Meet the service designer(s): Adam Lawrence and Markus Hormeß

Service Design and Theatre Is Exactly the Same Thing

With the topic of this Touchpoint issue in mind, I met Adam Lawrence and Markus Hormeß of WorkPlayExperience to discuss the connection of service design and theater and to find out more about their unique approach. Interview by Miriam Becker.

Miriam: You come from a background of natural sciences, Markus and you, Adam, come from a background of acting, right?

Adam: It's a bit more complicated: I am a scientist too, originally. A zoologist and a psychologist. Then I worked in marketing and product development. And Markus also has a pretty colourful resumé.

Markus: I started off at university with theoretical physics and then moved over to the dark side of business consulting. (Adam: Darth Vader breathing)

Markus: Yeah. So I have been involved with knowledge - and innovation management and consulting ever since university.

Did you meet in that area or in theatre?

Adam: We actually met on stage. I was director of a musical, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, some years ago. And my band exploded and my assistant director knew a guy who she phoned up and she said: we need a band. And he hadn't got a band, so he built a band.

Markus: Yes, I had two days to form the band and then one week of rehearsals before opening night, which was a tough time scale, but I loved it.

Adam: And he did a fantastic job and since then we have been working together.

How did you come to acting or to theatre then, Markus?

Markus: I am a musician so, ever since school, I have been in bands, and that's where we met. I have been doing theatre slash music slash musical productions a lot of that time.

And then you were so excited about each other that you decided to join forces forever?

Adam: Markus went to Scotland but we kept in contact. After that, we started various projects in a mediaeval club and we organised events together. We also ran a Jazz festival for eight years and various other bits and pieces. That was the start. It came out of theatre and it was always about human experiences. That was the common thread.

Markus: We always kept talking about what we do in our day jobs. I did a lot of process consulting – improvement of heavily technological services inside companies and the toolset that was used in there wasn't quite up to the job. Then, at some point, I stumbled across the service design field. Its toolset was quite young, but I instantly saw the value of it for my daily practice. So we started talking about it. Adam reached the same point from a completely different angle.

Adam: Yeah, I was already looking at where I found theatre in business and I was running a blog about that. Some of the people who were responding to my blog and were suggesting further reading came from the experience and service design field. That’s how I discovered it.

So it just happened naturally that both of you turned towards service design?

Adam: Yes. And it was already something that we got angry about. We got angry about bad customer experiences and ‘Why do they do it like that?’ We believed there must be a better way. And then we found there actually is a way to do this, there are actually people doing it in another way and they are a cool bunch of people.

Markus: And then we realised that there were these three things coming together: the service design, the process consulting and the theatre work. These bits and pieces were at the table when we started talking about our experiences. And we recognised that the language of theatre actually is a perfect way to talk about all this business stuff, without having people learn new words. Especially in a co-creative environment like service design or process design, you get people in for just one or two workshops and you can't always explain to them: what is a customer journey? What is a persona? What is XYZ? Otherwise, you would just be teaching them all the time. You want to get them involved at a low cost so they can share their knowledge. The theatre language provided that tool.

Adam: Everyone knows what a script is, everyone knows what a role is, everyone knows what a prop is and what staging is these words you understand. So you can get straight into working without having to teach people language first.

Adam and Markus in action at the service design conference in Cologne, Germany

Do you see any connections between service design and theatre?

Adam: I think it's the same thing. Other people use it as a metaphor, I don't. I think it's exactly the same thing. What is show business, what is service design? I am doing show business whether I am a singer, a songwriter, a theatre maker, a film maker or a game designer. All these people are trying to set up a process to give people a series of impressions – or experiences, if you like – which, at the end, give them a good feeling. That's what a song is, that's what theatre is and that's what service design should be. And, of course, it goes back into process design but so does film-making, so does theatre. We don’t see all of a theatre, we only see what is on stage. We see the head of a caterpillar, but behind that there is a big, big apparatus. A theatre with thirty actors might have 500 people backstage. And they are working away to make this happen.

A service designer's toolkit

Do you think service design could still learn something from theatre?

Adam: I think they can both learn from each other. Absolutely, yes I do. One of the things that we found by using our theatrical tools is they certainly make it easier to empathise and get emotional about a topic. Service design already does pretty well, much better than most business tools. But we think we can go further using theatrical tools.

There are other things that I don't think service design addresses very well yet at all like dramatic arcs and timing. That’s a big thing. If a film is badly cut, it's a bad film. The same film, better cut, can be rock'n roll. So where is that in service design? Where is the timing?

What do you miss in service design, Markus?

Markus: We should strive for being more open for other disciplines that have already been where we are now: we have a co-creative process, we want to change things and companies. There are people out there who have faced all the challenges that are connected to services before and they have solved some of the problems already: people that were involved in change, people in consultancies. We can learn from them how to work with clients, how to handle the process and how to actually get these ideas implemented.

Adam: Another thing that we discover a lot when designing services, using our weird tool set, is that there is an awful lot that happens between the process design and the experience that the customer has. Whether it’s an internal service or an external service doesn't matter. There is a big human factor, because humans are doing this. I did a nice workshop in San Francisco where we were looking at a hairdressing experience. And we got down to how much difference it made whether the guy greeting you at the door had his right foot 40cm from the door or 60cm from the door; whether he turned in at 30 degrees or not. One of them felt like a greeting and one of them felt like a bouncer keeping you out of the shop. Where is that in the service design process? You cannot specify these details. You can't say “Stand 45,70 cm from the door”. That would be ridiculous; that would be Big Brother.

So what this means is: in service design you need to leave the people room to interpret the service. Just like it’s on stage. I, as an actor, have a script and it's up to me to interpret this script. It's an interpretive art. And I would do it different from how you would do it or how Markus would do it. You have to remember that service design is about a human being making it real - unless it’s a purely online service, and even there humans are involved. They need to have space to be human beings.

And to improvise.

Markus: Yes, along certain guidelines.

Adam: Yeah, give them some help, give them some guidelines and let them be themselves. And give them a chance to practice it as well: when does that happen?

Markus: Look at a really good theatre script like Romeo and Juliet. In the wrong hands you can slaughter the whole thing easily. Some productions I saw were really bad.

Adam: ... some school productions (ahem)...

Markus: But then there are lots of movies with different approaches to the whole thing. They didn't change a word. But you have a really good Zeffirelli* version from 1968 which is really traditional – men in tights – it’s fabulous. And then there is the very colourful, very loud, every-song-a-finale version by Baz Luhrmann** where it’s South America, MTV style. Really, it goes to 11. But it’s the same script. So the question is: do you allow your people to interpret your service design in their way? Where is the limit? What kind of guidelines can you give them?

Adam: Do you give them a script or a mood sheet? What tools are you using?

Which projects are you working on at the moment?

Adam: We are continuing a reasonably long project that we have been running for a couple of years with a large Swiss telecommunications company, where we are helping them to re-think their internal education services and change their whole thrust and emphasis on how they educate inside the company. It's been really exciting and very experiential and they’ve been great to work with. What else?

Markus: JamJam? Jam?

Adam: Yeah.

Markus: After the second Global Service Jam and a couple of other Jams coming up, the demand for that is growing. We are now trying to build a platform. It’s not quite clear which platform it's going to be. We cannot really talk about it right now, but there is going to be something more suitable to the community.

Adam: We try to help people to more use jamming energy and tools in their work.

How does a typical working day look at Work Play Experience? Is there a typical working day?

Adam and Markus: No. (laughter)

Markus: Basically, I get put in a sack and Adam kicks it … Cut that!

Adam: We are quite atypical. We nearly always work at our customer's location. We are totally co-creative in that way. Or we work in the train or in the hotel because we move around so much. So a typical working day is us getting on a plane very early in the morning or waking up in a hotel, going to a client and ‘leaping and screaming’ all day and then we go somewhere else for the next day. But we laugh a lot and we have chickens. That makes it easy.

What advice would you give an up-and-coming service designer?

Adam: You should learn to speak Six Sigma. Seriously, you should understand more about business. This is a business field, not just a design field. And I know that’s scary but it's not hard. There are human beings doing business as well, they might wear suits but they are not scary. And visit an improv-class as well, to get more in touch with the emotional and the human side of service design. Get away from the traditional design skills happening on paper or on camera. Get more into the business skills, the physical skills and more into the human skills. To widen your skill set could be really good. It's the T-shaped person approach.

Markus: And I think in the whole process it’s a lot more about facilitation than it’s about design. You need to be the facilitator of the process, which is a completely different role. You are not a quiet person that takes stuff in and produces great stuff. I mean, you can be a quiet person but you have to lead groups of people and you need to be able to direct them, so that they can actually create a fabulous outcome. You are the facilitator and sometimes you have to be the ‘difficultator’. And it takes the whole range from, as Adam said, the back stage to the front stage.

Adam: One last comparison that’s useful: a theatre director is not usually an actor. He can’t act. And, in the same way, you should remember that the people whom we are designing for know a lot more about their business than we do. And it's very easy to forget that, when you are being brought in as a quite well-paid consultant or designer, you think: ‘I have the wisdom you do what I say.’ But these guys who are working on the front line 37 1/2 hours a week, they know their business backwards. So sometimes a bit of humility is good as well. Like: ‘I got some good questions and some good examples for you, but you guys have to re-design your business and I can facilitate this.’

Editor's notes

* Franco Zeffirelli is an Italian film and opera director and producer. For his 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet he was nominated for an Academy Award.

** The Australian film director, screenwriter, and producer Baz Luhrmann is also known for his films Strictly Ballroom and Moulin Rouge.

Markus Hormeß and Adam Lawrence lead WorkPlayExperience, a service innovation consultancy with a uniquely theatrical approach. With a joint resumé that includes process design, rock musicals, psychology, theoretical physics, product development and stand-up comedy, their mission is to help companies “...put the rock and roll into their services.”

Miriam Becker studied integrated Design at KISD, Germany and Visual Communication at PolyU, Hong Kong. As projekt manager at Service Design Network she is responsible for the Journal ‘Touchpoint’ and the Newsletter ‘Insider’.