Make yourself useful

By Joe Heapy

1.0 - Make yourself useful
Designers have a role to play in addressing business and social challenges beyond the design of individual products and services. Organisations are under pressure to do more for customers and for society and as a result are having to question their own organisations, culture and business models. Why are designers and the practice of Service Design becoming more relevant to a wide range of organisations now? How do we progress our own skills, our ways of working and our ethos to ensure that what we offer is understood to be distinct and of genuine use?

I am going to try to describe a role for Service Design in complex design contexts, demonstrate where Engine has applied itself in this way; how and to what end, and what we have learnt from this work that can be directly applied to our role in the future.

2.0 - I estimate that I am between three and five years away from being really useful.

I don’t yet know quite how I’m going to become really useful. My prediction is based on a change in the nature of problems, an amalgamation of disciplines and a mass of credible stories to tell. My fear is that I may need to step out of Design to be really useful: that I’ll need an MBA or degree in economics or that Ill need to stop designing altogether and start doing. On a scale from ‘useless’ to ‘indispensible’, I consider myself to be fairly useful. Maybe that’s enough.

Those who call themselves Service Designers long to be useful. The practice of Service Design - as we in this room understand it - is both an ideology and tool for achieving usefulness. We have a belief in design and a belief that things can be better. So Service Design is not only about the craft, the science and the creativity like all good designing it is even more so about catalysing change. The challenge for us is how to work our way into positions where we have, and are seen to have, something genuinely different and useful to offer.

I am optimistic for the three to five year estimate of my true usefulness, based on what I see happening around me. The kinds of people I meet, the commissioners of Engine, and the problems and opportunities in business and in the public realm make the conditions right for Service Designers and design thinking to be even more useful.

3.0 - Why Now? Designers have a history of understated usefulness
Around the turn of the 19th Century and into the early part the 20th Century designers made tangible the ideas of artists and writers as a way to embrace or react against the harsh aesthetic of the industrial revolution. In the post war period designers were able serve countries and economies by helping to drive mass consumerism through industrial design. Designers again stepped in to help when the desktop PC and consumer electronics were invented, and a whole new way of designing emerged to make the Internet useful, usable and exciting. Design and designers have helped to make sense of the prevailing technology and of the world at each stage bridging the gap between what’s possible and what’s needed.

4.0 - Things are happening that should make us even more useful
The more complex the system the greater the need for guiding principles and a big idea
The search for greater cost efficiency and for converged offers to customers has led to development of de-centralised, networked systems of delivery. The complexity of these networks increases the need for a unifying big idea, a shareable understanding of the customer, principles, values and clarity of design.

1. Self-critical sector
Everybody is serving everybody else. We are all both providers and consumers of services. As more of us work in the service sector and less of us make goods, the sector becomes increasingly self-critical.

2. Conventional business models are being challenged
The soulless agendas and methods of large corporations are slowly being challenged. This not only means greater support for smaller, local providers but also a reassessment of conventional business models by large corporations. New kinds of enterprise are needed.

3. Paradox of fast, cheap, accessible - and personal
Consumers now want it all. Many service providers work hard to provide high levels of access while keeping costs down and ensuring that customers feel as though they are getting a solution that matches their needs. For example, we are working with one of the UK’s top supermarket chains to understand how they deliver service to consumers who are now far better informed about food.

4. Hybrid people and professions are everywhere
All forms of practical and academic study and disciplines are becoming more cross-disciplined: economics and sociology, economics and behavioural psychology, art and politics, design and business, business and eastern mysticism. There are fewer professionals in the traditional sense and a larger number of overlapping professional affiliations like the Service Design Network.

5. Service sector innovation
Innovation in services not just products is now much better understood, and is understood across sectors. However, innovation and user-centred design methods are less well developed in the service sector.

5.0 - Getting to the need behind the needs of organisations
For Engine this year has been a year for exploring the role of Service Design in catalysing change within organisations that want to design and operate better services. Were trying to make ourselves useful by offering a way of working and applying it. We’ve been lucky enough to be invited into some great organisations. We’ve learnt a lot and we’re still exploring.

Beneath the design briefs are a set of latent needs that our client organisations seem to share. Although these are acknowledged as likely barriers to success on a project there is nearly always nervousness about addressing them. In some cases however, clever clients use this kind of work to subtly highlight deficiencies by demonstrating an alternative approach. (Its interesting how often there are layered agendas woven into service design projects.) I do believe that the design process can address the need for a solution while subtly or blatantly addressing aspects of an organisation great value for money I say.

Beyond the explicit brief we often find that:

1. There is a need for a vision or a big idea. But in many cases this need isn’t articulated at the start. The explicit need that is defined is very specific. It becomes apparent as we work that a barrier to moving forward is that there is no higher-level sense of purpose and therefore no way of making decisions about how something should be.

2. There is a hesitancy to site the problem within its system through a fear of not getting out alive.

3. There is a need to get closer to the experiences of people. Many organisations can articulate this gap in their knowledge and many lack the capability to gather and connect such insight to a design process.

4. Another common need of organisations is the need for permission to work in new ways often despite the prevailing culture and constraints. Much of our work is about legitimising alternative approaches to getting things done.

5. They feel the need to develop the capacity to be more innovative specifically to find new solutions in a world where budgets are decreasing and there are more diverse and complex needs. Often however the push to innovate is from the centre. The requirement and responsibility to innovate is devolved downward which is why many people become sceptical about the idea of innovation.

Service Design needs to be understood in this way - as an organisational challenge. Achieving great services through existing organisations goes beyond designing great services and starts to become about helping to articulate the purpose of that organisation. The need is to address the capabilities of organisations to design and provide services that are useful at scale and in response to complex needs. For many of our clients these services are enabled by technology systems but are delivered through systems of people and things that need to be understood in their complexity.

6.0 - Complexity is an exciting context for design
Today, complexity and the technologies of complexity are the materials of the problems and the solutions. There are big challenges for markets and marketing, for societies, communities, individuals and for the environment. This isn’t to say that things weren’t complex before but rather that there is a greater recognition that simplistic and reductionist approaches tend not to work or are not sustainable. Were trying to address head-on the conditions with which we sustain our quality of life and the fragility of these conditions. We recognise the extremes of lifestyle that exist where in the past it was easier to be ignorant or blind to them.

7.0 - “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong,” wrote American journalist and essayist. H. L. Mencken.
The complexity and ambiguity of even relatively small challenges can be debilitating to teams and organisations as well as to individuals. As designers and as Service Designers I see some value in our fearlessness - often born out of professional naivety - to maintain the view that something that sounds really difficult might just be possible.

As practitioners and academics working in this area you don’t need me to explain the practice of Service Design. The brilliant speakers and break out sessions will take the practice forward over the next two days anyway.

What I wrestle with most is the question of how we make ourselves useful how do we connect the practice of service design with the challenges and the nature of client organisations to help them achieve better services?

This is design for complex contexts in which the solution (if there is indeed a single solution) is often not describable at the start of the process. Designers are used to designing for mechanical and digital systems. Designing for systems of human behaviour requires new tools and methods of working. This has shaped our practice and the range of skills across the Engine team.

8.0 - How Engine works with organisations

What Engine does is most accurately described as the strategic application of user-centred design to services, strategy and organisations. Our projects operate across four levels:

1. Service organisation, capability and culture. Projects that help organisations get better at designing and providing services.

2. Service proposition. The development of new ideas for services to customers.

3. Service architecture. The configuration of the elements of a service and the principles by which it operates.

4. Service experience: The touchpoints and behaviour of a service.

We’ve been progressing up the triangle over the years. This year we are completing projects that span the whole triangle with elements of organisational re-design, development of service management tools and the design of services and interactions.

Id like to tell you about three of the projects were working on this year. I hope that I can illustrate the ways in which we are trying to explore a role for Service Design practice beyond the basics of service design. Ill then show how we have begun to reflect on this years body of work in an attempt to define an offer to service organisations.

9.0 - Barnet

Barnet Council is one of Londons 33 local government authorities. The London Borough of Barnet has a population of about 340,000, is reasonably affluent with a right wing leadership. This is significant as the Conservatives are in the ascendancy in the UK and there is talk of greater autonomy for local government under a Conservative national government.

Just before Christmas last year, their Assistant Director of Strategy approached Engine to discuss an ambitions internal programme he was responsible for planning. The objective is to understand what the role of the local authority should be when there is considerably less money going into local government.

Called Future Shape, the programme began by recruiting 70 people from across the Council and from local partner organisations such as the National Health Service and the Police to form seven working groups each with a different brief. The plan was to propose a set of strategies that addressed everything from how the Council used the properties that it owned to how they offered customer service around transactions with the Council.

Engine was asked to design and facilitate a programme of work to re-design the way the Council commissioned services. Our group was asked to focus on the commissioning of services for the most disadvantaged in the Borough - the one to two percent of people living in Barnet who cost the Council the most money.

It turns out that there is a great deal of consensus about what should happen but the greater hurdle was that there was no clear understanding of what happens at the moment.

Engine developed and ran four sequential workshops to design and prototype a new commissioning model for public services in the Borough with a particular focus on those most disadvantaged in the Borough. They described the objective as the design of a commissioning vehicle. In fact the team changed their view as a vehicle was seen to retain too much of the current way of thinking about commissioning as something that is done by a central body like a Council.

10.0 - Designing an organisation

The workshops structured a process to envision, model, plan and communicate a new commissioning model for services. The process was informed by a review of the literature on disadvantage from which we translated several good pieces of theory into tools. We made sure that the group didn’t stop when they got to the big idea. We facilitated them through a process of detailed design as well as identifying issues around implementation and strategies in response. We also worked with the team to identify people and organisations that are critical to progressing the model and constructed a proposition for each of them.

11.0 - Organisational model built directly from insight

Putting the stories of people actual experiences at the centre of the methodology was really powerful. It did the job of focusing thinking and overriding any objections to change and to collaboration. We worked with low-income families, children permanently excluded from school and young people leaving care who are not currently in employment, education or training. We developed six ethnographic studies with families and individuals. Studies were over a whole day and were undertaken by an Engine social researcher in participants homes and local areas.

With the consultancy OPM we developed life-costings for four families in Barnet. Life-costing is an analysis of the costs to the state of supporting someone through their life. The families we met were expensive. Costs include those for direct service interventions, for example a social worker, legal proceedings and other costs. When you extrapolate forwards you can also estimate the cost to the state in income tax revenue for those who are likely to be what governments call unproductive - or a burden on the state. The ethnographic studies and life-costing were used to develop an insight report and materials for workshops.

12.0 - Modeling the current system

We ran a series of exercises to model how a selection of current systems work in Barnet. The team used a series of techniques including system modeling using Lego. These enabled the group to begin to develop a palette of techniques and signifiers to support the modeling of a new system.

13.0 - The vehicle model sketches

Through a series of exercises the group designed three separate system models to address disadvantage. The three system models reflected different levels of system interaction and Engine brought the models together and worked to refine their design and further imbed the system principles.

14.0 - The vehicle model version 1.0

The resulting single model specifies a top-level framework for citizen interaction and community development. This is supported by seven system platforms, defined by the system principles and refined by platform principles. We went on to develop the features and specification of each platform or capability.

It was important that the group could have a very different kind of conversation and tackle the problem in a very different way. Engine developed the analytical skills and drawing skills of the team as part of the process. And we introduced aspects of system thinking as accessible exercises for the group.

Using the insight and outputs from the group, Engine worked with Barnet to develop a report to be presented to the Cabinet at Barnet Council. This report included a further synthesized model of the Vehicle (version 2.0).

How useful are we being in Barnet?
- We were able to get them further than they could have got through their usual modes of working with each other.

- Most powerfully we kept the service user always front and centre through a range of activities.

- We skilled the team as we went along, pausing to prepare for each next step.

- We also focused on telling a very clear and compelling story at the end. The team were keen that this would look very different from the usual policy report.

- In the next phase well work with Barnet to prototype aspects of the commissioning model. The focus will be on developing an understanding of what needs to happen at the system level. We’ll look to prototype some of the capabilities identified in the model.

It would only be fair to say that despite inviting us to help run this work there was an amount of scepticism at the start from some of those involved from Barnet. As we know there is a constant additional task to convince people to give it a go especially on high profile piece of work like this.

15.0 - The European airport group

We have been working with a state-owned (but operated as a business) airport group in Europe.

16.0 - Developing passenger services with the airport group.

Around this time last year members of the airport group visited Engine in London to meet and to talk through their plans. They had made a proposal to the Board of the Group suggesting that they needed to shift the emphasis in their business from managing infrastructure to managing services; towards seeing themselves as a services business. The Board also felt that their company was behind in investing in services generally when compared to other airports in Europe and globally.

There is a refreshed ambition to be as competitive as other leading European and international airports. The group wanted to raise their scores on a European-wide league table against a set of metrics that measure service across the industry. In essence, they felt that to impact their scores and the overall perception and performance significantly, they needed to improve on delivering services.

The brief from the Board was simple. Confirm that this is a worthwhile objective and come up with a plan. A piece of work was instigated and help sought from Engine to make the case.

When airports talk about their customers they mean airlines and not passengers. This is part of the problem. The operation of an airport is driven by the agreements that the airport has with airlines. This focuses the airport on processing passengers through key mandated stages at the lowest cost, increasing the importance of the design of these elements.

However, a focus on these mandated element means that the total experience for passengers and visitors isn’t well designed. The drive for a change in approach here came through being able to describe the relationship between the performance of passengers, in other words their ability not to mess up, and the overall performance of the airport against its targets. If the airport is useful and usable and responds well to passengers needs then passengers make few mistakes, spend more money and are less likely to miss their flight. This means developing and understanding of passengers in all their diversity and the usability and utility of the airport.

Often the answer to an airports problem is to start again but many airports (including London’s Heathrow which we know well) have grown organically as demand has grown over thirty, forty or fifty years. Radical improvement through capital investment is an ongoing process that spans decades. Service and services on the other hand are far easier and cheaper to develop and adapt.

What this airport group needed was to develop a capability to identify the latent needs of a diverse group of passengers and to iterate the design of services. They needed to improve the ways they implemented and managed services. Developing such a capability and a system level response to passenger service - beyond the basics - was a new idea for them. The programme has had to negotiate the particular culture of the company and at a difficult time for the air industry.

We designed the first phase of work with the objective to create an Initial Passenger Services Strategy for the Group. We began by uncovering the needs of passengers and understanding their business from the inside. We looked to identify what could be designed in the broadest sense to help the Group achieve recognition as a service brand from passengers.

17.0 - Passenger service strategy

The output from the first phase was a document and presentation to the Group board that made the case for a shift to services. The document also described an over-arching proposition that recognised the role of airports for passengers and under which service and services could be developed. The document also described what would need to be put in place as a capability within the Group. I suspect that no other airport group has embedded service design thinking in such a comprehensive way.

The document was presented to the Board in March. They gave the go ahead to implement the strategy. Through the spring and summer of 2009 we worked together to refine the plan that included establishing a Services Development team within their company.

We developed six projects as a second phase. The first project is developing the management tools needed to define, implement and monitor a level of service to passengers and visitors to the airport across services and touchpoints.

There are also five service development projects that address the needs of specific groups of users. We are now working as a team between the Continent and London to deliver this programme of work.

How useful has this work been for the Group so far?

- Made the case for a shift towards passenger services seems possible.

- Given the Board confidence that there is a plan in place

- Made the case to create a team within their company and to develop this team into a Services development function.

- Made the case and release budget for investment in implementation of new service offerings to passengers.

- Begin to develop a capability within the Group through collaboration over a 10 month period with regular exchange visits.

18.0 - What have we learnt so far

Weve learnt a lot about service organisations and there are some things we’ve needed to learn how to overcome:

1. Many companies and organisations look great from the outside but share very similar problems when you get inside.

2. The people closet to the problem will have some hugely valuable unseen perspectives but they can’t always tell you the answer. There is often an expectation that they can.

3. There are many ways to elicit information it depends how you go about asking the question. The activity of designing itself is one form of enquiry that isn’t often acknowledged.

4. We often have a wider perspective on the problem than our clients hence the habit of ‘questioning the brief’ but we lack the detail and a knowledge of the politics. This means holding onto a few principles that you know to be true in any organisation on any service design problem. And it means listening, learning fast and not underestimating the importance of what you don’t know.

5. We often also have greater ambition than our clients and this means there is the risk of answering the wrong questions. Although occasionally the client comes with you and the result is far more impactful than they expected.

6. There are few perfect answers despite everybody willing you to be right and this point needs to be gently made. Its important to frame the answer with some of the complexity of the problem - but not enough to scare people.

7. Much of what we can do can be done by others and the kernel of what we do is hard to describe, hard to teach (which makes people really suspicious of it) and of course its hard to measure.

8. What I think we do in these situation is hold the whole problem in our heads on behalf of the group until solutions emerge and then manage those solutions through a process of compromise to achieve a better than expected outcome for the client.

This is where I think our value lies.

19.0 - SILK

There is now a Programme Manager for the Social Innovation Lab for Kent (SILK).
Kent is a county in the south east of England with a population of 1.6 million people. Kent County Council is seen as an innovative local government organisation and has launched a number of high profile services including its own Internet TV channel. In contrast with Barnet, the approach adopted by Kent County Council is to grow capacity and capability at the officer and community project level through the development of a support service, a network and resources for service design.

20.0 - Social Innovation Lab for Kent

Engine worked with Kent County Council to develop the Lab’s proposition as a support service and went on to run projects under the SILK umbrella and develop design resources and a simple website to support the programme. We also ran design and research projects alongside colleagues from Live|Work and Esro, and one of Engines designers was seconded to work the Lab two days a week.

The aspiration for SILK is to inspire and support change towards an organisation that is better able to listen, respond and adapt to the needs of residents; and one that is able to respond well to a significant reduction in overall funding while improving outcomes. To achieve this, SILK needs to catalyse change at a number of levels from citizen to system and in the most appropriate ways.

Engines development approach acknowledged that these levels couldn’t be influenced simultaneously from the start. A sense of urgency, coherent and compelling evidence, motivation through mutual benefit, and the proposal of practical strategies and solutions are all necessary as part of the process of change at each level.

Our partnership agreement with Kent County Council finished in July and since then work has continued. One project looking at the bulk-buying of food in a fairly deprived area of Maidstone has been handed over to the community to run with a business plan in place. A new project looking at the re-housing of offenders is being set-up.

Our final delivery to the programme was a training package of seven workshop modules covering areas of practice including service design, user research and managing multi-stakeholder teams to be run by SILK and open to anybody working for the Authority or any other public sector organisation in Kent.

Other local government authorities in the UK have benchmarked SILK. Two have approached the Council for help in setting up a similar enterprise in their areas.

How useful are we being in Kent?

- We helped to conceptualise what the innovation lab could be.

- We develop SILK as a brand in a broad sense with clear underlying values, touchpoints and customer journeys as well as a visual identity. There is nervousness and negativity around the use of the word brand. But a clear brand is an important part of effective communication of a new idea. SILK it now its brand. The lab could stop doing practical projects altogether and still have an impact on ways of working across the Council.

- We’ve been using our experience and expertise as consultants to a range of organisations in a range of sectors as well as our own experience of running Engine to help SILK move from start-up to growth through business planning. Were also support a process to scope a proposition around the network of innovative practitioners in Kent.

- Transfer of skills in both directions has resulted in a hybrid practice that combines innovation, design, policy-making, community engagement, communications and aspects of change management. This hybrid practice is made accessible through the SILK method Deck.

21.0 - Using a service innovation lab as a catalyst for organisational change

We’ve been working with the team in Kent for over two years and have learnt a great deal in that time about the meeting of two cultures. With the benefit of hindsight we’ve also done a lot of thinking about how given another go at it we’d set the aspiration for a social innovation lab even higher.

Our latest proposal is that a Lab and the components of service design practice can be assembled into a change process that is vision-led and develops the capability of the organisation along the way. Whatever happened to Transformation design?

Lets remind ourselves of some the latent needs of organisations. The need for a vision and a purpose, the need to site the problem within the system, the need to get closer to people, the need for legitimacy and permission to work in new ways and the need for capabilities and capacity to do so.

The project plan for the creation of a Service Innovation Lab should form the initial phases of a broader process of change for an organisation. Such a Lab should be understood to have a high-level objective to become the change that it will first demonstrate and model. Such a Lab could be seen as having a life-cycle that extends beyond its own development programme and sees its role transition through: demonstration, facilitation, incorporation and diffusion or mainstreaming.

22.0 - The cumulative cycles model of design-led change or the Hoops model: Catalyzing organisational change through service design

The model captures the proposition that user-centred service design projects coupled with ethnography and in the right organisation can catalyse change within a service organisation. Our challenge is to get beyond the demonstration projects.

The Hoops model describes a development programme that begins by using ethnography to develop insights on existing services. It proceeds to create the conditions for a system level planning process and vision, and uses new capabilities to propagate further development and organisational change.

Here’s how it works:

- The model shows work beginning with small projects to demonstrate the impact of ethnographic work on the way professionals view services and the people who use them. This is powerful stuff in our experience.

- Each project builds the case for the next. Insight projects create opportunities and an appetite for service design. These projects identify the need to do more projects and therefore to develop a capability and capacity.

- A suite of projects and new outcomes demonstrates the value of new approaches at a higher level. And importantly such work begins to describe the gaps between what people want and the ability of the system to enable this to happen.

- Each level creates evidence and functions of the organisation.

- It becomes possible to use new evidence and new capabilities to remodel the system.

- New capabilities are then applied to change the system through the design of systems and services.

23.0 - Barnet

Future shape at Barnet Council. Phase one and two

What’s important is that an organization is prepared and able to adapt. In the case of Barnet Council the ambition is there. The current cash crisis in government has heightened the need to address existing delivery-based models of commissioning and explore co-production and new sectors and investors. It is believed that whichever government we have in the UK after the spring, Local Authorities will have greater autonomy.

24.0 - European airport group

The work with the airport Group can be understood as a rapid journey up the left hand side of the model to make the case at the top. Were now building a capability as we go heading down the right hand side.

25.0 - SILK

The impact of the style of leadership in an organisation is very significant. In Kent the approach is dissemination from the middle downwards. What’s lacking to date is the connection up to the system level. An area of weakness for SILK is that it doesn’t gather evidence from its work systematically.

26.0 - Back to the challenge of being useful

What the Hoops model proposes is way in which the kind of work that we all do can be assembled into a more significant process. We can map many of our case studies on to this model but we still cant demonstrate the impact of this model if you were to work it through from start to finish. However, this year we have all felt a little bit more useful and we are scoping several pieces of work that we hope will allow us to apply what we’ve learnt about design-led change.

Being useful is about creating great services but it could also be about supporting the organisations that deliver services at scale to get better at listening, responding and adapting. Many businesses and organisations that we consume today wont be around much longer if they cant figure out how to make themselves useful in peoples lives. This is fundamental to good design. Getting beyond basics means getting beyond the assembly of the tools of the trade and learning how to apply them with conviction; and creating the conditions within organisations to get beyond blue sky and demonstration projects.

Service Design has no superior view on whats right for organisations, but at Engine we’ve had direct experience of catalysing significant change through the work weve been part of. Its these large organisations that influence quality of life the most both positively and negatively and therefore it feels like a worthwhile endeavour to help them out as best we can.