 In this episode, we'll be talking about building organizational design capabilities, how to design for nomadic welfare systems, and how far design can reach to achieve political goals. And here is the guest of this episode. I'm Stefan Holmeldt from Linköping University and this is the Service Design Show. Hi guys, my name is Marc Fontijn and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to create more human-centered businesses and we all know that this is important but also can be a big struggle sometimes. When I started the show, I wanted to learn from the ideas of the people that are shaping the service design field, believing that by carefully listening to them, I'd be able to quicker overcome the hurdles we meet every day and thus create a bigger impact with the work we do. So on the show, we talk about topics ranging from design thinking and customer experience to organizational change and creative leadership. If these are the topics you're also interested in, know that we bring a fresh new episode of the show every two weeks on Thursday. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to show your support, please click that like button or leave a short comment. It lets me know that the things we're doing here are appreciated by people like you. My guest in this episode is Stefan Holmeldt. Stefan has quite an impressive track record and here's a short summary. He started out as a GUI designer in the 80s. He co-founded as a global service design network in mid 2000 and currently is leading the design research area at the Link Chipping University. In the next 30 minutes or so, Stefan will be talking about building organizational design capabilities, designing for nomadic welfare systems and how far design can reach to achieve political goals. If you want to fast forward to one of these topics, check out the episode guide down below in the description or just stick around and enjoy the whole episode. And in case you prefer to listen to a podcast version of this episode, head over to soundcloud.com slash service design show where you'll find this episode and all the previous ones. For now, let's jump right in. Welcome to the show Stefan. You've been in service design for so long do you even remember the very first time that you came in touch with the term? No, actually not. Can you guess? Yeah, I mean, when I was a PhD student in the 90s, I probably stumbled across it because I read a lot of management and service management literature. I was working with banks and interaction design at that time. But it kind of landed on me when I was working at Ericsson in the early 2000s. Ericsson was setting up a service business globally and we were, as designers and the design researchers at Ericsson, we saw an opportunity to find better places and better possibilities to do really good user research. And that's when the term service and the term design kind of landed on me as something that could be really, really interesting. And then in 2003 somewhere, I met Birgit and we invited her to Sweden and had a bit of a strategic discussions with the ministries and so forth. So from then on. That was quite early, 2003 or 2000. And that's quite interesting because I had more guests from Sweden actually on the show. And it sort of, it seems that it started really early there somehow. Yeah, I guess, I mean, it all depends on how you look at it, of course. So if you look at the old service marketing people, I mean, they started all their 70s talking about these things, trying to figure out how to make these customer experiences into something that was part of the relationship between service providers or service providers and customers and so forth. So, I mean, in one sense, they've been working on it for a long time there. But from the design point of view, of course, there was also the participatory design, collaborative cooperative design kind of arena here, also starting in the 70s. We had a lot of things kind of coming together and suddenly there were things clicking and just working. You had the right breeding ground, I guess. Exactly. Let's move on, because you gave me a few interesting topics and you're coming from an academic background and people will notice this definitely in the topics that you provided. But I'll try to, yeah. I'm from the books, right? From the books. But I'll try to make them as concrete as possible. So, and you've got a bunch of question starters that you'll use to co-create the actual questions, right? Let's start. Topic one. And this has been on the show quite a few times so I'm interested in your take on this. And this one is called Building Organizational Capabilities. Which question starter goes along with this one? It's a why. So, why are we talking about building organizational capabilities? And which ones are we talking about to be specific? Yeah, that's a really good question, of course. In one sense, I mean, it's organizational capabilities has to do with how we, as organizations, make use of different kinds of knowledge areas or professions or practices or whatever. So, in relationship to design then, it's of course how do we make sure that design is not only something that is sitting in a person's head or just sitting in a method that we're saying that we're using or a tool maybe. So, understanding how these organizational capabilities can be built and developed so that we can, in a more confident way or in a more systematic way, make use of the very specific things that design and designers bring. Have you found something that is specifically challenging for design to become an organizational capability? Yeah, one of the difficulties, I think, for design is that designers want to do things, right? And designers want to make sure that people experience that fantastic feeling of being with the users, getting all that empathic kind of boost that you get when you see what they're doing and the IDs that users can have and your prototype and all these things. You want other people, but maybe not all designers, to experience that. And then you hope that they will take that further on in the organization and promote that or whatever. And that's actually a problem. Because most people then that we invite into these experience-based kind of learning processes, they don't necessarily have the possibility when they get back into their own organization without the designer as a help to do this. They experience something fantastic and when they maybe try to apply it, they don't have the support within their organization to be able to do the same things. They might know everything. They might be really good at exactly getting the empathic knowledge out of patients and sketching out whatever, but they don't have the support in the organization. It's that kind of support that is needed to make sure that we build these organizational possibilities for them. And is this something that is... Do you think this is part of service design? Also being able to think about and build these organizational capabilities? Yeah, I do. I mean, it's part of trying to figure out what it means to be a service designer to understand how, of course, if you're a consultant, you can go in and do something and then get out, right? But if you think that you're going to contribute with something beyond just the project you're involved in, then you need to figure out what is it actually that is the kind of leverage that this brings into the organization. There are all these labs around, right? And when I was working in Ericsson, we also built a usability lab. And the reason for that was not necessarily to do all these usability studies, but to make sure that after the lab, more people would be doing usability studies in their own projects. So the lab is more interesting from the after-the-lab perspective, which then also feeds back into, if you look at yourself as a designer, what comes after me in this organization that I have been working with. Yeah, and that's from a perspective where service designers are working with an external agency. Of course, the whole tendency now is to start building internal teams, right? Yeah, yeah. In-housing is, I mean, that's been expanding just the last five years really, really much. But the saying goes there, of course, that if you direct all the work onto yourself or into that specific team, that also creates a certain kind of structure and a certain way of working things. But what happens in the next step when someone is saying, we're going to distribute this, you know, centralization and decentralization, that happens all the time in organizations. You need to figure out how to work that, both as a centralized kind of function and decentralized, maybe in markets or whatever. And you've got some experience also with public services. Do you see any difference between building these capabilities in a publicly run organization and a privately run organization or is it both the same? I think it's hard to tell. But I mean, a lot of the work we've been doing on these capabilities building has been in the public sector. And one challenge there is that a lot of the professions that are involved in public sector organizations, they are experts in the same sense that the designer is an expert. And many of them, especially in healthcare, are actually experts in being empathic. So a nurse spends all day being empathic, right? So it's both an opening, of course, because then there is someone else coming in also saying that, oh, I have this empathy kind of ideas that I can work with. So that might be a bonding thing, but it's also, it might be a threat, of course. So trying to figure out how this, how it works from the contextual perspective is, of course, really important. Maybe before you go in or being open when you go in and say, okay, so I'm if you're new to it, I mean, I'm new to this and I'm open to understanding what this actually means. So adopting the beginner's mind also from a service designer perspective, especially from a service designer perspective. One final question around this topic, and this is, I'm sure you also have a lot of questions yourself around this topic. So what is the biggest question you have regarding building organizational capabilities that we don't have to answer right now? So that's my, this is my profession, right, asking questions that we want to know things about. No, but we are working with a specific idea about, or a set of specific theories and ideas about these capabilities, and they are both on the individual level, how these capabilities can be built from the individual level, but also from the institutional level. So I have two things that I'm kind of interested in right now. And it's, so one of the models is about the learning processes that happens in an organization when they try to take in new knowledge. And so there are three sets of learning processes. One is the explorative learning process, the transformative learning process, and the exploitative learning process. And given that designers and other professions, especially in healthcare, build their identity and their practices on aesthetic knowledge, the kind of knowledge that we get from feeling things and seeing things and yeah, whatever. So how can we capture that in the transformative phase? It's easy in the explorative phase, right? Because we can just experience it and do it and try to figure it out. But how can we capture that into the transformative process where we both adapt the way we are doing those things and the way that the organization is working to accommodate for that kind of knowledge? So that's a really tricky question right now at least. Interesting. Let's leave it at that for this moment and move on to the second topic because I'm expecting that we'll need some time also for this one. And this one is even already curious on paper and it's called Nomadic Welfare Systems. And which question starter goes along with this topic? Yeah, I did a little bit of hacking so it's a what is Nomadic Welfare Systems? Yeah, that's a really good question Stefan. So what is or what are Nomadic Welfare Systems? Yeah, that's what we're going to find out, right? No, but it started out as kind of an idea coming from Etsu Masini actually. He was here a couple of years ago giving a talk at our big literature fair. And I mean we have a lot of people moving around in the world between 50 and 100 million that's the kind of estimate that we have for the future that will be constantly moving around in the world. And for different reasons. Some will be refugees, some will be moving because they want an education, some will be moving inside Europe just to get work, whatever. And that's somewhat just curious, right? So, but our Welfare Systems, they are kind of built around and the Welfare kind of services also. They are built around an idea either that you pay up up front, maybe with subsidiaries, but also that you have kind of a base. It might be city-based. A physical location. Exactly, and when we start to move around that doesn't work anymore, right? So, how do we make sure that we can... We don't have to go as far as looking at this 50 to 100 million people moving around. We can just look at, in Sweden for example, we have Gotland, which is an island on the east coast of Sweden. And they are probably the most visited place in Sweden during summers. So, they grow 100 fold during summer. And it's a small island. So, in the winter when there is just the fixed inhabitants or whatever that is in English, they don't have all the welfare that all those millions that comes during the summer expects from their home cities, like Stockholm or whatever. So, it's kind of a... We can even look at the micro kind of level and see that there is already these things happening. And how do we rig and how do we set up systems and services that works under these conditions where we have variations in volume, maybe variations in scope that are huge? So, for me to understand, this is really related to the fact that everybody who lives in a country who is a resident in a country has a backpack with, I don't know, with insurance, with healthcare, with people that fix the roads. But as soon as you move across the border, even the border can be a country border, by your city border, you leave some of that welfare behind. And the question is, how do we design systems for people that are constantly moving, right? Yeah, exactly. And where does service design come into play in this story? Well, I mean, it comes into play, I think, where if we start to look at the individual perspective, for example, and trying to figure out how do people, what do people expect? How can we make that backpack into something that you know maybe that you're leaving behind or can carry with you? If we scale it, scale escalates to the policy or politics level, how can we find ways of structuring systems? And that might be just the way that two cities pay each other for giving healthcare, for example, based on taxes or whatever. So what can we do then? And what kinds of policies do we need to design based on the idea that people are moving around like this? What do you find the most interesting or inspiring example that has this nomadic welfare system already developed or embedded? I haven't found any yet. I mean, there are, of course, these. So we have like Gotland or... And in the United States, you have Arizona, which is a state that is... A lot of people go to and play golf, right? But they pay their taxes somewhere else in the United States. So probably it might be even, as usual, it might even be easier to find these things in systems that are not to the Western systems, that have other ways of thinking about how we structure things and why we do things. I mean, we've been building these kind of welfare systems from the bottom up for a long time. So there is a lot of installed base stuff that it might be really difficult to throw overboard, right? And I'm really curious, how did this topic even came on your radar? You have to ask my PhD students. I don't know, no, but seriously, my mind works in mysterious ways. Nobody in my mind... Usually I kind of... I go running, right? So and when I'm running, things pop up in my head. And then I write them down. And then four days later, I go running again. And then the opposite thing turns up. And that turns out to be the interesting thing. So this was part of that, actually. It started out as collaborative welfare systems. But that's not so interesting, right? Sounds kind of boring. So I was running around the creek here. And then the idea, yes, it's not collaborative, it's nomadic. That's the thing. And then when that clicked, suddenly, oh, is it the... And it was just a word. It was nothing, no content, basically. But then suddenly, you start thinking, oh, so what does it mean? What is a nomadic welfare system? Does the system move? Or is it the person who moves? Is it for people in the north of Sweden, the Somic people? All these different things start to grow. So if people are interested in this idea, would like to know more or would like to explore this topic or help you out in these ideas, what should they do? Where should they look? I'm kind of thinking, look around you. I mean, probably there are examples of this happening already, but just that we haven't thought about them in that way, like Gotland. I mean, I didn't think about that as that kind of thing before. And then there's probably a lot of things happening around in tourist areas, for example. Might be bad examples, of course, but that's another question. And then I mean, we're in our new master programme that we're starting. This will be one of the topics that the students will be working on next spring. So I'm really grateful for all the kind of feedback and input we can get, of course. And the students will work on that next spring, which is spring 2018. Maybe the third topic also hints up on that. So let's see and let's explore that one. And maybe this one is even as cryptical or even more cryptical than the previous one. And this topic is called mediators and political goals. Yeah. And it's cryptic because you had to write it in three words, right? Yeah, actually four in this case, but yeah. We don't count and. Right, so my question here is, how far can designers work with social causes? Or how far can designers go in their in their own kind of work? And this builds on a. Yeah, yeah, how do. Okay, so social goal, social causes, political goals, mediators. How do these link up in this scenario? Yeah, it links up in the way, in the sense that. Well, I just do it really based on example. Okay, sure. So we're working in this project with, it's called Night Football. It's not a new idea. It's it was around in the US as midnight basketball in the 80s. And the idea here in Sweden is that. Football is a way to help migrants to. Find ways of understanding how things are working. Find friends, find people that they can look up to, find things to do, whatever, you know, all these things that kind of drives people to be part of society. And feel that they are part of society. And so as desires, of course, it's difficult to drive these things. We might want to. We might want to do these social innovations, but these things are difficult in the sense that they are the goals, you know, getting to a society which is integrated. And it's that's important, actually, that it's society. It's it's society that is integrated. It's not people who are integrated. So getting to those goals is a difficult thing because it has to do with politics, which might it doesn't change from day to day, but it's it's still a negotiation kind of business. And it's also a business where where argumentation is part of the democratic structure. So you will have people saying one thing in debates in that end. And other people saying things in this end in the debates. Not only as a part of a debate, but as a part of showing in our democratic structures that there is this whole space to work with. And it's the job of the of the more of the government and the political structure to find a position here that will work. And that's when policies made and those policy makers might want to have might have the same goals as these social innovators that wants to do good. And which means that there will be political pressure or policy pressure also on these people that are working, for example, with night football. So working as a designer in that space is is not as simple as just helping these innovators to design a better thing. But you actually have to understand how the system interacts, how the different ways of working within that kind of system is can be matched and can be integrated or synchronized, or maybe they should there should even be friction. Everything doesn't have to be smooth, right? But isn't you say it's not as easy to work in these kind of environments? And is it is the challenge that if you want to create really big impact, you need to take all these factors into account. So you of course, you can sort of design or innovate on a small scale. But if you really want to make an impact, you need to integrate all these elements. Is that why it's so challenging? Yeah. And also because it's it's partly this policy thing, which also makes it I mean, policy is one thing, of course, but it's the politics policy kind of relationship that makes it also difficult. So how does this play out in the example of the night soccer? We call it soccer in the Netherlands instead of football. Okay. That's all right. No. So it plays out in the sense that the if you look at the entrepreneur, the football entrepreneur, they have one idea of how this, how they work this network of stakeholders to make their goals come true. And they might have their own ideas of what is important. And then you have the funders, which might be, you know, nonprofit organizations or whatever that have their own ideas on and their own idea about how the network should be should be worked. And then you have the policy level and the politics that might have another idea of how the stakeholders and actors work together and what the goals actually are. So starting to work with those three different ways of looking at how this structure is working is part of that, that thing that makes it difficult. And you need to understand, not only there is no, there might be no idea in trying to make them match or make them be the same, right? They will always be different than that's good. So there will be no way of doing a seamless kind of design. But I guess that's the, that is the part where designers are really good at having design challenges where there is a real challenge, right? Yes. And also to sort of wrap up this topic, which question do you find most interesting surrounding this topic? What is it the thing you think about when you're out running? Well, then it's the meeting between the policy way of, or the politics and policy way of making things happen and the experiential way of making things happen. So it's the meeting between the policy drive and the experiential drive actually. Stefan, I want to thank you and just now let's wrap up this episode. What did you find the most interesting thing we discussed in this episode? Let us know down below in the comments. And remember, more people like you are watching the show. So your comment might just be the thing that gives them the next meaningful breakthrough. If this is your first time here and you'd like to see more interviews, check out some of the past episodes and be sure to click that subscribe button. I'll see you in two weeks time with a new episode. For now, thanks for watching and I'll see you then.