Touchpoint Vol. 11 No. 3 - Service Design and Change Management

vol 11 no 3 | march 2020 | 18 €

Service Design and Change ­Management

C hange Fundamentals for Service Designers Dr. Tina Weisser, Prof. Dr. Eike Wagner 90 Service 58 A Flywheel Model of Change Management Susan Bartlett, Terri Block 68

Design and Agile: A Seamless Symbiosis Raphael Sousa

Touchpoint Volume 11 No. 3 March 2020 The Journal of Service Design ISSN 1868-6052

Pictures Unless otherwise stated, the copyrights of all images used for illustration lie with the author(s) of the respective article

Published by Service Design Network

Printing Hundt Druck GmbH

Publisher Birgit Mager

Fonts Mercury G2 Apercu

Editor-in-Chief Jesse Grimes Guest Editors Dr. Tina Weisser Robert Bau Project Management Moira Douranou Art Direction Miriam Becker Jeannette Weber Cover Miriam Becker Jeannette Weber

Service Design Network gGmbH MĂźlheimer Freiheit 56 D-51063 KĂśln Germany www.service-design-network.org Contact & Advertising Sales Moira Douranou journal@service-design-network.org For ordering Touchpoint, please visit www.service-design-network.org

f ro m t h e e d i t o r s

Service Design and Change Management Service design has an interesting conundrum in its (methodological) heart. If you pick up any textbook about our practice, or scour places such as Pinterest, Slack workspaces or Medium, you will find countless examples of deliverables and techniques from the earliest stages of a typical service design project. Journey maps, variations on service blueprints and methods to conduct research abound.

Yet as you travel from left to right on the proverbial double diamond – towards the ultimate goal of implementation – examples and guidance become fewer and fewer, and the literature provides less and less guidance.

That moment when implementation begins is the culmination of weeks and months of a dedicated project team, and often represents a significant investment.

Yet not only is external guidance often lacking for a service designer who goes in search of it, an even bigger challenge awaits. And while it has its own entirely different discipline, seeing a service design project through to true completion often means embracing its challenge. It is organisational change.

Delivering new services into the market, or improving existing ones, often means fundamental changes within the service provider itself. As the organisation grows larger – or the service more complex – more and more roles are touched by our work. And precisely because this challenge feels very different than ‘design’, service designers often feel out of their depth, and find themselves reading up on Kotter’s theory of change, amongst others.

Yet plenty of service designers have tread this path already, and have recognised the importance – necessity – of having an awareness of, and guiding, organisational change processes, as part of their projects. In this issue of Touchpoint, we bring their learnings and advice to the fore. For those seeking to understand how to bring about the required change in an organisation, and feel adrift beyond the second diamond, I hope you find new inspiration, techniques and avenues of exploration in the pages of this issue.

Jesse Grimes for the editorial board

Jesse Grimes, is Editor-inChief of Touchpoint and has thirteen years’ experience as a service designer and consultant.

He is an independent service design practitioner, trainer and coach (kolmiot.com), based in Amsterdam and working internationally. Jesse is also Senior Vice President of the Service Design Network.

Dr. Tina Weisser is an innovation and systemic change consultant based in Munich. She is a lecturer at various universities and has worked for the last twenty years for a wide range of clients. She also developed the KUER innovation capabilities compass to support service design implementation through applying change management.

Robert Bau is Senior Service Design Director at Fjord, design and innovation from Accenture Interactive. Robert is a recognised expert in harnessing human-centred innovation and design to tackle organisational challenges, reinvent brands and transform experiences. He has served as lecturer and course leader at ten design schools in five countries over ten years.

Birgit Mager, publisher of Touchpoint, is professor for service design at Köln International School of Design (KISD), Cologne, Germany.

She is founder and director of sedes research at KISD and is co-founder and President of the Service Design Network.

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3

Global theory of change

40

A map of all the systemic changes and actors needed to support the broader outcome helps explore complexity and show interdependencies and feedback loops.

10 2 imprint 3

from the editors

Service Design and

6 news

Change Management

10 cross-discipline

24 Getting the Machinery

10 The Art of Speaking

about Schizophrenia Paola Andrea Venegas, Federico Baraya GalĂĄn

14 Empowering Service

Designers to Become Agents of Change Joumana Mattar

18 Change as a Force to

Design IT Solutions Nina Pennock, Marcella Rademakers, Ilka Tuinstra

4

22 feature:

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Ready: Re-imagining a Service Relationship Catherine Charbonneau

28 Designing in Complexity

Demands Change Management Henrietta Curzon

30 Using Service Design to

Transform Higher Education Elliot Felix

36 Change as a Hero’s Journey

Ying Zhou

40 Designing and Scaling

with Theory of Change Edgar Daly, Zazie Tolmer, Ellise Barkley

44 The Challenges of

Unlearning Company Culture Jeannette Weber, Bettina Thielen

48 Unleashing the Potential of

Organisational Prototyping Gloria Biberger, Alexandra Pretschner, Stephan Rein

52 Going from Service Design

to Organisational Designing Barend Klitsie, Frithjof Wegener

58 A Flywheel Model of

Change Management Susan Bartlett, Terri Block

Neste

Honing change and the betwee

c ontents

48

90 64 Designing Change from

the Inside Out Laura Wesley, Antonio Starnino

68 Change Fundamentals

for Service Designers Dr. Tina Weisser, Prof. Dr. Eike Wagner

74 Service Design to the

Rescue Robert Bau

80 Creating a Culture of

Change Agents Karen Rozenbaum

84 Tools and Methods 86 Mirrors Were Not

Made for the Blind Dr Lidewij Niezink, Dr Katherine Train

90 Service Design and Agile:

A Seamless Symbiosis Raphael Sousa

92 Storytelling as a Service

Lennart Overkamp

94 profile 94 Patti Hunt 98 inside sdn 98 Service Design as

the ‘New Normal’ at Laurea UAS Touchpoint 11-3

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Pack your bags because this year’s Service Design Global Conference is heading to Copenhagen!

Join some of the industry's brightest professionals at the 13th annual Service Design Global Conference in Copenhagen and discuss how we can merge design and technology to guide the way towards meeting the challenges of today and tomorrow.

The services and systems we design today shape the experiences and the world of tomorrow – whether explicit, subtle, or even ignorant or unaware. Against this background, service design plays a crucial role in creating the positive changes we want to see in the world and addressing key questions relevant to any business or organisation.

Are you wondering how you are intentionally designing services to shape the world you want to live in?

Do you want to learn how to generate 6

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positive, measurable, human- and planet-centric impact? And do you want to ensure what you are creating is ethical?

Then you are cordially invited to participate in the SDN’s annual conference to learn from our international speakers about the opportunities offered by service design to change the world for the better. Join us in Copenhagen on 22–23 October and engage today to shape tomorrow.

Service design began making its mark in Denmark around 2011, and since that time has experienced steady growth and acceptance in both the private and public sectors.

In fact, more than 50,000 design professionals work in Denmark – that’s approximately two percent of the workforce! In addition, a very strong design cluster is located in Copenhagen.

What’s more, Copenhagen is a city teeming with culture, history and architectural charm, making it an alluring setting for the 13th edition of our conference. Taking place from 22–23 October with preconference events on 21 October, we are looking forward to converging on this exciting metropolis, which has been a service design hotspot for many years.

Presentations and workshops led by some of the industry’s best, coupled with multiple opportunities to meet up, network and have a good time, make this event a significant addition to every service designer’s calendar.

We look forward to seeing you in October!

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SDN Chapter Awards 2019 – Acknowledging the World-wide Impact Excellent Cultural Inclusivity: SDN Japan

Most Innovative Initiative: SDN Portugal

Recognised for raising awareness and

Recognised for their highly innovative and

developing understanding of service design

collaborative approach to member strategy.

in Japan through translated content.

Best Member Relations: SDN Finland

Excellent Event Organisataion:

Recognised for the excellent experiences

SDN New York

and opportunities for professional

Recognised for their commitment and

development they provide for their local

innovative events strategy which led to more

community.

than 20 highly successful events in their city.

If you want to be put in touch with your local Chapter team or are thinking about building a Chapter in your city, region or country, please get in touch at: chapter@service-design-network.org

The Global Chapter Team and the SDN are excited to announce the four winners of the SDN Chapter Award, which took place during the SDGC19 Members Event on 9 October, 2019.

The awards showcase the amazing impact the SDN Chapters have on our international community and raise awareness about their activities.

This year we would like to especially thank the SDN Canada team for their amazing contribution, collaborating with SDN Global to host the Service Design Global Conference 2019 in Toronto!

The SDN Chapters not only host events but are recognised as leaders in local and national service design initiatives. We are delighted to have initiated the annual SDN Chapter Awards to celebrate and share their great work.

Once again, a huge thank you to all the fantastic Chapters who showcased the great work they are doing for their local communities!

In addition, the jury awarded an Honourable Mention for Excellent Event Organisation to SDN Shanghai for their amazing work in 2019.

A special thank you also goes out to the SDN Chapter Awards Jury: SDN President, Birgit Mager; SDN Global Chapter Team Principal, Tarja Chydenius; Representative for SDN Japan, Taro Akabane; and Representative for SDN San Francisco, Gassia Salibian.

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Service Design Award 2019: We have Winners in the House!

Late last year, the SDN was incredibly pleased to honour the 2019 Service Design Award winners and finalists for their exceptional devotion and the impact they delivered through service design.

Over 100 projects were entered, and they faced higher submission standards than ever before. In total, twelve projects made up the 2019 finalists, across three categories of Professional Commercial, Professional Non-profit/Public sector, and Student . The winning projects set international benchmark for world-class service design. It is thanks to their exceptional work and project contributions that we are taking our industry to new levels.

The Award ceremony was a huge success and took place on 10 October 2019 in conjunction with the SDN’s Service Design Global Conference.

The conference also was the setting for the winner presentations and the finalist exhibition.

Head of the Jury J. Margus Klaar and President of the SDN Birgit Mager took the stage to co-host the Service Design Award Ceremony and announce the finalists and five winners selected by an international jury of service design experts.

The conference attendees had an opportunity to hear key insights into the processes, learnings, challenges and outcomes of five world-class service design projects.

We are delighted to congratulate and showcase the winners for their exceptional projects, and have made their presentations available to you.

Award for lean approach to service design and prototyping: Laboratoria Mobiele Alternativen – By Twisted Studio

Best Student Project: Service Design to Improve Women's Maternal Healthcare Services in Nepal – By Ida Christine Opsahl, Julie Nyjordet Rossvoll and Nora Pincus Gjertsen

Best Commercial Project: Transforming a

Award for innovative combination of

Award for application of service design to

Social Security Organisation through Service

technology and service design:

information transfer: Lift the Lid – By Good

Design – By UC Design School, Brandbook

The Evidence of Design 2.0 – An Impactful

Innovation

and Surandina Consultores

Service Identity Designed with AI – By Hellon

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What happens when you submit your work?

1 2 3

Submit your work at service-design.awardsplatform.com

Have the chance to get your work published in the SDN Case Study Library

IF YOU ARE SHORTLISTED, YOU WILL HAVE

The privilege to be part of the SDN Award Exhibition at SDGC20

Media exposure via SDN’s global channels and media partners

The Service Design Award 2020 submissions are open from midFebruary to June 2020. As in the previous years, an international jury will be looking for exceptional service design projects and best-case practices from professionals and students. Use the opportunity to submit your own great work and have the opportunity to celebrate on stage at SDGC2020 in Copenhagen!

Special discount for Service Design Global Conference tickets

Project summaries of

4

all finalists and winners AND IF YOU WIN, YOU WILL

are available on the SDN Award web page (www.service-design-

Take the stage!

Present your work at the Service Design Global Conference in Copenhagen

Have the Winner‘s Badge on your website and professional profile

network.org/servicedesign-award-2019finalists). You can hear insights directly from the winners in the SDN podcast (www.service-design-

Celebrate!

Become a star of the Award Ceremony, share your project with audience of 700+ people!

network.org/podcast).

Deadline: Early bird until 4 April 2020 Regular entry until 12 June 2020

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The Art of Speaking about Schizophrenia Approximately 21 million people world-wide suffer from schizophrenia, a chronic and severe mental disorder characterised by an abnormal interpretation of reality that impacts the way an individual thinks, feels, acts and interacts with the environment.

Paola Andrea Venegas is a senior service designer at Háptica, a service design consultancy agency based in Colombia. She has four years of experience designing and leading teams to create human-centred services for complex business problems across different industries. paovenegas481@gmail.com

Federico Baraya Galán is a storyteller and service designer at Háptica. He has mainly worked in the pharmaceutical industry. He has a degree in journalism and truly believes in the power of telling stories to compel change in people and society. federico.baraya@gmail.com

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Due to lack of information on its symptoms and treatment, schizophrenia is a disease that carries a significant social burden that in some cases may even lead to the patient’s death. Such social burden concerns not only the patient’s relatives, friends, acquaintances and co-workers, but also professional caregivers.

The World Health Organization has stated that this mental disorder commonly results in stigma, discrimination and violation of human rights.

Háptica, a Colombian service design consultancy agency, was engaged by one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world to identify why the sales of their leading schizophrenia medicine were not successful among psychiatrists.

In its first stage, the study tried to ascertain why caregivers were not prescribing their patients the medication despite the fact that its benefits had already proven to be the best in the market.

As we conducted the research, we found out that one of the main

challenges faced by the client in selling its medication was the general lack of information about the disorder itself. People in Colombia, including caregivers, have limited information about the causes, treatment, economic impact on society and the patient’s struggles with schizophrenia. Moreover, at least in Colombia, people do not even want to talk about it. Caregivers, patients, and society in general, prefer to avoid the subject, because it makes them very uncomfortable. In fact, it is common to hear people say that schizophrenic patients are attention seekers, or that their symptoms are a result of their imagination. All of these misconceptions increase the stigma around the disorder, and discourages schizophrenics seeking help.

We conducted more than twenty interviews with different psychiatrists to understand their views of the illness, their needs as professional caregivers and experts in the field, as well as their wants and

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beliefs. In doing so, we discovered that art was going to be our main tool to empower psychiatrists and change the role of our client’s sales force.

Campaign logo inspired to reflect on a schizophrenic

Initial insight When we asked psychiatrists to tell us what they considered made them different from other medical specialists, they said that they understood the importance of treating patients as a whole, and – more importantly – that they considered themselves as doctors with a highly-developed humanistic sense. In their own words, their humanistic side was demonstrated by their attunement to the world and to their connection with arts, such as literature, theatre, films and paintings.

After hearing this answer for the first time in an interview, we inquired further with later interviewees to determine whether this relationship between psychiatry and art was common, and we ended up learning that it was. This might be connected to the fact that throughout the history of civilisation, art has proven to be the only vehicle to talk about issues that are forbidden. Schizophrenia is not an exception to this rule.

After the interviews and research regarding the disorder and our client’s treatment, we learned that schizophrenia is a common subject covered in art. Films, books and paintings speak about schizophrenia, including the paintings of Van Gogh and films such as Alice in Wonderland, Birdman, Fight Club and Mr. Robot. We concluded that all of these art expressions are a means to trigger a conversation related to a mental health condition that people are unwilling to raise on their own.

This vehicle to facilitating the conversation is art.

patient’s hallucinations

Schizophrenia is not a short story Art became our main tool to bring people together to discuss the importance of understanding schizophrenia in its multiple dimensions. This connection between art and schizophrenia gave birth to a project called “Schizophrenia is not a short story”.

The project aimed to raise awareness about schizophrenia as a mental illness that needed to be discussed and normalised through art. We figured that the stigma surrounding the condition could be broken down one story at a time.

We worked closely with our client’s sales team to understand and hear real stories of patients they knew.

We wrote a short story of each patient, based on his or her day-to-day experiences with the condition, and created illustrated brochures to tell each story.

Make them care As a result of what we learnt from the interviews with the psychiatrists, patients and our client’s salespeople, we understood that we needed to develop a mechanism to reach out to our target: psychiatrists. We trusted our four stories to be the key tool in this process, but we required an additional ingredient in this equation: we had to make psychiatrists feel part of the story. As Pixar calls it, we needed the ‘make me care’ elements of the stories.

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Illustrated brochures with key moments of the story and the triggering questions

That’s the moment when we came across storytelling methodologies. We started playing with the ­n arrator, tone, voice and use of suspense. But this wasn’t enough – we needed to involve them in the conversation through using triggering questions to engage them and ­c reate value-based conversations about the treatment and the patient’s case.

Prototyping We went on to convert the short stories into illus­ trated brochures that could be told through story­ telling techniques, and that also included the triggering questions. We then spent two days ­prototyping the scripts at Nuestra Señora de la Paz, a renowned hospital for mental disorders in Bogota.

It is standard practice that while a patient has twenty minutes with a doctor, a pharmaceutical salesperson has only three to five minutes to convince a psychiatrist of the benefits of the medicine they intend to sell.

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Therefore, our first challenge was timing. Our stories required at least ten minutes to be told, and another five minutes to be discussed with the psychiatrist.

We began by disguising ourselves as salespeople, and in those two days told each story at least once.

The first time we ran our experiment, we went into the psychiatrist’s office and began telling one of our stories. As we spoke each word, we could feel his eyes staring at us while he thought to himself, “What on earth are these guys doing?”. However, as each minute went by and before we could finish our story – which ends with the dramatic suicide of the main character – with his hands on his head the psychiatrist cried out, “No, no, it can’t end like this!”.

He was shocked by what he had heard. He sub­ sequently shared his experiences with schizophrenic patients he was treating and concluded that people who suffer from schizophrenia should not end up like the one presented in our story. Action was required.

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The results: art breaks stigma At the end of our experiment, we proved that art was the key feature to build a conversation around schizophrenia, and that the stories we created had the power to make our recipients feel like they were part of the narrative.

One hundred percent of the psychiatrists that we met during our experiment told us they would like to speak about the experience with their colleagues.

One of them told us that it was his opinion that “art was a kinder way to speak about schizophrenia”.

The results of the project caused an impact on the psychiatrists that went beyond our expectations.

They felt deeply connected to the stories and believed that through initiatives like the one we were proposing, people would finally understand the importance of the psychiatrist’s role not only in

connection with mental health, but in medicine as a whole. “People think that what psychiatrists do is just sit down and hear fictional stories, and that our role in medicine is not a science,” argued one of the psychiatrists we met during our project.

Not only did the stories resonate in their minds, they also wanted to keep the illustrated brochures to use with patients and families. We discovered that art helped them translate schizophrenia into easy and comprehensible terms. Our stories would also become a tool for real patients and families to deal with the disease. We were now deconstructing the stigma that schizophrenia has had for so many years. Through using storytelling and art as a vehicle, we were raising awareness and reducing fear of the condition, and at the same time humanising it and engaging people in a conversation.

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Empowering Service Designers to Become Agents of Change Leveraging coaching for sustainable service impact Service designers are increasingly called upon to oversee the deployment of new services, ensure the handover of a design vision and empower internal stakeholders with the tools and skills needed to learn and perform new tasks with dexterity, autonomy and confidence.

Joumana Mattar is a Service and Organizational Change Manager at 4AM by EY and a certified coach by the International Coaching ­Federation (ICF). She is continuously curious, exploring the role of rituals in transitions, employee engagement and sustainable service delivery. She was previously a Design Lead at Fjord and founder of Mirada Madrid. joumana.mm@gmail.com

Both coaching and service design are people-centric processes shaped by a client’s context, aspirations and needs.

While service design focusses on un­ covering pain points and designing new solutions, coaching focuses on empowering coachees to achieve extraordinary results through ownership and accountability.

Both practices start with a trigger.

For example, user needs trigger service design, while career re-skilling triggers coaching. In both cases, an existing situation is no longer sustainable and a different reality needs to emerge.

So how do we get there?

Currently, service designers create and implement new visions at an organisational level, and employees are expected to embrace that new reality on a personal and professional level. This is a painful experience, but coaching can be used to facilitate the change process.

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Not all service designers want to coach internal teams, but it is critical to identify why they are being asked to do so in the first place. Throughout the design process, service designers build equity with the client team by listening to their fears and aspirations, facilitating workshops, making user needs visible and streamlining internal processes. They do so by creating safe spaces for employees to share, and they often have the ear of decisionmakers.

Furthermore, while employee involvement is critical to the design process, their participation varies depending on their level, responsibility and availability. Front-line employees typically lack visibility of the over­ arching strategic vision and how their actions contribute to it, and they are often invited late to the design process, even though their performance metrics are directly impacted, generating resistance and anxiety.

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However, both coaching and service design are interested in the future, embracing the dynamic environment of organisations as living systems in constant iteration and growth.

So what is the difference between a service designer and a coach?

Service design and coaching both wield similar tools, such as questions. However, they each have different intentions. A service designer is concerned with why things happen (or not), while a coach is concerned with what, how, when and where. On the one hand, a coach uses words, reads body language and uncovers limiting beliefs while accompanying a coachee. On the other hand, a service designer creates tangible artefacts that map out current situations as well as new possibilities, co-creating with employees to make prototypes around which discussions occur.

Consequently, what tools can we learn and adapt from coaching to expand our toolkit as service designers?

How do we deal with an extended project lifecycle – beyond design and into implementation and maintenance?

Agents of change Service designers need to address different audiences (from client-facing to back-office) through key moments, including discovery and implementation.

Because coaching is a non-judgmental process, this neutrality gives it credibility and makes people more open and trusting. When service designers deliberately plan activities designed to explain and on-board employees to their new tasks and tools, they can deploy coaching tools simultaneously, creating the reassurance and confidence necessary to enable the right conditions for employee learning and buy-in.

The following tools create an extended service design coaching toolkit, complementing tradition­ ­a l design activities and permitting a deeper understanding of how to overcome the barriers to change. They include: A. Distinctions A distinction is when two or more concepts are compared in order to help coachees explore, understand and learn from the differences between them, so that they may identify and release limiting beliefs and make new actions possible.

For example: I am not what I do

Research

Ideation Design decisions

Alignment and boundaries

Setting the context

Service design

Prototype and test

Change management Buy-in

Follow-through

Conflict resolution

Key moments within a project lifecycle

An employee who associates their job description with their personal identity will resist any attempt to change it. Enabling them to see that their concept of self is larger than their current role allows them to embrace new behaviours.

The service design coach can incorporate these distinctions into their co-creation and handover sessions with employees. Being comfortable with uncertainty, service design coaches are freed from a one-size-fits-all approach and can help others explore different possibilities. They invite employees to imagine how a new service vision can benefit them and choose for themselves how to accomplish it. The service design coach also enables employees to select the path that best suits them, while keeping the milestones to achieve clear and unified.

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B. Ladder of inferences This tool is useful for understanding why people take different decisions even when faced with the same data. For example, when a new service is deployed, employees often go through a thought process to evaluate whether or not to buy into it.

By using a ladder of inferences, the service design coach can explore limiting beliefs, contrasting evidence with assumptions, and invite employees to explore what other interpretations of the facts are available.

When employees realise that the possible actions available are wider than those initially considered, they can enter into a cost/benefit analysis of what this change of behaviour entails.

The service design coach has considered the internal implications that the deployment of the service has on employees, and if there are unmet needs, the service design coach can integrate this feedback and iterate the service solution.

Take actions based on beliefs

Adopt beliefs about the world

Draw conclusions

Make assumptions based on meanings

Add meanings (cultural and personal)

Select “data”

What do I want to achieve?

What do I need to learn?

- Professional or personal SMART goal

- Soft and hard skills

Vision board 2020

What do I need to un-learn?

- Habits - Fears

What is my support system?

- Friends - Colleagues - Hobbies

The vision board is a tool for self-reflection and growth that helps a person identify their goals and the actions necessary to achieve them

C. Vision board The service design coach understands that employees need assistance moving from their comfort zone to their growth zone. By helping employees state their professional goals, mapping out what they need to learn and unlearn as well as identifying their professional support system, designers can help the company identify which resources would be best to invest in to ensure employee readiness to deliver the service solution. They also enable employees to develop their own career programme, aligned with the company's vision, moving from their current reality into the ideal future state with enterprise support.

from what is observed

Observable “data” and experiences

The ‘ladder of inferences’ from The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook: Strategies and Tools for Building a Learning Organization (Senge, P. (1994))

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D. Feedback This tool has been used in many contexts including product testing and service delivery, and depending on the format deployed and the usage of the results, employees can be fearful of participating truthfully, especially when their financial remuneration is at stake.

The service design coach builds rapport and uses active listening (suspending judgement and not mentally preparing an answer for every problem), in order to

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create a safe space for employees to give feedback during the co-creation sessions. They also establish acceptance criteria to help individuals and teams focus on a holistic vision and realise how their contribution affects the company results as a whole. If teams only stay committed to their department at the expense of the company, they miss opportunities to bridge the service gaps with other departments, which impacts the overall quality of the experience for users.

By making feedback structured and regular, service design coaches can iterate the service, document the changes, test with users and employees and share the results. By creating evidence of how important and actionable employee feedback is, service design coaches create credibility and trust in the design process and demonstrate commitment from management to see it through.

For example, service design coaches can ask employees: “What can you learn from this project?

How might we approach things differently?”

Service design coaches can also offer feedback: “Could I offer you a different perspective? What are you taking away from this conversation?”

E. Rituals Finally, it is important to engage all stakeholders in actively adopting new behaviours to sustain the organisation's growth by using rituals.

Rituals are meaningful and intentional ceremonies that are designed to achieve a purpose and include artefacts that are interacted with at specific trigger moments. Different from routines (which are automatic actions), rituals are consciously designed and deployed during moments of change. They can be inspired by cultural and contextual settings, for example weddings or funerals. Furthermore, service design coaches can complement their facilitation skills with their design skills to create inspiring artefacts (stories, posters, objects, training programmes, physical/virtual set-ups) that model and reinforce new behaviours. Consequently, the cumulative impact of these participatory rituals will stimulate employees

to share values based on trust and transparency and will ultimately impact company culture.

For example, a service design coach can organise a “Wedding of the Orgs” ritual to celebrate the merging of two companies.1 Used by IDEO to mark the joining of their Chicago office with Datascope, a data science firm, they set up a ceremony in which participants from each company vowed their commitment to the joint venture, acknowledged what they were fearful of (for better or worse) and then used favourite music and food to celebrate the new beginning and reinforce the transition.

Take-aways Companies, their employees and users are inter­ dependent parts of a dynamic system in constant change. By using the toolkit described above, service design coaches can create empowered communities of proactive employees that approach new services with curiosity and willingness, to consequently ensure smooth service delivery to customers.

1 Ozenc, K & Hagan, M (2019). Rituals for work: 50 ways to create engagement, shared purpose, and a culture that can adapt to change

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Change as a Force to Design IT Solutions A well-designed IT solution doesn’t only provide new functionalities which need to be adopted, it also provides a viable and desirable tool for the customer and the employee providing the service. We don’t simply see ‘change’ as helping people adopt a new IT tool, instead we use the phenomenon of ‘change’ to design the IT solution. We Nina Pennock is a service designer at Conclusion Digital-X, where she uses her endless curiosity to connect people, departments and organisations, especially where people have to collaborate.

Her clients include Heijmans, ABN AMRO and SUEZ. ngpennock@gmail.com Marcella Rademakers is a UX designer at Keen Design, and studied industrial design. She enjoys unravelling complex problem to understand the core needs of her clients and their users. Her clients include KPN, Aviko and Royal HaskoningDHV. marcellarademakers@live.nl Ilka Tuinstra is a designer at Nextview. She is ambitious to create value for users, society and businesses.

She has extensive experience in designing desirable, feasible and viable products and services for local SMEs, governments and corporates. ilka.tuinstra@designthinking.center

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often come across situations where these solutions were pre-selected by management to improve efficiency.

For service designers and UX designers involved in the design, development and implementation of IT solutions, change is more than just the challenge of adoption.

It relates to the transformation of the entire organisation. We believe that the IT solution will only be adopted when it supports employees in providing service to their customer. Therefore, successful adoption will only occur when employees from all relevant departments are involved in designing the solution from the start and are co-owners of their future waysof-working. We use a service blueprint as our key tool to reveal the handling of customer data and to design this solution.

In this article we set the context, explain the way we work with the service blueprint and share our challenges and learnings.

Double design challenge

Consumer journey

Employee journey

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Context The focus of IT in medium/large enterprises is changing, and organisations are becoming aware of the increasing influence of the IT department. Historically focusing on delivering feasible and functional IT solutions, we see now that the IT department is being asked to create viable and desirable tools for both employees and customers. For example, there is the basic expectation of having a well-implemented CRM system in an organisation in order to provide a rich picture of the customer. Stakeholders however, expect the CRM system to solve a wider range of issues concerning the customer experience. Therefore, our clients are not simply asking for an IT solution as a set of functionalities, but as a solution for more customer-focussed delivery of their services. So, simply digitising the current way-of-working of the organisation is not sufficient.

Approach We typically kick-off an IT project by defining the future vision of the customer experience. This is done by our multi-disciplinary team (developers, architects, software and business consultants and service designers) together with members of the client team (business and IT leads as well as representatives from relevant departments). It is the designers´ role to facilitate the process of the entire team to unravel and visualise the current workflow, and to define the future service and customer experience. From here on we start building the service blueprint. Layer by layer we map the customer journey and ways-of-working of the different departments, including the internal way of handling customer data and the respective IT landscape.

This approach is crucial for adoption. Our prime directive is to involve the right stakeholders from the start and co-create solutions. We’ve found that this approach brings the following four challenges:

Simplification of a service blueprint to illustrate the double

As service designers, we focus on the entire delivery of a service. Therefore, when we are challenged with the design and implementation of IT solutions, we focus on the employee providing the service, because they are the users of not only the IT solution itself, but also are in contact with the people they are serving. Lastly, we design what data can be consumed or produced at certain touchpoints to improve the customer experience.

As an example, imagine Julia, a person who wants to buy a new house. Her first moment of contact with a service provider is an online form, which we are able to design beautifully (touchpoint). The data collected must be processed (data point). This process is often not completely automated, meaning an advisor might need to assess and process the information (employee touchpoint) before sending a confirmation to Julia (second customer touchpoint).

This example reflects the need to design the customer experience, the employee experience, and the movement of data in an intertwined flow. The IT solution and data flows improve the end-to-end customer experience, and streamline ways-of-working for the employees.

Service designers look to add value for both employees and customers, continuously voicing both perspectives in a multi-disciplinary team, checking every data flow as well as the features of the solution.

1. Multi-sided design challenge design challenge

Context

Sales representative Consumer looking for a home

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Transcending silos

Purchase process

Damage and complaint process

Line of interaction Revealing gap of information and dependecies between departments

Line of visibility

Highlight of a service blueprint showing the dependencies between departments IT systems

2. Transcending silos

Many of our customers’ questions originate in the opportunity to capture and analyse data, in turn deriving insights into customer behaviour, culminating in the delivery of better customer services. Within medium/ large enterprises, most services are delivered by one department. The entire customer experience, however, is made up of multiple services, across departments and touchpoints. Each department has its own KPIs, ways-of-working and capturing specific data. The capturing and storing of customer information at a departmental level results in an erratic customer experience. We strive to design the consumption and production of customer data across the journey to deliver a seamless and personalized customer experience.

As an example, we worked with sales employees focused on reaching their targets. They play a key role in gathering a huge amount of customer data in order to close a deal. Unfortunately, they only hand over ‘order information’ to other departments, completely unaware of the information gap created, resulting in customers repeatedly explaining their entire story to support agents, who lack a full understanding of their context.

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When visualising the customer journey in the service blueprint, we reveal dependencies between departments, discovering insights into the effect of employees’ behaviour when managing customer data. This enables employees to define improvements for both their own experience, their colleagues’ across departments, and that of the customer. At that moment of defining and designing improvements, organisational change organically starts happening.

3. Visualising complexity

The complexity of a multi-sided design challenge within an interdepartmental project is mapped and arranged onto the simple framework of the service blueprint. The front stage depicts the customer journey, the backstage below the ‘visibility line’ is where we visualise business processes as lanes and actions to provide insights into various connections, dependencies and goals of the organisation, finally adding an IT layer. This illustrates the IT landscape, the data flows and the handling of customer data.

To visualise all information and ensure readability, we use ‘levels’ of blueprints. You could describe these

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as lenses with varying zoom levels when looking at a service; one can hardly do without the other.

— Level 1: A main blueprint for the entire customer experience on the first, abstract level. For example, the entire customer journey of someone buying a bed, starting from reviewing possible options, testing mattresses in stores, and all the way through to disposal of the bed.

Level 2: Sub-processes and/or sub-services. And — example is visualising the customer care service when a customer complains about the box spring squeaking after three years of use.

Level 3: Sometimes added for a variety of customer — experiences based on persona, such as someone who needs a bed but searches online and wishes to donate her bed to someone else.

This creates a complete view of all dependencies across departments, roles and data, enabling the team to codesign new services whilst maintaining readable and high-level views of complex blueprints.

4. Shared ownership

‘Change programs’ are often necessitated by the need to adopt a new IT solution, often selected to improve efficiency and productivity. When implementing a predefined solution, without considering the formal and informal processes, one might lack visibility of the current underlaying problems and miss information about the existing risks. To avoid this we’ve learned to deeply understand and map all roles when starting projects.

In the mapping process, we invite users and various stakeholders of the organisation, ranging from executives to sales agents, to co-design their way-of-working from the start. In our workshops, we provide the opportunity to expose and explain how they currently work. From this point, we can co-design their future way-of-working and how customer data is handled. To ensure a fit between a feasible IT solution and employee needs, developers and solution architects also use the blueprint to provide feedback. To ensure an efficient way of working, we designers consistently capture key insights and update the blueprints to provide a true overview.

The initiators of the change programme should proactively support these future processes, and ownership of problems and solutions is shared across a diverse and unified change team with the aim of successful implementation.

Conclusion Using the service blueprint as a core tool ensures that everyone involved understands it, and it allows us to gain insight into how the organisation, departments and roles currently work. When co-created with stakeholders, the service blueprint visualises the future way-of-working for employees, and shows how customer data is handled to provide the desired customer experience. When this is done well, there is both a sense as well as evidence of shared ownership of the newly designed and implemented IT solution.

Shared ownership Shared ownership

A co-creation workshop creating the service blueprint

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f e at u re

Service Design and Change Management

Getting the Machinery Ready: Re-imagining a Service Relationship Reconciliation from the perspectives of front-line staff For 12 months, the Department of Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) Innovation Lab has led an internal service transformation design project for a programme that aims to better support labour market integration for Canada’s Indigenous Peoples. Complexity in the desired future state made it a promising Catherine Charbonneau is head of the Design Unit at the ESDC Innovation Lab, Government of Canada.

She is an organisational development specialist, experienced facilitator and strategic designer. She leads public sector innovation through human-centred design.

Denisa Iancu, Christine Ung and Jespal Panesar are all Innovation Researchers at ESDC Innovation Lab. We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to each and every person who participated in this project.

A special thank you goes out to Gillian Campbell and Shane Reoch, Director Change Champions.

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space for bottom-up innovation through service design.

DNA of the project The project was driven by a largescale policy transformation towards reconciliation from a pan-Indigenous to distinction-based delivery model, and shifting traditional front-line approaches from oversight towards capacity-building.

The transformation of the Indigenous labour market programme happened in the context of deeply-rooted historical dynamics between Indigenous Peoples and the Government of Canada, thus impacting everyday service interactions.

Transforming the vision of the programme fundamentally changed how front-­line staff did their work, including the way they needed to inter­act with Indigenous partners.

In anticipation of the programme launch, regional staff were nervous and concerned, and some were angry.

The desire to empower front-line staff

and give them a voice in shaping their role created an opportunity to address implementation challenges through a novel, bottom-up and peer-led approach to change management. Senior-level support enabled cross-regional interventions to align people, process and culture.

The ESDC Innovation Lab was a thirdparty convener, and used facilitation techniques, human-centred design and organisational development principles to generate insights from regional front-line staff and regional change leaders (RCLs) to reimagine their service relationships with Indigenous partners, and consider how their role contributes positively to Indigenous communities.

The ESDC Innovation Lab trained and coached a cohort of non-designers from the front-line: RCLs. They came from across Canada to learn about the intersections of Design Thinking and

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change management in order to help their own colleagues discover irritants and unmet needs from meaningful interactions. The Lab led systematic virtual and in-person engagements with the RCLs and front-line staff across job functions, tailoring interventions to regional contexts and continuously building capacity for change management.

The human-centred approach of the project focussing on the lived experience of front-line staff disrupted the organisational culture and deeply-rooted ways of working, by shortening the communication grid across operational functions and layers of leadership, and hacking away at the traditional top-down, layer-to-layer communication practices. This created windows for collective sensemaking. The new service relationship was taking shape through ongoing peer-to-peer exchange across regions throughout Canada, dialogue between regions and National Headquarters (NHQ), and from direct engagements with Indigenous Agreement Holders (AHs).

The infrastructure To support this project, the Lab developed an internal structure from the ground up, with the network of RCLs meeting bi-weekly through teleconferences chaired by the Lab, and included the presence of one NHQ representative on behalf of Director Change Champions. The Change Champions were two members of programme leadership, one from NHQ and one from a regional office. Having the vision for this project, they provided rich operational context to help the Lab design its interventions, created space for discovery, and liaised with their director peers and other executives across the organisation. Several regional bilateral calls were organised for more tailored support. The Lab also made use of an online platform to share simultaneous information across regions throughout the project.

Status meetings were organised at every project milestone with the two Director Change Champions, who briefed senior executives and their peers across an already established Directors’ Network.

The journey To better understand the transition context, the project started with two engagement strategies. First, a frontline qualitative survey was co-developed with the RCLs and the Lab to establish baseline information about the programme transition. Secondly, an anecdote circle with NHQ collected their perspectives. The findings

from the two engagements informed the kick-off change management workshop hosted by the Lab for RCLs. Then, in-person regional workshops were co-­ developed with the RCLs and empowered 120 regional front-line staff to raise their concerns and tensions, allowing the Lab to uncover deeply-rooted assumptions and practices about their new and future roles. The workshops generated more than 750 ideas, and 14 ‘napkin pitches’ for pro-active action in support of the change, showing promise of impact and scale.

The workshops also provided an opportunity for participants to exchange best practices across regions, distinctions and programmes, as well as occupational groups, and to identify common solutions. For example, commonalities were discovered amongst different Indigenous labour market programmes, but differences were also shared across functions. Assumptions of roles and functions to support internal change management were discussed to better understand the multiple points of views that can clash and also work together.

Various activities facilitated by the Lab enabled participants to dive more deeply into the findings from the survey, including an ‘evidence safari/gallery’ and an ‘iceberg exercise’ that guided the review and analysis of survey responses into systemic barriers impeding a successful transition. The Lab also made use of storyboarding, perspective taking and point-of-view exercises. Mindful of diversity and varying degrees of readiness across the regions, the Lab designed tailored interventions to adapt to each regional context and its organisational culture.

One exercise called ‘sharing circle through metaphors’ allowed front-line staff to express their unmet needs, pains and frustrations through images in a dialogicallyfacilitated plenary session. Another exercise, ‘mapping the landscape’, involved filling-in a grid of system players to uncover assumptions on their locus of control and responsibility in specific problem spaces. Identified problems were flipped into ‘how might we?’ statements that guided idea generation via brain-writing and mash-up exercises. Finally, the Lab pushed participants to develop ‘napkin pitches’, evaluating specifications from a ‘new-useful-feasible-scalable’ (NUFS) scorecard and feedback from ‘ritual dissent’.

The project concluded with a final survey to RCLs and an engagement session, bringing together key stakeholders in NHQ (policy and operations) as well as Touchpoint 11-3 25

the RCLs, to integrate efforts for shared commitments, including the maintenance and governance of the RCL network to continue to leverage the upstream approach to change management. The discussion included RCLs’ regular participation at senior management tables, as well as a promise for continued engagement of front-line staff in the policy programme discussions.

Š Jordana Globerman

Insights The project provided the opportunity and space for frontline staff to mobilise in areas that are critical under the new service delivery model. The novelty of the approach enabled honest discussions about deficiencies in the organisation to support the transition, and allowed for solutions to adjust the inner workings between functions, attitudes and behaviours. The uncertainty that staff faced was both scary and exciting. The active motivation and

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leadership shown by RCLs was fundamental to helping staff shift towards a growth mindset, moving from the role of a bystander to one in which they took ownership of redefining their new service relationship, influencing the organisation as a whole.

Communication arose as a symptom of broader issues.

In such a large organisation, staff craved communication across functions with more real-time information sharing, improving the flow top-down, bottom-up and sideways, using a common and open platform. For example, reframing the service relationship requires both sides to adjust and shape it together, but front-line staff were reacting to negotiated expectations from other government officials, context they knew was important but that they were not privy to. To satisfy these confidence and operational awareness gaps, front-line staff wanted to develop among themselves

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their shared understanding of their new role, and wanted to share their fieldwork experiences to learn from each other. As such, multiple solutions proposed across regions responded to that need.

Under the new service model, the scripted and prescribed structure that defined the service relationship disappeared. This cultural legacy put front-line staff in a foreign position, without the tools and confidence to reimagine and be part of the new relationship with AHs. As the project evolved, each region started to experience their new service relationship differently, influenced for example by specific provincial political dynamics and the heritage of the historical relationship with Indigenous peoples. Front-line staff also shared that local and/or regional realities needed a more tailored and holistic service approach.

Creating organisational impact by redefining a service relationship bottom-up, using organisational development, Design Thinking and service design techniques

Final remarks and lessons learned This project was grounded in human interactions and reverse-engineered service design for the new programme. Upstream innovation leveraging service experience busts silos and instils change by uncovering solutions grounded in front-line interactions with end users, where policy ideals, programme operations and service delivery meet. The project approached the realities of front-line staff by looking at strategic gaps between policy intentions and operationalising this vision in a service model. The co-developed activities, tools and infrastructure empowered front-line staff to transition away from old habits into new ones, and surface irritants and motivations regarding gaps in current procedures.

RCLs now help their peers realise the intentions of the programme and support each other.

The project resulted in concrete measures to continue the efforts of change management initiated. However, implementing a transformation is a long-term effort and the organisation’s journey towards a sustainable cultural turn-around is well underway. There is nothing more challenging than changing ingrained behaviours.

Ambiguity makes change hard, and large organisations make change even harder. Clarity and direction in the change vision, as well as the inclusion of all concerned players – especially front-line delivery staff – are pivotal to ensuring success.

For questions, please enquire at: NC-LAB-GD@hrsdc-rhdcc.gc.ca

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Designing in Complexity Demands Change Management When designing services, the fundamental challenge is people.

Organisations don’t change – people change. In complex systems such as within the public sector, people are even more critical as they are relied upon to make decisions in an unpredictable environment rather than being able to follow predetermined Henrietta Curzon is a Senior Manager & Insight Lead at IMPOWER, the UK’s largest independent consultancy focussed exclusively on delivering better public services. Prior to this she was the Design Lead for Westminster City Council and the Service Design Lead for the Public Service Transformation Network. hcurzon@impower.co.uk

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activities. Change management, with its focus on the people side of change, enables service design to scale in complexity.

Why incorporate change management into service design?

In complex systems, the outcomes of a service design project can be great, yet still not scale effectively, because the system is always changing. The service design is often too inflexible to cope with this constant change or to deal with the unpredictable issues that arise. To add to this challenge, in complex systems each situation is unique in terms of the relationships, energy and levels of collaboration. Therefore, doing the same thing in the same organisation – for instance prototyping a service with a team that covers the north area of a council and scaling it to the south area team – won’t necessarily lead to the same outcome.

Addressing complexity is like the challenge of raising a child: there is no manual, and raising two siblings in the same way is no guarantee they will end up alike.

A well-designed process will not remain relevant in a constantly changing environment, but service design activities that bring staff along in the journey, so they have effective principles to guide their decisions, create the flexibility required.

A helpful change management model is ADKAR, which refers to providing staff with Awareness and Desire for the change, instilling Knowledge and Ability to implement the skills required, and Reinforcement to sustain the change.

Incorporating change management into service design isn’t new Service design has a tradition of incorporating change management thinking.

Co- design is a key tenet of both service ­design and change management. Engaging staff in the design process builds awareness and desire for the change. Proto­ typing is another crossover, ­providing the

servi c e de si g n a nd c h a ng e m a n ag emen t

Managerial Control

High

space for staff to move from knowledge to ability, gaining hands-on experience. The recent shift from user-centred to human-centred1 design reflects ­f urther incorporation of change management ­thinking into service design practice, expanding from being focussed solely on the customer to including the experience of the service provider.

What ‘inventive methods’ to use?

At IMPOWER we have developed a set of techniques that enable sustainable change in public services.

Here are three of our ‘inventive methods’ that are particularly relevant in managing the people side of change within the design process: Holding up the mirror

Holding up the mirror encourages staff to acknowledge the disconnect between what they say they are doing and what they actually do, in order to help them acknowledge the need for change. For instance, in trying to understand the behaviours that influence someone’s reliance on adult social care, we might ask staff, “Do you consider how connected the person is with their local community?”, to which the answer is often, “Yes of course.” Yet we still see missed opportunities because although someone perceives that they are doing this, their behaviour often tells a different story. We reveal what they are actually doing in ways that encourage self-reflection, including role-play, peer feedback and case reviews.

Values baseline

A values baseline identifies the motivations that inform peoples’ behaviour. We create the baseline by running a staff survey. People are segmented into three core value groups and knowing a person’s group gives the service designer a sense of how to frame communications to build the desire for change. For instance, a key driver for a person in the ‘Prospector’ value group is knowing “what’s in it for me”. Communication to them might

1 Stickdorn, M., Lawrence, A., Hormess, M., & Schneider, J. (2018).

This is Service Design Doing. O’Reilly

Controlled

Primed

Disoriented

Commited

Low Low

Social Purpose

High

Primed Metrics 4-box model

then focus on opportunities to progress their career.

Similarly, a person in the ‘Pioneer’ value group is driven by a concern for society, so the message might highlight how the change will improve the lives of local residents.

Primed metrics2

Performance management is key in reinforcing change because it increases employee engagement, highlights successes and identifies when things have gone off-track. Traditional methods of measuring performance in the public sector have tended to focus on activity and outputs, often resulting in decisions that do not drive better outcomes. Primed metrics are designed to reflect the purpose of the service to drive the desired behaviour of staff. For instance, the number of housing repairs undertaken by local government is typically measured, yet measuring the time between repairs compared to their cost provides a better indication of quality, outcome and value.

To change reality with service design, one needs to move beyond prototyping to scaling. This requires a knowledge of how people change, an understanding of what drives behaviour, and – especially in the public sector – providing staff with effective principles to guide their decisions to deal with the constantly-evolving system.

2 IMPOWER Consulting (2019). The Edgework Manifesto.

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Using Service Design to Transform Higher Education American colleges and universities inspire their students, conduct game-changing research and contribute to their communities, but there are major demographic, technological and economic changes affecting higher education.

Elliot Felix founded and leads brightspot, a consultancy on a mission to make higher education more engaging, equitable and impactful. He is an accomplished strategist and sense-maker who has helped transform more than 80 colleges and universities and impacted over a million students. elliot@brightspotstrategy.com

Service design can be a tool for organisational change. In this article, we will explain how brightspot uses service design to effect change by sharing lessons learned from our work transforming the student experience at more than 80 American colleges and universities. We’ll provide five guiding principles and five ways to help colleges and universities adapt to change. We hope to enable service designers to join us in transforming higher education so that it continues to be an engine of opportunity and tackles some of our world’s most complex and pressing challenges.

Why higher education needs to change The current composition of today’s student body has changed: 46 percent of students are the first in their family to go to university, 42 percent are students of colour, and 37 percent are aged 25 or older.

Technology has also changed how and where students learn1 . Approximately onethird of students take at least one course

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online2 . Furthermore, the economics of higher education has changed. Tuition fees at American public universities have tripled in 30 years3 , student loan debt is now $1.5 trillion US dollars4 , and about 150 non-profit educational institutions have closed in the last five years5 .

Many institutions are not adapting well to these changes; they are risk averse, afraid of implementing ideas that peer institutions haven’t already adopted.

Decision-making is also slow. Leadership, staff and faculty often lack the mindset, tools and skills to imagine new ways of doing things, or adapt to a changing world.

The results are worrying. Only 60 percent of students graduate within six years. Overall, 26 percent of students leave after their first year, a figure which more than doubles when looking at those who are the first in their family to pursue higher education6 . Only 40 percent of students are academically engaged7, and only 33 percent of faculty and staff are engaged – what Gallup defines as “involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their work8.”

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Service blueprinting workshop

How service design can be tool for organisational change In the face of these challenges, service design can be a powerful tool to effect organisational change. At brightspot, we use the mindset, toolkit, and skill-set of service design to help colleges and universities redesign their offerings, their operations, and their organisation – often all at once.

Student learning experiences can be redesigned to actively engage students working in teams on real-world problems – the kind of active learning that has been shown to cut failure rates in half9.

Student services, from admissions to career advising, can be redesigned to be more accessible, seamless and responsive, and to be physically and digitally centralised into one-stop-shop student service hubs, which have been shown to increase graduation rates by an average of six percent10. The spaces where students live and learn can be reimagined to be more inclusive, flexible and sustainable. Staff can be reorganised and retrained to be more collaborative and change-ready.

Along the way, service designers can inspire colleges and universities to adopt new ways of working for even greater impact.

Five principles to guide transformation To transform higher education, service designers should use a participatory process, have a holistic perspective, create common ground for different groups, find inspiration internally and externally, and use prototyping to test ideas and make the case for change. We use these five principles for service design to effect change in colleges and universities: 1. Have people shape their own future. For change to happen, you need a participatory process, solutions that are both innovative and practical, and a way to prototype them. Creating an inclusive process in which people feel heard is critical to their acceptance of new ideas, even if ultimately a different direction is chosen. It’s also the best way to enable accountability. As organisational guru Ed Schein stated in Process Consultation Revisited, “It is the client who owns the problem and the solution.”

2. Design inside-out and outside-in. Think about the user experience and the staff experience together; don’t optimise one at the expense of the other. A simple way to do this is to create personas and journey maps for both. Maybe users and staff share the same pain-points? Another technique is to use consistent metrics. You’d be surprised how often performance targets for staff satisfaction are lower than targets for user/customer satisfaction. We even made this mistake initially at brightspot!

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5. Prototype ideas to make the case. Like many sectors,

When

Service operations

Why

Service philosophy

Service design approach

Where

Service points

What

Service offerings

?

Who

Service providers

How

Service delivery

higher education can suffer from ‘analysis-paralysis’ and the false hope that collecting enough data will make a hard decision easy. Because this is rarely the case, institutions can instead test ideas through prototypes and pilot projects. These kinds of experiments are particularly appropriate given the culture of higher education, and enable you to refine your ideas, gather data to make the case for change, and build momentum.

Five ways service design can transform higher education To put the above five principles into practice, service designers can train university staff in service design and use service design to re-think student services, spaces and organisational structures. Furthermore, this can all be done in a way that demonstrates the agile and collaborative ways of working that many institutions so desperately need.

brightspot’s service design approach

1. Train staff in service design. Service designers can

3. Start with ‘why’. Collaboration among staff must

inevitably increase, because resources are limited, problems are complex, and students want to go one place for help rather than be sent from office to office across the campus. John Kotter long ago established that change doesn’t happen unless the status quo is no longer viable. Our corollary is that staff collaboration doesn’t happen without first establishing a shared service philosophy rooted in shared values and experience. Without that, there’s no hope of groups like the library and IT working together.

4. Find inspiration internally and externally. In his classic book Diffusion of Innovations, Everett Rogers analyses how and why new ideas are adopted. He provides a useful checklist for a change: Enable people to understand it, observe it, relate it to their life, try it out, and then see its relative advantages. Finding inspirational examples within and outside of higher education accomplishes many of these. For instance, there may be ‘lead users’ on campus who are doing today what others will do tomorrow, or there may be a store that assists customers in ways that could inspire student services.

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train university staff directly in the philosophy, process and toolkit of service design. By designing learning experiences for staff in which they apply service design to their work, they are more excited and become empowered to solve their own problems, and then teach their colleagues. For example, we trained a technology group at Stanford University to rethink their learning spaces and services. Moving from principles to personas to journey maps to service blueprints to prototypes, we enabled them to identify and address gaps in their services. Similarly, the iZone Innovation Lab at the University of Rochester has applied to its operations many of the service design techniques we used to plan its services and spaces.

Now, the lab offers workshops in topics such as prototyping to help students explore their ideas.

2. Treat space as a service. The way space is planned and run on many campuses is outdated: There is limited input from users, solutions are rarely prototyped before construction, and design teams deliver a ‘product’ in a process that ends when people move in – when the real work operating and activating a space begins! Not only is this unfortunate because peoples’ needs are unmet, it affects the bottom line as well. Our research indicates that facilities have the

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© Snøhetta and Clark Nexsen

second highest correlation with students’ likelihood to recommend their university (r = 0.45). Instead, university spaces can be designed as services, making them more user-centred, responsive and effective.

This happens through using service design tools such as personas, journey mapping and prototyping, and by employing service design principles such as co-creation. For instance, we designed a flexible work programme for the University of Minnesota that enabled greater efficiency. Staff response times to queries decreased by 67 percent. We also planned a flexible academic workplace for the University of Michigan where different academic centres could share spaces and ideas, resulting in an effective workplace – each staff member experienced an average productivity gain of 4.26 hours per week.

3. Redesign student services. Student services have been typically slow to respond to changing student needs beyond adding new standalone, specialised functions such as an ‘Office for First Generation Students’.

Not surprisingly, the cost of student services has increased 22 percent in the last ten years11 . Students are unfortunately shuffled from place to place for onlineand in-person assistance. Institutions often have outdated systems, policies and processes as well, such as paper-based forms. Instead, colleges and universities should create student service hubs which are more effective and efficient for both students and staff, and can reduce student attrition by about 10 percent12.

We brought together two dozen different advising services in one place at the University of Virginia to – in the words of our client – “interact with students in new ways and to reach students they might otherwise miss.” Likewise, at Portland State University, we uncovered the need for an updated online portal that would centralise student services, and this new site was rated the best platform by students.

4. Reorganise staff for collaboration. Resistance to change and the tendency to add new functions without removing or rethinking old ones leave many university organisational charts outdated. Often, there are groups of services that don’t correspond with the groups of people providing them. This is not only inefficient but is bad for morale, leaving staff who are motivated by the mission feeling like their structure, spaces and systems keep them from making a difference. Service design can define and categorise service offerings so departments can better align. We used this process at Florida International University's business school to organise student service departments based on the student journey: marketing, recruiting, admissions, student experience, career services and alumni engagement. We’ve also used it to help Miami University Libraries reorganise their staff to better deliver existing and new services in a process they called ‘game-changing’ because it freed them from a perfectionist mentality and enabled them to experiment with ideas.

5. Show new ways of working: One reason that staff have difficulty adapting to change is that they are using outdated tools and processes to get their work done.

Instead, in the course of redesigning services, systems and spaces, service designers can demonstrate agile, collaborative and user-centred processes that inspire institutions to work differently. This can be as simple as introducing new scheduling and collaboration tools, but it can go beyond that. For example, the participatory workshops and prototyping exercises we used with the University of Miami helped them reimagine their library services and spaces because we brought together previously disparate groups to support students more collaboratively. Our client noted that the process “fostered the development of a community of practice that continues to thrive today.”

Hunt Library Service Point

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Service Point prototyping

Service design as a tool for change Higher education is at a crossroads. Many of our most valuable institutions are also amongst the most vulnerable as they try to adapt to social, technological and economic change. Service designers can make a difference. We can train people in our craft and show them how to work differently. We can redesign services, staffing, spaces and systems to work for people.

The encouraging part of this is that service design is a proven approach that’s safe for colleges and universities to try, and is a great way to get institutions ‘unstuck’.

One of our favourite examples is the pop-up service desk we created with Adelphi University. We identified a lot of uncertainty about a change towards a one-stop-shop model for technology support, research support and the checking-out of both books and technology. A one-day pop-up service desk created using temporary signs, foam core mock-ups and movable furniture answered many questions, set many minds at ease, and generated great feedback from users in real-time.

Service design can holistically transform a college or university’s offerings, operations and organisation. Done right, it can better connect people to a purpose, place and each other. It can help level the playing field in the face of systemic inequities so that all students have the same access, opportunity and achievement. It can ensure that the learning and discovery create economic, social and cultural impact on the campus, in their communities and around the world.

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1 Lumina Foundation. Today’s Student. [Online] Retrieved February 10, 2020. https://www.luminafoundation.org/todays-student/index.html 2 Lederman, D. (2018). Online Education Ascends. Inside Higher Education [Online] Retrieved February 10, 2020. https://www. insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/11/07/new-dataonline-enrollments-grow-and-share-overall-enrollment 3 The College Board (2019). Trends in College Pricing 2019. Retrieved February 10, 2020. https://research.collegeboard.org/pdf/trendscollege-pricing-2019-full-report.pdf 4 Friedman, Z. (2018). Student Loan Debt Statistics In 2018: A $1.5 Trillion Crisis. Forbes. [Online]. Retrieved February 10, 2020. https://www. forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2018/06/13/student-loan-debtstatistics-2018/ 5 The Chronicle of Higher Education (2019). College Closures 2014 – 2018. [Online]. Retrieved February 10, 2020. https://www.chronicle. com/interactives/college-closure 6 National Center for Educational Statistics (2018): First-Generation Students: College Access, Persistence, and Postbachelor’s Outcomes (2018). Retrieved February 10, 2020. https://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/ pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2018421 7 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) (2019). [Online] Retrieved February 10, 2020. http://nsse.indiana.edu/ 8 Gallup (2020). The Engaged University. [Online] Retrieved February 10, 2020. https://www.gallup.com/education/194321/higher-educationemployee-engagement.aspx 9 Freeman, S., Eddy, S., McDonough, M., Smith, M., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., and Wenderoth, M. (2014) Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Online]. Retrieved February 10, 2020. https://www.pnas.org/content/111/23/8410 10 Zhu, J., Harnett, S., Scuello, M., (2018) Single Stop Final Impact and Implementation Report. [Online]. Retrieved February 10, 2020. http://www.metisassociates.com/latest_insights/single_stop.html 11 Delta Cost Project (2016). Trends in College Spending 2003 – 2013.

[Online]. Retrieved February 10, 2020. https://deltacostproject.org/ trends-college-spending-online 12 Zhu, J., Harnett, S., Scuello, M., (2018) Single Stop Final Impact and Implementation Report. [Online]. Retrieved February 10, 2020. http://www.metisassociates.com/latest_insights/single_stop.html

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SERVICE DESIGN AWARD 2020

Calling all professionals and students!

Enter as an early bird until 4 April 2020 Regular entry until 12 June 2020 Read more here www.service-design-network.org/how-to-enter Enter here service-design.awardsplatform.com Touchpoint 11-3 35

Change as a Hero’s Journey Facilitating change with storytelling

In today’s modern, complex business world, it’s not enough for service designers to only focus on delivering the concept of a new service – they must also address its implementation. This article describes an easy-to-understand and intuitive model for doing so, based on Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’.

Ying Zhou is a change consultant with multiple years of work experience in Germany, China and USA in a multinational medtec company. Having grown up in Germany, she looks at company cul­ tures with her multicultural eyes and encourages clients to dare to think and act out of the box. ying.zhou@t-online.de

Service design typically requires certain behavioural changes for the benefit of the customer experience1 , and that often makes implementing new services extremely difficult. This is because humans usually don’t like to change their behaviour. Rational arguments that are commonly used in business conversations don’t adequately target the necessary emotions to effectively motivate behavioural change. To change, people need to deeply feel that they must change, that they want to change, and that they can change.

That means service designers need also to facilitate change management to get people’s emotional buy-in.

I am working with a model that was inspired by ‘Heldenprinzip’2 which itself is based on Joseph Campbell’s

1 Stickdorn et al. (2018). This Is Service Design Doing, p. 276 2 Trobisch (2017). Das Heldenprinzip

36 Touchpoint 11-3

‘Hero’s Journey’3 that he established in 1949, and which has been used in movies and literature ever since. The ‘Hero’s Journey’ is a kind of overarching journey which shows the typical stages of someone undergoing life changes as a result of dealing with new situations.

It begins with the hero feeling stuck in a state of inertia and from there he or she hears a call (Joseph Campbell calls it “follow your bliss”). The call draws the hero away from the known to the unknown world and into a phase of adventure in which he or she must face trials. Finally, the hero returns back to their community and contributes to improvements by sharing the treasure: the reward of the trials.

I have translated ‘The Hero’s Journey’ into the challenges of the modern business world, and I call it

3 Campbell, Joseph (2008). The Hero with a Thousand Faces

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‘Hero Dynamics’. It allows the audience to understand the internal psycho­logical dynamics of the hero (the person going through changes) and what is required for them to move on to the next stage.

Hero Dynamics is like a four-part ‘mental strength training’ and takes the following order: Part 1: Departure Part 2: Adventure Part 3: Return Part 4: Co-creation

1. Departure Common issue: Organisations usually put their main

focus and effort into explaining the reason for their (management) decision for change. But what is more important than what has been ‘said’ is actually what has been ‘heard’, which depends on the inner state of the audience. If people feel fear or can’t personally relate, they will neglect the need for change and instead find lots of arguments to hold on to the status quo. No matter how loud or often the change message is broadcasted, it is rather unlikely to be heard or be taken seriously.

Hero’s Journey: A hero usually has an open heart and mind and still has dreams of a better version of him- or

herself and the world. The change message appears as a ‘calling’ of his/her life’s mission. The hero also feels fear of the uncertain future and might want to resist, but they will meet a mentor that opens up their perspectives and trust in their abilities to address future challenges. Feeling encouraged, the hero will take the first steps on their new journey and obtain a better sense of the upcoming challenges.

Hero Dynamics Approach: At the core of this phase is ‘imagining’. Encourage clients to be vulnerable to their own dreams and visions. Help them to take their own feelings of resistance or fear seriously. Try to identify where they originate from and whether they are justified. They should look for supporters and promoters for their vision and check whether they are equipped with the necessary resources.

At the end of the day, it’s crucial that they believe in their ability to be able to make an impact even if they don’t know yet exactly how. What is important is that they trust that things will turn out fine.

2. Adventure Common issue: Organisations have to deal with many

stakeholders. The bigger it is, the more approvals seem to be necessary. But this approach rather reflects a fixed Touchpoint 11-3 37

mindset than a growth mindset, if it is assumed that outcomes can be predicted even before having tried it yet. The problem with facing new circumstances is that people lose the feeling of sovereignty. Not being able to meet own expectations lead to feelings of disappointment which are hard to bear. Therefore, people usually turn very quickly to sticking to old patterns.

Hero’s Journey: Heroes move from their known world into an unknown world and go on their adventurous journey (usually a kind of dark and winding forest) equipped with some basic weapons and a lot of self-confidence. They trust in their ability to work themselves through the upcoming challenges, even if they will sweat a lot, get dirty and don’t like everything they will need to do. But that’s fine. What doesn’t kill them makes them stronger. They will be improvising and learn along the way. It’s all worth it for the treasure they are seeking.

Hero Dynamics Approach: In this phase, it’s all about ‘experimenting’. Give space to it and don’t drive too quickly towards solutions.4 It’s not about to go from one success to the other, but rather learn from

38 Touchpoint 11-3

the experiments. Prototypes help to think better. Aim to learn unexpected things together by doing things differently instead of doing different things in the same way over and over again. Encourage clients to be open to the ‘unknown’ and leave their comfort zone to allow learning to happen and to become creative. Moreover, the emotional learning here is about dealing with negative feelings, especially feelings of disappointment.

Celebrate even small successes and make enough breaks to be able to sustain the energy and keep moving on.

3. Return Common issue: The trial-and-error mode becomes familiar

and therefore becomes the new comfort zone of the ‘hero’.

Improvising and trying out new things is not easy but also exciting. There is always ‘one more thing’ to learn and there is the tendency to lose sight of the forest for the trees.

Alternatively, following a new call appeals also attractive which means the hero changes the ‘forest’ but stays in his/ her learning and improvising mindset. But what is needed is actually synthesizing the learnings and looking for efficient ways to implement it in the organisation.

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Avoid reinventing the wheel from scratch.

It’s easier to join forces and naturally weave into other existing ‘movements’.

Hero’s Journey: After having ‘fought the dragon’ and ‘rescued the princess’, the hero finally receives his/her treasure. Now he or she needs to leave the adventurous forest and return back to his/her community and share the treasure. But on his/her way back, there are still challenges ahead and the treasure will be at risk of getting almost lost again. The hero needs to focus and to put all his/her energy together to succeed the final challenges of the unknown world although he or she is already quite tired.

Hero Dynamics Approach: The hero has to synthe­ size the key learnings of the adventure phase and its relevance to the problems in his/her organisation.

Encourage clients to pause and reflect on the past learnings. What is already good enough and matches to the organisation’s pain point? Watch out for potential platforms and occasions to launch the new service. Where is already a good ‘wave’ that they can jump and surf on? If possible, avoid reinventing the wheel from scratch. It’s easier to join forces and naturally weave into other existing ‘movements’.

4. Co-creation Common issue: The hero reminisces in ‘good old

memories’ of his/her adventures of the unknown world and fails to connect with the members of the organisation or to understand their key problems. He or she can’t speak in their lingua or convince them of the advantage of the new service in comparison to the old.

There is a de-synchronization between the hero and the audience. For them, everything is new while it’s all so familiar and ‘obvious’ to the hero.

Hero’s Journey: The hero returns back from his/ her adventure to his/her ‘familiar’ world. But nothing seems familiar anymore. Because he or she has changed.

The hero sees the ‘old world’ with new eyes and needs to adapt and find his/her new place in the supposed ‘known world’.

Hero Dynamics Approach: The challenge in this part is implementation. That means to reach as many followers as possible for the new service and ‘speak the audience’s language’ by generating high participation that leads to low resistance (whereas high resistance usually results from low participation).5 A proper format needs to be found. Focus on winning your followers’ hearts so that they accept the new service as a new standard and a ‘better’ way of doing things even if it’s not perfect and still have flaws here and there. Invite them to co-create together with you.

That’s the best way to get their emotional buy-in. Make them a crucial part of the story of the new service.

Conclusion In phases of change, it’s natural to feel fear or uncertainty and our emotions are often fuzzy and vague.

The benefit of working with ‘Hero Dynamics’ is that we can finally introduce a language for these fuzzy feelings so that they can be adressed and reflected instead of running away from them. Therefore, it can also be used as a map to navigate us through our ‘emotional storms’. People develop a better understanding for their own feelings. And with a more stabilized psyche, they get better access to their skills and capabilities and achieve better results with less effort.

4 Dickson, Friedman, Ross. Touchpoint (September 2011), p. 49 5 Stickdorn et al. (2018). This Is Service Design Doing, p. 279

Touchpoint 11-3 39

Designing and Scaling with Theory of Change As designers it is our responsibility to surface and navigate the tensions and complexities of social change and transformation.

‘Theory of Change’ is a methodology for revealing design questions, bringing together insights, stories and evidence, enabling constructive exchanges of knowledge and values, and testing boundaries, contexts and scale.

Edgar Daly is a senior consultant at Clear Horizon. His expertise is in participatory evaluation and facilitation and he works primarily on early-stage pilot and systems change initiatives.

Zazie Tolmer is based in Copenhagen where she works with groups and organisations on system transformation efforts.

Zazie is an experienced mixed-methods evaluator and theory of change facilitator.

Ellise Barkley leads the ‘Culture and Place’ team at Clear Horizon. She works with diverse partners on social justice and systems change initiatives to develop tailored evaluation approaches for complex settings.

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In this paper, we draw together insights from our design and evaluation friends and colleagues about their contemporary applications of theory of change in complex settings. We asked, “When has theory of change been most valuable, why, and what value does it offer systems change?”

Theory of change At its core, theory of change is a methodology that helps to unpack the hypothesis of how a set of actions may lead to a desired outcome. It is not a new methodology and has been used extensively for theorybased evaluations, assessing the effectiveness of interventions. Designers have leveraged theory of change to articulate and test the beliefs and assumptions about how change occurs or might occur as the result of a new intervention. Theory of change models are usually presented in diagram or

narrative format, and occasionally as a more creative visual output.

Here we present five ways theory of change offers value for building understanding, enabling design and conveying complexity.

Building understanding

One of the strengths of theory of change – when developed using a participatory or collaborative approach – is its ability to bring together diverse stakeholders to build common understanding. On this, theory of change continues to deliver in both design and scaling efforts.

An example where theory of change helped bridge perspectives occurred in a community-led design project aimed at improving employment outcomes for women from refugee and migrant backgrounds. The co-design team used theory of change to unpack and test their intervention options and their potential efficacy. They used

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Theory of change - Surfacing design and scaling questions - Testing hypotheses - Scaling Involving diverse people and perspectives helps build a robust theory of change that can surface design and scaling questions, test hypotheses and inform scaling decisions.

Theory of change

an approach called ‘people-centred logic’, which uses a stakeholder map and a series of questions to surface the theory of change. The theory of change supported the design process, but the most valuable outcome was in how it “helped to bridge the different perspectives in the team …[and] to bind the team.”

Keeping connected to intent

Engaging in the complexity and mess inherent in social change and transformation requires an anchor with a long rope. A design consultant worked with two young Australian Aboriginal men who were implementing a youth leadership programme. She used theory of change as the core framework to clarify the purpose of the program, and then explored how this might be achieved.

The key difference in her approach was to drop the very structured theory of change processes and adopt an organic and unstructured process which

allowed the theory of change to emerge. She used brainstorming, open discussions and storytelling to surface and clarify the intention of the programme.

She had to work quickly to facilitate a path through the wealth of information, inspiration and ideas that flowed in order to help clarify the curriculum’s intent.

Once this was in place, participants designed the suitable steps to achieve their intended outcomes.

Surfacing design questions of substance

In design and scaling projects, theory of change becomes a theory-building methodology. One designer noted she takes the “theory part quite literally, it is a hypothesis for how we create change.” And, without a hypothesis, there is no design. Once a theory of change has been surfaced, it can then be critiqued to draw out assumptions and new design questions (curiosities, knowledge gaps, etc.). Involving relevant diverse voices, including the voices of the target group in this process, is essential. As one designer remarked, “you can’t do service design without people who are able to conceive of the emotional life of those going through the service.”

To do this well, you need to use tailored and inclusive techniques that make the theory of change process accessible to the group. This may include using visual techniques or three-dimensional objects to build a theory of change. One designer gave an example in which she developed a large-scale domino set to explain how theory of change works. For another group, the same designer provided 3D rubber bricks so participants could physically build a theory of change, offering an innovative way for people to explore change pathways spatially and structurally.

Touchpoint 11-3 41

Population-level impact Instances of impact Systemic community change Enablers for change Foundations

Global theory of change

Nested theories of change

A map of all the systemic changes and actors needed to support the broader outcome helps explore complexity and show interdependencies and feedback loops.

Honing in on the ‘nested’ theories of change can aid decisions about boundaries and the interactions and relationships between the moving parts.

Generic theory of change for systems change approaches Complexity-aware theory of change often involves defining the ‘enablers’ (way of working) and systemic changes needed for sustained long term change.

Change across scale

Addressing scale and complexity

Theory of change is often critiqued for its linearity and inability to capture the multi-dimensional nature of system-focused design and scaling projects. In these scenarios, cause and effect is generally more complex, outcomes are more emergent, and boundaries of initiatives harder to pin down and less stable. In our conversations, we found that theory of change is taking on new shapes to address this complexity.

For example, we use a ‘global theory of change’ to map, in an un-prioritised way, everything we believe needs to change for a desired outcome to be achieved. It focusses on the necessary precursors for social change, regardless of the resources and capacity available, or the political will to work across the system and achieve this change. This big picture view of the system helps us to engage with the scope and extent of change needed, and the assumptions in the theory.

This global theory of change is used to identify leverage points for how a system might be influenced 42 Touchpoint 11-3

and changed. Nested theories of change are then developed for one or a group of leverage points.

These nested theories of change become prototypes in the design or scaling process. Our peers described how theory of change has helped them to realign a group’s efforts, refocussing their design thinking on a critical leverage point in the system.

A container for innovation

One of the designers we spoke to described theory of change as a “an evidence-based sandbox.” The concept of the innovation sandbox has been popularised in recent years and is an analogy for creating a contained space to play and experiment in. When the boundaries of the sandbox are explicit, and we know the limits and constraints, the analogy posits that this can then contain the messy experimentation involved in innovating.

Equally, the theory of change provides a creative container for design. The example the designer provided was the development of a theory of

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change for a social justice framework, within an academic context, that balanced structured processes with those that held space to be organic and flexible. It involved a paced and iterative process over a six-month period. The model was developed and tested with an emphasis on building-in data, evidence and experiential stories, and had a strong focus on surfacing and testing assumptions during its development.

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Concluding remarks: Challenges and future possibilities

Cross-discipline teams are increasingly being asked to design and support initiatives aimed at systemic change. As these briefs become commonplace, the integrity of approaches that drive change from the ground up are challenged, and processes that honour a diversity of thought are often diluted. We need tools and processes suited to collaboration, inclusivity and flexibility.

This is where our design and evaluation friends and colleagues found the value of theory of change for designing in – and conveying – complexity.

Like any other methodology, theory of change has its limitations. While theorising global, systemic and local transformation, practitioners must make every effort to account for the power imbalances that play out in social transformation initiatives. If we fail to incorporate a greater focus on equity into our theory of change processes, we risk amplifying the values and disparity we are seeking to address.

The official SDN Community workspace on Slack offers a community platform for service designers around the globe, with direct community interaction, discussion and knowledge sharing.

Our Slack workspace is open and free to both members of the SDN and the wider service design community. Upon joining, you’ll be able to choose to participate in a range of channels which match your interests: •

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Touchpoint 11-3 43

The Challenges of Unlearning Company Culture Designers and lawyers share a high affinity towards creative problem solving, although their approaches in doing so vary widely.

In a recent legal design project, we were given the opportunity to bridge both worlds and change the working culture of German law firm Streck Mack Schwedhelm. It is possible and rewarding — Jeannette Weber is a senior service designer at service works, a service design consultancy based in Cologne, Germany. She has a master’s degree in Integrated Design and enjoys using design to guide change in the most diverse places and contexts, from China to the Ukraine, from municipalities to law firms. jw@service-works.de

Bettina Thielen is Managing Director at service works and service designer for more than 15 years. She enjoys designing and diving into different worlds, whether it’s the social, automotive, insurance or the legal sector. bt@service-works.de

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for both sides — as long as one is aware of some of the inherent challenges involved.

Change—which over the last few decades has transformed major industries from health to finance—has finally reached the legal industry. Disruption through digital transformation, legal tech, third-party services, new work and expectations from clients and employees alike, all call for innovation in what has been, up to this point, a rather traditional work culture.

Streck Mack Schwedhelm, a German tax law firm with offices in Cologne, Berlin and Munich, sensed the need for change and set up a project to actively steer this transformation. “Fit For Future” was initiated to address the demands of a new generation of lawyers and remain an attractive employer by improving internal structures, processes and communication.

Chance brought designers and lawyers together. In an informal conversation, it became clear that directing Streck Mack Schwedhelm’s future would only be successful if those directly affected—the

employees—were involved in the process.

This human-centric approach is specific to service design; it places the client, user or, in this case, the employee at the centre of all considerations. This approach offers a framework to deliver change and innovation to the legal industry, starting from a human perspective. That's where this legal design project took off.

Margaret Hagan, the Director of the Legal Design Lab at Stanford Institute of Design, refers to design as “a new pair of glasses. A new toolset for solving problems around delivering services, building relationships, fostering collaborations, developing innovations.”1 Within this article we seek to address questions of how traditional and rigidlyorganised law firms and their employees can embrace this new approach to

1 Hagan, M., (2015), Retrieved December 13, 2019 from http://www.legaltechdesign.com/

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Legal meets design and paragraphs meet Post-its in this first workshop set-up

thinking and working, and to consider which mindsets and qualities are required from the different groups involved to master that change.

Breaking new ground Streck Mack Schwedhelm is a boutique law firm focused on fiscal law. Eleven partners form the management level of the company, and they lead and direct all internal and external affairs. The organisational landscape is completed with lawyers and supporting legal staff, such as research associates and trainees, as well as secretaries and other non-legal staff in various administrative roles.

For the legal design project, an interdisciplinary team made up of participants from all groups was formed to represent all perspectives within the firm.

All roles and hierarchies that may have existed within this team were discarded in favour of shared decisionmaking and cooperation on equal terms. Partners needed to hand over responsibility to their employees and the latter needed to learn to fill their new roles accordingly. The creation of proto-personas helped to recognise each other’s perspectives and create empathy within the team.

The project had a rather classical approach structured along the phases of the design process. It was an open process in which needs, problems and opportunities were identified in the first phase(s), and ideas were developed in response to these. At any moment, ideas could be discarded and new directions chosen.

What sounds very familiar to designers is miles away from a lawyer’s operating principle, in which clear goals need to be achieved and deadlines must be met. Room for failure is non-existent. Seen with this perspective,

“It was an empowering experience to get the opportunity to actively and creatively shape the various processes of our work! The project fostered constructive exchange among one another which led to a much higher level of acceptance and understanding.”

Fridtjof Hinz, Associate at Streck Mack Schwedhelm

Touchpoint 11-3 45

Photos helped to prototype team set-ups and processes

it is evident that engaging in the project was already a huge step. It meant giving up control and giving in to what looked like uncertainty. Luckily, Streck Mack Schwedhelm took the courageous decision to break new ground and suppress the desire to jump to conclusions, and instead endure some necessary uncertainty. Klaus Olbing, a Partner at Streck Mack Schwedhelm, admitted that he was sceptical. But he got more curious with every session, realising that only through an open, trusting and self-critical collaboration could new futures be explored.

Listen to understand One of the first steps in the project was the creation of several working journeys in order to achieve a shared understanding of the different roles in managing a mandate. All employees were invited to identify pain points and opportunities within their daily working lives.

Seeing processes and pain points visualised lead to the conclusion that it was in fact relatively ‘soft’ factors that had a huge impact on employees’ well-being at the workplace, and that needed optimisation. Suddenly, 46 Touchpoint 11-3

besides the re-organisation of processes, a change in Streck Mack Schwedhelm’s work culture became the focus of the project team. This change was challenging for every management level because it required employees to accept and then steer the necessary change.

We set up a workshop in which we worked solely with the firm’s management level. We used playful tools to mirror their perspectives on company culture with the perspectives extracted by the project team, with surprising results. The rather stark representations of the different perspectives in work culture functioned as a strong impulse for management. One could literally see the employees’ needs for more feedback, transparency and a clear career path – to name a few needs – and therefore understand the necessity of developing ideas from their perspective.

Taking small steps With those needs as a starting point, ten focus areas were defined by the project team. Some targeted the firm’s culture (e.g. social values or feedback), while others were aimed at specific moments within the culture, such as

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the on-boarding process and a company-wide ‘Monday meeting’. Yet others addressed the firm’s organisational structure and processes as well as personnel development.

The variety of topics and their complexity made it important to focus on smaller steps that could be promptly implemented, rather than revolutionary changes that would need more resources.

With strong agreement and very few resources invested, a dress code manual was abolished. This demonstrated trust and confidence into each employee’s understanding of the company.

Sharing these small steps and making things tangible encouraged the team to move forward and try out solutions in a testing stage, even before solutions were close to perfect. It provided the space for early mistakes and set the mindset that innovation is not a final state but a constant process.

Safe space To enable team members to learn and participate within such a change process, the notion of trust and faith in each other very important. The term ‘psychological safety’ describes the ability to feel accepted and respected within a team and having the confidence to feel “safe to learn, safe to contribute, and safe to challenge the status quo”2.

KANBAN became a tool to practice and create this safe space. Usually being regarded as a tool to manage workflows, we developed its functionality further into a ‘team board’ that addressed the strong need for more shared moments, understanding, appreciation, feedback and transparency. In a daily stand-up of a team consisting of partners, lawyers and secretaries, to-dos were discussed and distributed, and completed tasks were noted. In addition, this new ritual also offered a moment to personally check-in with each other and increase communication. Post-its served as constant reminder to actively integrate feedback into daily work processes.

Despite these positive outcomes, this new aim for transparency, collaboration and effective distribution of

tasks evoked fears that workloads would be controlled and compared. Open team board meetings of the first successful pilot team, along with accompanying communication and the integration of small-scale tests in other groups, reduced these fears and generated curiosity across the whole firm.

Learnings

“It requires courage to be open to fail with an idea. Especially for us being lawyers!

We aim on creating the perfect path for our clients. If something goes wrong here, things get expensive. But within our organisation, testing ideas that are new and sometimes even seem crazy at first, is rewarding and adds huge value” Jens Stenert, Partner at Streck Mack Schwedhelm

Legal design was a catalyst for change, delivering tangible results to the firm’s corporate culture. We identified four main challenges that we believe must be considered when starting into a change process: 1. The unlearning of old processes and ways of thinking is

harder to accomplish than the learning of new models.

2. Honest and transparent communication is key continuously and between everybody.

3. Create small steps on a learning journey with training and real experiences in equal measures.

4. Provide a culture where equal exchange is valued, and everybody feels free to speak up and to fail.

2 Clark, T. (2019) Retrieved December 13, 2019 from http://adigaskell. org/2019/11/17/the-4-stages-of-psychological-safety/

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Unleashing the Potential of Organisational Prototyping A co-creative and pragmatic approach to mastering change Staying on top in an ever-changing and increasingly complex world has become a necessity for any organisation wishing to be future-proof. Investments in change management and transformation initiatives are therefore becoming more and more valued. Organisational prototyping provides a lean, hands-on approach to incorporating change in a pragmatic and sustainable way.

Gloria Biberger is a lead designer at IXDS. Gloria searches for the human side in digital transformation.

As a design expert in organisational, interaction and service design, she consults organisations on how to stay relevant in people’s lives.

Alexandra Pretschner is a partner at IXDS. Alexandra combines her background in business design with 20 years of design-driven product and service innovation in consultancies, corporations and start-ups. She is passionate about building sustainable organisations.

Stephan Rein is a Director at IXDS. With an industrial design background, prototyping and user involvement is second nature to him. His passion is combining various design and tech disciplines to shape future working environments.

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Success factors for incorporating change IXDS is a renowned design and innovation studio, with more than a decade of experience in helping our clients with their innovation and transformation endeavours. We realised that client organisations often lack the organisational readiness to launch service innovations quickly, and to successfully maintain these on the market. At the same time, remaining flexible and fluid in an ever-changing and increasingly complex market environment is a pivotal factor for staying in business. Change and adaptation have become necessities.

So, how can change permeate an entire organisation in a way that is both fast and sustainable? Drawing from the experience in our own organisation, we identified four essential factors that empower any organisation’s leadership team and workforce:

1. Inspiration

Providing an achievable and desirable target picture is essential – make people believe in the vision. To facilitate this, we recommend a great deal of inspiration and anecdotal evidence ranging from completely different to very similar contexts to trigger different thought processes and create excitement. This can happen through talks, brown bag lunches, meet-ups, learning safaris, etc.

2. Guidance

Enable everyone to work in an innovative and collaborative way through learning formats and on-thejob training. This may include building up design thinking capabilities, applying lean startup methods and fostering cross-team collaboration.

3. Involvement

Involve everyone in the thought and change process by employing co-creation methods to ensure

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commitment and emotional involvement.

Increase the effects with the help of ambassadors from all experience and hierarchy levels.

4. Communication

Make change visible and transparent, establish an open discussion process and a strong feedback culture, and frequently review where people actually stand on the subject.

Organisational Prototyping as a catalyst for change Originally adapted from our design-driven service innovation methodology, IXDS’ Organisational Prototyping incorporates the above success criteria into a comprehensive and workshop-driven four-week approach which is divided into three major phases: Understand

In this two-week phase, we define the ‘change challenge’ ahead, collect existing insights and hypotheses, and compare and contrast these with selected in-context interviews. From this initial platform, we then derive a change vision shared among everybody involved in the workshop. Next,

we break down the challenge into its key aspects in a half-day workshop. A vital element of all these workshops is the integration of inspirational formats to trigger imagination, stimulate outof-the-box thinking and create alignment.

Systemise

In this one-week phase, we develop four to six opportunity areas, along with “How might we …?” questions to solve the change challenge. We then prepare for a two-day hackathon of around 25 participants aimed at developing solutions to this challenge. The hackathon format has proven to be highly beneficial, because the collaborative set-up yields creative yet realistic solutions.

Create

This two-day hackathon is the core element of the Organisational Prototyping format. Here, the teams co-develop, iterate and improve on ideas based on the topics identified in the previous phase. They then create prototypes, ready for testing and piloting, to solve the change challenge. The inherent beauty of the process is that the results come from within the organisation and therefore fit its culture. As facilitators and designers,

Touchpoint 11-3 49

a simultaneous challenge and bonus for us is the opportunity to provide inspiration, open people’s minds and empower the hackathon team through guidance and cooperation to build workable prototypes, rounded out with an implementation, feedback and communication plan.

It is essential that the workshop completely focuses on building just-good-enough prototypes in an MVP (minimum viable product) spirit. These should be immediately testable for a representative group of users and stakeholders in everyday working situations. New workplace rituals such as meetings and cross-team collaborations, or communications of the company vision and strategy, are all areas where organisational prototypes can easily be employed.

Iterate

After the hackathon, the solution sponsors and teams implement their prototypes, keep them running and collect continuous and direct feedback. After a trial period of around three months, the prototypes are evaluated, then improved, stopped or disrupted by new solutions. Decisions are then made about using funds and resources to transform low-fidelity prototypes into scalable solutions. For this iteration

50 Touchpoint 11-3

phase to be truly valuable for the client, a solid knowledge of quantitative testing is mandatory. We can act as advisors and facilitators in this field.

Co-creating change with German’s leading cultural organisation At IXDS, we have successfully implemented this approach with various clients, including the Goethe-Institut.

The Goethe-Institut aimed to leverage the relocation of its headquarters as a catalyst for introducing ‘New Work’.

Along with the new office space, new ways of working and forms of collaboration were planned, including open space offices, desk sharing, remote working options and shared creative spaces. Together with a select group of stakeholders and ‘relocation ambassadors’, we delivered a compact Organisational Prototyping process, in which we developed the organisation’s vision and key principles for their new approach, and identified opportunity areas related to the new location.

Based on these principles, the Goethe-Institut team developed working prototypes during the hackathon that could be used in working life. For example, indicating whether a desk is free or not, or whether someone in a shared space is available to talk.

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Furthermore, the team created several new routines and formats based around skill and capability transparency, and fostered peer-to-peer exchange.

One specific prototype was “Hack the Goethe-Institut”, which involved setting up a cross-departmental team to solve upcoming organisational challenges quickly and independently.

All prototypes realised in the workshop have been implemented in the organisation and are currently in the testing phase. The process generated dynamic momentum within the team and translated into several new prototypes which are being developed by employees outside of their work routine.

An even greater takeaway from the two-day hackathon was that the team developed a sense of certainty that they are free to initiate transformation and launch initiatives by themselves. The joint process leading up to this served as ‘New Work’ collaboration training as well: The team implemented ideas on their own and quickly created tangible outcomes in a trust-filled, cross-departmental co-operation that enabled a highly effective fail-and-learn approach.

Convinced by this approach, the Goethe-Institut felt that, after the organisational prototyping format,

“… seemingly complex topics can be simplified by looking at them from another angle with your colleagues. In diverse teams you often come up with surprisingly simple solutions”.

A unique method Organisational Prototyping provides the means to quickly make changes in an organisation tangible, and foster reflection and iteration among all stake­ holders. This allows for a lean yet holistic change process with significantly reduced investment efforts.

Because solutions are best created by intrinsically motivated employees within the organisation, rather than by external consultants, a sense of ownership grows among the employees. Intense focus on a specific topic during the hackathon also lead to participants taking over the role as prototype owners, and in turn having dedicated, motivated owners increases the chance for successful and sustainable implementation of change.

Last but not least, we witnessed that hackathon participants experienced a feeling of real empower­ ment once they sensed that they could influence their future working culture, despite being in a more ­t raditionally hierarchical organisation.

At the hackathon, participants apply design methods to rapidly build workable prototypes that inspire new ways of collaboration

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Going from Service Design to Organisational Designing In this article, we highlight that going from service design to organisational designing means switching from complicated to complex problems. We show how designers can reframe complicated problems to uncover the deeper, complex issues that caused the problems. Solving complex problems, however, Barend Klitsie is a PhD candidate at the TU Delft.

He investigates how (strategic) design helps to transform large service firms to make them more effective at innovation.

Frithjof Wegener is a PhD candidate at the TU Delft on organisational designing. His research is inspired by pragmatism and extends the work of Schön on reflection-inaction through organisa­ tional design experiments.

We thank Tinie Lam, Yun Jung Tsai, Daniela Victoria Romero and Haoxin Weng for sharing their work and thereby contributing to this paper.

52 Touchpoint 11-3

requires a different approach.

Service design is maturing, leading to a practice that transcends designing new services, to one that considers fundamental organisational issues such strategy and organisational change.

However, dealing with complex problems is not achieved by a rational problemsolving approach in which the problem is first analysed, then a solution is designed, and finally the implementation is ‘change managed’. Instead, designers need to recognise that complex problems cannot be fully understood beforehand, which means it's difficult to predict how an organisation responds to intervention.

In this article, we reach into the field of organisational design and change to reveal that progress in complex problems requires a new approach which includes organisational design experiments through a process we call organisational design inquiry. Designers must learn to experiment with organisational change through prototypes to learn about the

problem-solution fit. For this, designers need to create spaces where reflection and experimentation between stakeholders are possible, while improving the service.

Types of problems: from complicated to complex In a 2007 Harvard Business Review article, Snowden and Boone1 reflected on a decade of leadership coaching and introduced the Cynefin framework. This framework classifies management problems in four distinct categories based on how causeand-effect relationships are perceived.

Snowden and Boone propose appropriate responses to each type of problems (as illustrated in Fig. 1). This paper focuses only on the difference between ‘complicated’ and ‘complex’ problems.

Complicated problems are perplexing to understand at a glance, yet causeeffect relations can be identified with deeper investigation. For example, mechanical engineers often use the

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Simple Sense Categorise Respond

Complicated Sense Analyse Respond

Chaos Disorder

Act Sense Respond

Complex Probe Sense Respond

Fig 1: The Cynefin Framework1

suggested sense-analyse-respond order. Dividing systems into understandable sub-systems with clearly-defined relationships and then performing local optimisation can improve the system as a whole in a predictable manner.

When airlines try to increase online bookings, they approach the challenge as a complicated problem. By improving the user experience (UX) of separate touchpoints, customers become more likely to buy a ticket because they experience less friction and an improved customer experience.

On the other hand, complex problems are uncertain and dynamic. For these problems, it is difficult to draw system boundaries, cause-effect relations are uncertain, and there are ‘unknown unknowns’. Snowden and Boone propose a response in the order of probe-sense-respond, where interventions help build an understanding of the problem and potential solutions. For airlines, their responses to climate change and sustainability are the greatest complex issues currently facing their industry.

Dealing with complexity through organisational design inquiry Complexity itself challenges organisations to their very core: the design of the organisation. When dealing with the complex problem of changing an organisation, managers and designers need to inquire into the design of an organisation. Consider this quote by Peter Senge on organisation design: “The neglected leadership role is the designer of the ship. What good does it do for the captain to say, ‘Turn starboard thirty degrees,’ when the designer has built a rudder that will turn only to port, or which takes six hours to turn to starboard? It’s fruitless to be the leader in an organisation that is poorly designed. Isn’t it interesting that so few managers think of the ship’s designer when they think of the leader’s role?”2 Organisational design inquiry (see Fig. 2) requires experimentation and prototyping3 through organisational design experiments. Such an organisational design inquiry process is better able to deal with the complexity of collaborating with diverse stakeholder groups than a problem-solving approach.

Organisational design inquiry goes beyond service design by facilitating the co-evolution of problem and solution through an experimental co-creation process with stakeholders. This experimentation facilitates the dynamic collaboration between multiple internal and external stakeholders. As such, we go from the noun ‘design’, to the verb ‘designing’4 .

A telling example from design is the practice of Frank Gehry, the famous architect.

Rather than a static organisation design, Gehry requires a constant process of organisational designing, where the organisation adapts to the ongoing design process 3 . Linux and Wikipedia 5 have shown that rather than defining one static organisation design, these organisations keep their organisation design consciously ‘incomplete’ to adapt to future challenges.

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The case of digital tools in an airline turn-around We use a case of an airline to illustrate this organisational design inquiry. In recent years, airlines have started introducing digital (handheld) tools in their operations to improve their performance. However, at one European airline, the usage of these tools was lagging behind.

As a result, the expected operational improvements weren’t materialising. In September 2018, the airline presented a team of designers with the following design brief: Design an implementable solution for the ground services team6 to leverage digital technology to improve the turn-around7 process and customer service delivery. The project owner identified three fields of improvement, as shows in Fig. 3: How new features were designed and developed, how employees were prepared to use the applications, and how employees were triggered and facilitated to use new applications.

The initial exploration: technology, business processes and humans

To understand the challenge and identify possible solution areas, the designers performed a broad range of analyses.

They interviewed the employees that were expected to use digital devices, the product owners of the applications, and senior management in the operational department. Additionally, they identified the current and future capabilities of the technology and built process maps. Approaching the challenge from a broad range of different angles allowed them to reframe the initial problem statement.

Org a nisa tio n Serv ice

Problem

Solution

Fig. 2: Organisational design inquiry

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Reframing: collaboration and trust in the turn-around

Through their research, the designers identified two pivotal insights: 1. Because of the increased use of digital tools, the information exchange during a turn-around is evolving. Below- and above-the-wing stakeholders are physically separated by airport architecture, until then linked only through the limited use of communication devices. With all stakeholders becoming interconnected, a new dynamic is created.

2. Operational employees do not yet perceive enough added value of applications and are unaware of the purpose of these tools. The tools mainly digitise physical processes and replace desktop applications with apps for handheld devices. Employees were asked to change their routines without knowing how operational performance would be improved.

With these insights, the team reframed the challenge to: “How to improve the turn-around time by redefining the collaboration between the key players of the digital tools in the collaboration around the turn-around”.

Additionally, the designers stated: “The solution must be processed by the end user on two levels: head and heart. The aim is for the employees to have more perceived value from the app, which leads to engagement, subsequently becoming more efficient and sparking an emotional connection developed through empathy.”

The new framing uncovered complexity in two areas.

First, they aimed to solve a deeper issue: instead of focussing on the operational process, the designers aimed to redefine the collaboration. They framed technology as a means to foster empathy, trust and collaboration. As they noted, they thereby transcend matters just of the head (the logistics) and include the heart. The questions therefore became: “How do you create empathy and build trust? And how can employee collaboration be facilitated, when they have previously always been separated and belong to different organisational silos?”

With this recognised, the number of stakeholders also increased. Whereas the initial challenge focused on below-the-wing stakeholders, the designers realised that

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Solution space

The right features

The right training

The right circumstances and interface for use

Enablers for adoption

”I want to use the tool“

”I know how to use the tool“

”I am enabled and triggered to use the tool“

Result

Adoption of digital tools

Operational improvement and better service

Fig. 3: The problem description, when framed as a complicated problem

tools were used by all key players in the turn-around, not only those reporting to the original problem owner.

The intervention: shared training and a platform for organisational design experiments

The team focussed on designing a serious game to be used during a new ‘application training’. The game, shown in Fig. 4, simulates a turn-around process with the use of a board and playing cards. The players, which include gate agents and baggage handlers, deal with real-life situations such as last-minute baggage arrivals. They have ‘screen cards’ available to them that present functionality or capabilities of the digital tools. When presented with a situation, the players can discuss together what actions each of them would take, which information they would need, and what tools they would like to use. Decisions result in more or less ‘time coins’, which represent delays encountered during a turn-around.

This game aims to redefine the collaboration on two levels: 1. Shared training

Trainings within the airline are organised per division, because they usually focus on mastering

operational skills. In this case, the team proposed to organise trainings in which below- and abovethe-wing employees are trained together. With this setup, the training aimed to orchestrate a faceto-face encounter. This enables the employees to understand each other's' roles, which is challenging in the otherwise time sensitive environement with no physical interaction. Understanding, they predict, will lead to an increase in trust, empathy, and better collaboration. This should eventually lead to a more efficient and robust operation.

2. Experimenting with situations and features

The game also offers an opportunity to build an understanding of the impact of tools on the collaboration. The card deck allows new functionality, players and situations to be added. Managers can use the game as a generative and experimental tool: it is a learning environment where they can experiment with situations and new functionality. As the stakeholders during the game interact directly and give feedback without the pressure of the live operation, they can discuss their actions and motivations in great detail.

These discussions and the stakeholders’ actions Touchpoint 11-3 55

can be used to evaluate functionality, identify new process improvements and help understand which mechanisms improve collaboration. The game therefore creates a new organisational form in which designers can do organisational design experiments and learn more about improving collaboration.

Implementing the game

As the solution aims to tackle a challenge from multiple departments, the implementation plan sparked a discussion. Who should organise the training? And who would take ownership of the game (develop it further, design new functionality, analyse the results, etc.)? The design team proposed to form a cross-disciplinary team. Such a team, with staff from various divisions, is highly unusual within the airline. Despite enthusiasm about the game’s effect, management is still deciding on how to proceed.

Summary

Table 1 illustrates the differences between a service design approach and an organisational designing

approach. In the case described previously, the designers initially approached the challenge as a complicated problem. When the initial scope meant only a focus on below-the-wing staff and a digital tools, the designers realised that the underlying problem was not being addressed. Instead, the designers chose to address the underlying complex problem of collaboration and trust between the different below-the-wing and above-the-wing departments.

What we see in the case as well is the important role of stakeholders. The more complex problem entailed a broader set of stakeholders. This required an approach that went beyond service design, to start redesigning the organisation. In order to deal with the complexity of these stakeholders, the designers had to switch their role. Instead of only designing the service, they designed a game to organise the experimental process. This experimental process facilitates organi­ sational design inquiry. Designers inquired with the stakeholders into the organisational design. For this, the designers created a space for the stakeholders to experiment and empathise with each other.

Fig. 4: The board of the turn-around game

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servi c e de si g n a nd c h a ng e m a n ag emen t

Designed object

Service design

Organisational designing

Problem type

Complicated

Complex

Proposed response

Sense, Analyse, Act

Probe, Sense, Respond

Design process

Problem, Solution, Implementation

Organisational design inquiry

Stakeholder involvement

Stakeholders assumed static

Stakeholders are dynamic

Conclusion In this article we showed how service designers may need to deal with complex (organisational) design issues on top of complicated service design issues to realise organisational change. Designers need to be critical of initial problem framings and pose the question: “Is the problem complicated or complex?”

To determine the type of problem, designers should prototype as fast as possible to learn if the organisation reacts the way they expect. Experiments will also identify stakeholders that aren't involved yet.

Secondly, designers should evaluate if interventions within the service are sufficient to achieve the goals.

If not – for example if the IT infrastructure also needs to change – the designers should consider whether this warrants a complex problem framing and approach.

If the problem is complex, designers need to integrate organisation design for service design: organisational design inquiry. This means creating a space which allows for co-evolution of problem, solution and stakeholders. Such space where reflection and experimentation are possible mimics the actual process, but without pressure, and allows for new dynamics to emerge. Example are roleplaying, digital simulations, or Lego Serious Play.

Service design and change management are appropriate approaches for complicated problems.

However, complex problems, in which stakeholders and their needs are dynamic and uncertain, require complex approaches. Insights from studies on organisation design show that to realise organisa­ tional change, we need to engage in organisational design inquiry and include organisational design for service design in our process.

Table 1: Difference between service design and organisational designing

1 Snowden, D. J., & Boone, M. E. (2007). A leader's framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review, 85(11), 68.

2 Senge, P. M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organisation. New York: Doubleday/Currency, 341.

3 Wegener, F., Guerreiro Gonçalves, M., & Dankfort, Z. (2019).

Reflection-in-Action When Designing Organisational Processes: Prototyping Workshops for Collective Reflection-in-Action.

Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design, 1(1), 1255-1264. http://do.org/10.1017/dsi.2019.131 4 Yoo, Y., Boland, R. J., Jr., & Lyytinen, K. (2006). From Organisation Design to Organisation Designing. Organisation Science, 17(2), 215–229. http://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1050.0168 5 Garud, R., Jain, S., & Tuertscher, P. (2008). Incomplete by Design and Designing for Incompleteness. Organisation Studies, 29(3), 351–371. http://doi.org/10.1177/0170840607088018 6 The department that coordinates all the ‘below the wing’ operations such as fueling, cargo loading and food replenishment.

7 The turnaround process is the logistical process that takes place between parking an airplane at the gate and leaving the gate again for take-off.

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A Flywheel Model of Change Management Inspiring traditional change management through service design In this article, we discuss that service designers are particularly well equipped with skills and tools to create change in organisations and can do so more explicitly by applying a flywheel capability model to their work.

Susan Bartlett is CEO at Bridgeable. Susan has a track record of delivering remarkable customer experiences and kickstarting cultural change within organizations. She has overseen large-scale transformation initiatives across industries. susan.bartlett@bridgeable. com

Terri Block is Director of Design Strategy at Bridgeable. Terri designs and oversees projects in Bridgeable’s healthcare practice that intersect strategy, service design and organizational change and learning. terri.block@bridgeable.com

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“We need a new organisation-wide training strategy. We have been training the most critical teams in the organisation in the same way since the 1980s and we need to move out of the dark ages. Problem is, the teams are so used to the way things are done.

How can we build the strategy in a way that brings people along as we go?”

This was a question one of our clients posed to us when considering how she would redesign training for an entire department of a Fortune 500 company.

Inherent in her question are two principles that drive our perspective on change management. Firstly, it is the people – not the initiative at hand – that play a leading role in enacting change.

Secondly, change management needs to be baked into the initiative itself and not treated as a separate activity.

We’ve seen executive teams spend months designing a strategy or new initiative in isolation from the organisation, conduct a grand unveiling of the transformation agenda, and then

focus on typical change management activities such as socialisation and training. The trouble with this approach is that it separates change management from the initiative itself, assuming that people will come along after the ‘grand reveal’. Even if they do, the energy can be hard to sustain. Perhaps more importantly, this approach misses the opportunity to design user-centered change management activities based on real insights about how employees and stakeholders react to the new initiative.

Finally, this approach to change management can disillusion employees who are experiencing change fatigue1 — which is the opposite of inciting stakeholder desire to participate in and lead the change.

At Bridgeable, our model of organisational transformation finds its roots in Jim Collins’s seminal book, Good to Great, and we argue that in this model, service design is itself a powerful tool for delivering change management, and an antecedent for transforming

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organisational design and culture, and pursuing new strategies.

The core idea within Good to Great is a ‘flywheel’ model of innovation. An actual flywheel is a mechanical device for storing rotational kinetic energy. Turning a mechanical flywheel is very difficult initially, but with each revolution, it becomes easier and easier, until eventually the flywheel has a self-maintaining momentum that takes an even greater force to stop. Collins argues that this is a metaphor for the transformation model employed by the most successful companies that have made the transition from ‘good’ to ‘great.’ It is also an explicit rejection of ‘big bang’ models of organisational change: “There was no launch event, no tag line, no programmatic feel whatsoever.” Rather, these highly successful organisations achieved dramatic transformations with a consistent set of small steps all building in the same direction2 .

Designers instinctively apply similar principles within the scope of their projects: they build prototypes or minimum viable products, put them in front of endusers, learn and iterate at increasing levels of fidelity, and repeat. The flywheel model is a conceptual framing that extends our natural mode of prototyping from a service or experience towards a broader organisational transformation, where the change management isn’t a distinct workstream or programme, but is integral to the approach itself. As Collins observes, “Under the right conditions, the problems of commitment, alignment, motivation, and change just melt away. They largely take care of themselves.”3 Let’s look at how we have seen this work in practice.

By far the most common kind of transformation we

1 Morgan, Nick (2001, Sept. 10). “Do you have change fatigue?” in Working Knowledge: Business Research for Business Leaders https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/do-you-have-change-fatigue, accessed on 05 January 2020.

2 “There was no launch event, no tag line, no programmatic feel whatsoever. Some executives said that they weren’t even aware that a major transformation was under way until they were well into it.

It was often more obvious to them after the fact than at the time.”

(Good to Great, pg. 169)

work on is an organisational transformation towards customer experience or customer-centricity. For firms with a desire to make their organisation and offerings more customer-centric, service design and humancentred design are a natural fit. There is often a desire to start top-down, with a grand strategy that maps out how to achieve that goal, and a certain amount of up-front work to align on a ‘north-star’ vision is important. But we always recommend that process is relatively brief, and importantly shouldn’t end with an extravagant presentation of the strategy across the organisation.

Instead, once the direction is clear, we believe an organisation should quickly move on to solving a practical service design problem within the business.

For one Fortune 500 client, we worked with their newly-formed customer centre of excellence to complete a brief engagement developing a customer experience strategy, and then turned our attention to redesigning a single (but thorny) customer touchpoint. That project was classic service design: understand the customer journey and organisational context, co-create prototypes of new touchpoints with both internal stakeholders and customers, iterate and refine those prototypes to validate design decisions with new customers and internal players, integrate with the broader ecosystem and bring it to market, and finally measure the results. Change management was never a line item on the project plan, but it was actively at play nonetheless.

Key internal stakeholders were active participants in co-creation and ongoing prototype validation.

Through their participation in the design process, those stakeholders became dedicated advocates and champions for change. They couldn’t wait to tell their managers and co-workers about the great project they had done and the great results it had produced. People in other areas of the business heard about that success and beat a path to the door of the centre of excellence. Could we take a customer experience approach to their problem too?

3 “Under the right conditions, the problems of commitment, alignment, motivation, and change just melt away. They largely take care of themselves.” (Good to Great, pg. 176)

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We didn’t need a top-down change management programme to drive adoption of the new customer experience strategy.

By co-designing and iteratively prototyping with key stakeholders, we fostered awareness of – and desire to engage with – the practical project at hand, and the larger customer experience strategy as well.

In true flywheel fashion, that first project was really difficult. In that organisation, there was no precedent for co-designing with customers and validating early prototypes, so we had to figure everything out as we went. But the second project was a little easier, and the third easier still. With each turn of the flywheel, we incrementally built out broader and deeper organisational capabilities, and reached more and more parts of the organisation. After three years, we had redesigned services or touchpoints in every part of the organisation, and customer experience had stopped being a transformation initiative – it became the way work got done in the organisation.

That’s not to say that we didn’t do any classic change management work as part of this transformation. Over the years, we did plenty of stakeholder analysis, built communication plans and delivered formal training. But change management was the connective tissue between projects that tackled meaningful business problems. And those change management initiatives were easier and more efficient because they stemmed from the service design work happening in the practical projects. We understood the stakeholders deeply because we had worked closely with them on design projects. We knew what messages would resonate because we’d first spoken them (prototyped them) in informal conversations in the course of doing the work. And we knew the most important training gaps, because we saw them pop up again and again in projects.

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Of course, change management isn’t only about large-scale organisational transformations. Just as often, you are doing the work of transforming a single service experience. But here too, the service design approach lays the foundation for seamless change management. For a recent client in financial services, we were working to build a digital experience from one that was previously carried out in-person with pen and paper. Here again, the project was classic service design.

Through our participatory design process, we came to understand the motivations and pain points of employees. That left us uniquely equipped to identify different stakeholder groups, assess what would make it difficult to adopt the new system and what they would find rewarding, and formulate specific, employeecentred change management activities to help smooth the adoption of the new system. Moreover, we uncovered all of this during early design work, which meant that ‘change management’ didn’t have to be a last-minute scramble of training built just before go-live, but something that could happen in parallel, alongside the implementation work.

But perhaps most importantly, by co-designing with front-line staff, we created change champions — a group of people who couldn’t wait for the change to come.

Building that kind of desire for change is perhaps the most important and most difficult element of creating an enduring change in an organisation. And in our experience it doesn’t come about because of a separate change management workstream, but through service design itself, and the act of bringing together stakeholders collectively build and care about an initiative at hand.

Service designers can (and should) leverage traditional change management tools such as stakeholder analysis, socialisation and training to help deliver change. But we must do so as an extension of the service design work we are already doing.

Service designers are especially well-positioned to enact employee-centred change management because of our sensitivity to human needs and behaviours. We can apply a change management lens to the kinds of observations we make through collaborative design

servi c e de si g n a nd c h a ng e m a n ag emen t

Stakeholder Name

Description

Example of stakeholder

Benefit/potential

Individual stakeholder

Benefit/potential

Feelings about transformation

Stakeholder

Championing team

Short-term

Short-term

Excited by

Long-term

Long-term

Concerned by

Drawbacks to consider

Drawbacks to consider

Short-term

Short-term

Long-term

Long-term

Ways to increase engagement with transformation

Interactions to date Credible communicator

Fig. 1: An example template to capture employee or stakeholder feedback on an initiative that can be fed into user-centred change management activities

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Internal tactic:

What is it?

Drawing/diagram

Why is it needed?

Who does it impact and what did we hear from them?

Low priority

Realistic/concrete

Content, questions and key messages that we should capture for socialisation or training

High priority

Blue sky/speculative

Dependencies

Special RACI Notes (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted or Informed)

Fig. 2: Example template to capture employee or stakeholder feedback on the initiative that can be fed into user-centred change management activities

62 Touchpoint 11-3

servi c e de si g n a nd c h a ng e m a n ag emen t

work and capture learnings into change management tools: “Jerry seemed really nervous about the regulatory approval for Feature X,” can be captured as a concern on a stakeholder analysis template. “Jing got really excited when we were building out Feature Y,” is the seed of a key message in a communication plan. “Users got confused unless the reps went through Sequence Z,” highlights both a training need and the concepts to be taught.

Whether our mandate is broad organisational transformation or more narrow tactical design, service designers can improve project outcomes by deliberately regarding their service design work as a vehicle for change management. When service designers are synthesising their findings from co-creation sessions, validation meetings, or even just internal team checkins, they can go beyond capturing the implications for the service they are designing and also document what they’ve learned about stakeholders’ motivations and concerns. We often use a simple template just to keep track of our stakeholder thoughts as we capture them (see Fig. 1 and 2 for examples). When service designers’ interactions with project stakeholders spark an idea for a way to help smooth adoption, they can do a quick concept sketch, just as they would for a feature in the service itself.

Leveraging tools like the templates provided here can be a helpful change management accelerator, but the flywheel model tells us that the most important way service designers can build momentum around organisational change is by doing the core work of service design: involve stakeholders in designing great touchpoints and services that get people excited about what new things might be possible. Each time you do that within an organisation, you are building the momentum you need to sustain meaningful change.

Expanding your service design work to inspire employee-centred change management activities will make you that much better.

References 1 Collins, Jim (2001). Good to Great. New York: HarperCollins “Good to great comes about by a cumulative process — step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel — that adds up to sustained and spectacular results.” (Good to Great, pg. 165) 2 “There was no launch event, no tag line, no programmatic feel whatsoever. Some executives said that they weren’t even aware that a major transformation was under way until they were well into it. It was often more obvious to them after the fact than at the time.” (Good to Great, pg. 169) 3 “Under the right conditions, the problems of commitment, alignment, motivation, and change just melt away. They largely take care of themselves.” (Good to Great, pg. 176) 4 “In a sense, everything in this book is an exploration and description of the pieces of the buildup-to-breakthrough flywheel pattern.”

(Good to Great, pg. 182) 5 Martin, Roger (July–August 2010). “The Execution Trap” in Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2010/07/the-execution-trap, accessed on 04 January 2020.

6 Haitt, Jeff and Prosci “Desire—The Prosci ADKAR model” https:// www.prosci.com/resources/articles/adkar-model-desire, access on 05 January 2020.

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Designing Change from the Inside Out ‘Self-as-instrument’ and service design When Bill O’Brien, ex-CEO of Hanover Insurance, was asked about leading transformational change in his own company, he said, “the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor”.1 How can we use self-awareness as a tool to become more effective as service designers?

Laura Wesley is an executive in the Canadian federal government and a global leader in the open government movement. She is passionate about designing processes that enable groups to reflect, learn and act.

She is also a Master’s degree candidate in Human Systems Intervention at Concordia University.

Antonio Starnino is a service designer and partner at Studio Wé, where he uses service design to explore design’s role in the future of work. He is a graduate of the Masters in Service Design programme at Politecnico di Milano in Italy, and currently is a Master’s degree candidate in Human Systems Intervention at Concordia University.

64 Touchpoint 11-3

We wrote this article to share our learnings from our Masters in Human System Intervention at Concordia University, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

These learnings have led us to be less reactive and more responsive, more patient, better able to observe ourselves in relation to others, and more ready to ask for feedback from others.

We use these skills to support people through change. As a service designer and public servant, we find ourselves increasingly supporting larger and more complex change efforts using design to improve outcomes and experiences.

Searching for a deeper understanding of human dynamics, we discovered a cruel paradox: to create change within organisations, we need to change ourselves. The most important tool in our toolkit is us! We began by asking how we could enable the conditions for people to change themselves.

As designers shift towards more participatory forms of design, we posit that understanding and using ‘self-as-

instrument’ improves our practice and our influence in the world.

Self-as-instrument within design practice We draw on the concept of ‘self-asinstrument’ as defined by Charlie Seashore. It is the “… link between our personal potential and the world of change”.2 Self-as-instrument values subjective experience – a filter collecting data about our experience. What is the metaphorical water in which we are swimming? What are the lenses through which we view the world?

At the 2019 Service Design Global Conference, Josephina Vink emphasised design as an embodied experience with designers entangled in the systems in

1 Scharmer, O. (2008). Uncovering the Blind Spot of Leadership. Leader to Leader, (47), 52-59.

2 Seashore, C. N., Shawver, M. N., Thompson, G., & Mattare, M. (2004). Doing Good By Knowing Who You Are: The Instrumental Self as an Agent of Change. OD PRACTITIONER, 36(3), 42–46.

servi c e de si g n a nd c h a ng e m a n ag emen t

Mastery

w no

Ik

Wh at

Is ee

at Wh Efficiency

Functionality

What I do The self-as-instrument model to develop capacity to see, know and

The self-as-instrument model To understand how to use self-as-instrument, crea­­tors Jamison, Auron and Schetman give us a model4 that consists of an outer dimension of core competencies – what we see, know and do – and an inner dimension of our levels of development of these core competencies (see Fig. 1). We attend to different levels, observing what is happening, identifying underlying meaning, and observing our reaction to it.

Let’s look at the model through an example.

While facilitating a co-creation workshop, Antonio encountered a participant who did not want to follow the ideation process he had designed. His strict timetable led to frustration – if the participants didn’t finish this activity, they would be behind schedule.

Antonio put pressure on them to finish, as tensions rose. He saw himself lose sight of his role.

do (adapted from Jamison, Auron and Shechtman, Managing Use of Self for Masterful Professional Practice)

which they design.3 She stated that as we design within a system, we change as well.

Many of the tools in the designer’s toolkit can also be used on ourselves. Re-framing is a tool used by designers, yet how often do we use it to shift our own world-view?

Re-framing stories we tell ourselves is an effective way to change the channel in our minds. To increase motivation, change your attitude, or increase your aptitude for learning; start by noticing your thoughts. We can identify and challenge our assumptions, reactions and biases by asking, “What evidence do I have that supports my thinking this way?”. We can apply our capacity for research, analysis and synthesis to ourselves, uncovering our own mental models and observing and enquiring into how our words and behaviours affect others.

What do I see?

When we ‘see’, we take in our environment and what we are witnessing in the moment. This requires being present, aware, drawing on our active listening skills and connecting to what we are feeling. The participant’s behaviour triggered Antonio’s sense of anxiety, and he assumed it was an act of resistance.

How can we stay humble, finding meaning in what we see, rather than making judgments? These are tools we can use when we are activated. It allows us to ask questions sincerely, rather than doing so inherently expecting the answers we seek.

What do I know?

‘Knowing’ draws on our experience, cognitive, somatic and intuitive ways of knowing. As service designers, we know about our craft (e.g. how to create and facilitate a customer journey map). We also have knowledge about ourselves, our passions, interests, opinions, behaviours, values, motivations and social identities. As we expose

3 Vink, J. (2019). In/visible - Conceptualizing Service Ecosystem Design.

[Unpublished doctoral dissertation]

4 Jamison, D. W., Auron, M., & Shechtman, D. (2010). Managing Use of Self for Masterful Professional Practice. OD PRACTITIONER, 42(3), 4–11.

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ourselves to feedback and learn to let go of our ego, our knowledge grows – both of our craft and of ourselves.

As a reader of Touchpoint at this very moment, you demonstrate the time we dedicate to knowing our craft.

But how much time do we spend to know ourselves?

In the situation cited earlier, Antonio already had the necessary facilitation and subject matter knowledge.

He knew what ‘not’ to do, but observing his own behaviour taught him something he hadn’t yet learned about himself.

What do I do?

Taking time to reflect has been shown to enhance depth and speed of learning. Organisational learning scholar Donald Schön spoke of two types of ‘reflective practice’, both of which can be developed through application5.

The first is reflecting after you’ve had an experience (reflection-on-action). The second, which Antonio’s example illustrates, is reflecting-in-action – being aware ‘in the moment’, and choosing to change course midexperience. Reflection-in-action allowed him to notice what was happening, which led to a greater awareness that his perception of time affects his feelings and behaviours when facilitating workshops.

How do I develop?

The inner dimensions represented in the framework show that we can develop our ability to see, know and do from a basic through to an advanced level. When trying new behaviours, we start at ‘Functionality’, in which we are hyper-conscious of what we are doing. Sometimes we fail, sometimes we succeed. As we move towards ‘Efficiency’, we are less challenged – we succeed more, draw on more knowledge, and more readily act in intentional ways. At the level of ‘Mastery’, our new behaviours become unconscious – we can act in new ways without having to think about it.

Depending on the skill or topic, we move between these levels. Returning to Antonio’s example, when he had experienced anxiety in previous workshops, he hadn’t

5 Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books.

66 Touchpoint 11-3

stopped to consider how to change it, or what it meant. At a higher level of mastery, he was able to.

Tuning your instrument: practice, practice, practice You can practice these skills as you read this. Firstly, change your posture. Notice how that feels. Take five deep breaths. Notice your thoughts. Check in with each part of your body. What sensations are present? What do you associate with these sensations? How are you judging these thoughts and feelings? How might that enable or hinder your presence with others?

Noticing, pausing, checking-in, identifying and testing assumptions are techniques that can be used in groups as well. Intentionally build time for pauses, silence and reflection into your meetings and workshops. Set the tone with a one-minute meditation. Ask people to silently envision the outcome of their work together before a creative activity or difficult conversation.

Appeal to different ways of working. For example, write individually for five minutes before a group discussion.

Invite conversations about preferences and willingness to contribute. Monitor what works for you and the group by journaling and tracking feedback and observations.

What’s next?

Take an inventory of your self-mastery practices by answering these questions: 1. How do you get feedback from others?

2. How do you track your progress?

3. What keeps you accountable to your ways of doing and being?

4. What builds your capacity to focus, stay present and sense what you are feeling?

5. How are you designing yourself?

What prototypes are you willing to try?

6. How do you nurture yourself?

How do you take care of that which nurtures you?

7. What professionals do you draw on to support you in this journey?

8. What rhythm enables creativity and generativity in your life?

servi c e de si g n a nd c h a ng e m a n ag emen t

Available on Medium!

To spread knowledge, insights and awareness of service design to the wider world we're now making selected articles from each new issue of Touchpoint available on Medium. We are proud that SDN got recognised by the platform as a top writer in ‘Innovation’!

Have a look! www.medium.com/touchpoint www.medium.com/@SDNetwork

Touchpoint 11-3 67

Change Fundamentals for Service Designers How to influence human behaviour From the wide body of knowledge on organisational change we have selected three theories and models that should be known by anyone working in the field of service design.

These theories can be used to understand people’s behaviour in the context of service design projects and to define Dr. Tina Weisser is an innovation and systemic change consultant based in Munich.

She is a lecturer at various universities and has worked for the last twenty years for a wide range of clients. She also developed the KUER innovation capabilities compass to support service design implementation through applying change management. t@feedyourmind.eu

Prof. Dr. Eike Wagner is a change strategist based in Munich and a Professor at Macromedia University of Applied Sciences. Since 1999 he has supported the design and realisation of change projects for clients such as Daimler, thyssenkrupp, Audi, Siemens and SAP. He drives the development of an emergent change approach. eike@emergize.org

68 Touchpoint 11-3

activities to influence that behaviour.

Definition of change and change management If you agree that service design projects are more successful when you apply change management, you need to have an understanding what change is and what change management is. For the purpose of this article, we define change as a difference in the state of the organisation at different points in time.

Amongst other ways, the state of the organisation can be described along these six dimensions: the products and services that are offered, the structures and processes in place, the systems and tools used as well as the mindset, the skills and knowledge, and the behaviour of the people in the organisation (see Fig. 1).

Service design projects always have an impact on the employees producing and delivering the service. While service design projects tend to focus on customer touchpoints and interactions, they will inevitably have implications

on the mindsets, skills, knowledge and behaviour of the affected employees.

We define change management as the approach to prepare and support individuals, teams and organisations in making change happen. It deals with the people side of the change: their feelings, thoughts and behaviours.

Products and Services

Structures and Processes

Mindset

Change wheel

Systems and Tools

Fig. 1: Change wheel

Knowledge and Skills

Behaviour

servi c e de si g n a nd c h a ng e m a n ag emen t

Autonomy Desire to be causal agents of one‘s own life

Sense of belonging Will to interact with and be connected to others

Feeling of competence

(Intrinsic) Motivation The natural, inherent drive to seek out challenges and new possibilities

Individual behaviour

Seek to control the outcome and experience mastery

Fig. 2: Psychological needs as drivers of behaviour

Change management encompasses analysis, planning and steering as well as leadership, communication, coaching and enabling.

Choice and application of concepts On the one hand, change management is a broad profes­sion with numerous theories and models. On the other hand, the field of change management is currently undergoing change itself. Widely-used models such as the one by John Kotter are criticised for being too linear, and new change models – which better fit complex challenges and environments – are beginning to appear. For the purpose of this article, we have selected three well-researched theories that help with understanding and influencing behaviour of those involved in service design projects. Primarily, we consider these roles: C-level executives initiating or sponsoring service — design activities — Project owners or project leads with overall responsibility for the output — The project team itself, including researchers, technologists, facilitators, designers etc.

— Employees providing the new service — Users of the new service

Theory 1: Self-determination theory The self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci 2017) is concerned with the motivations behind the choices people make, without external influence and interference. According to the theory, three psychological needs intrinsically motivate people to initiate behaviour: competence, autonomy and relatedness. These needs are said to be innate and universal. However, some needs may be more salient than others at certain times and in certain contexts. Furthermore, needs are expressed differently based on time, culture and experience.

What is the relevance for service design projects? Those involved in the project need to be intrinsically motivated to develop the best service possible, those providing the service need to be intrinsically motivated to produce and deliver the service in the best possible way, and the users need to be motivated to use the service the right way to get the job done as efficiently as possible.

Some ideas to increase perceived self-determination in service design projects:

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For most employees, service design is a new approach — with numerous specialist terms and jargon. You have probably heard statements such as, “Look, the colourful people with their Post-it notes are coming!”

Because employees have a need for relatedness, it is helpful to adopt the way of talking to them and to demonstrate in their language how the new methods help them to understand users better and co-create services together.

— If employees are not used to time-boxing, it reduces their perceived autonomy. They do not see the benefit of fast progress and prototyping and – instead – resist the new method because a basic need is unmet.

— The need for autonomy can be satisfied by the principle “inspiration instead of teaching.”

— Because of employees’ pursuit of mastery, they easily feel threatened when they hear that tried-and-trusted procedures are no longer successful in the digital world. Therefore, it is important to respect existing expertise and previous performance, and to present the need for new methods empathically.

— If key players among employees do not feel like they belong to the initiative that applies service design, they may withhold important information and the initiative becomes doomed to fail from the very beginning.

— Do not hide the fact that service design projects can become difficult. Otherwise, doubters immediately

become magnified when the first difficulties are encountered. Instead, remind employees that learning takes time and emphasise that the path to mastery in this future-oriented approach is worth pursuing.

Theory 2: Psychological safety The theory of psychological safety explains one of the key drivers of performance in teams and organisations.

Feeling psychologically safe at work is more than trust and respect between colleagues and superiors. It is about an approach to failure, where one is not punished or rejected for admitting mistakes. It is the shared belief by the team that it is safe enough to take interpersonal risks. Psychological safety is not about being nice, nor is it about personality and lowering performance standards.

Amy Edmondson (2018) emphasises that in order to be ambitious with your innovation goals, you need to create new knowledge through trying out, testing and exploring, which necessarily includes failures. She considers these as intelligent failures because they are the failures teams need to go through to be innovative. Edmondson found out in one of her early studies (and Google confirmed this many years later) that psychological safety is the best predictor for the performance of teams.

How does a lack of psychological safety occur in service design projects? You may observe that the people whom you involve in the design process are not open

Lead by example

Encourage Active listening

Create a safe environment

It is important for management to lead by example through asking for upward feedback, acknowledging mistakes, seeking different opinions and being approachable

Management should encorage active listening through encouraging people to share more by responding and asking questions

It is important for management to create a safe environment by accepting people’s ideas, being nonjudgmental, and accepting off-thewall suggestions because these can lead to innovation

Fig. 3: Techniques for management to increase psychological safety

70 Touchpoint 11-3

servi c e de si g n a nd c h a ng e m a n ag emen t

about their opinions or ideas. They avoid bringing up tough issues and conflicts, because they fear negative consequences. You realise that ‘error culture’ isn’t practised but only written on a nice innovation poster in the lab. People think that taking risks is not an option and critically reflecting on past projects to learn from mistakes doesn’t happen.

Some ideas on how to increase psychological safety in service design processes: Start with the C-level and make them aware that — good failures are important in order to learn quickly.

Discuss with them how they can set an example to destigmatise making mistakes.

— Facilitators should deal openly with the necessity of ‘intelligent’ failures. Service design projects need to take risks and accept uncertainty, otherwise innovative solutions cannot be explored and mastered.

Celebrate the scientist mindset: Fail early but fail well.

— Encourage open dialogue, honest reflections and active listening. Invite shy participants to participate actively and appreciate their input.

— Make failures transparent by putting up a board displaying the biggest misconceptions and, more importantly, the learnings drawn from them.

— Encourage participants to speak openly about the points that really matter in retrospectives.

— Use tools such as the celebration grid (instead of classical project reviews) because they emphasise learnings from failure.

— Project leads can share work in progress instead of holding glossy presentations, hold co-creative workshops and involve decision-makers in collaborative learning sessions.

A lack of psychological safety is also the main reason for defensive decision-making, which refers to situations in which a person making a decision consciously does not choose the best option for the organisation and, therefore, does not act in the best interest of the organisation. Instead he or

she consciously chooses the option with a lower risk and/or higher chances for him-/herself. In a study by Artinger, Artinger und Gigerenzer (2018) 80 percent of almost 1,000 respondents said that they made at least one defensive decision in the last 12 months and 17 percent answered that they made more than half (!) of their decisions defensively.

A typical example from a service design project would be when a C-level sponsor does not make a decision by themselves but delegates the decision to a representative on the next level. A defensive decision ends up becoming more likely because the middle manager often lacks in-depth competence regarding the respective service and because they cannot predict their boss’ reaction to a courageous decision.

Theory 3: Cognitive biases Cognitive biases are unconscious and systematic errors and deviations from rationality in perception, thought, memory and judgment. Over 150 biases unconsciously influence us in everyday life and at work (see Fig. 4). The psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman (2011) distinguishes two decision-making systems. The first is our so-called autopilot. It works quickly and automatically, with little effort and without intentional control. The second performs much slower and it is involved in consciously-controlled thinking process and therefore requires much more energy. The biases serve us as mental shortcuts, known as heuristics, which help us to cope efficiently within enormous amounts of information and to maintain our ability to react.

However, biases are based on beliefs and experiences from the past. They are influenced by the opinion of peers or the majority, and they strongly simplify reality.

What does this mean for service design projects?

Biases can hinder us because they are based on the well-known. They interfere with divergent thinking, and lead to mistakes in the assessment of new ideas and in the choice of concepts.

What follows are five biases we selected, and our illustrations on how they can occur in service design projects.

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Social desirability bias is a tendency that can significantly affect the quality of research and testing.

The following statement illustrates it well, yet many interviewees would not consciously admit to its validity: “I liked the interviewer, so I wanted to support her and gave her answers she wanted to hear.” This bias can influence how honestly people respond, and to what extend they admit their real feelings or needs. Usually, people want to be seen as competent, responsible and open-minded, and want to uphold social norms.

Sometimes they even want to please the research team. If, for example, an interviewee in an anonymous product test underlines how meaningful and important he/she finds a product, but is not interested in who sells the product or when it will be launched on the market, the researcher should be suspicious.

Confirmation bias occurs during research or in co-

creation activities. It describes the fact that we tend to listen more closely to information or ideas that confirm our prejudices. The prejudices also strongly affect the way we ask research questions. Confirmation bias can be prevented by watching out for inconsistencies, by observing if what people say matches with what they do, by using different research methods, and by testing your ideas and hypothesis at all stages of the process. Furthermore, don’t fall in love with your ideas.

decision whether to speak up or not, in turn, depends on the level of psychological safety within the organisation.

Outlook This article argues that every organisational change involves a behaviour change. Therefore, the actors involved in service design processes need to understand models that explain human behaviour. We have chosen three change concepts and applied them to typical situations – and challenges – in service design projects.

The choice of both concepts and situations was eclectic.

Our focus was on demonstrating the relevance for the practice of service designers by providing practical ideas.

1. Ryan & Deci (2017) Self-determination theory: basic psychological needs in motivation, development, and wellness.

2. Pink (2009) Drive: the surprising truth what motivates us.

3. Amy Edmondson (2018) The fearless organization: creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth.

4. Artinger, Artinger und Gigerenzer (2018) C. Y. A.: frequency and causes of defensive decisions in public administration. Business Research.

5. Kahneman D., Slovic P., and Tversky, A. (Eds.) (1982) Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases or Kahneman, Daniel (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow.

6. By design: John Manoogian IIIcategories and descriptions: Buster Benson, implementation: TilmannR - This file was derived from: The Cognitive Bias Codex - 180+ biases, designed by John Manoogian III (jm3).png:, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=69756809

This brings us to the ideator bias. Teams can identify so closely with their idea that they become immune to concerns or suggestions that may alter it. Any negative aspects or findings seem to simply bounce off. Or they believe that their ideas are relevant because other companies do so too, which is called the bandwagon bias.

In traditional companies the hierarchy bias is also prevalent. Many employees have a tendency to assign greater accuracy and importance to the opinions of someone high-up in the hierarchy, without reference to the quality of their ideas. Therefore, employees may not dare to speak up to challenge those ideas, potentially leading to poor results of a service design project. The 72 Touchpoint 11-3

You can download Fig. 4 in high resolution here: https://commons. wikimedia.org/w/index. php?curid=69756809

servi c e de si g n a nd c h a ng e m a n ag emen t

THE

COGNITIVE BIAS

We store memories differently based on how they were experienced

We discard specifics to form generalities

We edit and reinforce

some memories after the fact

We favor simple–looking options and complete information over complex, ambiguous options

To avoid mistakes, we aim to preserve autonomy and group status, and avoid irreversible decisions

Tip of the tongue phenomenon Google effect effect Next–in–line ct Testing effe ss indedne Absent–m effect cessing of–pro Levels– effect Suffix fect ef sition ffect e l–po Seria t cueing ffect e –se t ncy c Part Rece cy effe n a io Prim inhibit ect ry eff t mo Me odality eglec t n c M ffe on e t c rati Du length ll effe ct e a t– Lis l rec n eff ing n ria tio Se rma arpe rule d h info d s en ias Mis g an eak– tb s P lin ec bia e ve aff y ic Le g tivit jud ias din a Pre l b es g a yp Fa Ne pic t ty reo eo ste er St licit p Im

Remember?

Im pli cit as so Sp cia a tio Su cin n Fa gg g e e lse st ffec Mis C att Sou ryp me ibilit t to m y rib r uti ce c mn ory on o e of nfus sia Le me io ss– mo n is– ry b Oc etter Co nju cam's effec ncti t on razor L a fall w Bik Rhym e–she of Triv acy iali dd e–a s–re ing eff ty e aso n eff ct ect B Inform elief bia s ation bi Ambi guity as bias Status quo bia Social com s parison effect Decoy effe ct Reactance Reverse psychology System justification

We notice things already primed in memory or repeated often

than non-bizarre/unfunny things

Need To Act Fast

To act, we must be confident we can make an impact and feel what we do is important

Neglect of probability Anecdotal fallacy Illusion of validity Masked–man fallacy Recency illusi on Gambler's fallacy Hot–han d fallacy Illusory correlat Pareid ion ol Anthro ia pomor phism Grou Ultim p attribu tion erro Ste ate attri r re Ess otypin bution erro Fun entiali g r s Mo ctiona m Jus ral cre l fixed Arg t–wo denti ness Au ume rld hy al eff e th n p ct t fr oth Au or Ba tom ity b om fa esis llac Pla ndw atio ias y ce ag n bia bo on s O eff eff Cr ut–g ec ect t In oss rou –g – ro rac p ho up e m fa effe oge vo ne rit ct ity ism bia s

We notice flaws in others more easily than we notice flaws in ourselves

We think we know what other people are thinking

We tend to find stories and patterns even when looking at sparse data

We fill in characteristics from stereotypes, generalities, and prior histories

We imagine things and people we're familiar with or fond of as better

We simplify probabilities and numbers to make them easier to think about

We project our current mindset and assumptions onto the past and future

We are drawn to details that confirm our own existing beliefs

ion Confabulat on Clustering illusi size Insensitivity to sample

ct fe ef ct t fe er n t ef ad fec re c e f io h ffe at alo rle e d H hee ivity nte valu ad e C sit ve de ro y Po t in tive eled ac No eac trav ng y fall nti it R ell– ou abil cc b W l a pro s nta to Me peal y bia aw alc Ap m r 's L ias No rphy b s Mu sum ip bia ct h ro Ze ivors ity effe ct rv 2 Su additiv on effe r7± ti Sub omina mbe l nu Den agica m cy The aren transp e n of owledg Illusio of kn ct Curse ht effe or Spotlig incentive err Extrinsic external agency of Illusion c insight asymmetri Illusion of

To stay focused, we favor the immediate, relatable thing in front of us

Ac Illu to sio r Se –ob n o lf– se f c Ba serv rver ontr o rn in u g bia l O For m e bia s Du E ptim er ffe s n La ning goc ism effe ct e ke c – Wo Kru ntric bia t be ger bia s H Fa lse ard gone effe s con –ea eff ct s e s Th ird– ensu y effe ct So pers s e ct cia l on ffec d Ove e rco sirabil effec t nfid it enc y bia t s e effe Self– ct con siste n Rest cy bia s ra Proje int bias ction Pro– bi innova as tion bi Time– as savin Planning g bias fal Pessimis lacy m bias Impact bias Declinism Moral luck Outcome bias Hindsight bias Rosy retrospection Telescoping effect

To get things done, we tend to complete things we've invested time and energy in

We notice when something has changed

w la n sio ner n illu ch tio s ey –Fe za n bia r ali o M ebe ion ias on at e b rati bias W m fir enc ase tive t n u h ec Co ngr urc ppor ption eff Co st–p –su erce tancy Po oice ve p pec s Ch lecti r–ex s bia Se serve enter' t c Ob erim r effe s p Ex serve n bia o Ob ectati ect on ct Exp ich eff validati effe Ostr jective fluence x Sub ued in refle tin Con elweis m Sem spot blind m Bias cynicis Naïve realism Naïve

Backfire effect

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Too Much Information

Bizarre, funny, visually striking, or anthropomorphic things stick out more

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What Should We

We reduce events and lists to their key elements

CODEX

Not Enough Meaning

Fig. 46 Touchpoint 11-3 73

Service Design to the Rescue The critical roles service designers play in organisational change

Innovation drives change. Change requires innovation. Innovation and organisational change are so intertwined it almost feels disingenuous to untangle them. By the same token, service designers are increasingly using their superpowers in humancentred innovation and design projects to empower leaders, Robert Bau is Senior Service Design Director at Fjord, design and innovation from Accenture Interactive. Robert is a recognised expert in harnessing human-centred innovation and design to tackle organisational challenges, reinvent brands and transform experiences.

He has served as lecturer and course leader at ten design schools in five countries over ten years. The content in this article reflects the author’s own views and does not necessarily represent the view of his employer, Accenture. robert.bau1@outlook.com

managers and employees in system-wide change processes.

As a community, we need to understand, articulate and own the substantial impact we are having on organisational change.

So how do service designers become effective change agents?

First, I will encapsulate the myriad of change theories out there by presenting four distinctive ways to manage change in organisations. Second, I will determine the superpowers of service designers by clarifying the roles we perform in human-centred innovation and design projects. Finally, I will explore how our superpowers can be used to help leaders, managers and employees make change happen. For the sake of brevity, I am assuming that readers are familiar with the fundamentals of service design and change management.

Four high-level change approaches Just like design, change can be seen as a verb (the act or process of becoming different, or making something or

74 Touchpoint 11-3

someone different), a countable noun (the final result or outcome of the change activity or process), and an uncountable noun (the situation or process of change).

Following this train of thought, I have devised a two-by-two matrix to capture four distinctive approaches to change management. While it is admittedly impossible to encapsulate every single change theory in a single matrix, the purpose is simply to facilitate a discussion about how service design can support and drive change. It also serves as a reminder that not all change theories are by nature top-down, sequential and outcome-driven (see Fig. 1).

One dimension in the matrix explores whether the change process seems inherently planned or is in fact emergent. A ‘planned’ process implies deliberate, co-ordinated and integrated actions across the organisation. An ‘emergent’ process implies autonomous or semi-autonomous actions within the

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Change process

Planned Emergent

Change outcomes

Planned

Emergent

Directed change

Darwinian change

Like winning hearts and minds in occupied territories

Like Battle Royale, the 2000 Japanese dystopian thriller

Guided change

Self-directed change

Like wandering into the unknown with sherpas by your side

Like jazz improvisation, which is all about studious practice and being in the moment1

leadership-driven and/or expert-led approach to change, supported by a compelling vision, deliberate action plans and ‘scientific’ evidence. Employees are spurred or forced into action through a series of planned interventions, such as directives, communications, upskilling, layoffs and restructuring. Employee participation is restricted to negotiations and/or ‘symbolic gestures’ (limited consultation and co-creation).

The ‘Directed change’ approach fits the prevailing discourse on change management, with its emphasis on phase-by-phase, step-by-step models and guidelines for change implementation. The process may be linear, cyclical, iterative or even a bit messy, but it widely assumed that the intended outcomes will be achieved (as long as the process is followed). This approach is based on the Empirical–Rational, Power–Coercive, and Normative–Re-educative change strategies by Chin & Benne2 and Thurley & Wirdenius3.

Fig. 1: Four high-level change approaches

Change strategies:

organisation that may or may not become co-ordinated and integrated over time.

The other dimension explores whether the change outcome is inherently planned or emergent. ‘Planned’ outcomes in terms of organisational quests, longterm goals, vision statements, etc., are determined more or less from the outset and imposed over time. ‘Emergent’ outcomes materialise over time, shaped through the qualities and capabilities of the organisation. Further­more, planned and unplanned actions will have intended and unintended consequences, and internal and external factors may push change in unknown directions.

Subsequently, each quadrant in the matrix represents a distinctive, high-level approach to change management, with specific metaphors, characteristics, strategies and benefits. There is no winner or best approach; given context, situational factors, leadership philosophy and organisational culture, any one of these four approaches (or combinations thereof) might be deemed effective.

Upper-left quadrant: ‘Directed change’ ‘Directed change’ is the combination of planned outcomes and planned process. This is a top-down,

Carrot, stick, or both. Change leaders and managers encourage change through charismatic leadership; futuring and visioning; rhetoric, storytelling and communications; expert-led interventions; hard facts and ‘scientific’ evidence about the need for change; employee participation (with an emphasis on consultation); employee training/upskilling; and employee incentives.

Change leaders and managers (en)force change through directives, negotiations, manipulation, coercion, sanctions (or threats of sanctions), restructuring, layoffs, replacements, etc. In addition, change recipients may view top-down proposals for new or revamped workspaces, processes, ways of working, tools, services, performance reviews, etc., either as encouragement or enforcement (depending on context and individual preferences).

Benefits:

According to proponents, this is the fastest way to drive first-order and second-order change (first-order change being incremental, continuous, or evolutionary, while second-order change is radical, discontinuous, or revolutionary). Resistance to change is typically high but (ultimately) futile.

Lower-left quadrant: ‘Guided change’ ‘Guided change’ is the combination of planned process and emergent outcomes. This is a bottom-up, systematic Touchpoint 11-3 75

effort to improve the problem-solving capabilities of the system as well as to unlock and foster growth in the individuals and groups that make up the system.

Under the guidance of expert facilitators, employees learn how to understand themselves better, improve interpersonal/group dynamics, and tackle real-life challenges at work. Change is the result of individuals and groups adjusting their deep-seated values, norms and attitudes in order to behave differently.

While the overall aim is to inspire excellence and improve performance, it is seemingly impossible to predict what the outcomes may look like for the organisation at large; change is driven by employees and groups, not imposed by leaders. This approach is based on the Action-centred change strategy by Thurley & Wirdenius3, the Normative–Re-educative change strategy by Chin & Benne2, and the experiential aspects of Organisational Development 4 .

environments. Taking inspiration from biological sciences, organisations are viewed as being complex adaptive systems; the focus is on the relations and interconnections of the system components rather than on the individual components themselves.

Uncontrollable and unpredictable outcomes will emerge from the numerous, dense interactions between members of the organisation. These outcomes will in turn affect the members, resulting in further changes to the system. In other words, the system continually evolves through a cycle of interactions, emergence and non-linear feedback loops. In addition, members and teams operating in a complex and open system should be set free to self-organise in order to solve problems, adapt to the environment, and cope with external and internal forces. This approach is based on complexity and chaos theory5 .

Change strategies:

Change strategies:

Expert facilitators guide and empower people and groups to change through team-building, sensitivity training, and resilience training (boosting the ability to cope with stress); experiential learning, action research and appreciative inquiry; widespread collaboration co-envisioning the future, co-framing problems, and co-creating solutions; and facilitative coaching and mentoring.

Change leaders and managers support and facilitate system-wide change by encouraging and sponsoring organisational learning at scale, by creating a safe and supportive environment for people and teams to implement what they have learned, and by putting in place systems for continuous feedback, learning and adaptation.

Change leaders and managers nurture change by boosting the capability to interact, self-organise, learn and adapt. Examples include destabilising people and systems to foster a level of anxiety and instil a sense of urgency; improving the ability to cope with uncertainty and change (through resilience training); embracing diversity, differences, contradictions and multiple viewpoints; increasing the flow of information and promoting informal communication networks; building slack/redundancy into the system; encouraging creativity, collaborative play and voluntary co-operation; exercising decisionmaking autonomy and self-direction; facilitative coaching and mentoring; and designing systems for continuous feedback, learning and adaptation.

Benefits:

Benefits:

According to proponents, this approach is best suited for first-order change. Resistance is minimised thanks to heavy employee involvement. At a collective level, continuous adjustments made simultaneously across the organisation can create substantial change.

Lower-right quadrant: ‘Self-directed change’ ‘Self-directed change’ is the combination of emergent process and emergent outcomes. Organisations operate in increasingly diverse, dynamic and interconnected 76 Touchpoint 11-3

According to proponents, this approach is the best way to explain how organisations adapt, evolve and survive in turbulent environments. Resistance is minimal/nonexistent because everybody is a change agent.

Upper-right quadrant: ‘Darwinian change’ ‘Darwinian change’ is a combination of planned outcomes and emergent process. Predetermined quests, visions, long-term goals, and values function as a lighthouse to guide innovation efforts and change initiatives within the organisation (and ecosystem). Autonomous or semi-

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autonomous units are encouraged to come with fresh perspectives, experiment with new ideas, battle for attention, and fight for resources.

In this rather competitive and combative environment, the ‘fittest’ ideas make the cut and get adopted, while ‘bad’ ideas are rejected out of hand and fall off the radar. Other ways to resolve conflict between competing viewpoints, ideas and truths include co-operation, consensus, compromise and consolidation.

This approach is inspired by van de Ven and Poole’s single and dual-motor change theories6 .

The seven roles of service designers 7

The Empathiser — —

—

The Sensemaker

—

—

Change strategies:

Change leaders and managers experiment with, make sense of and arbitrate intrapreneurial efforts and change initiatives taking place in or originating from innovation labs, innovation sandboxes, skunkworks, hackathons, competitions, internal/external crowdsourcing, open innovation, alliances/coalitions, joint ventures, outsourcing, etc. In addition, change leaders and managers nurture change by creating the conditions for innovation to exist and flourish.

Benefits:

According to proponents, this is the best way to drive first-order and second-order change when the path to desired outcomes is deemed unclear, uncertain or unpredictable. Resistance to the ideas of others is actively encouraged (to a certain degree).

The seven roles of service designers Based on my consulting and teaching experience, I have determined that service designers perform seven critical roles on large, complex innovation and design projects: The Empathiser, The Sensemaker, The Creator, The Maker, The Navigator, The Story­ teller, and The Servant Leader (adapted from Bau7 ).

Generally speaking, service design teams will need to perform all seven roles throughout the inno­ vation and design process in order to achieve desired outcomes. On an individual level, some service designers will want to ‘jump back and forth’ between multiple roles, and some may prefer to specialise in two or three. Few designers, if any, can perform all seven roles to a high professional standard.

For the sake of brevity, each role is explained with the help of three capabilities (see sidebar).

Understanding complex systems and problems Understanding organisations and competitive landscapes Understanding actors and activities in context

Uncovering and contextualising insights across all research methods and sources Framing/reframing assumptions, hypotheses, problems and opportunities Defining possible service outcomes/futures

—

The Creator

—

—

—

Generating ideas and designing concepts for behaviour change Generating ideas and designing concepts for tools, product and services (to get the job done) Screening and assessing ideas and concepts for desirability, feasibility, viability, sustainability, etc.

The Maker — Designing, executing and interpreting experiments — Prototyping, validating and refining concepts

— Building, launching and refining pilots

The Navigator

—

—

—

Setting strategic directions and creating strategic platforms (vision statements, business models, strategies, plans, value cases, roadmaps, etc.)

Defining, tracking and evaluating business and stakeholder impact Identifying roadblocks, defining requirements, and mobilising resources for implementation and sustained success

The Storyteller

— — —

Crafting, dramatising and telling the right stories (to create shared meaning and drive action) Collecting, curating and sharing the right stories Defining and developing the right ways to engage and interact with audiences

The Servant Leader

—

—

—

Planning, facilitating and leading innovation and collaborative practices Directing, leading and empowering innovation and design teams Defining and building organisational, team and individual capabilities

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Directed change

Guided change

Self-directed change Darwinian change

Change outcomes

Planned

Emergent

Emergent

Planned

Change process

Planned

Planned

Emergent

Emergent

Metaphor

Like winning hearts and minds in occupied territories

Like venturing into the unknown with sherpas by your side

Like jazz improvisation, which is all about studious practice and being in the moment1

Like Battle Royale, the 2000 Japanese dystopian thriller

Description

Employees are spurred or forced into action through different types of top-down interventions

Employees are empowered to change through expert facilitation in experiential learning and action research

Organisations survive in turbulent environments by setting employees free to interact, selforganise, learn and adapt

Employees are encouraged to experiment with ideas, battle for attention and fight for resources

Resistance to change

Resistance is futile

Resistance is minimised

Resistance is nonexistent

Resistance is encouraged

Service design as change agent

Helping leaders make the case for change through compelling ‘north stars,’ stories, value cases, etc.

Making bottom-up innovation happen through systemic and systematic co-creation

Creating the conditions for change, creativity and collaborative play throughout the system

Designing the rules and setting the tone for the organisation-wide game of innovation

The Empathiser The Sensemaker The Creator The Maker The Navigator The Storyteller The Servant Leader Fig. 2: The roles service designers perform in change processes

For each capability, the service designer carries out specific activities, applies specific methods and tools, and produces specific deliverables/assets. For example, The Empathiser will use specific research tools, techniques and prompts to uncover the hidden motivations behind consumer behaviour in a certain context.

We can easily map these seven roles to Kumar’s model of the design innovation process, IDEO’s Hear-CreateDeliver process, and Design Council UK’s framework for innovation. These models and frameworks show that innovation and design projects jump back and forth between modes of activity in a non-linear and iterative 78 Touchpoint 11-3

fashion, and that innovators and designers should constantly switch between thinking in abstract ways and making something concrete and tangible.

The service designer as change agent Service designers can become effective change agents in all four change approaches by performing multiple roles over time. The relative importance of each role will differ depending on approach (see Fig. 2).

In ‘Directed change,’ service designers help leaders and managers make the case for change through compelling ‘north stars,’ stories, concepts and value

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cases. In this approach, it is likely that change leaders have made their minds up and will not be interested in design research and open-ended concept development.

However, we can help leaders and managers understand the implications of desired goals, through – for example – identifying the need for new or revamped capabilities, tools, processes and systems. We can also help specific business units or functions understand how to react and respond to change. The most important service design roles in this type of change are The Storyteller, The Navigator and The Maker.

In ‘Guided change,’ service designers are heavily involved in bottom-up innovation efforts across the organisation. Working side-by-side with expert facilitators (in experiential learning and action research), we empower employees to collaboratively frame problems, create solutions, and envision the future of the organisation. We create meaningful innovation playbooks and how-to guides, design engaging innovation workshops, and deliver effective coaching sessions. We can also bring proposed solutions to life and validate them in the spirit of continuous feedback, learning and adaptation. The most important service design roles in this context are The Servant Leader, The Sensemaker and The Maker.

In ‘Self-directed change,’ service designers create the conditions for change, creativity and collaborative play throughout the system. On one hand, we help change leaders and managers ‘loosen the system’ by instilling a sense of urgency, by showing employees how to play in creative ways, and by encouraging creative collaborations in the ecosystem. On the other, we help change leaders and managers ‘tighten the system’ by creating guardrails and guidelines for collaborative innovation and design.

Furthermore, we turn employees into effective change agents by transferring ‘designerly’ ways of knowing, thinking and doing. The most important service design roles here are The Servant Leader, The Sensemaker and The Creator.

In ‘Darwinian change,’ service designers are designing the rules and setting the tone for the organisation-wide game of innovation (and, upon invitation, we are taking part as active players). In close collaboration with change leaders and managers, we clarify the organisational need for innovation; determine the principles and desired behaviors underpinning all initiatives; define roles, responsibilities and decision-making powers; establish

ways to initiate, orchestrate and balance innovation efforts across the organisation; and determine how to assess initiatives and measure performance. We also nurture change by boosting innovation and design capabilities across the organisation. As the ‘game designer,’ the most important service design roles for ‘Darwinian change’ are The Servant Leader, The Navigator and The Creator.

Let’s start owning it In this article, I have explored how service designers are supporting and empowering leaders, managers and employees in four types of change processes. As a community, we have a responsibility to understand, articulate and own the impact we make in organisational change. Based on my experience leading and directing multi-disciplinary teams working on complex branding, innovation and transformation projects, I feel service designers are the unsung heroes of organisational change.

The author invites readers to treat this article as an initial hypothesis – the next step is to confirm or reject it through research. Reach out if you want to join forces for version 2.0! robert.bau1@outlook.com

1 O’Donnell, E. (2012, April 9). Is Improvising Really Improvising?

Retrieved from https://bit.ly/36LL2oy 2 Chin, R. and Benne, K. (1969). General Strategies for Effecting Changes in Human Systems. Research Report. Boston, MA: Boston University.

3 Thurley, K. and Wirdenius, H. (1973). Supervision: A Reappraisal.

London, UK: Heinemann.

4 Brown, D. and Harvey, D. (2006). An Experiential Approach to Organization Development. 7th Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: California State University-Bakersfield.

5 Stacey, R. (1996). Strategic Management and Organizational Dynamics.

2nd Edition. London, UK: Pitman.

6 van de Ven, A. and Poole, M. (1995). Explaining Development and Change in Organizations. The Academy of Management Review, Vol. 20, No. 3 (July 1995), pp. 510-540.

7 Bau, R. (2013, October). What It Takes to Become a Superb Service Designer. SX 2013. Talk presented at Adaptive Path’s 2013 Service Experience conference, San Francisco, CA.

Touchpoint 11-3 79

Creating a Culture of Change Agents Upgrading how change management is done Organisational approaches to change usually follow a traditional process, in which the achievement of businesses goals and technological change are favoured over the cultural change that is needed. Often, they overlook how employees are emotionally equipped to deal with change. This article aims at bringing a Karen Rozenbaum is a Brazilian service design consultant based in London.

She combines systemic thinking with tangible details to bring a project to life and believes in the humancentred approach to shape desirable futures. Karen has a master’s degree from the Royal College of Art and was acknowledged as an emerging talent by the Service Design Fringe Festival X ArtsThread Rising Stars 2019.

fresh perspective to change management with insights on ‘how’ and ‘when’ to engage employees.

I will introduce key learning’s from the “Employee-Centric-Design” (ECD) project1 that investigated how large traditional organisations2 established in the 20th century currently approach managing change, and – more specifically – how they take into account the employee experience in the face of organisational changes. I will suggest tangible actions that practitioners can take to support the process of transition, highlighting tools both within and outside the service design toolkit as ways to upgrade change management. I will also propose the ‘ECD Change Index’, a new tool currently being tested, that seeks to reveal employees’ understanding of change, their motivations and resilience.

Current approach to change management: Three key learnings Organisations involve employees too late in the change process

Based on in-depth interviews with 80 Touchpoint 11-3

experts and leaders, real examples of organisational change were identified, including structural, process change and changes driven by technology. Examples ranged from a private company that just announced a digital transformation to implement a new global sales system, to a public sector organisation seeking to go paperless internally and in its interfaces with customers. Based on these, I was able to map and validate a recurrent ‘journey of organisational change’ (see Fig. 1).

There is a common pattern: organisations start a change management process driven by business needs and enabling technology to implement the change, and involve employees too late in the process, creating reluctance. This brings to light a prioritisation issue: Instead of starting with a customer need and focusing on cultural change more broadly, the current journey is inverted, reinforcing the idea that change

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Organisation has a need for a change

Kick-off Pre-beginning

External consultancy

Credit: ECD 2019

1. Organisation (C-suite) defines the business case, identifying a need for a s­ pecific change

Innovation team

2. To kick-off, it brings in an external consultancy and/ or sets up a dedicated team, normally referred to as a ‘transformation’ or ‘innovation’ team, to identify a solution to enable a change in process or behaviour

Set up new systems Beginning

Employees involvement Period of adaptation

Tech contractors 3. The technology that is needed to make the change feasible is defined, and contractors to install new systems are hired

Roll-out Scale-up

Change agents/ consultants 4. By the time employees are informed and engaged in the process (culture focus), sometimes with the help of change consultants, employees report negative reactions, such as feelings of exclusion and reluctance

5. If the change happens to be successful and employees don’t receive continuous training and support, they tend to go back to old ways of working

Fig. 1 : The journey of organisational change

management has been too business-focused, and has had too little focus on people.

Employees lack of awareness about change

In the organisational changes that were reviewed, it was only commonly communicated ‘what’ was changing, without clearly explaining ‘why’ it was important, the wider benefits, and ‘how’ the change might look and feel like in practice. Therefore, employees were left with unanswered questions, feelings of insecurity and a sense of being undervalued and without support.

Fig. 2 (below) shows examples which demonstrate the lack of clarity in communication. The ‘what the employee heard’ column contains quotes of how organisations described the change to their employees;

What the employee heard “We’re going to go through a ­digital transformation” “We have to cut costs by 20%”

in the ‘what the employee understood’ column are the assumptions employees made; and in the ‘what it actually means’ column are suggestions of how organisations could have better communicated the reasons ‘why’ they wanted to go through the change.

Many organisations still rely on one-way communication channels and have heavily top-down communication processes rather than engaging in a two-way dialogue.

This ranges from informative emails from top-level management to the message content and tone-of-voice line managers use with their teams. Organisations are missing the opportunity to create more compelling stories that set out a coherent ‘why’, using effective media and encouraging continuous conversations that is bottom-up and peer-to-peer, as well as top-down.

What the employee understood “Why change now?

We’ve been doing great as it is” (lack of awareness) “Am I going to lose my job?” (job security) “What if I don’t have the necessary skills?” (capability issue) “How my day-to-day job is going to change?”

(Job content)

What it actually means “Customer expectations are changing. They want to access our service 24/7 on various devices.

So we have to adapt the way we work and be more effective to deliver better services for them” (This means more opportunities for you to learn new skills and collaborate with others)

Fig. 2: A communication issue

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Participants

Detractors

Characteristics Positively willing to change, strongly motivated and proactive, encourage their colleagues to embrace change

Characteristics A second group formed of employees that act more passively, behave as observers and usually lack motivation

Characteristics Knowledgeable people, working in the organisation for many years, proactive or passive, are unsatisfied with their current role, tend to be reluctant, negatively influencing others

Needs To further develop their leadership skills and to have more voice inside the organisation

Needs Although aligned with the change’s goal, they still need incentive, orientation and a broader vision about what’s happening outside of their industry

Needs To understand the ‘why’ (with the reason for change), guidance and inspiration

Credit: ECD 2019

Promoters

Fig. 3: Three common employee archetypes during organisational change

People experience change in different ways

The project showed that organisations fail to have an understanding of how their employees experience change processes. Interested in identifying people’s behaviours during these transitions, I was able to map three archetypes related to organisational change: ‘Promoters’, ‘Participants’ and ‘Detractors’. See Fig. 3 above.

Commonly, a few of the ‘Promoters’ are accidentally recognised through bottom-up engagement approaches, for example, with the help of change consultants. But this is usually resource-heavy and time consuming. Through these processes ‘Detractors’ are often rapidly dismissed as “hard to engage with” or “actively blocking change”, without creating an opportunity to change assumptions and have difficult conversations.

Because of such frustrating processes for employees, this ‘Journey of Change’ results in long-term consequences for these traditional organisations, which suffer from low talent retention and high turnover3, skills shortages and high recruitment costs.4 The research found that by not putting enough emphasis on understanding how their people are feeling about change, organisations were missing an opportunity to positively engage with a broader spectrum of employees (such as ‘Participants’ and some ‘Detractors’), potentially leading to higher retention.

Overall, these three key learnings demonstrate that trying to ‘manage change’ and approaching this in a linear 82 Touchpoint 11-3

way is no longer sufficient. Organisations need to deploy more flexible approaches to enabling change that create spaces for greater openness, allowing employees to be heard and involved in the end-to-end process. As service designers, we can help address this significant matter.

Creating a culture of change agents: How and when service designers can best support organisational changes Designers are already working alongside change consultants to find new ways to support both organisations and their employees through the process of change.

To further inspire practitioners, I would like to suggest three insightful methods that emerged from ECD: 1) Make space to prioritise cultural change

How? Help set the scene for change by creating greater

visibility of how employees understand and feel about the change.

Tool: The ‘ECD Change Index’ is an online assessment tool that seeks to uncover employees’ recognition of the reasons for change (the ‘why’) and their expectations, and identifies effective communication channels. It is composed by a series of 14 open, multiple-choice and likert-scale questions, making use of qualitative and quantitative methods to come up with insights that can be identified at scale.

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Benefits: The data collection activities uncovers employees’ ‘invisible’ feelings, and analysis of the results enables organisations to identify more effective communication media. It also offers an evidence-based approach to persuade the C-suite for making space for cultural change, informing and prioritising actions. In addition, by going through this process, employees can be engaged from the beginning, passing on the message that their views matter and are really taken into account.

2) Create a sense of purpose to develop positive emotional connections

How? By understanding how employees feel about

the change, organisations are in a stronger position to respond to employee concerns and identify ways in which to support them through the change process. By involving them early, employees can better understand the role they can play, creating a greater sense of purpose.

Tool: Storytelling is a powerful mechanism to engage employees. For instance, offering curated content such as case studies that are in-line with the organisational change objectives can broaden employees’ perspectives about the importance of the change. Moreover, trainings about the language and tone-of-voice line managers use to communicate with their teams5 is another way of involving a particular group of employees in creating more inspiring stories.

Benefits: Start approaching employees in a more personal way. By recognising that different groups of people (e.g. different teams or hierarchical levels) experience change differently allows organisations to take an approach that doesn’t assume one-size-fits-all.

3) Build an on-going community of change agents How? Encourage organisations to actively listen to

their employees and enable them to have a stronger voice. Make use of existing physical and digital tools and adapt them accordingly.

Tool: ‘Co-design change workshops’ was a new tool identified as a collaborative approach to involve employees in cross-disciplinary teams, giving them the space to test and experience what a particular change could look and feel like. Support them in envisioning how they are going to go through the changes, together.

‘Future wheel’, speculative design and ‘What if’s’6 could be great techniques to accomplish this.

Furthermore, encouraging them to share this on the organisation’s social network to show how they are adapting to new ways of working can make changes visible and attractive for other employees.

Benefits: Create a social space for employees to start thinking about their own needs for change, motivating and inspiring their visions about the possibilities that the changed environment could bring.

From ‘managing change’ to ‘creating a culture of change agents’ The “Employee-Centric-Design” project aimed at identifying and enlightening practitioners about ways to better support organisations to create cultures in which employees have a greater voice and are valued as whole individuals. During times where change is a constant, engaging employees not only at the start of organisational changes, but as an on-going activity, can increase their sense of ownership in the change process and stimulate organisations to become more peoplefocused, flexible and transparent in their practices.

1 [Unpublished master’s project] Rozenbaum, K. (2019). ECD: EmployeeCentric-Design. Service Design Master’s project, Royal College of Art, London, UK. ECD was a project developed throughout eight months in 2019 at the Royal College of Art that continued as an exploratory initiative. It investigated different large traditional organisations from the public and private sector, and included 15 in-depth interviews with employees from different hierarchical levels, and more than 12 interviews of immediate ‘influencers’ of organisational changes: professionals from consultancies, coaches and leaders inside organisations.

2 This traditional organisations have a rigid structure, are departmentalised and highly hierarchical. They operate in a way in which decisions are often top-down and quite slow to be approved, and therefore are difficult to change.

3 Based on primary research conducted as part of the ECD project, it was identified that organisations lose talent due to constant delays during organisational change, lack of autonomy and opportunities to learn and grow inside their current organisation. Emerging talents tend to leave to join other companies that already have new ways of working.

4 Sources: Readie-Nesta Report 2018, Deloitte 2018, Work Institute Report 2018.

5 Working together with training coaches and using techniques such as Nonviolent Communication could be interesting approaches to explore with line managers, To know more, you can read the book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships (Nonviolent Communication Guides), by Marshall B. Rosenberg.

6 To learn more about these tools, please visit www.mindtools.com and www.servicedesigntools.org

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Tools and Methods

Mirrors Were Not Made for the Blind ‘Empathic Intervision’ for systemic empathy in service design Whereas a lot has been written about the usefulness of empathy and when to practice it in service design, very little is said about the actual practice of applying it. This article will introduce practical, in-depth, science-informed, actionable and verifiable tools for the practice of empathy as it is relevant to service design.

Dr Lidewij Niezink is an empathy scholar and practi­ tioner and co-founder of Empathic Intervision, holding a PhD from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

She develops evidence-based interventions and education for diverse organisations and writes and speaks on empathy for scientific, professional and lay audiences.

Dr Katherine Train is cofounder of Empathic Intervision and Empathy Facilitator for Design Thinkers Academy, South Africa. She researches, develops and presents training on empathy, wellbeing and professional development.

Her current projects are with human-centred designers and service design in healthcare.

86 Touchpoint 11-3

Explicit versus implicit empathy education Empathy is explicitly advocated in service design. It requires personal transformation – from having a focus on oneself to holding space for both self and other. Empathy guards against interpreting the user’s experience through unacknowledged preconceptions, stimulates creativity and guides a nuanced understanding of others.

The specifics of empathy education are however often left to chance. While empathy is emphasised through doing research and interviewing and observing clients, what is lacking is instruction on how to do this in a specifically empathic way. Empathy as a skill is an embodied and experiential practice. A cognitive description does not suffice. At best, its potential remains untapped. At worst it is misinterpreted, and preconceptions of service designers overshadow the experiences of users, resulting in

superficial empathy maps and personas.

The resulting design could lack inno­ vation or be irrelevant for the users’ needs. Equally, it might provoke resistance amongst users if they feel unheard.

This article describes a systematic method­ology, called ‘Empathic Intervi­ sion’, to integrate empathy in design.

For this issue of Touchpoint, we describe the methodology as it relates to change management.

Systemic empathy enhances service design The skilful and systemic application of empathy is useful throughout the design process and provides universal skills applicable to all interpersonal interactions between multiple stakeholders. Service design applied to change management magnifies the complexity of interpersonal dynamics. It requires motivating, recording and understanding a complex array of perspectives of change agents,

tools and me thods

teams and users. Practitioners design to prepare, equip and support individuals to successfully adopt change.

Design solutions move an organisation from a current state, through a transition state to a desired future state.

Organisational change processes are notoriously problematic, with employees reluctant to change habits. It is therefore crucial to empathically understand individuals in the context of changing groups, current needs and perspectives, as well as responses and needs in transition.

Pitfalls of unskilful attempts at empathy We have observed a number of pitfalls designers fall into during service design facilitator training as well as in real-life change processes.

Directing towards a preconceived outcome

Preconceptions and biases determine outcomes if they are not explicitly addressed. Designers may avoid the big ones, but subtle ones, or those involving personal fears and anxieties, are more insidious.

Doubt about one’s performance, confirmation bias and anxiety about time constraints are commonly observed to cause a designer to direct outcomes.

Cultural biases may be deeply ingrained and therefore rendered unrecognisable. During a change project, a new member of a team attempted to communicate her view that the organisational processes were inefficient due to unquestioned cultural habits. However, the team failed to hear her or to evaluate a potential bias.

Breakdown in team cohesion

Habitual power dynamics and conflicts of interest form in interpersonal interactions, unless addressed.

Compromised interpersonal dynamics are common in teams and are also observed amongst stakeholders and between researchers and users. In change management situations where teams are likely to be dissolved and reformed, such issues are brought to the foreground and are unstable. Team members tend to listen without actively hearing what others are saying.

The team working on the change project introduced above were unable to hear her new professional insights.

Not feeling heard, she withdrew, refusing to come to meetings, and considered looking for another job.

Avoiding difficult experiences

Significant insights about user needs are rare. Personas that record the ‘already known’ – even when thorough and expansive – lead to ideation which lacks true innovation. Difficult emotions of the interviewee often steer or persuade an interviewer towards safer ground.

Through active and reflective listening, the designer can help to surface the deeper needs, thoughts and desires that are the cause of these difficult emotions.

In addition, people mimic each other’s emotional and experiential states, leading to unconscious emotional contagion. Unless vigilant, designers are prone to confuse who is the true originator. Needs attributed to the client or user may in fact be the unacknowledged needs of the service designers themselves.

A lack of self-awareness, the inability to separate the experiences of self and other, the inability to really hear the other and the inability to take their perspective lie at the core of these failures.

Empathic Intervision as a systemic practice of empathy A recent meta-analysis shows that formal empathy training programmes are effective1 . Empathic Intervision is such a programme, and aims to help groups or teams to engage beyond cultural differences, to listen and hear each other’s experiences, thoughts and feelings about a topic, and to identify and take the perspectives of others.

Empathic Intervision skills are applied to capture multiple perspectives of current and desired future states. The programme is particularly interesting for change management because it

1 Teding van Berkhout, E., & Malouff, J. M. (2016). The efficacy of empathy training: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials.

Journal of counseling psychology, 63(1), 32.

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Self-empathy Intention-setting

Empathic creativity Actionable outcomes

Reflective empathy Mutual understanding

Kinaesthetic empathy Connection with others

Imaginative empathy Diversifying perspectives

The process of Empathic Intervision and its outcomes

addresses the human side of change through the experiences of multiple stakeholders. 2 Empathy is applied as a means to an end, not an end in itself.

Five layers of empathy and their application In Empathic Intervision, all empathy starts with self-empathy. The empathiser directs their attention to their own inner experience to gain awareness and understanding of their current inner state. This creates self-awareness of biases and preconceptions and aids the suspension of judgment. It ensures that what the designer perceives to be part of the other is not in fact a projection of self. A participant in a self-empathy training realised that she could ‘download’ and experience the relevant emotional and mental state for a specific interaction.

each other. Empathy is more than a mental process.

While thought about with the mind, it is experienced and expressed through the body, specifically in the muscles, heart and nervous system.3 Kinaesthetic empathy aids designers to embody previously unknown client experiences and sensations. A concrete example would be where participants mirror each other’s movements. Physical synchronisation is the aim. This refines self-other differentiation – a sense of where the self stops, and the other starts.

Reflective empathy enables the clarification of

Kinaesthetic empathy – the capacity to participate in somebody’s movement or sensory experience of movement – aids in making a connection with others and creating an awareness of how people influence

problems and intensified listening through literal and advanced reflective dialogue. Effective listening is more than directing one's ears toward another person, and is hard to maintain. To listen empathically is to attentively lean in to the other, with a willingness to be changed by what one hears. It requires directing full attention toward all that the speaker is saying, gesturing and implying. When completely opening up to what the other is expressing, while

2 Nixon, M. M. (2014). The phenomena of change: A qualitative study. Journal of Business and Behavioral Sciences, 26(2), 39–57. [online] Retrieved, December 5th 2019, from http://asbbs.org

3 Schmidsberger, F., & Löffler-Stastka, H. (2018). Empathy is proprioceptive: the bodily fundament of empathy – a philosophical contribution to medical education. BMC medical education, 18(1), 69. doi:10.1186/s12909-018-1161-y

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tools and me thods

Empathy is more than a mental process. While thought about with the mind, it is experienced and expressed through the body.

refraining from judgment, interpersonal cohesion is maintained, and preconceptions and biases are contained. Designers notice the superficiality of data collected in habitual interviews compared to the depth achieved when applying reflective empathy.

Imaginative empathy uses imagination and ‘as-if’

acting to understand the perspectives of others and to experience the effects of having a problem explored from multiple perspectives. When empathising, one often asks the question, “How would I experience this person’s situation?” But this ‘imagine-self’ perspective does not provide valuable insights into the experiences of others. The real empathic question is, “What is it like for the other to be in their situation?”

This is an ‘imagine-other’ perspective, and when fully embodied through guided ‘as-if’ acting, aids innovation in empathy maps and personas and provides a check to the limits of one’s empathic accuracy.4

memorable.5 They signify the moment when one realises something is ‘different,’ although one might not fully understand what that means. They are ‘change events’ because they spur empathic action – they energise people to pick up on what is happening and follow through, enabling designers to keep everyone on-board during the change process.

Future developments for education and research Empathic Intervision has been applied and studied in human-centred design facilitator training. After a three-year pilot phase, it is now being implemented and researched in an organisational change process within a national NGO in South Africa. The pilot shows that Empathic Intervision creates awareness of empathy shortfalls and provides a benchmark for potential skill development. The practice brings cohesion to working groups and participants repeatedly express surprise at biases brought to awareness and possibilities to move beyond them. A critical comparison with other methods of empathy training is recommended in fu­ ture research. In order to do this, training needs to be accompanied by pre- and post-mixed method interven­ tion research to measure efficacy and applicability.

Empathic creativity gathers insights into a guideto-action. Empathic creativity is a direct result of the aforementioned empathic practices. At any time during change management, the designer can be confronted with ‘significant change events’ which are particularly intense, meaningful and

4 Ma-Kellams, C, & Lerner, J. (2016). Trust your gut or think carefully?

Examining whether an intuitive, versus a systematic, mode of thought produces greater empathic accuracy. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 111.5: 674.

5 Elliott, R. (2010). Psychotherapy change process research: Realizing the promise. Psychotherapy research, 20(2), 123-135.

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Service Design and Agile: A Seamless Symbiosis A successful case in the retail industry Service design and agile practices are leading approaches to create and deliver value. Here, we present a successful case where both approaches accelerated the implementation of new service experiences, supported nation-wide scalability and created a new organisational culture.

Raphael Sousa is a hybrid senior designer and agile technologist at Designit, originally from Brazil.

He is an instructional design specialist and has collaborated with the World Economic Forum in a project to formulate new public policies for 4IR emerging technologies adoption through design-led processes. raphael@sek.com.br

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Process of artefacts simplification

Context Service design has started to go main­ stream. Organisations in all sectors are developing the discipline internally to permeate their current initiatives.

Organisational objectives include remaining relevant in the digital era, keeping on track with evolving customer behaviours in a continuous, fast-changing society, and anticipating potential new competitors that are not necessarily in the same industry.

As a consequence of the organisational need to be more agile and adaptable, service design is facing some challenges in terms of implementation: How to accelerate the time to market of its interventions? How to scale? And how to

support a permanent transformation? In contrast, agile methods tackle problems in a fast, lean and flexible way. According to the 13th Annual State of Agile survey1 , 63 percent of respondents consider delivery speed and time to market to be the real benefits of the adoption of agile.

In 2019, we teamed up with the leader in retail commerce in South America, which has more than 2,600 stores across the continent. In Colombia, the company used to operate stores with a non-standardised sales and operating

1 https://www.stateofagile.com/#ufh-i-52125190913th-annual-state-of-agile-report/473508

tools and me thods

model, which led to diminished in-store customer experiences, operational inefficiencies and growth rates beneath expectations. Our challenge was to design an internal sales enforcement programme that could enhance the customer experience and increase sales.

Focus and alignment To understand the challenge in-depth and define an interesting scope, we started the project by gathering as much information as possible that was available regarding the programme axes: people, processes, tools and communications, and by visiting stores as researchers and mystery shoppers. We used in-the-field research methods (shadowing, guerrilla interviews and participative observation) to map the in-store customer experience and understand the processes that impact the experience. The purpose was to identify the exchange of value between people in the sales process.

It was a complex task to align expectations and motivations from different departments around a common focus. To tackle this, we focused on objectives that all stakeholders must consider important, such as helping employees give effective feedback and enhancing communication. The findings and insights guided us to reshape the scope to address the employee experience as well as the customer service experience.

Human-centred process and artefacts After defining the scope, we focussed the project on two stores, and defined success factors and KPIs to measure and evaluate the results of the interventions. The two stores were chosen after careful evaluation. We used the Pareto principle as the main criterion to select an environment in which to implement the project. Then, we started the project preparation, co-designing all the dynamics (ceremonies, warm-ups exercises, etc.) and artefacts (user diaries, pitch cards, etc.). We co-designed a new employee and customer journey based on strengths and improvement opportunities identified. To meet

sales and operational staff expectations, including the participation of people that had participated in many similar projects with a high resistance to change, we adapted the project artefacts to their simplest expres­ sions, in order to facilitate their usage and adoption.

In the employee journey, we leveraged the scrum pillars (transparency, inspections and adaptation) to co-create ceremonies such as daily stand-ups, iteration reviews and retrospectives, in which employees could gather and support each other to boost morale, evaluate the team performance and adapt the sales strategy. With all resources and dynamics ready, we launched the pilot project, inviting store staff to an on-boarding session. The key to empower and transform people’s behaviour is to explain the ‘why’ in the right way, and involve them from the beginning.

Outcomes and learnings After three one-week sprints, we reshaped the sales enforcement programme into a sales culture that would impact the workflow of 900 people in the sales staff and management chain. We identified an important learning issue: tools and methodologies are not rigid structures and must be adapted or hacked to fulfil both project and human needs and expectations.

To support the challenge to scale to 120 stores, we converted the final journeys into a video journey to facilitate its distribution and better support people in their learning process. The biggest outcome of the symbiosis between service design and agile was that in a short period of time, we could help people in an iterative and user-centred way and understand their value and role within the organisation and value chain. This resulted in boosting morale and reducing resistance to change. Ultimately, the client encapsulated all the journey maps, sales protocols and other artefacts into a unified operational playbook that helped transform the employee experience, provide better customer service and drive revenue.

Hacking scrum ceremonies to fulfil project’s objectives

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Storytelling as a Service

It took less than a minute for our stakeholders to disregard two months’ worth of hard work. Halfway through a change management project, we had created an opportunity map that visualised our research. We felt confident the map – meant to help stakeholders prioritise their initiatives – was a prime example of service design.

Lennart Overkamp is a senior interaction designer at Mirabeau, a Cognizant Digital Business. With a background in psychology, he works across the entire design cycle, from user research to conception to prototyping to user testing to implementation.

He has worked on projects in aviation, logistics, manufacturing and global trade. lennartoverkamp@gmail.com

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So why did our deliverable fail to move our stakeholders?

The power of stories What we missed was the emotional appeal to our stakeholders. If people are not convinced emotionally, they continue “arguing with you in their heads.”1 Based on rational arguments alone, clients will not be willing to risk their money or reputation to implement our ideas.

As service designers, we can use storytelling to engage people on an emotional level. Humans are moved by narratives, because they are engaging, meaningful and far more memorable than facts. Stories are how the human mind makes sense of the world.1 Storytelling is not alien to service design: We use storyboards to explain a concept, and dramatic arcs to plot the service experience. And we help people relate to our work by simplifying the complex, visualising the ambiguous and prototyping the intangible. If we combine these skills with a compelling narrative,

the result is a highly visual story that inspires change.

How to tell a successful story I’ve worked on three change manage­ ment projects for the Dutch airline KLM, all focused on the adoption of digital technology. In each project, our design team conducted months of research and co-creation, ideation and testing to craft a visual story that describes a future in which digital solutions support employ­ ees. Our process was not unlike the ‘snow­ flake method’2 by Randy ­Ingermanson: start with a one-sentence story summary and systematically expand. As our under­

1 Fryer, B. (2003, Summer). Storytelling That Moves People. Harvard Business Review. [Online] Retrieved December 10, 2019, from https://hbr. org/2003/06/storytelling-that-moves-people 2 Ingermanson, R. (2014). How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method. DitDat, Inc.

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Proud protagonists of our visual story for KLM Engine Services

Stakeholders provide feedback on the draft storyline

standing of the organisation and the employees grew, we fleshed out the storyline and characters. We visu­ alised each scene in the storyline by creating screen mock-ups and conducting photoshoots with employees.

informal feedback sessions with stakeholders from IT, business and operations. We kept ourselves visible and ap­ proachable in a dedicated space at KLM, free for everyone to walk in, provide input and witness the progress.

A big advantage of storytelling is that it continues to build political support long after the budget for service design has been spent. Self-explanatory scenes come alive and become shared across the organisation.

At KLM Component Services, the product owner went on a roadshow to present the story to all departments, and it became a communication tool for managers as well as a promise to employees.

Employee acceptance If a visual story’s message is to be accepted by employees, it needs to be relatable to them. There are a number of ways to ensure this.

First, the story should be tailored to a homogeneous audience. In one project, we tried to balance input from operational employees, front- and back-office staff, man­ agers and executives across many different departments.

By trying to appeal to everyone, the result spoke to none.

Second, the story should take place in a familiar context. Use correct terminology, realistic work scenarios and known colleagues as protagonists.

Photo­shoots are crucial; KLM employees enjoyed see­ ing familiar faces of colleagues in a future narrative.

Third, don’t go too far into the future. Address immediate challenges first with realistic solutions and sporadically add futuristic concepts for inspiration.

Our story for KLM Engine Services mainly focused on solutions for relatable issues – such as a lack of insight in material availability – but included a few far-out concepts (such as AI inspection). Finding a suitable balance requires thorough research of the organisation’s people, processes, history and culture.

Political support To win the full organisation’s favour, a visual story needs to be co-created. When drafting the storyline, we conducted co-ideation workshops with employees and

From story to reality Visual storytelling is an effective way to translate logical ‘business speak’ into an emotionally appealing medium that fits the reality of end users, builds organisational support and provides the foundation for change.

However, our design deliverables are often too qualitative to be actionable for IT and executives.

To achieve implementation of a change effort, I’ve learned that visual stories should come with an appendix: a structured list of concepts and solutions with marks for desirability, feasibility and viability. This has proven to be effective to determine business cases, prioritise initiatives and set up the necessary architecture.

The storyteller’s part A good story needs a good storyteller. Designers who genuinely care about their audience, avoid misleading communication and embrace the collaborative storybuilding approach will tell the most moving stories.

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Patti Hunt Meet the service designer

Patti Hunt is the founder and director of MAKE Studios, a service innovation company based in Hong Kong. For this edition of the Touchpoint Profile, she had a chat with Jesse Grimes, the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, about her work with multi-national corporations, NGOs and start-ups in Patti Hunt works with multi-national corporations, NGO's and start-ups in the Asia-Pacific region to build innovation capabilities, identify growth opportunities and design new products, services and experiences.

the Asia-Pacific region, as well as the unique challenges posed by practicing service design in Hong Kong.

Jesse Grimes: Your location in Hong Kong must offer a unique and exciting dynamic, with China on the doorstep, yet having a very different business environment from the mainland. How have you been working to further establish an awareness of service design and Design Thinking there, and what have been the successes and challenges?

Patti Hunt: As one of the world’s most well-known cities, Hong Kong has a dynamic that is attractive and exciting.

It’s like a hybrid mash-up of the rest of the world, anchored by a strong local identity, ethic and culture. It has a lively and energetic personality, but it can also be quite challenging, especially from a business point of view.

As we have seen from recent events in the news, the people of Hong Kong are very determined and resilient. They gain a strong sense of identity from working 94 Touchpoint 11-3

hard and overcoming adversity. Hong Kong is a harsh teacher – it forces you into the same dynamic and stretches you in ways you can’t anticipate. There are many reasons to love Hong Kong but being sweet and nurturing is definitely not one of them. When I arrived in 2012, I was quite shocked by the hierarchical ways of working and the risk-averse nature of many people tasked with driving innovation and change in organisations.

I had to quickly figure out ways to navigate these situations, understand the prevailing mindsets and adapt the way I worked as a service designer. Working in mainland China can be even more complex; the way business gets done and the logistics of organising interviews or doing research is not as easy as you’d expect. We have found local partners and ‘fixers’ who can help us navigate and problem-solve whenever we need to work in China. There can also be a big

p ro f i l e

The Service Design Hong Kong conference planning team

Prototyping gets underway at Service Design Hong Kong

difference between how a company does things in Hong Kong and how it does things in mainland China.

While everyone may be aligned on a desire to do things differently, the expectations and interpretation of what that means can differ greatly. When I arrived in Hong Kong, Design Thinking as a concept was starting to be known, but service design was still basically unheard of. There were a couple of pioneers in the space (such as Elaine Ann) with whom we collaborated to help raise the profile of service design. We got a bunch of student volunteers from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and mentored them over a period of eight weeks to improve the local taxi experience and build a local case study. Around seven years ago, I started a local community group called Design Thinking Hong Kong which now has around 3,500 members. We run events each month where the focus is on having fun, learning something new and getting inspired. There is a lot of interest, especially from younger people, who want to change from more traditional career pathways (such as legal, medical or financial), to ones where they can be more creative and experimental. The social aspects of design help people to explore their curiosity and tap into what inspires them. We also run an annual conference called Service Design Hong Kong where we showcase examples of service design and innovation from the Asian region. Now in our fifth year, we examine how the practice is evolving in this part of the world

and what unique opportunities it offers for businesses, governments and communities. We encourage people to get inspired by what others are doing and adapt the practices to work in their own context.

To touch on geography again, I'm interested to hear more about what perspectives shape the local awareness of service design, and what value it can deliver. To what extent are local businesses and organisations aware of our practice, and from whom are they learning?

The Hong Kong government has a Design Thinking programme called UNLEASH that has been running for the last couple of years. The programme is building awareness about the value of human centred design methodologies such as service design. They have started to collect local case studies and are running events, trainings and workshops. MAKE Studios and other local companies are working in collaboration to support these objectives as the practices mature. While service design has become quite well known in Hong Kong’s English-speaking corporate sector, it hasn’t entered Hong Kong much beyond that. Ninety-eight percent of all businesses in Hong Kong are local SMEs for whom service design is a completely unfamiliar concept. Even when attached to more familiar terms such as customer or user experience, the value remains Touchpoint 11-3 95

unclear. This is not something that can be addressed simply by English-to-Cantonese translation. The whole idea of service design has to be disassembled, reframed, re-built and localised in order to be understood.

The workshops that we deliver in Cantonese often have little resemblance to the English equivalent. Common frameworks such as the double diamond are difficult to translate and communicate, so we have to adapt and find new ways to convey meaning and intent.

Community-building is another important part of creating sustainable learning systems and structures and nurturing talent. At Service Design Hong Kong last year, we launched a programme called ‘Design for Impact’ which modelled a systemic approach to solving social issues. We combined NGOs, social enterprises, corporates, subject matter experts, customers, suppliers and stakeholders to explore different perspectives of the same problem. The programme encouraged people to explore the ‘white spaces’ between organisations, people and perspectives to find opportunities for mutual value. This sparked a number of spin-off projects to build on the solution ideas generated.

For those in your practice that have moved from Australia, Europe or North America, what adaptions have they had to make to practice service design in Hong Kong? Are there cultural or business dynamics that are unique to the territory and influence how you run your day-to-day work? If so, what are they?

Everyone who moves to Hong Kong from another country has to adapt the way they apply the practice of service design in a fundamental way. It’s not just the practice, we need to re-examine the philosophy that underpins it and understand the context from which it emerged. We need to be aware of any assumptions and nuances that may not have a local equivalent.

Many people say that the most difficult part of doing business in Hong Kong is an unwillingness to accept the role of ambiguity in business. The belief that there are solutions out there that will fix the problem is reflected in the pressure to prove that something will work before it can be started. We are seeing the language of service design and Design Thinking being used to help people to have different conversations about ambiguity and reframe traditional beliefs about doing business.

Other dynamics at play are the culture of hierarchy.

There is the sense that it has to come from the top in order for it to work. This also reinforces a silo mentality across and between organisations. There is no sense of urgency or obvious reasons to collaborate. This is gradually changing but many grass roots or bottom-up efforts currently fail because of this. There is also a lack of local text books and case studies – many international case studies do not resonate with local people and companies, or use examples that are not relatable. Service Design Hong Kong and our work with the UNLEASH programme is addressing this and we are currently building a substantial library of stories and examples to share more widely in the coming months.

Masterclass collaboration between MAKE Studios and

Service enactments offer a new

Work.Play.Experience

perspective for clients

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Global Service Jam 20 - 22 March 2020 The biggest, oldest and boldest of the three Jams, the #GSJam appeals to everyone interested in a design-based approach to change.

With its broad appeal, it’s a great place to learn – or get better at – a whole set of design tools, methods and mindsets, which can be applied to any project. Or for experienced participants, the unique Deep Jam challenge lets you test your skills against the clock, and against your peers on five continents.

With over 100 Jam locations all over the world, you won’t have to look far to find a Jam site. Or why not start your own?

For more see www.globaljams.org/news

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Service Design as the ‘New Normal’ at Laurea UAS Laurea University of Applied Sciences in southern Finland has adopted service design and co-creative approaches as its strategic emphasis, for both the development of the university’s own processes and activities as well as incorporating them into education and RDI activities.

Both staff and students are expected to embrace service design thinking and apply co-creative methods for developing new activities.

Service design nicely supports the institution’s regional development efforts. Having recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, the global pioneer master’s degree in service design (a business administration degree in service innovation and design) continues to be one of the most popular degrees granted at Laurea.

Good experiences with service design education as well as societal needs have paved the way for academic service design studies on a wider front. All told, service design has become the ‘new normal’ at Laurea.

Besides the full master’s and bachelor’s degrees in service design, the subject forms a compulsory element of every Laurea degree.

Every year, over one thousand students are adopting a design mindset and learn service design as part of their degrees in fields such as business management, 98 Touchpoint 11-3

healthcare management, hospi­ tality management, IT and safety, and security and risk management, just to name a few.

All students get an opportuni­t y to immerse themselves in prac­ tical service design for at least 10 ECTs (equating to about 270 hours of student work), with many com­ pleting even more. The compulsory study units take many forms: Service design courses are run as participatory, campus-based units, as intensive implementations (such as sprints and hackathons), or as full online studies.

One service business manage­ ment student summarised the intensive study unit as follows: “I learned a lot in working in a multicultural team and was surprised to see how much we achieved in such a short time. I am now able to understand things from the service

users’ point of view and know that service design definitely helps.”

Laurea, a long-time SDN Academic member, is regionally well-networked and most learning environments take place in real work-life contexts, based on the ‘Learning by Developing’ study model. This approach is an excellent match with the participatory and co-creative nature of service design.

As a result, the service design implementations focus on applying co-creative problem-solving in real projects for external and internal partners. Students follow iterative processes by researching the service context for deep customer insights, followed by ideation, testing, and finally documenting the prototype for implementation. A large variety of multidisciplinary service design projects have been carried out for regional partners in the past years.

Student team ideating for a design challenge during a Finnish-Belgian partner exchange project

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