Service design is a team sport, not an individual pursuit
by Ffion Jones and Jo Carter
When did you last achieve anything significant entirely on your own?
I’m guessing there is very little that springs to mind. The age of the heroic individual is dead.
In today's fast-paced and interconnected world, the key to success lies in harnessing the power of teamwork.
Enter Service Design; and the opportunity to create a blend of diverse perspectives, skill sets, and a willingness to learn from failures. But, how do you ensure that your service design team is set up for success?
In this post, we dive into the crucial elements to pay attention to when building a high-performing service design team.
Global GovJam: Slovenia - teams work together for 48 hours to solve a challenge
Forming your team
When we fail to include the right people at an early stage, we are denying ourselves and the people using our service the best opportunity for real improvement. The drive to keep the team tight and small comes from a place of not wanting to expose ourselves, usually disguised as not wanting to bring people in until ‘the right time’. Traditionally, the right time means when we have a fully formed idea, which in the iterative ethos of service design, is further down the track, towards the end of the work.
Involving people early on - stakeholders, users and other people from across the organisation in a multi-disciplinary team, or in co-design activities will have an impact on the project. It will give you a much higher chance of framing your problem well and setting it up on firm foundations.
You’ll usually be pleasantly surprised at how pleased those people are to be involved and asked for their perspective.
Clarity on objectives
One of the key principles of service design is to question assumptions. This starts at the beginning and continues throughout. Your team may have been commissioned to help improve a service or bring this approach to a particular project. As with any project, we need to have the courage to question the brief.
In many cases, your client (internal or external) may not have clarity on what they want or the problem they want to solve. So ensuring some clarity on outcomes from the work and objectives for the team will involve going further than asking, “What do you want?”. We might want to find out about past experiences of similar projects, pain points and what an ideal future state might look and feel like.
In your first team meeting you will need to work as a team on:
Building trust in the team
Establishing your ways of working, both behaviours and project planning.
Better understanding of the problem and (often hidden) assumptions
Service design is iterative - which means learning and adjusting our plans as we go. This doesn’t mean we have no project plan. It means we set the scaffold up front, and agree on the cadence of the work yet allow for new information and learning to emerge.
Unusually safe to fail
Acknowledge at the beginning, and throughout the project, that this is an unusually safe-to-fail environment. In the words of Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard University, failure in this context is ‘Praiseworthy Failure’, where experiments conducted to investigate a possibility may lead to failure.
It is critical to frame the project to the team as a learning project. Research tells us that projects framed for learning over a set of technical outcomes are more likely to be successful. People on the team will be open about their ideas and mistakes, so we accelerate our progress. This is termed a psychologically safe team or a team where people feel safe to speak up (see Psychological Safety - what’s it got to do with service design? for more on this).
When we're looking for novel ideas for complex problems that haven't been solved before, we're bound to make mistakes. The mistake would be not learning from those mistakes.
This is a simple, but an effective change of language. When you bring together a team to kick off any project, ask the question, “What do we want to learn?” first in your objective setting.
For a stretch, use these phrases as work progresses to signal that this is a safe space for learning.
I’d love for everybody to take some shots at this idea
Tell me what we’re missing here
We’re definitely going to try and get some things wrong here
This is just our first try – what will take this to the next level?
I need you to poke some holes in this
These questions/prompts are taken from, Leadership is Language by David Marquet
You could also set out Pal’chinskii’s 3 Principles as a framework for your learning. They are:
Increase your chances of success by seeking out and experimenting with a variety of ideas
Accept that some failure is inevitable, so do things on a small enough scale that it’s survivable
Quickly identify and select what’s working in the local context by developing effective feedback loops between decision-makers and those closest to the action.
These principles help us to deal with the uncertainty that is also inevitable when designing services for us, often unpredictable, humans in complex systems. We can steer away from defaulting to the false certainty provided by “best practice”, which is often a red herring.
The key to team effectiveness
However experienced or otherwise, your team is, the secret to unlocking their potential is how they behave during their time working together.
Think we’re over-egging the pudding?
These are the five factors Google found in their Project Aristotle (the whole is greater than the sum of its parts), a huge data set which set out to answer the question, “What makes a team effective at Google?”.
Below are those factors. There’s not a whole lot about technical knowledge here. There is a lot about how team members agree to behave towards each other and how they feel about their work.
Google: re:work
A simple question to ask your team when they begin working together is,
How do we need to behave as we work together?
How do we need to not behave?
Then set up a regular check-in on these behaviours as part of your retro, stand up or team meeting. It doesn’t have to be more than five to ten minutes, but it does need to happen.
Tip: it is most impactful at the top of your agenda, an instant indicator of how important this is to your team’s effectiveness.
Psychological safety will build in a team over time when they agree together to welcome ideas, questions and mistakes with an open, curious mindset. This means not laughing, ignoring or blaming anyone in the team when they are demonstrating vulnerability in order for the team to learn together.
From this firm grounding, a highly effective team can grow. A team where people are happy to question, challenge and hold each other accountable for performance - both technical and behavioural.
This graphic shows how building a team for psychological safety and accountability puts them firmly in the Learning Zone, and as we’ve said above, for service design we want to create a team that is ‘unusually safe to fail.’
Learning zone: high psychological safety + high accountability.
Diversity of thinking
Many different perspectives make for better decisions. The data is unequivocal on this. So how can we create teams that see each other's different perspectives without becoming defensive?
In service design different perspectives are the name of the game. From questioning assumptions, to user research, to idea generation and prototyping, we need a variety of data points and viewpoints to get the most out of the process. This is relatively straightforward in user research, as long as we can access a range of users to speak to. In teams, though, we should also question the assumption that people will share their thoughts openly in any setting.
Recognise and be aware that everyone in the team will have a different experience of being accepted in the workplace, some more positive than others, and be sensitive to this.
Be overt about welcoming all views into the room. If you are a leader, demonstrate this at first simply by inviting others' views before your own and gently inviting quieter folks to speak when they are ready. These will often be reflective people and will have much quality to add during or after the meeting.
In the spirit of service design, commit some time up front in the team to understand each other’s backgrounds and experiences of work and life. As Dr Steve Peters describes in his work on the The Chimp Paradox Model, if we can set aside our fight or flight reflex for a moment and find out a little more about the context the person over the table is operating in, we are much more likely to be able to behave as we wish to when they challenge our ideas i.e with empathy and the intent to collaborate.
It may even be useful to share the Chimp Paradox video above or similar information with the team to set the tone for the kind of respectful, safe and appreciative environment you want to create.
Finally, make sure the physical space you are working in is set up to be comfortable for all members of the team. Service design can take people quite far out of their comfort zones initially. Making the physical space you meet in comfortable for all team members in for your first few meetings is helpful. Later, you can take them to different settings to freshen up their thinking and bring out more ideas and new thinking!
Conclusion
How does our programme, Service Design in Practice, help people achieve this team-focused mindset?
At ServiceWorks we genuinely understand the importance of effective teams to the success of a service design project. All our workshops use a blend of the tools used in service design along with the individual mindset and team behaviours needed to make effective progress. We help our cohorts practise teaming live on Service Design in Practice and work on how to engage and influence a wider team across their projects and organisations.
After all, service design is a team sport!
Jo and Ffion’s unique combinations of skills and experience fuse service design know-how with seamless teamwork. Alone, they're great. As a team, they're brilliant.
And you can be too!
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