Where should service designers be focusing?

It’s only when you get the whole picture, you can fully understand what’s going on.

I’m reminded of an old ad for The Guardian. It talks about the importance of perspective (sound on please).

Teaching my son to play chess I kept repeating

you need to see the whole board,

and this feels like such a great example of the importance of understanding the whole ecosystem.

My current thinking on this is of course, that the epic, pyramid-building scale required to re-tool and re-shape the whole organisation is waaaay out of scope of the average service design project. There will be multiple orgs, multiple stakeholders, politics, budgets etc. which make attempting to fix everything at once just silly…

What really should always be in scope from a service design perspective is telling the story of how it could all fit together.

(Globe image from Natalie Harney who is AMAZING. Visit her site. Work with her.)