Taming Organisational Challenges in Service Design As service designers, we could talk endlessly about the times our designs were foiled. Not by customers, but by the stakeholders needed to implement the service. Our insights, blueprints and prototypes may fail to stand up to an onslaught of objections. During implementation, our goal warps and cracks until it is Gassia Salibian is Principal at Future-Proof, an innovation consultancy in San Francisco. Her work removes business risks from innovation processes for startups to global corporations. Gassia holds an MBA, a Masters in Architecture from Columbia University, and a BS from MIT. She serves on SDN’s National Chapter Board. gassia@future-proof.co
Alexandra Pratt is a design strategist helping clients create powerful brand experiences. Having worked across sectors — education, healthcare, finance, and tech — her versatile toolkit brings customer-centred strategies to life. She holds an MBA in Design Strategy from California College of the Arts and a BA from NYU. alexjean@gmail.com
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barely recognisable, diminishing the value of our efforts and of the service. We set out to understand why these objections arise by interviewing 13 senior level service designers across academic, commercial and non-profit sectors, as well as an organisational psychologist. We found four types of objections representing service design risk areas: 1. Legal or Regulatory risks – threaten project feasibility 2. Business and Brand risks – lower revenues 3. Operational risks – increase costs of doing business 4. Organisational risks – spur conflicts among team members 5 %
Interestingly, nearly 70 percent of projects suffer from organisational issues. In response to this, we developed a set of tools to help service designers with some of the most challenging aspects of teambuilding and collaboration. “The essence of team building is ‘ingroup/out-group’,” says Reza Ahmadi, an organisational psychologist.
Operational
9 %
Organisational 18 %
Legal Business/Brand
68 %
Types of Risks in Service Implementation
