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87 / Service Design: Methods & Tools that Improve the User Experience

Hosted by Paul Gebel

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marc-stickdorn-and-adam-lawrence-podcast guests

Marc Stickdorn & Adam Lawrence

More than Metrics; WorkPlayExperience

Marc Stickdorn is the co-founder and CEO of More than Metrics, a start-up creating software for service design, such as Smaply. He helps organizations sustainably embed service design in their structures, processes, and culture. He developed the approach of Journey Map Ops, a customer-centric management approach for agile organizations using digital journey maps as a visual management tool. He is the editor and author of several award-winning books and academic papers on service design. Marc regularly speaks at conferences on service design, entrepreneurship, and Journey Map Operations. With a background in strategic management and service design, he teaches at universities and gives executive courses, and pursues a Ph.D. in design science within information systems. Marc lives in Innsbruck/Austria, surrounded by the European Alps, and loves traveling with his family, the outdoors, and good coffee.

Adam Lawrence is a design educator and author, as well as a comedian, actor, and singer with a background in psychology and the global automotive industry. For years he has used expertise gained in the world of theater, film, music, and storytelling to help organizations become more creative and innovate better. Adam is co-initiator of the Global Service Jams, the world’s biggest co-creative design event, as well as co-author of the top-selling books This is Service Design Doing and This is Service Design Methods. Adam is an adjunct professor of service design thinking at the world-class IE Business School in Madrid, was one of the first SDN Master trainers, and has been recognized with the Core77 prize for service design. Based in the European Union and working for organizations worldwide, he is a founding Partner at WorkPlayExperience. A specialist in facilitation, he loves to help people better collaborate and create more value. Adam enjoys nature, riding his classic Japanese motorcycle, and dressing up in medieval clothes to hit his friends with sticks.

Service design is not new; in fact, today’s guests Adam Lawrence and Marc Stickdorn have been writing and teaching service design for more than a decade. But even in that time, the question of its precise definition remains, as Adam points out, “very active.”

It “is really the design process around any service that is the route or the basis for any experience,” Marc offers. It looks at both the customer experience and what an organization needs to do to actually achieve the customer’s desired outcomes.

Adam’s definition is more succinct, but no less thoughtful: “Service design is what service designers do,” he says. That sounds trite on its face, Adam admits, but there’s a good deal of thought behind it. Citing friend and colleague in the field Mauricio Manhaes, Adam adds, “We should spend less time defining service design and more time exposing people to it. Because often you don’t get it until you’ve actually tried it.”

So in their work – including delivering a pair of workshops and keynote addresses at ITX’s Product + Design Conference 2022 – Adam Lawrence and Marc Stickdorn are exposing audiences to service design thinking, methods, and tools “so they understand it in their gut before they understand it in their heads,” Adam says.

Tune in to catch Paul’s entire conversation with Marc and Adam, as they –

  • Explain how service design tools and methods help reduce the risks associated with product development
  • Describe trends in service design, from the early days spent convincing people that services are useful to the shift from a hands-on, tactical approach to a more strategic mindset
  • Provide examples for how you can use service design tools as part of your refined approach to organizational management

The ITX Product + Design Conference 2022 is coming to Rochester, NY on June 23-24; get your tickets here.

Paul [00:00:19] Hello and welcome to Product Momentum, where we hope to entertain, educate, and celebrate the amazing product people who are helping to shape our community’s way ahead. My name is Paul Gebel and I’m the Director of Product Innovation at ITX. Along with my co-host, Sean Flaherty, and our amazing production team and occasional guest host, we record and release a conversation with the product thought leader, writer, speaker, or maker who has something to share with the community every two weeks.

Paul [00:00:43] Hey everyone. Paul Gebel here. Today’s conversation is really special for a couple of reasons. First of all, Marc Stickdorn and Adam Lawrence have been driving the service design conversation for over a decade, and we’re going to dig into their body of work and bring a lot of it to light in really practical ways that you can put to work right away. The second reason is that they are two of four keynote speakers at our upcoming ITX Product and Design Conference taking place here in Rochester, New York, June 23rd and 24th, 2022. Find out more at ITX.com/Conference2022. Hope to see you there.

Paul [00:01:18] Well hello and welcome to the podcast. Today we are really excited to be joined by Marc Stickdorn and Adam Lawrence. Marc is the co-founder and CEO of Smaply, the first dedicated journey mapping platform, and Adam is the co-founder of WorkPlayExperience. Together, they co-wrote This is Service Design Doing. Adam and Marc, I’m so excited to talk to you today. Welcome to the show.

Adam [00:01:37] Great to be here. Thank you for having us.

Marc [00:01:39] Thanks for having us.

Paul [00:01:41] Absolutely. Absolutely. So I’d love to share my definition of what I perceive service design to be as a product manager. I’m a bit of an interloper in the space, but from what I’ve gathered and begun to learn about your body of work and your thinking, it seems like service design is really the design around the design. It’s the customer journey maps, the persona. It’s not necessarily the thing that people see as the final product, but it helps the humans that are building the thing get to that final destination. How close am I to what you would perceive a working definition of service design to be?

Adam [00:02:12] Well, that’s a new one. I’ve never heard it defined that way before, so that’s great. And this is, of course, as service design is perceived as being very fairly new, it’s not, but it’s perceived as being very new. The question of a definition is a very active one. And in fact, in our book we compared, I think, 11 or 12 different definitions and said, “this one is our favorite,” but even that’s not really perfect. Do you wanna have a go, Marc?

Marc [00:02:35] Yeah, and perhaps, first I’ll say, like, in our first book 12 years ago, we already stated that if you asked ten service designers about a definition, you’d probably end up with 11 different definitions because there’s not the one agreed on. Adam will do a very short one, so I will try to elaborate a little bit. For me, service design is really the design process around any service that is the route or the basis for any experience. And it actually goes by many names. There are many names that actually describe exactly the same stuff and sometimes it’s called experience design, but we usually say that you can’t design directly an experience, but you can design a service, an organization, and that might include physical products, that might include spaces, that might include technology, your website, and so on, with the intention to create a certain experience. So service design looks at both the front stage, what does the customer experience? And the backstage, what does an organization needs to do to actually achieve this desired outcome for the customer?

Adam [00:03:39] I think that overlaps with your definition is that this is an intensely, almost automatically, a co-design approach. We design with people, not for people. And that means that often we’re thinking very hard about how to make the process and the tools accessible so that it’s not restricted to the usual folks who are thinking things out, who have high skill levels of abstraction, of literacy, of presentation and so on, but is much more accessible to the people we’re designing with and for who might include customers, who might include front line staff and so on.

So that’s where this kind of design of the design aspect may come in. My definition is a very simple one. I say service design is what service designers do. And that may sound trite, but there’s quite a lot of thought behind it. And it goes back to what Marc said about how different designers have different definitions of what they do. And also, I’d like to quote a good friend and colleague here, Mauricio Manhaes, who until recently was the head of service design at SCAD, a great school in Savannah. And he said, “we should spend less time defining service design and more time exposing people to it, because often you don’t get it until you’ve tried it.” And that’s really, really important.

That’s one reason why about 10, 12 years ago, I co-founded an event called the Global Service Jam, which is the world’s biggest service design event, where literally tens of thousands of people have had their first experience of service design at this voluntary global hackathon type thing, which happens once a year all over the world in 150 cities or so. So we’re trying to expose people to this so they understand it maybe in their gut before they understand it in their head.

Paul [00:05:12] Amazing. So would it be fair to say that, while I haven’t met many people who claim the title of service designer, I’ve met many interaction designers, experience designers, UX designers, the thing that they are doing is service design in practice, even if it’s not always named that. Is that fair?

Marc [00:05:29] Brilliantly put.

Adam [00:05:30] If you go back to the early years of UX design in particular, you’ll find a description of what’s being done there is very similar, or at least the scope, is very similar to what service designers do today. UX these days is very, very on the screen focus. But it used to be about where do I buy it? How do I unpackage it? How do I transport it home? Which are questions which today experience designers, service designers, and so on would look at.

Paul [00:05:53] Yeah.

Marc [00:05:53] Design is a team sport. And particularly if you look at the diversity of services out there, what a service designer does is we design services in the area of public services. So everything from how do you file your taxes to how do I get a new passport? We apply it to telcos, we apply it to car companies. It has a huge variety in the services we apply it to, and that’s why it also includes always different people and we all play a different part in the service experience. So it’s a team sport where we need all these different expertise.

Paul [00:06:27] Amazing.

Adam [00:06:28] And if you want to make it even more complex, it’s based on a thing, often based on a thing, called service dominant logic, which says that, “well, this pen is a service, my shoes are a service, you know, a piece of software is a service.” So we don’t use the traditional term of service, which is something intangible. A provision, if you like. But we use a much broader term than that because no physical product doesn’t include some kind of intangible service. And no intangible service does not include some kind of physical or digital artifact. So these things blur together very, very broadly.

Paul [00:06:59] Wonderful. Well, that’s a great way to elevate the thinking and I think bring a lot of the hidden hand of design to the fore in terms of the things that keep this body of work that you’ve been focusing on for the past decade plus together. I’m wondering if we could get practical for just a minute and talk about how does service design impact a project? What are the trellis points that we can hang a vine on that look like what a designer in a product team today? What are those tools, what are those experiences that we can look to and say, “this is that service dominant logic in practice”?

Marc [00:07:32] So like any other design discipline, we like to talk about the cool stuff we do. We call them core activities. In service design, we talk about research, ideation, prototyping, and implementation. So implementation is part of the design process. It’s not about creating great concepts on paper then pass it on to someone else, like, “you make it real.” A design is finished once we had an impact on the customer or the employee or the citizen or whatever we chose. Wnd we jump between these activities as needed. And in these different activities we use different tools and methods. So there’s not the one service design process, but there are different tools and methods within these activities that can be used in certain contexts, in certain situations. So it’s never a question if we do a service design project, yes or no, but it’s actually for any project you can decide, “oh maybe this activity is useful here,” or, “using this tool might be useful,” or doing some research activity is really valuable.

Marc [00:08:32] And if you want to boil it down, what are the core things you always should be doing and what usually organizations do not enough is actually research and prototyping. So research means really understanding customer needs, behavior patterns, motivations, but then beside the customer and also understanding the organization, understanding employees and employee experiences. And very often the customer pain point is actually rooted in an employee pain point. So we need to fix the employee pain point if we want to have an impact on the customer experience. And the other big topic that is often neglected is the prototyping. So we can prototype services. With physical products there’s no discussion that we need to prototype. You wouldn’t buy a car if it wasn’t prototyped enough. In the end you do crash tests with the car and so and only then when you are absolutely certain that this thing works, then you launch it.

Marc [00:09:26] But for services, for decades, we just planned it and launched it and hope that it works. And that is actually a very risky thing to do. So one idea of service design is we want to reduce risk by understanding the problem and then making sure that whatever we design actually suits the purpose and fits to the pain point we’re solving, the need we’re solving. And then prototyping tries to reduce the risk of launching something that in the end, nobody wants.

Adam [00:09:54] I’d like to link those two things together, actually, in terms of a third really important thing which we need to do to get service design right. And by the way, back in, I think 2018, in their report, The Business Value of Design, McKinsey pinpointed these three things as being very, very important to get fairly massive business benefits from working in this way. Often when people hear the word research, they think it’s a thing you do at the beginning of your project to decide what to do. And prototyping, they think, is a thing you do at the end of the project to validate what you have done. We reject those definitions of these.

Research and prototyping happen in an iterative loop, and iteration is the third thing to get right.  So it’s not a case of doing a whole bunch of research, then a whole bunch of sense making, then having an idea and prototyping it until it works. No, it’s a case of getting out of the building, looking what’s going on out there, trying a couple of things, building some prototypes. They give you new questions, which you might answer with more research or with more prototyping. And it’s an iterative loop of jumping between the activities of research, prototyping, ideation, implementation as you learn your way forward. And this is what reduces the risk. You’re not making big bets anymore. You’re making a portfolio of small bets to learn your way forward in a changing world. And this is why people often come to us as service designers, because their world is changing too fast for linear development techniques anymore. I need a more organic, a more down-to-earth, based on reality, fewer PowerPoint vision statements and more experiments out there in reality, to learn their way forward, to evolve their thinking, rather than dreaming our way forward.

Paul [00:11:33] I love the way that you brought that to a higher level. There’s no recipe that I heard in there. There’s no checklist that you can say, “this is how you implement service design in your agency, steps one through ten and voila you are a service designer.” What I heard is you show up as a mindset, as a framework of thinking about, who are the humans that we’re going to be impacting, what are the ways that we can de-risk a project timeline, but also the experience to the people we’re hopefully improving the world for in the back end? And I think the thing that I heard most in that project mindset of how an agency or the service designer in an organization can bring this to the table practically today is by taking that, I hate to use the phrase old school, but taking that linear thinking out of the conversation and starting to look for those opportunities to place those small bets that you mentioned, to research, prototype, iterate, but not in phases as a continuous loop.

Adam [00:12:25] Absolutely. In fact, we don’t use the word phase at all in our work. We say there are activities that you’ve gone between. Sure, early on, quite a lot of that mix is going to be curiosity, looking around, getting out of the building, what you might call research. And later on, more of it’s going to be prototyping, implementation activities, but you’re still doing research while you’re implementing. You’re trying stuff while you’re researching. Because one of the best ways to research is to change something and see what happens. Prototyping has been called research of the future. So these things all overlap really, really well. And I think this is an interesting approach to people. And I want to point out, by the way, that linear thinking works really well for some problems. This is not a replacement of that. It’s having an intelligent awareness of, what type of problem is this and what type of approach should we take to solve it? Because it’s crazy to think that one problem-solving approach fits everything.

Paul [00:13:18] Wonderful. I wonder if we can shift gears for just a minute and talk about where service design has come. As we mentioned, the book is over a decade old now. You are still teaching. In fact, you’re in the middle of the course right now as we’re recording.

Adam [00:13:28] We are.

Paul [00:13:29] And it has outlived other buzzwords in the industry. It is a thing. But it is, as you mentioned, a living, organic, moving target of a definition. What are some things that you’ve seen develop recently? What are some of the trends that you’ve seen in service design that have come to light that either weren’t well-defined at the beginning or maybe have evolved outright over time?

Marc [00:13:50] When we look back 15 years or so, the discussions in the community changed a lot. And in the beginning, like 15 years ago, remember, we were all trying to make a point for service design and trying to convince others that services are actually useful. And I think that’s done. Like people understand how important customer experience is, citizen experience is, and so on. Then there was a time when there were simply not enough people out there who could do this. And it’s something we still see, like organizations are looking for service designers and they can’t find enough. It’s still a not saturated market.

Marc [00:14:24] If we look at the content, it moved from being very hands-on and tactical, project work, we’re going from one project to another, to a more holistic thinking. And what we see now is more and more interest into a strategic perspective on service design, or customer experience in general, because organizations understood how important that is. They understand the impact good customer experience has on topics like revenue, profit, costs. So it actually is a core part of the business. And service design started to adapt to that.

And what we’ve seen now is that tools we’ve been using in projects are now scaling up and are being used in an ongoing basis in a management approach. And if you think of a journey map, for example, journey maps can be one of the core tools of service design. They can be used within the workshop as a great cooperative tool that you use to reach alignment and that you can use for research or for prototyping. But the same tool can be used on a project level where a journey map remains useful for a couple of months and it is one of the core focus points and what we like to call a boundary object, connecting different team members with each other. And what we see now is that they become actually a visual management tool.

Marc [00:15:46] And if you compare a journey map with a map and geography, if you go and Google Maps or whatever, you can zoom out and you can zoom in. You can zoom out and take a look at a whole continent, so you don’t see a lot of details, but you get a good overview, then you can zoom into a region, you can zoom into a city. The more you zoom in, the more details you’ll see.

So you can build a similar system with journey maps, from a high-level map, kind of the customer lifecycle or the employee lifecycle, all the way to detailed interactions. Now if you link each of these maps then with live data, with projects and where do projects actually impact customer experience? Because most projects that impact customer experience do not come from the innovation or the design team. They come from anywhere in the organization. Think about the impact in Europe Legal had during the indication of GDPR. Any change of standard operating procedure, any change of software, be it customer-facing or employee-facing, all of that impacts customer experience. And usually we are not aware of that. We are not aware of all the projects that are running and where do they impact customer experience.

Marc [00:16:49] So what we’re building then now is we’re linking journey maps into each other. We are showing which projects are running, where do they impact the experience, what are the different KPIs per journey, what are pain points to a journey, and all of that in a system where you can zoom in and out and suddenly it becomes as zoomable day-to-day dashboard for an organization showing an outside perspective, a customer perspective, understanding, how are we performing day-to-day? That really changes and in fact then management.

Adam [00:17:21] Yeah this is also what interests me very strongly. I think it’s interesting to see how organizations are evolving. And we’ve seen this over the last few centuries, even, from very hierarchal organizations like churches and universities and so on and feudalism, moving through a very mechanistic model, which we have in many organizations today, where it’s all about input, output, performance, efficiency, all these words that come from engineering. And then things like Agile come along and they start saying, “okay, within a certain process, we give people more freedom, they get the chance to decide their own short-term targets and so on, decide the prioritization, and we give them space to work.” We evolved beyond that into organizations like Ben and Jerry’s or Patagonia and so on, who have even more levels of, if you like, freedom and self-organization and self-management within the organization itself.

Adam [00:18:10] And that’s really, really interesting because that goes along with what service design can do and how it flourishes. If I’m a jobbing service designer, I need to call that customer and ask them a question. I don’t need to need permission for that. But most organizations, you need permission for that kind of stuff. I don’t understand why. I don’t need permission to use Excel. Why can’t I run an experiment with the customer really quickly? And the answer is what? It can lead to chaos. And what Marc is talking about is systems which you can use to connect all these different Agile teams who are working with more freedom than we used to to make sure they’re working in a sensible direction, which fits the goals of the organization, using the tools that they’re using every day anyway, to keep those hundreds, maybe, of Agile teams heading towards the same goal, with enough freedom to also explore other avenues safely as they come up.

Adam [00:18:59] That’s really, really fascinating because that impacts the individual very strongly about making, I talked about small bets before, that also means more bets being made and the bets being decided on lower down in the organization. That needs a level of trust which is not always present in every organization. And service design not only benefits from that kind of trust, it can also help create it because of the responsibilities and the opportunities which it gives the individual worker.

Paul [00:19:25] Amazing. I love how you both sort of responded from two sides of the same coin in the scaling out of journey maps from the high-level, global view down to the day-to-day project view. It really shows how resilient this concept is, how well it scales. And it’s not just for designers. It is a tool for general managers and profit and loss statements and accountants and lawyers. And they’re all humans who have an experience and a stake in the game. And Adam, from your perspective, having these ways of essentially, when in charge, take charge. You’re on the project team, you have the right, the say, and if you’re empowered, if the organization is truly Agile, if they are trusting enough to allow it, there’s a way for the frontline designer to be a cause for the service design change, this implementation. So I really love that thinking. It really shows, again, the resiliency of the thought of how well this does scale. It doesn’t live just in the design department. It really is a way of being for an organization in total.

Adam [00:20:27] That’s very important. And that brings us back to the design with rather than design for, because even in organizations which are quite mature in this, still much of this happens in some kind of, let’s call it a design department. But increasingly, other parts of the organization are involved because we’re not building for you and saying you, “should implement this.” And then you say, “that can’t be done,” which can be a problem. There’s a degree of involvement all the way through. So people are experts being brought in for ideation, we’ve been brought in as research partners, as prototyping partners, and as implementation partners as well. So I’ve worked with clients where during initial like home user research, coders are among the people sitting on the customer’s sofas. Not all of them, sure, but some of them. They are represented. So when ideas are being thrown around, there’s somebody to say, “actually that’s really hard,” or, “actually that’s really easy,” just to keep the conversation more intelligent. And then later on when the app or whatever it is being written, there are still folks from customer insights, from the research and if you like, still hanging around. Not every day, maybe, but they’re regularly checking in with the coding teams. So if the coding teams make a decision, A or B, and B seems easier, somebody might say, “uh, remember, we had that experiential goal and I think A meets that better.”.

Adam [00:21:44] So it’s about having this shared responsibility, sure, with changing levels of engagement, which runs over a whole project from the initial conception, right the way through to a sustainable change having taken place. And engaging people across the organization in that, that’s a big change. And together with that change in shared responsibility and more decisions being made at lower levels, it can be quite a challenge to some leadership models. And that’s something thing not to forget as well. We’re talking about an emancipation of decision-making through the organization, and we need mechanisms to make sure that those decisions make sense.

Paul [00:22:19] Well said. Just got one more question before I do want to shift gears and talk a bit about our upcoming conference and time together and things that people can expect to hear. But last question before we get to that, behaviorally speaking, how can we, jumping off of your last response there, how can we start to enroll folks in this process? How can we bring this to an organization that might be resistant or just not understand this way of thinking? How can we start to perhaps exemplify the small behaviors to start to manifest change in an organization?

Adam [00:22:50] Maybe I should start on the small stuff when you then go to a higher level afterwards, Marc? This is tough. Yeah. People identify with their expertise, with their experience as part of their literal identity as a professional. And when you come along and say, “Hey, well, you know, we’re getting more experimental, so your experience is less relevant and we’re entering new futures so your expertise is less useful, that can really be an assault on someone’s identity. So it’s important that we don’t do that.

Adam [00:23:16] But what I find very useful to do is to talk to people about what’s changed in the world. What’s changed in the last 15 years or last 25 years? And it’s so much and the acceleration of that seems to continue. And then talk about, you know, what have we changed in the way we approach things? And honestly, it’s not usually very much, you know, we may have shifted from email to Trello or something, but that’s about it. Yeah. And then we say, “okay, well, if we look around, there are some people using other approaches to certain types of problems which could be useful to you alongside your tried and tested approaches that you already have. We still need those. So how about a chance to try some of those things out?” And then I like to give people a safe space in which they can experiment with some of these things. That might be a certain project, a certain physical room. I like to use these short timeframe events like jams and hacks and so on, to give people a taster where they have a chance to concentrate on this thing for a day or so and to try things out. And at the end, they decide, “that’s nothing for me; I don’t need any of that.” Fine. Thank you for your time. Or, you know, “this, this, and this seem useful,” or, “I’m going to drink all the KoolAid, give me everything.” Yeah. And it will depend on who they are and what they’re doing and any of those is acceptable.

Adam [00:24:26] But it’s presenting alternative strategies, tools, options, which can go into my tool kit beside my tried and tested ones. So I, as a professional, can make a decision what kind of problem am I facing here and what is the tool for that problem?

Paul [00:24:42] Wonderful.

Marc [00:24:43] When we zoom out on an organizational level, we often talk about becoming user-centric or customer-centric as an organization. But frankly, if we look at many organizations, they are silo-centric because we measure success within each side of the organization. And if you think of customer experience and which part of the organization actually affects customer experience, it goes across all the different silos. But that is always a breaking point for customer experience. If you jump from one department to another and suddenly it feels like a different organization, it’s not consistent. So one question we need to solve is, how can we get from a silo-centric organization to a proper customer-centric organization? And that means we need to bring in the customer as much as possible. And I mean that literally, like bring in the customer. Ask customers to join you for your projects and let them co-design together with you. Bring research, I mean, qualitative research, not reports or something, but qualitative research from customers into your work, be it videos, see how customers are failing using it. And that is really, really powerful because that is the reality we’re facing.

Paul [00:25:55] It takes a lot of integrity as an organization to be able to even face those things because there is risk involved in showing the flaws and iterating through it and researching and prototyping and finding those things out, because it can be messy. But back to the beginning, design is a team sport. When we’re not in the room with the users who are actually using the things that we’re building, whether they’re physical or digital, we’re not going to see how we can improve or how we are improving the lives of the folks that we’re trying to help out.

Adam [00:26:24] I think it’s less risky than people think. Obviously, it’s a small bet, so the risk is lower than getting the large bet wrong. But also we found that integrating users, partners in this way, they love it. They say, “thank you for speaking to me as an adult and not as a research subject who fills in a questionnaire and then gets something plonked on their table afterwards, but treating me as a partner and co-developing a thing with me.” We’ve seen that in B2C and B2B contexts. Actually, it can be a really, really good boost for relationships that we have with the people who we provide value to.

Paul [00:26:58] Amazing. Well, as we close down our conversation today, I want to shift in just the last few minutes here to, what can we look forward to? As of the time of this recording, we’re less than a month away to welcoming you into our space in June of 2022. But what maybe by way of an appetizer or two, can we look forward to talking with you about when you come to town?

Adam [00:27:18] Well, we’re going to focus on, if you like, the two levels that we’re also speaking about today. So with me, it’s going to be much more on the human, behavioral level, the individual in the room, in the workshop, in the project, and with markets, that higher level strategic organizational one. We think they add together really nicely. And in fact, I’m going to be honest and say we haven’t actually pinned down what we want to do because we want to have conversations over the next few weeks, conversations on the day before when we get to Rochester and meet some people. And then, because we believe in responding to the world around us, we will fine-tune our activities, probably as we go in these sessions, because that’s what design is. It’s responding to the world around you and trying something and then seeing if it works. And if it works, you follow that up and if not, you pivot and you try something else.

Adam [00:28:05] I’m going to be probably talking about behaviors that are useful and showing some techniques that I use in the room around facilitation, around engagement, around getting people on board for this, getting them trying things that they’ve never tried before and enjoying that and doing great work while they do that. Any thoughts for yours?

Marc [00:28:23] I’ll be speaking about service design in general, like, what is it actually and what makes it different to other design decisions, to UX design, product design, and so on? And then in the workshop, we are going to deep dive into what we call journey map operations. So a rather strategic perspective, what I teased on earlier using journey maps as an individual management tool, as an information system for an organization.

Paul [00:28:49] Well, this has been wonderful. The ground that we covered today certainly gave a ton of food for thought and you’re certainly putting your money where your mouth is. Service designing a service design conference, who would’ve thought. Marc and Adam, thank you so much for your time today. This has been an absolute pleasure getting to know you a bit and looking forward to the conference, absolutely.

Adam [00:29:06] It’s been great chatting with you and I can’t wait to Rochester.

Marc [00:29:09] Looking forward to it.

Adam [00:29:10] Yeah.

Paul [00:29:11] Cheers.

Adam [00:29:11] Thank you.

Paul [00:29:15] Well, that’s it for today. In line with our goals of transparency and listening, we really want to hear from you. Sean and I are committed to reading every piece of feedback that we get, so please leave a comment or a rating wherever you’re listening to this podcast. Not only does it help us continue to improve, but it also helps the show climb up the rankings so that we can help other listeners move, touch, and inspire the world, just like you’re doing. Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next episode.

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