Top 4 questions I get about implementing service design—and my big mistakes.

Erika Flowers 🏳️‍⚧️
Practical by Design
9 min readMay 12, 2017

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I’ve spent the last 5 years working slowly on becoming more and more of an embedded service designer after moving from predominantly UX. And with the popularity of the Practical Service Design community, I have fielded a lot of questions from people. After a recent phone call from an organization looking for insights, I figured—it’s time to write up another article on service design culture building.

Jarvis, prepare the blueprints.

As an internal service designer, these questions are based in that context. If you’re wondering from an agency perspective, I am not the best to provide info 😳.

Also if you haven’t seen Avengers: Age of Ultron, the gifs won’t make a lot of sense and I feel bad for you.

1. Where do you start inside the organization?

Service design is a term that no one really understands, but when you explain it, it sort of makes sense. If you go up the ladder high enough, they tend to understand it even better than those down more on the individual contributor rungs. You may talk “end to end” and looking at holistic pictures, and when the higher-ups hear it, there are 2 responses you’ll get:

Sounds great, we should be thinking that way

and

We already do that, don’t we? If we’re not thinking holistically, we should be!

This is because typically, those higher up the ladder do have a bigger picture view. However, that view is managerial, it’s not on the ground level, and not detailed. It’s us on the ground that have the details.

Mistake I made

I went in with the terms, the ideas, selling blueprints like some huckster pitching snake oil, envelopes of rattlesnake eggs, and cheap bridges. The problem was that everyone was busy; their plates were full. There was just no time to listen to some crackpot—me—come in with these new ideas that no one believed in.

My answer

Start bottom up. You start at the bottom of the Sisyphusic hill and roll that boulder, hoping it doesn’t roll down, only that after you get to the top, there’s another hill to roll up.

Implementing service design as a culture is a DNA level evolution that takes generations (measured in quarters/years), not grafting on new body parts. You have to get it in the system slowly as a mutation and evolution. No matter how intelligent your design, this is something you have to do slowly, see how the organization responds, and let your fittest ideas survive, and the others die away.

We all start somewhere. And sometimes, this is how we feel.

2. What if you face resistance?

You will probably face cultural resistance simply by the fact that you’re trying to bring something new that there may not be room or interest for.

Imagine that you’re a software programmer. Everyone is coding in language A, everything is built around language A, and you have language B. It’s cool, fast, slick, and awesome—and you know it can solve a lot of existing issues.

The problem is that everyone is already set up to use language A, we all know language A, language A has got us this far. Why should anyone believe in you and language B? Because you come from the Savannah College of Another B-Language, or SCAB?

The cultural immune system will eat you alive. If you don’t have a way to get them to believe, no one is going to give you a chance. You’ll be overrun by the existing, WORKING methods. Don’t call it the status quo, and don’t insult it. It works. It got us here. YOU didn’t get us here with service design. All that resistance you’re facing, it’s deserved. You can’t just be some service design geek off the street, you have to earn your keep.

That which you fight against fights right back against you.

Mistake I made

I tried to brute-force the service design culture. I talked about it, I reiterated my title in every meeting. I sent people blog posts and books. I stomped around like some giant green service design monster trying to force things that couldn’t be forced.

Someone give me a hand!

And the impact I made was minimal, at first. That cultural immune system, can’t be fought. At best, you can only hope to contain it. It’s built to keep things working, not to allow new elements take over.

My answer

Don’t fight against things. You need friends, especially friends that have already been there and know the system and can help you work your way in. Get that key stakeholder support. Face the facts: service design is new, and you’re probably bringing it to somewhere new. Everything about the situation is new.

Find the stakeholders who like you and are willing to help you figure out how to work as the scientist, not the giant green rage-monster.

A friend in need.

3. How do you get key stakeholder support?

I am glad you asked! Stakeholder support is about one thing, and one thing only: points on the board.

You must figure out ways to get in on little projects, often things that are already underway, and offer what you can. You probably won’t be the leader, and you probably will only get to do a fraction of what you want. But you’ll be a part of the team that delivers the win.

It’s not hard work, it’s teamwork.

Mistake I made

I tried to be solo, tried to show how great I was and how the service designer was there to save the day. This didn’t work, and will never work, for any of us. No one likes a lone hero that won’t integrate with the team. Just like gravity, your feet are pushing down on the Earth just as strong as the earth is pushing back up at you. But I think the Earth has a slight mass advantage.

The answer

I had to learn that there’s no one of us that is as smart or strong as all of us. You have to integrate. Integrate. Integrate. Do whatever it takes. Be a hammer that other’s can use, don’t try and fly down like some Norse god. We are all better off as a set of parts that form a greater machine. Take a page out of your own service design book and be there to provide SERVICE to those around you.

I think this may help.

4. So how did you institute a service design culture

I haven’t. There’s no such thing. There’s only a customer-backed, empathetic culture, and some of us use service design as our toolbelt. There are lots of other toolbelts though, this one just happens to by mine.

We all pick the way we want to work.

The mistake I made

Thinking I could change a culture. I mean, c’mon. In a place with hundreds, then thousands, of people all in a working system. The arrogance in this is staggering and I deserved every smashing I got.

And it did hurt, and it was hard, and it still is. Service design is a hard road to cut. If you’re reading this article, then you already know that. You’re not here to defeat what you think is a broken culture, you’re here to help enhance and add to a working culture that might need a few new perspectives and fresh takes™️ to believe in.

The answer

I don’t have one. Culture’s grow on their own over time based on what makes them up. Be a positive influence, and you may alter the makeup of those around you. Be a disruptive influence, maybe you make some changes, or maybe you hurt your chances.

The core of is—which sadly, this article isn’t going to get into—is that you shouldn’t be trying to be service design backed, you should be trying to be customer success backed. If you’re working with a team on performing and providing service to your customers, it’s hard to go wrong.

Not from Age of Ultron, but close enough.

Erik, These aren’t the answers I was expecting. What should I DO?

I am not sure I can tell you what to do, I can only tell you what I’ve done and seen. I am a wanderer with nothing to give but some life stories and a little advice.

I was too tangled up in service design as a panacea and assuming it was something people wanted to hear about. The only people who want to hear about it are other service design nerds like us.

The working folk that you are with and responsible for delivering success and prosperity to those you serve, they want to SEE it to believe in it, not hear about it, not be cajoled into trying it, not being forced to dance your dance like some marionette puppet.

So what do you DO? You stick at it from the bottom up, you be positively-subversive and slowly integrate more DNA into the system. You merge, you adapt, and you assimilate yourself into the system.

Let your conscious be your guide

Do I have all the answers? Not even close. I came to realize, I was my own marionette, trying to make myself tell a riveting story instead of putting on a riveting show. People don’t want to be told a story, they want to be shown something they can believe in. Then, when they have something to believe in, they’re much more willing to try out and follow your crazy ideas, even if it seemed obvious to you.

Since I’ve let go of forcing service design as a “thing,” I feel a lot more liberated. It’s a way that I work, it’s an ethos I believe in, but it’s not who I am, and it’s not what I do. What I do is use it as a tool to deliver success to my customers.

I’m only 1 day old.

I’m becoming more untangled from thinking that I have all the answers, or that service design can control the culture and people around me. It’s about me letting go of my own strings, realizing that I am my own puppet and can let go of what doesn’t work, and let go of the belief that the things I believe in defines who I am. What I do defines who I am, and what people see.

Every day, I look forward more and more to helping customers and finding my place in the service design career world, so that I can eventually feel free and look down say:

I once had strings, but now I’m free—there are no strings on me!

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