A lot of service design actually happens in workshops. And I think maybe it's the 'kiss' that service design has had with design thinking. And a lot of design thinking happens in workshops, in a workshop format. These are very interactive, lots of stakeholders, lots of sticky notes, affinity diagrams, personas, journey maps,
discussions, prioritization-weighting exercises, going through the business model canvas with your team, with your stakeholders – all really, really important. And they make up a huge part of service design. That's not enough – you have to follow through to execution. But let's spend some time on workshops and collaboration and what's called "co-creation" because there's a really important role here. So, co-creation is central.
Everything in service design is co-created. And what that means is that *you're doing this with stakeholders*. Just like with those two canvases, you want to use those with your stakeholders and teams to get the most leverage from the conversations, the discussions *and* the knowledge, the information, the contribution but also the problem solving of your team. People from different vantage points will bring
different *information*, different *solutions* and different *levels of ownership* to the problem. I mean, think about it – if your executives or someone who's a head of operations or support or whatever – if they're involved and they're listening to the customer pain points that you're introducing – those pains and gains – if they're part of the business model canvas discussions,
they're going to have a stake in how it gets delivered, and they're going to want to influence it, they're going to want to be part of that, as opposed to being on the side and being called in waterfall-style at the very end. So, it's important to do this work with your colleagues – that's co-creation. Of course, the other piece of co-creation is doing this ideation with your customers, and so, bringing your customers in and testing your service prototypes with your customers
becomes part of that. Understanding a service value proposition, the data, the processes, the procedures, the workflows and constraints – all that stuff is going to come out of your interaction with your stakeholders. What you're looking for from co-creation I think is not only the beauty of that cross-pollination but also the alignment that you get from that. Ultimately, I think what you're designing is a *culture of service design*
so that your delivery of a service is not just what happens outside to the customers, but it happens inside to the way the company thinks and makes decisions about products, about business models, about revenue streams, about the innovation that a design approach – you know – that divergent thinking – it's one of those things that with design thinking – which is a very popular tool used in service design – is just getting people to
do divergent thinking and not jump to solutioning; to actually spend time in the empathy of customer pain points can be a *huge* transformational shift. So, the other strategy or key is aligning your service design teams, especially if you have multiple service designers. For me, one of the keys with service design is *congruency in execution*. There are those of you who have different service designers working in different areas, bringing that into a cohesive strategy and cross-pollinating
is a huge challenge. It's not trivial. But it's one that comes down to how you design service design within – *within*. The other key is aligning agile to UX, especially if you have a digital delivery component. And, at the end of the day, you're going to introduce new ways of doing business. That's going to mean disruption. So, I really think a culture of service design is required.