Design Within Organisations Needs Sustained Thinking and Doing Great service design is all about designing a service so it is useful and desirable to customers, while also making sure the service is both usable and used during and after its introduction. Achieving this within large organisations needs a healthy and sustained dose of Design Thinking and Doing, along with some timely and Ewan Cameron has over ten years consulting experience working across business disciplines, and has never had ‘design’ on his business card. At Engine Service Design he is blending change management and design expertise to get things to market, faster. He has led projects at Bupa, the NHS, BT, Dubai Airports, Amnesty and Emirates.
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targeted doses of UnThinking and UnDoing. This article tackles how organisations can do this to deliver great services that drive better results. In today’s increasingly competitive world, services must be beautifully designed to connect emotionally with customers, making sure they will both want to use a service, and actually use it. The designed service must then successfully deployed into the organisation in such a way that the service realizes its promised value right away. In large organisations, making sure this happens drives a need for sustained Design Thinking and Design Doing on two fronts. One front is focused on the design of the service itself. This starts by gathering the right inspiration and insights on what customers find useful and desirable, as well as what context the service will need to work within. The second front is about designing the right interventions and conditions needed to successful deploy the service into the organisation itself. Like Design Thinking and Design Doing,
both of these fronts are iteratively and closely linked and must happen together if the service is to be a success. We are in a world where more than half the large companies that made up the UK’s FTSE 100 the last time it peaked in 1999 have since left the index. The pace of change, rising customer expectations, reshaped consumer behaviours and rapidly evolving new business models is driving a need for clients of both small and large companies to start thinking and doing differently (and quickly), and turn to more creative ways to solve their problems. Why is thinking differently important? All organisations consist of groups of people working together to accomplish an objective. Yet the culture and prevailing mindset of large organisations – where individuals default to the thinking that made them successful in the past – can
