What Is Service Design?

Chapter 3. The Impact on Organizations

Just acquiring service design capabilities is not enough to sustainably introduce service design in an organization. That process usually includes a cultural and organizational transformation that cannot be implemented within a few months.¹ It requires the alignment of the whole organizational system, including organizational structures, processes, practices, routines, and values. It is a change process in itself, and needs to be carefully designed and managed.

It’s much easier to introduce service design if the organizational transformation builds on a supportive corporate culture. Signs of this are, for example, customer centricity, cross-silo thinking and doing, or an iterative way of working, such as early prototyping. While there’s a lot of knowledge on how to change organizational structures, processes, and sometimes even culture, there’s no silver bullet that works for all organizations.

One of the infuriating things about service design that I have experienced is that people need to do it to understand it. So, the more you can get people to do service design, the better the understanding and uptake.

Simon Clatworthy

The Difficult Changes

Some of the key success factors for a design-based approach to innovation feel very unfamiliar to many organizations. Here are some tips for the especially challenging changes:

Learn by doing, not by web-based training

Both practitioners and organizations need to try service design to grasp it. ...