Knowledge management for service activists.

What do you need to know to design services these days?

In a somewhat eclectic career, I used to be head of knowledge management at a creative agency called Razorfish. It’s one of those fancy terms you can spend hours debating what it means. My definition back then was to figure out who needs to know what when, and why, and try to make sure they got that in some shape or form.

As part of your role, whatever it may be, you’re supposed to be useful and add value at certain points in time, often as part of some process to develop solutions to certain problems that involves working with other people and getting approved by a client or a higher paid colleague. And that means you need to know (about) different things at different times to do the right stuff the right way.

One of the famous frameworks in knowledge management, developed by Nonaka and Takeguchi, is called SECI, and outlines how knowledge is created, converted, and transferred between tacit (in your head) and explicit (codified, typically written down). Without going into too much detail, they describe it as an continuous dynamic process of organisational learning including the four modes of Socialisation (tacit to tacit); Externalisation (tacit to explicit); Combination (explicit to explicit); and Internalisation (explicit to tacit).

These days, as the guild lead for over 40 in-house service designers (which I think makes us one of the largest in-house teams of service designers in the UK if not Europe, not counting consultancies or agencies, love for someone to challenge me on that statistic…) I keep thinking about how we collectively and individually remain professionally useful and valuable.

We are creative knowledge workers. How we use the tools at our disposal through certain methods and apply our experience and skills with a design mindset is I believe also a context where we could use ‘knowledge management’ approaches, and apply it to identify the gaps and needs for learning and upskilling. And think about how much of it is explicit and codified (e.g. the need for templates), and what is best suited for interpersonal socialisation, also known as creating opportunities for learning from each other, or from others externally.

I think to stay at the forefront (i.e. from my humble perspective to retain the permission to keep doing meaningful and interesting work) we will have to keep developing and pushing not only who we are as service designers, but more importantly who we might become in response to emerging needs and opportunities.

Service design has grown to mean many things to many people, and if I have to read another article trying to define what ‘service design’ is or isn’t I am probably going to scream internally. Possibly moan or grunt externally too lol.

There is a vast number of definitions out there, with different emphasis whether the authors come from a background or are working in one or more of the adjacent fields of user experience, user interface and interaction design, user and design research, information architecture, digital, product or industrial design, producers or any old design discipline, design thinking, co-creation, strategy, management consultancy, business design and business analysis, systems thinking, and so on.

How does service design add value to the business? How do we therefore keep improving our capabilities and skillsets? What is relevant training and good learning journeys we could and should consider?

Rather than focus on what ‘service design’ is, or what it isn’t which is also a quite common approach, I find it helps to focus on what we do.

Service designers design services.

You may go ‘no shit Sherlock’, and we could also argue about what ‘design’ means, or what constitutes a ‘service’. Interesting but let’s save that for another day. For now I’ll postulate two simple axioms, more around service designers than service design:

1. Firstly that we are activists. We perform, even juggle, a broad set of purposeful activities to get to the right outputs and outcomes. What is considered ‘right’ may vary between organisations and contexts.
2. Secondly that it is a team sport. We cannot design services on our own, we need others to design with. We do join up the activities, thinking, outputs and outcomes into a hopefully coherent whole.

To these points, this is why when I’m (too often) asked in that first team meeting “oh you’re the service designer, awesome, can we have that service blueprint thingy next week do you think…?” I ask if they want the long or the short answer…?

The short one is ‘No.’, the long one is no and patiently goes on to expand on activities and team sports to explain why and how these things take time to co-think and co-do, whatever the outputs and outcomes.

I think service designers operate across four main domains of activity, all interconnected but with some distinct characteristics, and therefore somewhat different knowledge and skills required, and which hence might form the frame for identifying the potential for upskilling.

Domain I [E2E]: End to End

We help understand the customer and/or colleague journeys and experiences end to end, as a whole as well as interaction touchpoints and individual moments of truth, pain and opportunity. We identify the customer needs and goals, their real problems and what matters, the jobs to be done. We help tell that story in a coherent and engaging way to generate shared insights.

Domain II [F2B]: Front to Back

We dig deeper into the organisation to unpack what is necessary to consistently and even delightfully deliver on the end to end, across every moment, what has to come together in a coordinated way from multiple perspectives like people, process, technology applications and architecture, risk & legal, and data.

Sarah Drummond (ex Snook) has written along these lines in her approach to the Full Stack Service Design.

Domain III [S2S]: System to System

We know that no service is an island, the customer does things in a much more complex world than a purist end to end perspective might at first lead us to believe. In addition there are often connections internally to consider from an impact analysis, business architecture, organisational design or systems thinking perspective. And so much these days is intertwined with broader society and issues like sustainability and climate that we need to design for in a systemic way, e.g. when solving those ‘wicked problems’.

Domain IV [B2F]: Beginning to Finish

We work across the whole process of designing the services, from the beginning of strategy development and the embryo of an idea, through concepts and formulating problems and opportunities, as-is and to-be, to initial research and prototyping, and subsequent iterative design and user testing, through to capturing relevant success metrics in the live run state of the service for further feedback and ongoing improvement. We help ensure consistency and coherence, and that the dots not only get connected and stay so over time but connect better and better.

Domain I is traditional design territory, customer experiences and design research, and where a lot of ‘service design’ has come from, you need both creative skills and analytically connecting the dots.

Domain II starts to take us into what has become known as business design, and not only requires different skills and knowledge such as target operating models and supporting capability development (whether human or technological) for the organisation, but also a stronger sense for the bottom line and what the value is to the business in terms of things like reducing customer churn or cost, increasing revenue through new sales or higher share of wallet on the existing service set, brand building or revenue protection.

Domain III joins us with systems thinking, internally to ensure alignment across sometimes complex work in flight in different disconnected initiatives, and the emergent field of systemic design, like deeper and more meaningful bottom lines of not just financial value but also all aspects of societal impact.

Domain IV encompasses an array of technical as well as soft skills needed. We facilitate workshops using a range of tools and methodologies, do stakeholder communications, and help organise, brief and run focused activities in design and alongside other relevant team members, often in agile environments.

Broadly speaking, and there is so much more depth and width to go into (I have a first pass inventory spreadsheet with over 100 line items…), the activity sets and related relevant knowledge required to deliver value in each domain then need to be understood through an audit of current skills, an organisational desired future state of capabilities to align with long term objectives and strategy, and subsequent upskilling and knowledge transfer programs to fill the gaps.

If the service designers in question wish to develop and expand their skills portfolios across all domains I should add. You might be really happy being the world’s best ‘Domain I service designer’, which is cool and should be acknowledged as such in terms of career paths and recognition.

There is also the fifth element I think. These are all still pretty much service designers of today, there are many many things to learn to become the ‘Domain V service designer of the future’, more on that in coming meanderings, and it might not even strictly speaking be ‘service design’ anymore.

On that note, I am looking for co-conspirators to co-develop both the thinking and the doing around the many wonderful and useful skills we crave, so if you are passionate about using knowledge to empower service designers in your organisation, please hit me up on Linkedin…