SYSTEMIC SERVICE DESIGN REINVENTING WORK FOR SMARTER SERVICES
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Business & Service Design using Systems Thinking

Management, Leadership in the modern complex era of today

27/6/2022

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One of the reflection on how to deal with change, is that change is less about a change initiative, and more about how we work. We are recognising that change is more and more like the way things are around here.
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This is an interesting point, because there is a strong metaphor of; we are either in a balanced and stable state, or we are trying to change something. When we are stable we work one way; procedures instruct us, measures guide us, and people do the things they have on their job description.
And when we ‘do change’ we work another way. We plan, decide, develop a programme, and implement. We are move from one state to the next.
But increasingly we see that both seem to be constants at the same time… And trying to jump between one and the other seems to be unstable and often contradictory. Staff cannot keep up, and managers are trying to fight fires.
The clash between the two states points to a tension, that if it remains, becomes increasingly uncomfortable. And the more we try and pin each down, the more confusion it seems to create.

The Flexibility we Actually Need

Looking at how progressive organisations deal with being agile to deal with the modern world. We can observe that those working in them have different characteristics. It is not that they are different, it is simply that they are working in a way that creates an ongoing balance between change and operations. Those leaders are able to develop the accommodation required for both states to exist at the same time.
I write at length about these two different ways of working, but here I wish to describe leadership and management; there is a key characteristic that defines the traditional form the progressive.

Traditional Management and Leadership

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This focuses on clear departments, with employees doing their roles as described. The work is standardised as much as it can be and described by procedures that we know work well. Managers ensure that this works well, by the practices of measurement, targets, and dealing with the variation that they find.

We measure Customers and change things when we have to.

Leaders use summary measures and their expertise across the organisation to develop plans to move forwards. These plans and visions are communicated to the rest of the organisation in grand ways, where it is up to managers to ensure that they are implemented.
​

This approach works well, except of the fact that when you actually delve into these organisations, it does not really work that well. The culture often becomes one of ‘managers tell’ and ‘workers do’. Innovation has to be done in a room with bean bags. And HR have to come up with ways to motivate. We look and feel like a corporation, that thinks itself important.

Progressive Management and Leadership

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Imagine an organisation that works according to the way that individual customers want us to. Where front line staff can deal with customers, and decide what they need to do and how they should do it. They decide within a framework, and can easily pull for support from their managers or experts when they need to.

‘Management is learning and supporting'
In this environment, the real change is in what leaders and managers do. They are less glued to their screens and writing report, and they are out and about learning. They are learning about what is actually happening in the workplace, they are engaged with customers and see first hand the impact of their staff. They witness the teamwork across the organisation. They engage vertically and horizontally.
Mangers observe and learn when things go well, and support when they dont. They have the ability to stand back, and make sense of the the various levels and dynamics that synthesise into a whole service. They pinpoint where they need to act and how to do that, that allows for the causes of problems to be dissolved, never to occur again.
The role of Managing and Leading is learning and acting with the staff to ensure that they can learn and adapt
Engaging in horizontal and vertical learning cycles.
This is the synthesis of stability and change. With the understanding of how deal with the complexity of a real organisation within its dynamic business environment.
And the reason why we often find this a difficult thing to do, is because we often fail to recognise that this change needs a change in the ways we behave and act as managers and leaders. We try and be flexible, by applying our traditional behaviours and methods of management.
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Digital, Data, and the paradox of complexity in public services

5/10/2021

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Complex person-centred public services and Digital have to be designed in ways that are fundamentally different, to how we design transactional services.

The Human Learning Systems (HLS) 2021 work of Prof Toby Lowe, and and his analysis of around 50 public sector case studies is an important step in understanding why change in the public services is often so elusive.  But his report begs a question that we have to answer here;
​ Why is Digital not a fundamental part of the solution in any of the case studies?

The seduction of simplicity; the Amazon effect.

We all know what Digital is, and how it has transformed the way we work and live. It is now hard to remember what we did without it. Google and Amazon have imbued us with a paradigm that Digital is transformative and provides us with a quantum leap in service efficiency and delivery.
 
We fell in love with the Digital paradigm a long time ago. We can foresee the landscape of how our organisations would work differently, and how our lives would begin to be transformed, if only we design in more Digital! The next digital developments would simplify our work life, and present us with data that we could then use to make quick decisions. And Service Designers spend much of our time working to make this happen.

As someone asked me... "What is the problem with Digital? It is easy, and quite logical."

 
But whenever we look at the outcomes in organisations, we often never quite get there. And here is why… ​
Digital is based on one key assumption, and that is that our behaviour is logical and predictable. The problem is, people are often complex, irrational, and unpredictable; especially when they are in need of help.

Transactional vs Complex Services

To probe the original question as to why none of the HLS case studies has Digital as a solution is simple. It comes from understanding the complexity of the services that are the core of the public sector.
Digital is a logical technology that enables transactions, communication and data movement to be automated. It has transformed how we renew passports and driving licenses, stripping out large chunks of unnecessary work, producing both large efficiency and effectiveness gains. For highly transactional services, where the unit of service is an item, with very low variety and no variation of input, Digital is stellar.
 
Data 
Data consists of units, defined and unchanging from the moment they were created; by a design based on simplifying reality through categorisation.  It is the ultimate act of logical reductionism, where we interpret the world through these categories and units. We compare like with like.
 
Knowledge 
Knowledge is that which is what we perceive of what we learn about what happens in our lives. Whilst some knowledge can be reduced to single units, the reality is that knowledge often contains the nuances of beliefs, and behaviours. It may consist of thoughts and feelings, about the reality that we inhabit as irrational human beings. 
 
To make matters worse, knowledge is often dependent upon the situation that we are examining at the time – being highly contextual. To use a simple example; the experience of one person in a restaurant, eating a meal, may be totally different to another doing exactly the same thing. How can we collate and store this information, except by the simplifying and assuming that each person has the same context as the other?
 
Complexity
Is a situation that is difficult or impossible to predict because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognise. It defies any standard attempt to understand because it is a symptom or result of multiple, contingent, and conflicting issues. Much of the work of the public sector in dealing with people, family and community issues are like this.

Combining data, knowledge and complexity together

As soon as we consider services that deal directly with people, this introduces complexity and variation that is unpredictable at the level of the individual demands that come into the service. If we attempt to Digitalise that demand, the evidence shows that the information that we have just stored becomes unrepresentative, simplified and rapidly out of date. The result over time is a separation of engagement between the citizen in need and the government agency.  This fact alone causes a whole host of reactions from citizens in need. The data becomes trans-contextual. Causing;

  •  An increase in alternative routes of demand input into that agency, as citizens look for more suitable ways of engaging. 
  • These additional attempts increase overall demand volumes, together with processing costs, and barriers to an effective workflow emerge.
  • A distancing of the citizen from the service becomes more apparent.
  • The categorisation of complex needs into simplistic activities occurs at all levels, distorting our understanding of our citizens.
  • The increase in failure of such services to provide the value they are there for, increasing the problems in communities and the demand into services.
 
Alternatively, by using staff themselves to understand and assess citizens needs, they can take in whatever level of variation and complexity that they need to, to deal with the context that they are immersed in. 

As an example, the success of the initial response to the COVID pandemic by local authorities has been overwhelmingly down to applying HLS principles in uncertain environments. At this local level, the absence of Digital solutions can be contrasted by the effective use of telephones and direct communication between staff and citizen in need, and local agile community responses. Digital big data was left behind in its inability to function in its abstraction from the reality of the immediate situation. The response was delivered by people thinking within the context Infront of them; a triumph of human, not Digital, ingenuity.
'You don't listen, you never do, none of you, you think you know what I want and if I don't do what you say when you say, I'm back here sleeping in that arch'
​Citizen, aged 26, homeless, in and out of prison, and struggling with addiction, talking to Charlie.

"In that 30 second exchange, he summed up everything I understand to be one of our biggest challenges in Local Authority."
Charlie Edwards, Head of Community Safety, Derby City Council, 5 October. 2021

Power with, rather than power over

Traditional public services 'deliver' services to citizens, in ways that there councils have deemed appropriate. However, in the case studies, the power is balanced between the officials and the citizens. True collaborative working.

Each of the HLS case studies point to successful outcomes through increased engagement by direct collaboration between the citizen and staff. This is not accidental, but a feature of the nature of the information that pertains to the rich picture that represents the needs of a citizen and the complexity surrounding that need. This ‘warm data’ contains the necessary nuances and immediacy that is needed at that moment in time, for that particular contextual situation. And this knowledge is best defined and transmitted person to person. The fact is, that the success of the recording and transmission of this richness fails spectacularly if we attempt to do this through Digital means.

Digital Service Design

Over the last few years, Digital Service Design has stormed into the mainstream private sector, with agencies springing up rapidly. Characterised by working in agile and progressive customer centric ways. For some, they seems like the young brash upstarts that they are. But they do represent the vanguard of a new paradigm shift that has gained momentum almost everywhere. They are proving to be successful in what they do; transactional Digital design.
 
In the public sector in the UK, the success that Digital has had, has faltered through various failed initiatives. This was until Government Digital Service (GDS) came along. Since its start in 2011 GDS had reportedly saved over £1b, with improvement of around £500m annually after that.  Perhaps this has been the most rapid improvement initiative in the history of UK government? No wonder GDS is now poised to expand its reach across government, with Digital now being seen as a major enabler within the recent NHS White paper.

​GDS has, more than anything else, managed to create its own unique island of a new paradigm, a different way of thinking and operating, within the heart of central government. It has managed to carve out highly agile teams of eager and motivated staff, who collaborate directly with each other in ways that are as distinct from the traditional central government ways of working as it is possible to be. This characteristic perhaps owes more to its overall success than anything else. What it is interesting is that these GDS principles of working, closely match those of the HLS framework. 
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Conclusions from the evidence

By forgetting the distinctions between complex and transactional services, we are in danger of being seduced by the attractiveness of the simplicity and success of Digital, and we may use it to redesign every service we come across. We must separate the design and application of Digital into transactional (logical) or person based (complex) services, and recognise Digital has to be applied in the appropriate way as a technology and an enabler.

Digitalisation suits logical transactional services, by taking over the role of administration, processing and communicating of information. People suit complex services, by understanding the complex nature of individual citizens in need, in their context, and can deliver the service through decisions made in that context.
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human learning systems, HLS - an evolution of service design

11/6/2021

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A new way of designing and managing services based on design thinking and systems thinking

The Human Learning Systems approach offers an alternative to the “Markets, Managers and Metrics” approach of New Public Management. It outlines a way of making social action and public service more responsive to the bespoke needs of each person that it serves, and creates an environment in which performance improvement is driven by continuous learning and adaptation. It fosters in leaders a sense of responsibility for looking after the health of the systems, and it is these systems which create positive outcomes in people’s lives.

HLS  takes the practice of service design into the realm of the triple diamond as a methodology, and it takes service design into the application of the whole service

Is there something wrong with public services?

Do you have this sense that we struggle to realise why our public services don’t seem to work very well, and why we keep implementing change programmes every few years? Why some citizens seem to be having a more difficult time? And why demand and costs of delivery are always increasing?
There were people in the 1980's (Margaret Thatcher) who (rightly) thought that the public sector should move from its bloated bureaucratic paradigm, to one more defined by the success from the private sector, called New Public Management (NPM). They thought that it should (wrongly) embrace:
  1. Value for money through privatisation of functions. Marketisation.
  2. Managers control decision-making. Managerialist.
  3. Use of targets to 'manage' performance. Auditing and regulation.
  4. Delivering 'efficient' services.
  5. Focus on customer service.
  6. A great starting point for Digital design.

Who would not disagree with this? The public sector was the butt of jokes, and there were stories of waste everywhere. Something new was needed, and quickly.

The Outcome Today

Now, decades later, we know the outcome of NPM. We understand far more about complexity and service design than we did then. We can see what has happened to our communities and health services:
  1. Prevention has been sacrificed due to being unrecognised in our short term focus on activity.
  2. Demand has risen as we have not understood how the whole system works together.
  3. Decision-makers become distant from reality through targets and simplistic financial measures.
  4. Citizens become poorer, and the divide in society widens.
  5. Citizens lives become more difficult as the support for those in need vanishes.
  6. We are unable to deal with long term dependency on state aid.
We know, without going into the details here, that the current public sector design of NPM have themselves become obsolete, and this is the case even in the private sector. Here in the UK the primary focus on commissioning, referrals, centralisation, and the creation of services and targets is now failing us. It is failing us from an efficiency perspective, a wider systemic and citizen outcome perspective, and the long term viability of our citizen coherence and public services.

The Theory

New Public Management (NPM) is based on the scientific paradigm of designing an organisation as a pre-determined machine. Staff all have their roles to play, managers manage the service through measures. Senior managers use measures to tweak mainly financial based actions.
It is interesting that today the private sector is having issues with this paradigm. It is struggling to remain moral in the face of rampant shareholder returns, and to create good working careers for workers. They have to put in safeguards to mitigate the worst of the scientific model of management, but that that is simply papering over the cracks.
And most importantly, NPM is designed for products and service selling in an open marketplace.
 We also know much more about the theory of public services. We know that the public sector is generally a place that is full of complexity. Interestingly NPM is based on the opposite; on a transaction and compatitive based design that contains defined departments that have procedures that can be standardised, repeated and audited. As soon as we place a NPM design over complexity, we get a service that is unable to absorb that variety that is inherent in the system. Those who do not fit into the standard, are rejected and have a very difficult time trying to get support. In most cases they give up, and their lives take a turn for the worst.
Digitalisation is a great example of how the NPM paradigm and consistent Digital design fails to adapt to the reality of the variety that is the public needs. In local authorities, installed Digital designs often have to be bypassed if we truly want to achieve what is needed. In public services, we need flexibility rather than standardisation.

Designing for Complexity – Human Learning Systems

If we design services against the characteristics of the service we need:
  1. To understand the nature of the nature and the variation of the demand of all citizens.
  2. That service decisions are best made closest to the work, within each situation itself.
  3.  Service staff need to collaborate and engage together to solve multiple issues at the same time.
  4. Outcomes cannot be known before-hand and standardised at the start of engaging with citizens.
  5. Prevention of issues is about dealing with citizen issues at the earliest opportunity.
  6. Staff to citizen interaction is the best way to understand and develop actions for citizens in need.
The research undertaken by Toby Lowe and Human Learning Systems (HLS), spans several decades, and involves a great number of real examples. The basis of the research is an analysis of real prototypes that have used alternatives to NPM. And those studies are compared to the outcomes from NPM currently designed services.  

Progressive Approaches

What are the approaches that move us into the land of a new way of working, free from the problems of our current management and service design? Design Thinking and Digital Service Design have come to the forefront in recent years. This is despite the fact that they have been around for many decades. But what is different this time that makes then so popular? Well, it comes with a new paradigm, that is a break from New Public Management. GDS has been very effective in its development of highly transactional central government services.
In local government and healthcare,  there have been ongoing prototypes of new ways of working that have been quietely developing for years, and recently a group of those people decided to put these together, and examine the framework that makes them different.
Launched in June 2021, Human Learning Systems has been created by a collaborative of public service workers, managers and leaders who were fed up with the way that targets and markets create dehumanising, fragmented and wasteful public service, divorced from the reality of the lives of both the people being supported and the people who support them.
human learning systems
The HLS Report
The launch
recording

Human Learning Systems

Lets start with the belief that public service exists to enable each person to create good outcomes in their lives. To do this, we believe that public service must embrace the complex reality of the 21st Century world. This means being human, continuously learning and nurturing healthy systems.
BEING HUMAN
refers to creating the conditions in which people can build effective citizen relationships. This means understanding human variety, using empathy to understand the lives of others, recognising people’s strengths, and trusting those who do the work. It allows for new management competencies to develop.
It also means that staff bring their whole selves to work, recognising that we as people in work need;  challenge, learning, autonomy, and achievement.
CONTINUOUSLY LEARNING 
In complex environments people are required to learn continuously in order to adapt to the dynamic, ever-changing nature of the work. In complex environments, there is no simple intervention which “works” to tackle a problem. “What works” is an on-going process of learning and adaptation. It is the job of managers to enable staff to learn continuously as the tool for performance improvement. This means using measures to learn, not for reward/punishment. It means creating the conditions where people can be honest about their mistakes and uncertainties. It means creating reflective practice environments between and across peer groups.
THINKING AND DESIGNING SYSTEMS
The outcomes we care about are not delivered by organisations. They are produced by whole systems – by hundreds of different factors working together. The final job of managers is therefore to act as Systems Stewards – to enable actors in the system to co-ordinate and collaborate effectively - enabling positive outcomes to emerge.

How do we do this?

The principles of Design Thinking are the antidote to the machine based command & control paradigm.
Traditional Change
HLS characteristics
Our perception of what the public want
focused on the citizen and what matters to them.
Designed around legislation
designed around person-centred purpose.
Created by Service Designers
co-created with everyone in the end to end workflow.
keep the waste in the design
design out waste
managers decide base don their opinions and experinece
based on evidence from experiments, rather than management opinions.
only change one part of the service
we view the service as a system, including behaviours, team working, leadership, collaboration, and culture.
create a plan for change and measure progress
any design is emergent, so we iterate as we learn what works.
hierarchy is based on power and the right to make decisions
we develop ourselves so we remove fear from hierarchy and the work environment.
Digital solves all our problems
Digital is designed in when necessary
We need an approach that contains these principles, and is based on proven practice.  The HLS framework has been created from researching the approaches used in the HLS case studies.
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The Triple Diamond Design

We all use different variations of the framework. It is flexible enough to be able to adapt to change in organisations. 
service design triple diamond systems thinking
Triple diamond design methodology
More Triple Diamond...
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an example of complexity clashing with a transactional design

10/6/2021

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UNIVERSAL CREDIT EXAMPLE, Authored by LANDWORKS  June 10 2021

It was not going well. Universal Credit in some ways does help people back into employment.
In other ways, it is simply not designed for folk who are not, or have never been supported, educated, or trained in budgeting skills.
Jack (52) was struggling. Monthly payments make his life difficult. Like so many on UC, he takes to borrowing here and there, to get through.
Then, as Jack puts it, “come payday I’m f#*ked”, as the sharks swim in for the kill.
That was not what this meeting was about, we were discussing Jack’s PIP (Personal Independence Payment), which is a long-term benefit if you have difficulties with daily living and/or getting around.
And one of the assessment criteria is the capability to ‘make decisions about money'.
So together with the Citizens Advice Bureau, we work hard to support these PIP applications. We knew the application would almost certainly be turned down (a cynic would think they have a target of high rejections), and most are.
It was.
The appeal process is long and hard (not everyone is capable of this). Interestingly another of the criteria for getting PIP is your ability around reading and communicating.
Jack’s appeal (after 6 months) was successful… Hooray.
But DWP didn’t inform him… Boo.
A large back payment was made (as if by magic) into his account… Hooray, but with a note of concern!
Jack finds this pot of gold (6 months of PIP) in his bank and goes straight to the pub. To demonstrate to his new group of ‘friends’ just how poor his budgeting skills really are… Boo doesn’t really do it!
PIP is a progressive benefit designed for people with identified low life skills (e.g. capability to make financial arrangements) who have proved they are not best equipped to deal with daily living in the first place.
So, Department for Work and Pensions, could you please stop making large back payments. Please, it's unhelpful and in a few cases life-threatening.
These back-payments need to become forward-payments, spread out over an agreed period or used for a one-off payment such as a deposit on suitable accommodation. Also, DWP while you’re about it, stop the loan shark’s activity and make benefit payments weekly (supposedly fortnightly payments exist but all our applications have been rejected) for those who need it.
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integrating service design, systems thinking and complexity

14/2/2021

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service design systems thinking complexity

Moving service design forward to incorporate systems thinking, allows us to expand the depth of how we can evolve organisations and design for complexity

1. Systems Thinking

My definition of Systems Thinking for a service organisation is conceptually very simple;
it is a holistic way of looking at the service, its customers, operating environment, its service delivery, and all the elements that go to making this happen.
 One key aspect of systems thinking  that is easy to grasp, is that systems thinking sees the interactions and communication that occurs between departments. It's about how people interact within an organisation, in response to customer demand. When people start to perceive their organisation through a systems lens, they gain a perspective that leads them to understand how that service can work in a fundamentally different way to traditional mechanistic & reductionist principles that operate today. There are few good paths that lead to learn about Systems Thinking; the best way is to practice it. And looking for how to do this can often ends up creating more confusion than it solves! I hope that this article may help to make some sense of all this.
What is an Organisation when Viewed as a System?
A system isn’t just any old collection of things. A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.
If you look at that definition closely for a minute, you can see that a system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose.  Meadows

What is a Systems Thinking Lens like?

Systems thinking is a way of seeing a service, from the customers perspective, all the way through the service delivery. It understands everything that goes into that delivery, without the barriers inherent in departmental design. Therefore we can begin to redesign the service from that customer centric perspective, incorporating the staff, managers, behaviours, leadership, and the culture of that organisation.
  • It pulls down barriers between departments and stakeholders, it dissolves silo working.
  • We design services that match the flexiblity of the needs of all customers, and move away from standard processes.
  • We understand the interactions between activities, and use that to create design how the organisation truly works.
  • We recognise 'warm' data that contains the richness of experiences and behaviours, and avoid analysis dumbing down that richness through categories or personas.
  • We move away from a machine based and reductionist way of understanding of how we traditionally design organisations. This will then allow us to see problems from a new perspective, allowing us to create novel solutions that we did not see before.

Complexity and uncertainty are recognised as being different to transactional process design and certainty. Understanding this complexity then allows us to design in different elements to what we would have done. This then allows us to help decision-makers reframe and see their problems to sovle from a new perspective.
systems thinking iceberg
systems thinking iceberg
The systems thinking iceberg illustrates how systems thinking practice delves deeper into the hidden abstractions of how services truly work. 
Those aspects of a service that are visible, are often the only ones busy managers attempt to fix.
However, go underneath the obvious, and we can uncover how the myriad of connections, behaviours, personalities, and competencies interact together.
Start on the right hand side, and keep asking why until you can go no further. Then design back up on the left hand side. ​
Once we have understood this, then we can begin to alter the underlying structures so that we then effect deeper transformation.

Service Design with Systems Thinking = Systemic Design

Design Thinking is based on creating something innovative. This is ideally placed to provide a vehicle for systems thinking concepts to be incorporated.
Below is a diagrammatic way of demonstrating the difference between traditional service design (that begins with the needs of the organisation), and systemic service design (that starts from the customer and what matters to them.)
  • approach is iterative and is about learning,
  • destination is through enquiry,
  • understands the whole,
  • focused on the customer.

The concepts; traditional design vs systemic design.
Traditional approaches reduces the problem to manageable pieces and seeks solutions to each. Practitioners of this approach believe that solving the problem piece by piece ultimately will correct the larger issue this method aims to remedy. 

The systems design approach, in sharp contrast, the seeks to understand a problem situation as a system of interconnected, interdependent, and interacting issues and to create a design as a system of interconnected, interdependent, interacting, and internally consistent solution ideas. Systems designers envision the entity to be designed as a whole, as one that is designed from the synthesis of the interaction of its parts. A systems view suggests that the essential quality of a part of a system resides in its relationship with, and contribution to, the whole. Systems design requires both coordination and integration. All parts need to be designed interactively, therefore simultaneously. This requires coordination. The requirement of designing for interdependency across all systems levels invites integration.
Banathy

service design
Diagram 1 shows how managers and designers will start by;
1.  taking the assumptions that we hold, and the standards that we think we have to align to, and define these  before we start the design.  
2. These contraints then birth the design, that is ultimately designed around what the organisation believes to be important.
​3. The final design is then given to the staff to follow.
Managers define the design, and use their expected behaviours and staff roles to ensure the service operates how the managers wish it to.
systemic service design
Diagram 2 is where a team of operational staff and the designers;
1.  take real demands in an experiment, and develop flows as they deal with those demands.
2. When they need to, they pull in various specialisms, and the team interpret how those characteristics should be implemented into the fledgeling  experiment. No specialism should impose their views on the team.
​3. The design that emerges is person-centred, and developed by the operational  staff.
Managers work with the team, and learn new collaborative and team based behaviours, so they accept that the design is co-created. Managers role in the new design focus on systems competencies.

Traditional thinking & practice
Systems thinking & practice
Applying rationality, reductionism, expertise and functionality to an organisation may take us away from the understanding of that whole.
The whole service should be understood as a system.
Service functions have their own purpose, working against each other.
The whole service is defined by its purpose. And as such the service must be understood end to end, creating an outside-in view of the organisation as a system
Staff are cogs in a machine, they have little control over their work
People are the heart of any organisation, and they are the embodiment of the system. Staff bring their whole selves to work
Reductionist thinking
Holistic understanding
Impose standard services on the customer
Absorb variation in the design and operations
Internal focus, and satisfy stakeholders
Design around the customer
Leaders think that staff perceptions need to change, not theirs
Recognition that leaders mindsets creates the system, allows us to help leaders to change their fundamental understanding of how they see organisations work
Change is done to staff
The staff in the organisation undertake the change

2. Design Thinking & Systems Thinking

If, Systems Thinking provides the perspective, how to understand it
then,
Design Thinking provides the principles,
and Service Design is the practice.
Design Thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems in an attempt to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding. At the same time, Design Thinking provides a solution-based approach to solving problems. It is a way of thinking and working as well as a collection of hands-on methods.
Design thinking is also a set of principles that defines how to design something using iterative techniques, that create emergent designs. The 'customer' is the starting point, and the inherent nature of design thinking is innovative. It is a uniquely human activity.
And for the design of services, the Nesta's triple diamond model is a great place to conceptualise this:
Nesta design thinking triple diamond
Triple diamond service design
More Triple Diamond...

3. Complexity

Complexity defined by Grint

Complex  problems hold a multitude of other problems within them. They change over time and are affected by aspects outside our control. They have no predictable solution.
Complexity, it messes with our rationality. Let go of that rationality as a cage and allow complexity to become normal.
Picture
A great graphic demonstrating the fear we have of complexity. Graphics by Virpi Oinonen - Business Illustrator
Understanding complexity, and therefore moving away from my prevailing and rational mindset, has helped me to understand why I often failed to sustain much of what I was trying to achieve in the past, with managing operations and people, implementing change, creating and implementing IT systems. I, like so many others, have looked back and seen the frustration and struggle to ‘get things to stick’ and how I used to blame others for that failure.

Logical services - they can be analysed, and procedures created that can be applied through Digital means

Complex services - their interactions need to be understood, and the subsequent design is based on collaboration and fuzzy data.

The presence of Complexity should radically alter our approach to understanding users, and how we design services. It disrupts our view of how Digital should be applied, and how we deal with knowledge and engage across the whole value chain.

Understanding when to use a particular approach, helps managers to understand why sometimes their efforts are successful or futile.
In both the public and private sectors, managers understanding of management concepts is rooted in mechanistic and scientific management theories. This has evolved over the past centuries through the rise of scientific thinking. However, complexity cannot be successfully dealt with by applying these traditional concepts, and attempts to do so create poor service designs, and great frustration for all working in them. There are many resources now available, at the click of a button, to help us to understand complexity and how to deal with it, so I won't go into details here. But I have found the simplicity of Keith Grint's approach to complexity a very helpful starting point.

4. Service Design

Can we describe basic Service Design as the application of Digital to a Design Thinking approach? If we do, then we have to admit that SD is therefore bounded by Digital. In this article SD is defined as the design of services, using Design Thinking (without the constraint of Digital).

My Experience of Outcomes of Good Service Design

These are some of my Systems Thinking & Change principles, that I use as a foundation to my design approach.
  • The Service workflow is understood and designed end to end.
  • What matters to users and the variation of demand has to be incorporated into the new design.
  • That the fundamentals of the design is created from the Purpose of the service. Purpose is primarily defined by the user of the service. This immediately places the focus of the design starting from an outside-in perspective.
  • That the leaders thinking, assumptions and behaviours creates the whole environment within which the Service operates in. These need to align to managing complexity and systemic view, to create a new organisation design.
  • The thinking and approaches of leaders and managers, drives the behaviours of the staff and the culture of hte organisation.
  • The change is performed by those in the service itself, I merely ast as the facilitator.
systems thinking mindset
Real learning through fundamental mental shifts are difficult to achieve. This often happens whilst people are connected to the work itself. It hardly happens in a rational environment through teaching or reading. (Ref: Argyris & Schon). Systems thinking is real, and that reality is not possible to directly comprehend through human forms of communication, it should only be experienced. Its understanding lies directly in the human-ness that we are, with regard to our individual world views.
I hear things, and I forget them.
I see things, and I remember them.
I do things, and I understand them.
Confucius

5. Human Learning Systems - A combination for Systemic Design

Human Learning Systems
Human Learning Systems framework. Created by Northumbria University and Collaborate CIC
The HLS framework is an example of a methodology that can be seen combining systems thinking with design thinking. This helps us to frame the Design Council model of systems thinking into a coherent approach for change and design.

Service designers systems thinking workshop...

If you want to know more, then this 1 day workshop will help you as a service designer, to understand some of the systems thinking fundamental that are applicable to redesigning services.
Go To workshop

We now delve into the background and theory of Systems and Design Thinking. Recommended for those who wish to know more of the  issues I have faced breaking boundaries of what is deemed acceptable.

Getting into the Background and Theory - Using Different Approaches

Systems thinkers can collide because they see the world in different ways, or they can see this as essential. We should examine the different ways they see the world rather than argue about the way the world ‘actually is’. In some circumstances one viewpoint will give you the traction to bring about improvement, in others a different viewpoint is needed. You can make an informed choice of which viewpoint ( and associated systems approaches) to start with but you will never really know until you are engaged in the process of using it. And you should be ready to switch as a project progresses. Best is to have a variety of viewpoints (and associated systems approaches) at your disposal. This ‘second-order’ thinking - concentrating on the nature of the systems approaches and what they can achieve, rather than pinning down what the world is like - is called critical systems thinking, perhaps most well defined by Prof Michael Jackson, OBE.
It is easy to remember theory with the mind; the problem is to remember with the body. The goal is to know & do instinctively. Having the spirit to endure the training & practice is the first step on the road to understanding.
Taiichi Ohno.

Qualities Required to Learn about Thinking things

  1. The ability to put aside ones own views, beliefs, stated positions and truly learn from others that do not share your perspective.
  2. Realise that judging other is in itself a limiting action, and it inhibits point 1.
  3. Realising that others are different to ourselves, so their journey, whilst different to ours, may be valid for them.
  4. That to truly understand, words that have been written, data, presentations, case studies, none are a substitute to actually visiting a situation with that person, and witnessing what they are doing to gain true understanding.

Design Thinking

Background
Design Thinking has always existed, but the term itself was coined in the 20th century. It became the subject of ‘papers’ and then become increasingly recognised through very practical and successful product development. An interesting and important characteristic about Design Thinking, is the reluctance for those operating in that field to strictly define it from an academic perspective, and critically, to resist attempts to standardise and codify it. According to many practitioners, the day that codification happens will probably be the day it begins to die.
Section by Stefanie di Russo
We have come to realize that we do not have to turn design into a limitation of science, nor do we have to treat design as a mysterious, ineffable art. We recognize that design has its own distinct intellectual culture; its own designerly ‘things to know, ways of knowing them, and ways of finding out about them’
(Nigel Cross 1999, p. 7)
Schön aggressively refuted the idea that design needs to ground itself in science to be taken seriously. Like his peers, he made an attempt to individualise design as a unique practice through cognitive reflections and explanations on its process.

Schön’s main approach on design practice was not focused on analysing the process but rather framing and contextualizing it. He describes the idea of ‘problem setting’ as a crucial component that holds together the entire process. The point of focusing on this was to allow designers to best understand how to approach the problem before they go about processing how to solve it.

Let us search, instead, for an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which some practitioners do bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict (Schön 1982, p. 49)

Learning Systems Thinking? It’s not so Straightforward, lets ask Russ Ackoff

So I want to separate Systems Thinking from systems theory. They are different but yet related. I want separate the two because Theory itself, by definition, is a rational, scientific and reductionist way of looking at anything. Academia primarily engages in theory and research analysis.

As an example, when we use a model to describe something, we are not describing that thing directly. The model is and always will be an artificial construct that we create to help us understand. And often the model is a poor relation to the real thing, in that we have to embellish or move away from the model when applying it. We use models and theories to help us analytically to understand Systems Thinking, and for some this is the ideal route for them. But for others it could also confuse and only teach us about structured constructs and models, if we limit ourselves to this approach. Looking at Systems Thinking through a holistic lens, we would never reduce it to its component parts and then ‘teach’ those.
Ideally, systems theory and practice should inform one another,
Prof Mike Jackson OBE