Service design How-to Series #10 Engaging Stakeholders

Stakeholders can become a thorn in the side of a successful service. This example demonstrates one way of helping diverse stakeholders align themselves around a common focus

Stakeholders can be seen as those groups that are part of the end to end service that you are working on, but you do not have any direct responsibility or influence over. They are often groups outside your team, and perhaps they are outside your existing location or organisation. As such, they may have no desire to particpate in the redesign that you are working on, and if they may wish to, you as a designer could bring them into the redesign.
One common characteristic of stakeholders, is that they often choose to participate or not. They are typcially not aligned under one hierarchy

These are the principles that I have found helpful:

1. It is up to them how they become involved. This puts you in a position where the task at hand it to demonstrate to them how collaboration would benefit them. If you cannot do this, then attempting to involve them may be very difficult. Our task is to show then so that they can make those decisions to participate for themselves.

2. Bring out the common purpose. A service has a purpose that serves its customers. Those who are successful in engaging stakeholders focus aroud the common purpose that binds us all together.

3. How much you can involve stakeholders will impact on the level or depth of the redesign. If you can enable various stakeholders, then you have the potential to redesign more of the service

A Real Example

I understand the end to end workflow myself. It may take several days of visiting and experiencing the actual flow of a service or customer journey. This can take from half a day, to several days.
As part of Understand (Discovery), I or my team will create a robust story of a customer journey, that involves their end to end journey, and all the steps in the organsiation that they went through. This journey is more of a workflow, and includes the activities of the online interactions, each staff interaction in the front and back offices, and the activities that each member of staff undertakes.
I will visit each stakeholder, and talk to their manager. I primarily am there to listen; to gain knowledge about their thinking, barriers, problems they face with other stakeholders, and their design to engage. I get a sense of the view that manager has of themselves in the overall service. I build trust with them.
A session is organised where the key stakeholders that have a desire to work together are brought in. This should happen by a senior manager, who has influence over all the stakeholders.
I would consider if I facilitate this or bring in a professional facilitator.
Everyone sits in a circle. This is a powerful technique to diffuse power strtategies, and will allow people to have equal participation. Your role as facilitator is to allow everyone to have their say, and no-one allowed to dominate the discussion.
Go around every participant and Check in. And ask them what they hope to get out of this session. This brings them all to a place that is not their normal role in the organisation. They are there as people rather than roles.
Ask each one to write down the purpose of the work that their area performes. And they put up whatever they have written up on the wall.
Go through the pre-prepared customer journey FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE CUSTOMER. Demonstrate where in the workflow, are the barriers to this flow working well. Emphasise that these barriers are the causes by the system design and not the people in the work.
Ask each participant again, to write down the purpose of the service, but this time as defined by the customer. And put them on the wall.
Compare this purpose with the first purposes they wrote down. Ask them to disuss that gap.
They will come up with ideas on how to fix this. It is your job to help them to decide to create an EXPERIMENT lasting perhaps several weeks, with their own staff, to explore better ways of designing the work so that the customer has a better experience, and the service workflow is re-designed within the service end to end; including the stakeholders. They as managers can then observe the outcomes of that experiment to decide what to subsequently do.

This is only the beginnign of the process, but it is one that the designer, acting as a facilitator, can inititate. The responsibility for this whole collaboration must be a senior leader in the overall organisation. It is them that invites and follows up this initial session. There must be someone that 'owns' the end to end journey.

The concept behind this

This is about helping them to move from a functional mechanistic design, where each function or department HAS THEIR OWN PURPOSE. You have to highlight this and help them to see that this is the flaw as to why the stakeholders are not coordinated. You are helping them to see the systemic perspective. And it it then up to them to decide to 'collaborate' by focusing on the common customer defined purpose.
It is about reductionist vs holistic. Purpose driven service design and delivery. Synthesis. Big picture. Story telling. Levels of intervention.

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