the silver bullet or the answer or even like going to get to that destination while I'm working with the company. It's just helping move towards an inevitable, hopefully what is an inevitable future, right? Is building that case that they will get there at some point. It's the operational model. As you mentioned, I think I'm going to this as the operating system of the organization. I'm curious how do you actually do that or stick around long enough to get there when that's not what clients often approach you for? Unless, of course, you've built that positioning and people start to recognize you for this specific thing, but usually they don't. They see they want to do a service design project and they don't see the implications. Yeah. Yeah, they've definitely experienced both. So, you know, sometimes it's, you know, it was working with one company with a executive who had that vision started to do, you know, did the work, got people excited. Helping them start to think in terms of like designing and experiences, more of a service mindset, things like that. Trying to get the headcount to be able to have those, to have service designers on the team they didn't have before and instead of using an outsider and we're going to help them build that capability. And then he left. And so no one else picked up the torch, right? And so we hit a wall. Other organizations are working with one right now that their goal is to build this type of culture. Working with people very high up in the organization, not going to be easy, but there's multiple people who want to see this type of future. Not to be, and again, I think this is really important, not to be not service design, but an outcome, right? Of an organization that consistently delivers value to people, whether they're a customer and employee and does it faster and better than they do now and hopefully differentiated greatly from their competitors. That's what they do. Yeah. Right. And so service design is just a way to get there. Exactly. So conducting it to those forces. So if your goal is let's build service design, that is a very, that will be a goal that is detached from what the organization is trying to do. You want to trojan horse that. Yes. And you want to take little bits and pieces and get it into the culture. So, you know, Jamie Hegeman, you know, one of the global conferences for SCN, you know, I gave a talk about like giving it away. And I believe that it's like giving away these things of like, now you said before, like, I don't know if they're going to, they'll do it well. Well, sometimes you have to take the risk of just getting it out there. And there's this kind of balancing act because, because there can be a fear of, I teach a lot of people how to do it at a surface level. They all start doing it and it doesn't work and then no one wants it. Disappointment. Yeah. Or, but also if you're a person or a small team, how many people can you work with in a year at an organization? So that's going to be too slow. So, you know, finding this balance of finding people, spending time with them, helping build the capability, but taking some risks. You have to still have to take some risks because if you're too orderly about it, you know, it's too slow. And companies want to move faster and there are competing solutions to those bigger problems I was talking about that aren't designed that are promising. I can get you to that place. And so if you're, if you rest, if you, if you're too slow about it, then, then you'll have other, you'll have other approaches that could beat you to the transformational change you want to see. Yeah. Yeah. It's a complex environment. Any organization, 2000 people, 200 people changing something's part. And then you're going to be left disappointed and frustrated that, I don't know, the marketing department got the budget to do the user research part or the digital department. The IT department suddenly owns customer experience. Right. And that's, that's reality. Yeah. Yeah. They're doing what? Yeah. Did you hear that? So once I was doing this and like, yeah, everyone's trying to. Have an impact, which is a healthy thing in an organization. If every, if, if you were the only one trying to do something new and impactful, that would not be a place I'd want to work. So, you know, you know, organizations are, are competitive environments by nature. That's a whole other topic of how you partner with all those other groups on common outcomes that you're driving towards and building new approaches that kind of blend services and other approaches. But in the end, you have to always remember that there's a lot of people trying to push forward. And so if you overthink it, that someone's going to go past you. So you kind of, again, this is kind of combination of being strategic, but trying stuff and taking a few risks and getting those learning cycles down as quickly as possible. So you can find the right approach. What, when a starting service designer within an agency would approach you with a question, listen, I got a question from a client to help them out with a project. And at the same time, help them to grow this capability. What would your advice be to this person? First of all, make sure that that ask is genuine. So like I said, we, we, if we're approached for work, we really make sure that that is a true outcome and how do you gauge that truly valuable. Asking a lot of questions about why, right, so you can always go back to your five wise, just drill into it. So, so why, you know, because is it somebody who, you know, read a book on services? I'm, or I get people who read my book that Chris Riston and go like, I really like this. Like I want to do this. It's like, okay, you know, so you're, I said, okay, so you're someone who wants to orchestrate, but tell me more about your organization. Right. Is this bigger than this project? Do you see the, the partnerships internally? Do you see how it's like our, is it, if we do this on the project, I'm going to be giving you advice on what to do after the project. I want to think longer term with you. Is that really what you're trying to do? And it's not a sales technique to like make it a bigger project. What it really is, is if we're going to go through this, again, I'm really like, I want to make sure we're driving towards a clear outcome that's bigger than this project. So this would be like a step toward something. So it's just doing some due diligence. And also some education of like, this is not easy. You know, and so we want this to be a enjoyable project that we want to drive to support both of those outcomes. So as you might be thinking about how we might implement what we might come up with as the service or a new journey, how are we going to implement capabilities? Longer term. So that was the first piece of advice. Make sure that's genuine. Ask. Yeah. Anything else? The second thing is how you build the team. Right. So it's one thing to put a team together where people will learn on it, start learning services on. What parts of the organization do they come from? They represent a broad piece of it. Do they have the time built in to their schedule to do both the project and to learn and reflect? That's a big challenge because, you know, we definitely believe and try to help organizations think about focus on a key initiative as an individual and don't spread them out as a design or on five things. And one of them is this, like, they've got to immerse themselves in it. That's good for just the project and the problem you're trying to solve, much less learning and learning and being able to reflect. So those are some other things of making sure the team you're building is a strong team. And that as you build your project plan, what we're trying to get better and better at is, like, how do you build those learning reflection kind of like a before, during, after. So like prepping, doing it, reflecting, how do you build those rhythms into the project so that you don't lose sight of, remember, we're doing this both to learn and build the capability and do the work because the work of the project can often overshadow the learning objectives. Those are a lot of prerequisites or demands up front to somebody who might still need to get the confidence in this approach, right? Is it what it is or should we, should we, how, how purist should we be about this or how pragmatic? Well, it's tough, right? Because I mean, whether you're an outside consultant or internal trying to do this, like, you have to kind of stand firm on, I don't think it's purity to stand firm on. If we go past this line, the efficacy of this approach, it will not, it just will not work. That being said, I think a lot of it comes in adjusting along the way, right? Because this is how you set it up, but as you get into it, the reality is something can change. And then you can't be too rich, right? So then you can't be, hey, remember, you said you were going to be on this 100% and you're only on it 50%. It's kind of like, okay, let's deal with this, like, how might we either increase your capacity back so you're learning because you're only in half the stuff, you can't learn it? Or do I just need to adapt to this change and rethink our objectives as a result and reset expectations of what we're doing? If you ignore it or stay too rigid, then you're not, you're not designing along the way, right? Because it's constantly attacking towards the outcomes. But I think setting those expectations up front is so important, though, because it's kind of where we started with like, well, what are realistic expectations? You know, what you can even learn at the project. And then if you're not even doing a minimum threshold to create a good learning experience for the capabilities and do the work, well, then you can't even meet those expectations. So, you know, I think it's about, you know, and, you know, having that open dialogue with your partners, whether you're internal or external on, how are we doing towards the outcomes of the project? How are we doing towards the learning outcomes? So, you know, we're just talking about the outcomes, talking about both of them and talking about how to do better or what might to do next. What might change afterwards as a result of the experience you're actually having on the project? It's probably when you're not attuned to having that conversation, your client won't be either. Like, don't expect them to raise this topic. That's what I found at least. It has to come from you and you have to be very on top of it. Like, you will get lost in the practical work, the rolled up sleeves work, and then, yeah, this is also a strong reminder. No, it really, and I hear this from my designers all the time. It's a tough, it's a, I think what we, what I, the work I believe in is, again, not easy to do and you can get, tilt one way or the other too much. Like, I'm facilitating too much or I'm rolling up my sleeves too much. And so you always, you have to discontinually to reflect and try to get that right balance and definitely have gotten it right, gotten it wrong. I mean, it's always a learning process because each project and group of people is a little, a little bit different. But it's being reflective of that and understanding, you know, really embracing that the capability building, well, it's not that easy to do. The capability building is really a long term investment that the organization is making and being a good steward of that and making sure you're talking about that. But that's valuable and is the team and you, as the service designer, set up for success, right? And keep talking about that. Kind of, I don't have to talk because this is kind of our meta project, right? We're going to create great results for the service, but our meta project is capability building, change, doing this more. If we lose sight of that along the way, then that one of the reasons you said you wanted to do this project and do it in this way, because you could have just gotten a company just to do it for you. If you want to do it with and build these capabilities, then it is a different type of project and everyone has to commit to that. It's about zoom levels. And even if your client doesn't explicitly ask for you to zoom out and show the bigger picture, it's sort of your, you need to do it. And you need to show how a single service design project fits into a bigger picture, more long term, sustainable picture. The roadmap, you need to show the roadmap for three years, even if they just have a three month horizon. And that's right, because even for your client, it might not yet be part of a bigger plan, but you and I know that it has to be part of a bigger plan to be successful. Right. Is there anything that we should have discussed which we haven't done at this moment? I don't know. I think we open another can of words. And the Pandora's box. Sure. What we'll do is we'll invite the listeners and viewers of the show to leave comments, ask questions, if they want to reach out to you to continue the conversation. Is there a way to do so? Yeah, well, I'm on LinkedIn on Twitter. I am ptquantabomb and or or you can also get me at at harmonic design, which is our URL is thisisharmonic.com. So you can reach out to me is there as well. Also, I'm sure to add all the relevant links to the show notes. Patrick, like you said, we opened a new Pandora's box and probably raised more questions than given answers. But that's our job here on the show. Thanks for sharing this. And thanks for making the time to reflect and be on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for taking away from this conversation with Patrick. Leave a comment down below and let us know. And don't forget if you're an in our service designer who wants to hear the stories from people in a similar position who face the same challenges. Make sure to check out the campfire. You can find that the service design show dot com slash campfire. If you want to see more videos that help you to design services that win the hearts of people and business, check out this next video. Because we're going to continue over there. See you.