The Challenge of Co-production

It’s been about 30 years since Margaret Thatcher said ”There is no such thing as society”. I always felt that was a pernicious and cynical point of view, and gradually I think we’re witnessing the realisation that policies based on that view are unsustainable.

Nesta’s recent document on The Challenge of Co-production is an energetic manifesto for re-engaging society in public service provision. This goes beyond participation politics, with its consultations and surveys, as well as co-design, which involves users in developing the service. It proposes that shared responsibility for full service delivery is both more effective and more efficient. This is nothing short of a sea change of conventional wisdom. It’ll be very interesting to see how far the ripples ride on this one. Politicians from both sides are dropping already hackneyed words like “choice” in favour of “co-production”. But one wonders whether they have the legs to implement something so radical.

When Thatcher announced the end of society, what she marked was the division of public service from the public being served. Society no longer affected change. It was the individual, her dynamo of wealth creation, that did all the work. Well, as we can all now see, this provided a financial boon, but now things have gone awry  it turns out we might need society after all.

Social marketing detroit style

Great to see Detroit making positive headlines. Ford needed to enter the small car market, which has traditionally been a reluctant, cheap and recently rather worthy market. So they did some smart digital thinking and came up with a very effective campaign. Very nice.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/01/ford_recently_wrapped_the_firs.html

Which way the wind blows

Reading Matthew Taylor’s blog – he of the RSA – and his comments about the current zeitgeist for collaboration and inclusion struck a chord.

“So the message out in public sector land is; we have to do things very differently if we are meet growing needs with shrinking budgets, and that crucial to the capacity to reform and innovate is a much higher level of collaboration, focussed around a shared strategy and a strong sense of place. I don’t see this changing whoever wins the next election.”

It does seem to be that both sides are relying on us, the citizens, to design better services for ourselves. I can’t agree whether this shows a distinct lack of leadership, reflects paraylsis in the face of major demographic and financial upheaval or ingenuous insight into bottom up innovation. The proof will be in the pudding…

Service Design creeping up the agenda

Though I’m obviously personally excited to have a new job as Director of Service design for Capita, I think it’s also exciting for the industry. This is a large service sector organisation (36,000 employees, £2.5bn turnover) which has switched on to the potential of service design to provide new and dynamic approaches to service improvement and change.

What’s particularly exciting is that this is a business that’s formidably focused on the bottom line. My role will be to connect service design with that bottom line in very tangible ways. Less about the design aesthetic and more about the design impact. But IMHO this is exactly what the industry needs in order to get up the agenda – high impact projects delivered at scale, which really demonstrate the value of its methods, thus far only really deployed at a micro level.

It’s very early days yet, and my eyes are well and truly open to the challenges in front of me, but I’m starting 2010 hugely optimistic. And I’ve got a great opportunity to polish that elevator pitch, practiced with parents, in-laws and neighbours over Christmas when they asked “so what will you actually do in your new job?”

Happy new year to all.

Albums of 2009

It’s been a good musical year. These are my faves.

• The Ecstatic – Mos Def
• Ambivalence Avenue – Bibio
• Dark was the night – various artists
• Fever Ray – Fever Ray
• The Sleeper – The Leisure Society
• Thomas Dybdahl – Thomas Dybdahl
• Sigh No More – Mumford and Sons
• Sometimes I wish I were an Eagle – Bill Callahan
• Veckatimest – Grizzly Bear
• XX – The XX
• Declaration of Dependence – Kings of Convenience
• Tight Knit – Vetiver
• Monsters of Folk – Monsters of Folk
• Born Like This – Doom

Other stuff discovered and enjoyed this year

• The Last Beautiful Day – New Buffalo
• Bring it Back – Mates of State
• The Wackness OMPST
• Anything by The Books

Live service feedback

Great to see technology being used to capture live feedback on services. Two examples for you:

http://www.springwise.com/retail/7elevensurveys/
http://www.myservicefellow.com/

http://eezeer.com/

If you know any others, please drop me a line.

Crowdsourcing service design conference

There was a lot of debate at #sdnc10 about the next conference. So I set up this https://servicedesigners.uservoice.com to capture people’s ideas. Totally unrecognised by the network itself, but hey – that’s the generation we live in.

Service Design Network Conference 2009

I toyed with calling this “Helping clients see their organisation as their customers do” – as that was my best takeaway from an interesting conference. I had a great time in Madeira. The sun shone, the many swimming pools sparkled against the ocean and the hotel was sufficiently plush to warrant the flight. I thought I’d summarise my initial thoughts and reflections here.

Joe Heapy of Engine

The show opened with Joe Heapy talking us through some interesting case studies, and overcoming some technical problems that were to stick around for the whole two days. I was particularly intrigued by the Barnet Council example. Having heard about it first at Service Design Thinks, it was great to hear more. Just the sort of thing I’m looking at.

I’ll be honest and say I was pretty mystified by Live Work’s presentation on their work with the UN. It sounded interesting, but acoustics and accents got the better of me and I just couldn’t get a handle on it.

Similarly we had an interesting sounding, though also hard to follow, insight into what T Mobile have been doing in this space. As well as the acoustic/accent challenge, I felt they fell into the trap of talking about high level method too much – leading to a pretty generic set of conclusions. There was a bit too much of this over the two days, and not enough drilling into the detail of what works, what doesn’t and why.

Jesse James Garrett was a bit of a surprise speaker. Great to be taken back to the days when I had his books on my desk. Seems he’s had a similar journey into services, though still with a focus on the user experience – which he applied here to the wider scope of services. Not much evidence of how that method could be applied to more complex service systems, but a refreshing reminder of some of the principles.

The afternoon workshops were pretty diverse. I attended a presentation on Carnegie Mellon’s work with the Mayo Clinic, which felt like a deja vu of a similar presentation at last year’s conference. Followed by “Co-creation sucks!” a flamboyant and welcom dose of energy. It basically explored the misuse of co-design in the world. All good and interesting but for me it went a bit far down the purist route, almost concluding that any designer involvement would skew the findings. Sadly, the reality of time and budget constraints mean that the designer has to intercede to help the group reach a conclusive point. That’s the thing about democracy – it’s the art of getting everyone involved AND reaching a conclusion. Great animated workshop though. And another great takeaway – “agree to disagree rather than consensus.”

Day one closed with an interesting insight into service design 20 years from now. Some great pie charts demonstrated that, compared to other sectors like construction design and manufacturing design, there should be 300,000+ service designers in business. Of course there aren’t, because most service businesses are served by a medley of professions, not least management consultants. It was an tempting argument for manifest destiny – although we’re nowhere near claiming anyright to the sector. The presentation went on to explore whether service design should become a profession and so provide a clear articulation of our role. I don’t even think 10 years is realistic for that. We need to agree a clear value and approach, be regarded as a coherent discipline, before we can start broadcasting it – and certainly before we can claim a privileged position.

In the evening we all got bussed up the mountain to a traditional Madeiran restaurant where we drank some local brew and watched some locals dance. The food – great skewers of chargrilled stake hanging in the middle of the table – was great and it was good to drink my way through a few more rambling service design discussions. Had to keep reminding myself how lucky I am that Europeans invest so much on learning English.

Day two opened with an interesting project from Birgit Mager. Some interesting material, although the focus on change management perhaps stretched the role of service design. I was more interested in how the change was managed through the city bureacracy.

We the heard from Continuum with a very polished presentation around using employee motivation to ensure your staff are the ambassadors your service business needs. Though this strayed into well-trod HR territory, it provided some good insight, used some great case studies and was pretty energising.

In the afternoon I attended a workshop run by Engine, covering “Selling Service Design”. Unsurprisingly it was heavily oversubscribed with lots of people showing up. The guys did a great job of facilitating the session, with six good explorations covering different approaches/challenges. Ours was selling service design to a company that didn’t recognise service design or know how to buy it. We opted to sell service design to a utility company – assuming that their current heavy investment in staff and customer churn could be better directed to improving services.

The six approaches fell into roughly two camps – external and internal. The former groups settled on the following type of approach – identify the client’s problem, give an evidence based opinion, illustrate how it will be fixed and then demonstrate it on a small scale (“Clients don’t buy elephants” was a good quote). The second cluster of groups focused on selling SD internally – evangelise, gather followers, create a task force, pick your projects, build momentum. Informative and fun. The guys said they’d post the six mini-projects to their site so will have to keep an eye out.

Unfortunately I missed the end of the conference as I had to catch a flight, but I found myself mulling it over during the journey. I was left wondering whether we’d moved on very far from last year. I know for a fact that one of the workshop presentations was a repeat case study from last year, which is pretty lame. But can you blame the conference for not moving forward when the industry has struggled with a tricky year? I got to thinking what I’d want from a conference next year. Here’s my wishlist:

• We’ll be big enough to draw a major keynote speaker – a design advocate from a prominent organisation. Someone like Richard Branson who just gets the importance of good service.
• Speakers will come from related industries eg HR, change management, product design etc. This will help inform the industry and also define our scope. As designers, we’re too happy reinventing wheels.
• Clients will come in to talk about their experiences procuring and implementing SD projects. They’ll give a great inside-out view.
• They’ll be more opportunity for open dialogue eg panel discussions with questions from the floor
• People will focus on aspects of what they did, to provide focus and diversity of view, rather than the whole process of how they did it, which ends up feeling generic.
• People will be comfortable discussing failures, as a focus on perpetual success ends up feeling like a polished pitch
• The conference will loosen up a bit. It’ll feel more intimate and energised. Smaller main room, more time allowed for questions, more intimate compeering.
• Cities will collaborate and host workshops. This will bring together local communities / chapters in advance and also draw out diversity of approach.
• We’ll have a facility to sustain debate after the conference. The twiter hashtag is still being used. Maybe a Ning site would be good too. People will be able to see a profile of other delegates and contact them / follow them. I lost half my business cards along the way.
• The technology will work seamlessly
• There will be as much sun and even better food. Madeira set a high standard.
• It’ll be in the UK

Currys – the service innovator

I never thought I’d say this, but Currys, long time high street technology retailer of Britain, has actually done a pretty canny bit of service innovation.

currys ad

I’ve been in this predicament. New fridge comes, old fridge needs to go. I and so many other have relied on the wierd black market of delivery men who, for £25 would “sort it out for yer”. Lord know where those fridges ended up, but you just hoped it was better than dumping it on the corner like so many others.

Well Currys have been very sensible, identified that for each pallet offloaded, there’s a space to fill in the van, and in doing so won my business. Government should be supporting smart thinking like this. It saves on local councils picking them up off the street, it saves on fuel, it removes a tax evasive black market. Also – and correct me if I’m wrong – but I think the EU is trying to make manufacturers/vendors responsible for the eventual disposal of their products. If so, this could be a good example of a company turning an apparent cost into a clear benefit. Smart move.

America and Britain

Why is it that in America, where service expectations run so high and where people complain in an instant over bad service, they have no real service design industry to speak of? Whilst in the UK, where people will traditionally suffer in silence before complaining, we have a burgeoning little service design sector?

Hypothesis 1: the US have other techniques for engineering good service, less reliant on design thinking

Hypothesis 2: US service expectations have been invading the UK for years, leading to a greater demand for good services and reduced fear to complain when they are bad.

Hypothesis 3: it’s all about government funding, and right now the UK government is banging on about customer-centred public services, hospitals having to measure patient happiness and seeking out sexy techniques to help.

I’d be interested in the views of others in this.