Empathy-Driven Service Design: Building Collaboration and Leading Change with Kate Tarling

Gerry Scullion (07:54.872)

Kate, I'm delighted to have you on the show. Long time admirer, first time or second time, maybe third time speaking.

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Gerry Scullion (08:25.1)

And I'm really I'm I'm delighted to have you on the show because we've got a lot of mutual friends. And but maybe for our listeners who aren't familiar with your work, tell us a little bit about yourself, where you're from and what you do.

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Kate (08:39.374)

would love to and it's a pleasure to chat with you today. So I'm Kate Tarling. I live in the centre of the UK in Sheffield and I've had a varied career, I suppose, in the early days in the 2000s, I was running sort of operational services being thrown in at the deep end.

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And then later on, looked into more getting into human centered design, because it seemed to be entirely sensible focus if you want to successful product or service that you need to figure out what people actually need and what makes a difference to them. And these days I run an organization, the service or group. And we tend to work with organizational leadership.

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helping them to understand what it involves to be a good service provider and removing some of the blocks and barriers that are typically in the way. So things like how governance and decision making works, how funding works, how reporting and planning work or don't work, how long or how hard it is to get a piece of work initiated and kind of going through and how that's measured and thought about. it's really about creating the conditions for good services to happen.

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Gerry Scullion (09:59.021)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (10:03.798)

Yeah. You just mentioned Lou Downs book, Good Services. I'm joking. I know. Yeah. And Lou's been on the show and, you know, a long, long time friend. And, know, I put what you wrote last year to commit last year. And this is the book here, folks, if you haven't seen it, it's the service organization. If you're listening on the podcast, of course, you can watch this on YouTube.

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Kate (10:08.654)

I often do.

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Gerry Scullion (10:28.233)

But the service organization came out after Lou's work. And I can see there's a lot of dovetailing going on between that book and good services, especially when you're talking about the work that you do with organizations and governments. Maybe talk us through some of the steps and how you how you would kind of approach that space with organizational leaders who are taking the first steps.

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into service orientated kind of approaches to projects. How do start that off? How do you define those parameters?

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Kate (11:06.86)

Yeah, yeah, really good question. And I think to be fair, there's always like really great work that's usually already underway in those organizations. It's not, no one's sort of starting from nothing. There's often the places I'm going in, there's brilliant human centered design teams already doing good stuff. There are digital delivery teams, know, prototyping, iterating, learning as they go. So there's always that context. However,

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Gerry Scullion (11:23.117)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (11:35.245)

Yeah.

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Kate (11:35.916)

It's like the rest of the organization looks at it as if it's something other and different and not really anything to do with them. So whether that's operational teams or other parts of leadership or enforcement or compliance or all of those other areas. So although there's always really good stuff happening, it's just as a whole, the organization isn't necessarily doing all that it could. So I think the first step is often just setting out what

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what it looks like because for most people it's like, we're doing great stuff. Like, you know, we're fighting the fires, we're doing the best we can with not very much resources, you know. So it's about awareness of what it can look like and also for organisations that are a bit like them as well. So not sort of painting some unachievable standard from some organisation that was only existed from five years ago. And of course, you know, get to like benefit from contemporary ways of working. But

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Gerry Scullion (12:19.511)

Yeah.

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Kate (12:30.968)

you know, organizations like yours that have existed for hundreds of years, what are they doing? What kinds of things are happening now that are a bit different to what they're happening for you? We sometimes do a sort of organizational assessment, which is really about, you know, looking at different areas. These are typically the things that need to change. What is going on for you? What's that look like? And then usually just starting somewhere or strengthening work that's already happening somewhere. So picking one.

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Gerry Scullion (12:38.071)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (12:47.928)

Mm.

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Gerry Scullion (12:58.679)

Hmm.

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Kate (13:00.344)

whole service and actually putting in place some of the habits, ways of working and things that can help everybody work together a bit better across it. Something like that.

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Gerry Scullion (13:06.848)

Yeah. One of the things that I remember in our email, kind of ramping up for this episode, you said you don't really consider yourself a service designer. And that's depending on how you frame it, I think that can be a superpower. Talk to me about what's going on inside your head around how you position yourself and why you don't consider yourself a service designer.

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Kate (13:36.14)

Yeah, and I think it's to say that I have been and it's about sort of the kind of work that I do. certainly when I was working on a service or a set of services within an organization, very much looking at the design of it, what we know about our customers, users, the humans involved, staff members and so on, and looking at what can we do to kind of make things work better. I think because

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Gerry Scullion (13:40.972)

You have been,

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Gerry Scullion (13:48.012)

Yeah.

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Kate (14:02.316)

These days, it's less about the design of any one service and it's about the design of the organization, the habits, what goes on around all of its services that it doesn't quite fall into that same category, although everything I say is entirely relevant to service designers. So it's not exactly a trying to separate, but it gets really into the heart of operations, actually, for sort of big operational.

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Gerry Scullion (14:20.135)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (14:29.814)

Yeah.

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Kate (14:31.304)

areas of government or of organisations. So it's got as much to do with operations, with what goes on in contact centres, with leadership decisions, with the boards, with influence of non -executives as it has to do with design as we might think of it. And of course the whole thing adds up to how well the service works. So it's all part of it, but it's sort of a...

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Gerry Scullion (14:48.532)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (14:52.945)

It looks okay.

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I'm just holding a mirror up here. I'm just holding a mirror up. And you're like, I'm not really, but I I know I take every single one of those boxes as a service designer. But yeah, it's funny, a lot of people I speak to, you know, people who have written books as well, like they'd say, like, I don't really think of myself as a service designer. And it's really interesting for me to hear yet another story, another perspective on it. What's causing that? Like, because

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Kate (15:07.33)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (15:26.272)

At its core, you are doing all the elements of a service designer and you're helping the organization get better at thinking and reshaping how they deliver services. But in your mind, what is a service designer then? That question.

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Kate (15:44.76)

think it's just about the focus of work and at any given time. So if you think of service design as about designing services, depending on where you're at. I think sometimes coming in from a consultancy is quite different as we know to working in -house as a service designer, but the work tends to focus on a service or some common element that runs across services. It's sort of instrumental in the actual experience, the success of a service.

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Gerry Scullion (15:56.098)

Hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (16:02.487)

Yeah.

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Kate (16:17.12)

And yes, we know where do you draw the boundaries then because of decision making and everything else. So yeah, not to split hairs about it, but my God, you could call it a management consultancy or organization design. It's all really, really part of

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Gerry Scullion (16:24.33)

city.

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Gerry Scullion (16:28.001)

Amen.

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Business consultants, the. Yeah, I mean, I was traveling a couple of weeks ago and was working with Mark, Mark Stickton on this project, and we you know, he doesn't call himself a service designer, you know, and the argument there is like if you're working in an organization and they say, this is business consultancy, I'm not going to argue with them and say, well, actually, I'm a service designer and stuff.

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Kate (17:00.396)

Yeah, let me now spend half an hour talking to you about...

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Gerry Scullion (17:00.556)

I don't Yeah, and I'm sure you're pretty much the same like it's it's I mean, and I would have in times past, I would have been well, actually, I am I'm what's known as a sir. I wouldn't get into that. So I'd focus mostly on the work. I mean, that's that's the most important thing for us. know.

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Kate (17:21.42)

That's right. And also like these days my answer would be I'm the CEO of an organization. Like that's what I do at the moment. And if I'm running a taxi and somebody asks me, I generally say I build websites just because it depends on where you go.

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Gerry Scullion (17:29.706)

Yeah, you were in your own space.

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Gerry Scullion (17:35.838)

really?

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Gerry Scullion (17:39.608)

man, I hate that question. I've become that person when I'm when I'm traveling or going to an anything. What do you do? I'm like, man, that is like that social anxiety. It's room 101. It's going straight in there. I never know what to say. I think. What do you say? Websites.

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Kate (17:55.214)

Do you have, I don't know if you experienced this, so I say it depends, it depends what's going on. It depends what mood I'm in, whether I actually want to have a genuine conversation or whether I'm a bit tired and I don't, to be fair. But it's also, don't know if you have this, can some friends of yours, like if you're in the gathering and someone says, hey, Jerry, you know, what do you do? Can some friends of yours step in and tell them what you do and other friends have no idea. So I noticed this. I've got a couple of friends who are actually,

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Gerry Scullion (18:05.066)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (18:15.479)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (18:21.624)

20%.

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Kate (18:24.162)

can explain what I do and others have no idea.

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Gerry Scullion (18:24.439)

No.

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Interesting. I had this really this exact thought process on Saturday night. So one of my really good friends, former boss, would you believe, when I worked in Australia, Cochlear, my first service design project, he came over to visit and he stayed in our house for the weekend and I took him to Galway. And one of my other friends from my times past when I was young, free and single and known as Scully was my nickname, like wild kind of days.

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And he doesn't know anything about my design career. And we sat down, the three people at the table, so one over here, former boss knows exactly what I can do as a designer. And the other one is like, you know, you're not drinking anymore. Why not? Why aren't you drinking? Where's fun? Scully gone? Fun school. He's gone to bed and he's not getting up for the rest of my life. Like, that's it. Fun school. He's over. OK. And he was like, so you're not doing any of the design anymore. And I go, no, I'm doing design, but I'm not doing like, you know, website stuff.

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Kate (19:12.628)

Ha ha.

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Gerry Scullion (19:27.384)

It's mainly training these days that I do like, you know, he couldn't get his head around it. So it's not logos. It's not branding. So depending on the part of, you know, wherever people know me from school or from university, like, guess I've evolved an awful lot from over the last 20, 25 years. Anyone from those days that they don't know what I do like for a living. Like, you know, the people who've worked with me, obviously will be ex clients or whatever it is. They kind of know what we do.

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What about you? your friends? You said some of your friends do know what they do. How do they describe it? I want to hear that one. Yeah, 5050.

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Kate (20:03.392)

Can I phone a friend at this point? A friend who's a paediatric consultant and she can do a pretty good job of explaining what I do. And I think it's those that it probably resonates more with them because the people that I know who work in large organizations, like she's obviously in frontline service delivery. So experiences directly how hard

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Gerry Scullion (20:15.949)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (20:26.872)

100%.

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Kate (20:30.594)

the hardness of working in an institution and kind of the obvious things that should just be easy to do or that you could do for your patients that are so hard for reasons or the handovers involved that really get in the way of good sort of just treatment of patients, treatment of people. So I suspect there's a correlation between people who instinctively get what you do when they're working in the places that you typically go in and work with.

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Gerry Scullion (20:33.484)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (20:40.343)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (20:47.384)

experiences.

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Gerry Scullion (20:54.979)

Yeah. Healthcare workers are perfect. mean, they are changemakers 101. They control a small amount of space around their experience, but they get it. If you want to make improvements to increase chances of recovery or better overall satisfaction, that's the kind of work that I would do. That's straight away that they get it. And they're really interested. I don't know what it is about people working in airports or hospitals.

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They're really complex ecosystems, but they they get they get service design. In my experience, it's just kind of native to them in some ways like, know, I don't know why that is. Do you have any thoughts on why people in hospitals? What's driving it?

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Kate (21:42.03)

think it might be coming back to where I was talking about earlier and that I don't exactly see myself as a service designer and it's nothing to do with what service designers do because they do everything and get involved in everything. I think it's more because it can be bit othering to the people who are already in the service, working on the service, doing their best to hold things together. Like they are often, particularly with healthcare, like a one person service where they're getting on the phones to try and connect.

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Gerry Scullion (21:50.199)

Hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (21:59.01)

Yeah.

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Kate (22:09.194)

social care thing with a something else thing with a something else thing. Like they are doing it. So if you imagine like in some situations, you imagine you've got this consultancy team that comes in, it doesn't use the research to tell you what's wrong with the service and then tells you how to improve it. And they're like, do you think I don't know, I just have no time to do anything about it. So it's yeah, I think it comes back to that. gosh, yeah, it's not for lack, it's not always but it's often not for lack.

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Gerry Scullion (22:09.569)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (22:27.864)

Absolutely.

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Kate (22:36.364)

not knowing things are not working so well. It's all of the things in the way of people being able to do something about it.

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Gerry Scullion (22:40.13)

time and focus.

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Yeah. I mean, hospitals for me are a great example of a service organization, which is to, you know, re quote, you know, your book. Talk to me about the origin of the book, because I know you've had an interesting career and I'd love to hear more on the work that you did with GDS and you go to UK and you worked at Loo, didn't you? You worked at Loo and.

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Kate (23:10.656)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, in a few places. you know, Lou was pretty instrumental about getting services and services I'm really talked about and taking really seriously in government, which has just been phenomenal, like the impacts of that over time.

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Gerry Scullion (23:12.288)

and aware of its in the government.

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Gerry Scullion (23:26.73)

Yeah and I had breakfast yesterday by the way just as a disclaimer with Trisha Doyle who was like Kate is amazing Kate and I was like wait calm down Kate calm down Trisha like I can't okay it's cool all right let's talk about me for a minute when he's joking

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Kate (23:32.655)

Mmm.

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Kate (23:37.902)

Trisha is awesome.

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Kate (23:41.866)

you

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Kate (23:48.125)

there's a lot of mutual respect going on everywhere among us all, think.

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Gerry Scullion (23:53.302)

I mean, like, don't know what it is, but a lot of the the GDS crew all of the people that have come out of there, like Sarah Winters, like there's so many people that have done so much good work since leaving the GDS and go to UK and all all of the other various parts of the government that they're working in. And we mentioned there, Catherine.

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in the NHS before we started speaking. It seems that there's been a renaissance happening in the UK over the last 20 years as regards services and service design. What do you think is underpinning all of this? Where is this coming from as regards, I know Francis Maud, think it was the person that started the GDS, wasn't that right?

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Kate (24:46.357)

Yeah, we're certainly closely involved. Yeah. Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (24:47.811)

So closely involved. But like there's been so much incredible work come out of the UK in the last 20 years. And they include obviously, you know, the service organization and that as well and yourself. How did all that happen? Like, you know, because I know there's people in other parts of the world who really want to improve government services. They want to, you know, you know.

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improved talent with across the organization. But it just seems that over that maybe it's my own kind of perspective and I'm looking at the UK and the people I get to know. But it seems something has happened really positively over the last 20 years across the UK as regards design. What are your thoughts on that?

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Kate (25:29.973)

Yeah. So definitely true. And I think others look on and just sort of see we have a maturity about it, particularly, know, folks in the States notice the difference. I think certainly in government, there was a significant report by Martha Lane Fox.

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Gerry Scullion (25:36.758)

Hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (25:43.671)

Hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (25:52.268)

Mm

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Kate (25:52.946)

and with support of Francis Maud and then others. There was a big groundswell in doing government services better for sure. And with the influence of various individuals across the way, think that momentum just built and built and built. And I feel like there's more momentum coming again now towards it. But that's kind of different to other countries' focus. So if you think of like...

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Gerry Scullion (25:56.215)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (26:07.074)

Mm.

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Gerry Scullion (26:14.861)

Yeah.

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Kate (26:20.96)

Estonia, their focus was on sorting out the plumbing and the infrastructure that services are built on more than perhaps designing for user needs, but it's a sort of different approach. So there's sort of different versions of it, I think.

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Gerry Scullion (26:22.444)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (26:26.176)

And.

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Gerry Scullion (26:33.537)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (26:37.772)

Do think it's down to opportunity then? Is it a case that post academia that, well, there's just so many people in the UK, people had opportunities to sink their teeth into these projects. And it just happened like it was a perfect storm that government was ready and leadership was ready to accept design into the conversation.

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Kate (27:02.266)

And I think that's true of like when you're even you're building a groundswell of action within an organization as well. There are opportunities and moments in time that are more suitable than less suitable probably. So noticing what's going on and sort of yeah, when something big happens, something major happens, that can be an opportunity to to kind of pick that up and run with it or it can be an opportunity to bide one's time and think, okay.

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Gerry Scullion (27:08.075)

I

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Gerry Scullion (27:14.423)

Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (27:24.556)

Mm.

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Kate (27:29.548)

let's have a go at this in a few months time, not right now. But certainly that was like having the right people involved, the right opportunities, the right support, the right permission, the right buy -in from people, the right sort of funding mechanisms so that it wasn't just a conversation, a nice to have. You need sort of the right power, teeth, strength in order to kind of bring these things about. And I think that was certainly true at that time. that's

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Gerry Scullion (27:29.794)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (27:49.761)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (27:56.246)

Yeah.

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Kate (27:58.626)

has ongoing repercussions, which has been awesome.

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Gerry Scullion (28:01.696)

Yeah, and I mean, there's two aspects to that. A lot of the people that I've mentioned there who've created so much good for specifically service design and human centered design across the UK, they all seem to have this fire in the belly is what I refer to. I include you in that as well. you're like, don't you say that I've got a fire in my belly. But I'm just saying that I think everyone who I know

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that has done incredible things tends to not just accept the status quo. They have this this real kind of, you know, ability to to fight the fight like, know, and really become that change maker. And that's the first point. The second point is that one of the things that I can see across the UK since I don't know, maybe maybe it is 20 years.

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But it's this act of community within the design community where everyone seems to kind of know of each other or know someone who knows that someone, whether it's like the work up in Scotland, like Sarah, Sarah Drummond and all the way down to the GDS. It just seems like there's a really nice kind of level of respect that just permeated the community. Definitely over the last 20 years.

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Is that something that has happened with intent or it just happened congruently, like with the movement that we're talking about? Was there anything that you can see? Like, how did you hear about all of the other designers who are doing all this great work across the UK? What were the vehicles that you used to share knowledge during those times?

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Kate (29:45.226)

Yeah, good question. my God. wish somebody would be amazing for someone to go and dig out the history of kind of what groups formed and where things happened and sort of focus on me or something. I would love to hear about that. OK. OK, this is happening in action. I don't know.

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Gerry Scullion (29:55.652)

I've done some of this. This is part of my pseudo research. go on. I want to your thoughts. That's a really good point, Jerry. I wish somebody had got some notes. Go on, I hear your thoughts.

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Kate (30:09.258)

Yeah, hence the podcast. I don't know if it's something about people who are sort of drawn to design and thinking about things tend to be sort of more open or whatever. As an industry, we like all of us build on the shoulders and amazing work of each other. Like that is definitely the case, very true of my own work. I remember early on there was a beautiful community meetup called the London IA.

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Gerry Scullion (30:21.111)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (30:26.519)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (30:38.138)

yeah, yeah.

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Kate (30:39.608)

That's run by Martin, I think. And that started out as just being gathering. They would create talks by interesting people in and around. And just the people that came up and you would get talking to people is probably how I started to know some of the design community, at least in London. And none of it was, it was not competitive as all like, I'm doing this, I'm sharing this. And friendships were made and formed, I think, through that initial meetup.

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Gerry Scullion (30:48.449)

you

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Gerry Scullion (30:54.358)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (30:59.415)

Yeah.

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Kate (31:06.676)

And yeah, since then, I think the design community has done really well, probably because of those at the government digital service that put in work developing communities. There's one team, Gov, like that was another one set up by Kit and others, I think. But yeah, there's been an instinct for it. I have to say lately, I've been branching off and spending more time in communities like

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Gerry Scullion (31:12.545)

Yeah.

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100%.

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Gerry Scullion (31:23.426)

Mm.

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Kate (31:29.346)

finding out where the operational people meet up, like what are the conferences, what are the events that people go to if you're like running contact centers or you're running frontline staff. Last week I was at the Fast Flow Conference, so that's set up by the team topologies community who look at, you know, we have all these ideas, how do we organize teams to do great work and kind of get it done, particularly where there's a technology element to it, but not only.

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Gerry Scullion (31:34.113)

Hmm.

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Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (31:43.018)

Okay.

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Gerry Scullion (31:53.409)

Nice.

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Gerry Scullion (31:57.536)

Yeah, that's a really good point.

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Kate (31:58.786)

So I think the same is true of many industries and yeah, if we can sort of bring more people working together, all the better.

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Gerry Scullion (32:05.11)

Yeah, absolutely. I remember I don't know when this was this conversation. I was with Sarah Drummond and we were talking about how much happened on Twitter in the early days. And I think there's there's two particular platforms that I can look at and point at and say Twitter was definitely one. And the other one is an unpopular one. It's meetup and every meetup launched in Australia.

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There was this spawning happening of these communities every night of the week. And remember going into Atlassian. I don't know if you know of Atlassian. They're huge in Australia. They're huge everywhere. But the offices are huge. they said to me, Atlassian is like a 24 -hour pizza shop where you can come in here any day of the week and you'll have a meet up because they're sponsoring something every single day. Pizzas and beer, pizza and beer. And as a result,

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Kate (32:40.93)

Yeah, I do.

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Gerry Scullion (33:00.984)

was this kind of community of people who just went what time is it six o 'clock? We went to a class and get pizza and beer. Watch a bit of a talk and leave. So it was kind of the antithesis of. Yeah, who wants to go out and have dinner when you can go and get free pizza and have a beer and have a talk and then just go to the pub. But I don't know what it was about me. I'm not a big fan of meetup anymore, but there was definitely a huge amount of value derived from that when it launched in maybe 2011, 2012 around that time. And I can see that.

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Kate (33:08.528)

Just as a thing to do.

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Gerry Scullion (33:30.146)

the importance of community within the design community in particular and how it's really paid off dividends in Australia. I can speak firsthand experience there where people get to know each other and there's more support in the community and also in the UK. Whereas I just know if I speak to a UK designer, they're going to know several people that I know as well, which is something really nice. I don't know how it's working now and how it's operating now.

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But it's something to point back on. You're right. It would be a really nice kind of kind of reflection piece to read. If somebody out there wants to take it and develop it, I'd love to see it. Like, you how all these communities grew and how people got to know each other, because, you know, it is really interesting for me when I'm sitting in my attic in Dublin and I speak to you, who I've never met in person. But yet, know about five or six of my my friends. So I think that's just

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Kate (34:13.005)

you

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Kate (34:27.638)

Hmm.

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Gerry Scullion (34:29.034)

something kind of special and not like you

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Kate (34:31.69)

It really is. And I guess with it comes great responsibility to, yeah, not become like a kind of gang clique and then forget that others are coming from such different worlds when we're then working with people in organisations. But yeah, I don't think we could do the work we do without feeling like you have each other's backs because you're so often the one person saying, actually, there's something that doesn't seem right about it.

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Gerry Scullion (34:42.506)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (34:47.0)

100 %

‍

Gerry Scullion (34:56.205)

Yeah.

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Kate (35:01.612)

Shouldn't we actually go and see those people? No, no, no, we should. Other companies do that. Being the one to challenge is hard by yourself.

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Gerry Scullion (35:04.674)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (35:10.23)

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's not about the community becoming a tribe is one of the things that I speak about. It's about like a community, actually, with a sense of community like this. We have to give stuff back to the community. Like, you know, I see this as a as a community service, this podcast in particular, like, you know, I bring people on, I help shine a light on people's work. So in the hope that people connect with Kate or connect with whoever else we have here so they can actually.

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Kate (35:17.074)

Mm. Mm. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah.

‍

Kate (35:29.26)

Mm.

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Gerry Scullion (35:38.648)

talk about and stimulate those connections. What can we derive from the success that we're talking about there across, you know, communities that have kind of happened over the last 20 years? And what can we bring that into an organization that's going through that transformation to become more service led? What can we learn from those pieces?

‍

Kate (36:01.832)

So something that I notice works really well and try to encourage is the development of communities across different silos, different teams within the organization. So taking some of the benefits of goodness, I don't know if...

‍

you've got to experience this but there was a brilliant email group it might still exist today it's just I'm no longer inside government but there was an email group and before it got hugely big and probably became a Slack channel when Slack came along there was this email chain and you could people just ask any question and share their work and immediately it would be of benefit to 10, 20, 30, 40 other people and it was so amazing I think perhaps something about the size of the group

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Gerry Scullion (36:48.45)

Mm.

‍

Kate (36:48.5)

so that so much of the content was directly useful. So if one person was working on a thing, chances are it be relevant to everybody else. there's something, yeah, Lisa Rykut probably set up some of the first ones to do with user research. And it was, yeah, it was just, it was just amazing. And Lisa had an uncanny ability and we still does, but to just be right on the mark of whatever was going on in my head about.

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Gerry Scullion (36:56.298)

Yeah, think Lisa Reich helped mention this to me years and years ago.

‍

Gerry Scullion (37:02.326)

Yeah, I think she set it up. Yeah, it was.

‍

Kate (37:16.002)

gosh, I'm wondering how I'm going to talk about this. She would suddenly write a blog post. It's like, here's how you talk about this. And it would just be just ahead of the game with every single thing that she was writing. So there were people like that. But taking some of those things and then putting them in across a whole service or across more of an organization. So it isn't just this special superpower that the design community and research community have amongst themselves, but it's.

‍

Gerry Scullion (37:20.374)

Yeah

‍

Gerry Scullion (37:27.234)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (37:36.567)

Yeah.

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Kate (37:43.594)

everybody who's interested in getting a passport or this particular kind of credit card or whatever the thing is. And just trying to get some of those break down some of those habits of I talk to my profession or I, you know, I'm in operation so none of my ideas will go anywhere or like, you know, here's a whole community that's going to hear you and potentially action things. So that.

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Gerry Scullion (37:48.962)

care.

‍

Gerry Scullion (37:57.282)

Hmm.

‍

Gerry Scullion (38:05.656)

Yeah. I mean, that's been mentioned a few times on this podcast in particular, that whole thing around the email and the scaling of knowledge and the sharing of knowledge and, you know, to quote Lisa's thing, like, show the thing, like, you know, share the thing. And it's something that I still kind of practice to this day. I'm like, OK, I've got this work done. It's not going to live on my computer long enough, 24 hours and it's up on the wall. And I'm doing something about it.

‍

How do you get that kind of buy in though? Like if you're working at a local government or, you know, a federal government, say in the States, for example, you're like, yeah, we want to set up an email thing. And we're not talking about just replicating, you know, exactly what has happened before. But.

‍

To do that, you know, the easy solution would be something like a slack or a team's child or, you know, God forbid, a confluence or something like that. No, no disregard to people. And at last, if you do want to sponsor this podcast, please email community at this is a TV only joking. But confluence is not a very good tool for what I'm talking about. But if you wanted to do that, typically you'd get a pushback. OK, so let's use this as a scenario here where you want to try and.

‍

how we're sharing knowledge across an organization. We want to try and build community. How do you approach that? Because I know people listening to this podcast and especially on the community on This Is HCD was one of the questions. What advice would Kate give to try and build that kind of capability within an organization and how would you go about it?

‍

Kate (39:29.666)

Mm

‍

Kate (39:36.512)

Mm, yeah, brilliant question. Sometimes you're working in organizations that are quite fearful. There's, there's risk of stuff they imagine, hang on, what if all of our suppliers get on this thing? What if we invite people that shouldn't have access to information that sounds, I'm going to react in a fearful way about that very good idea that you're suggesting. so I think part of it is understanding, like genuinely understanding. Let's assume setting up a confluence or a Slack channel is bad idea.

‍

Gerry Scullion (39:43.116)

Hmm.

‍

Gerry Scullion (39:56.108)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (40:05.004)

Yeah.

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Kate (40:05.752)

help me just be familiar with why it's a bad idea. Like, well, this might happen, this might happen. So I think starting with genuinely understanding why it might be a bad idea in there, you for real or just in their heads. I think the second thing is you don't, if you're in that kind of organization that has a sort of organ rejection with anything that it doesn't already do, vibe about it. Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (40:15.906)

Yeah.

‍

Lovers

‍

Gerry Scullion (40:28.524)

I love that organ rejection! I'm stealing that!

‍

Kate (40:31.766)

Yeah, and you know, because I feel like I need to protect my organization. So I'm probably coming from like the best of intentions with my negativity. But unfortunately, it's also a habit that we need to break out of as well. So I think the second thing is if you recognize you are in one of those organizations, don't try and say, right, we're going to launch this organization wide thing across everybody. And I, I think it's a good idea. everyone will. And if you don't think it's a good idea, it's because you don't like sharing and that's no good.

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Gerry Scullion (40:39.127)

Yeah.

‍

Kate (40:59.884)

like recognize the read the room, the context you're in and just start doing things. So, you know, a week note or a fortnight note is a one way thing from your team to other people. You don't need permission necessarily. You don't have to spread it across the whole organization. You can start sharing with a few people and you can improve on that. And then you've got something to point to saying, you found that useful. Wouldn't it be great if that team did something like that too? So you can sort of start growing the pull for that sort of thing.

‍

think while understanding the reticence and then I think through those things you can come up with okay well what's a nice way of doing it. There will also be across professions there will be individuals for whom instinctively this is how people want to do it and they come from everywhere like I think as in the design community we're lucky and that maybe there's a high proportion of people or something.

‍

Gerry Scullion (41:29.506)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (41:44.224)

Yeah.

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Kate (41:53.026)

But there were people all over thinking, my God, I would love it if we could do this. It's like, well, maybe you can, shall I just send you a copy of my Fortnite note that I'm writing? Why don't you send one to your team? Just give it a go. If people don't like it, stop doing it. It can be simple.

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Gerry Scullion (42:01.269)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (42:07.222)

Yeah, absolutely. I love the fact that you called out the risks at the start. just say, like, let's try and, you know, let's hear the arguments against this, because that's like the cheat code for what I would call it. I'm like, these are all the pieces that people are going to try and block us on. And then they become design challenges. OK, how can we respond to these things to make sure that we've covered them off?

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Kate (42:15.096)

Let's get them down. Yeah.

‍

Kate (42:28.362)

It's quite funny as well, isn't it, how people kind of are quite good about pulling out the sort of risks and downsides. And I'm pretty good at doing that too, to be fair. But then they don't write out, what are the risks if we don't do this stuff as well? Like they sort of forget the other list, which is no, no, no, let's carry on. You don't know what I'm doing. You can't ask me for help. I can't show you the thing I'm working on that might have really helped. don't like those are the other downsides that you're fighting for.

‍

Gerry Scullion (42:34.134)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (42:55.5)

Yeah.

‍

Kate (42:58.904)

by calling out those risks. So there's something in that. I don't know how you design that conversation, these careful designs, so it's not to be antagonistic, but there's something in that, like forgetting that the status quo isn't all that.

‍

Gerry Scullion (43:00.653)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (43:07.254)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (43:11.041)

Yeah, absolutely. I have this thing where when I'm talking about complexity and, you know, complexity within the organization and how we listen is one of the key things. So like as opposed to listening to when like you're trying to listen to to understand and we're really most of the projects that I find myself involved in, they're not complicated projects, they're complex problems. And I have to try and learn.

‍

And I'm always like, trust me, I'm very, very impatient. Kate, you should speak to my wife. She'll just be like, he's so impatient. trying to listen to understand is one of the pieces that I have to turn that volume up when I'm in an organization. Yeah.

‍

Kate (43:51.086)

It's a constant habit in all of us. I think it was Chris Voss who wrote, if you find yourself explaining or arguing, you've lost. Like, understand, seek to understand. And we all do it, like just the other day, someone said, hey, hey, I've, you know, put this free course together. And they were like, you know, it'd be even better if you did this other thing. And I'm like, well, the reason I didn't do that is because I'm just like, okay.

‍

Gerry Scullion (44:00.961)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (44:05.216)

Yeah.

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Kate (44:19.778)

That's what you thought this is about. Excellent, thank you.

‍

Gerry Scullion (44:23.036)

I mean, it's something that like we're working on the community stuff at the moment. And one of the outcomes we're trying to derive is like how people can become better designers and how can they become better designers if they don't do any reflection? So if you do some reflection and you can, you know, you can have very kind of relatively superficial tools for really being totally honest, like, you know, checklist stuff, but really trying to drive that reflection piece.

‍

in terms of where strengths and weaknesses are and identifying the weaknesses. And I've done it. God knows I've done enough work on myself over the years and I continue to do it. But I know I'm impatient. I know my listening skills have to be on 10 when I'm in an organization. Anyone's working at me saying he never he never shuts up. I'm always talking. But it's one of the skills that I see with some of the best designers that I've ever worked with.

‍

They don't always transmit. They're usually just sitting and observing and watching and trying to know when to ask the question. And it's a really interesting point that you've made up, because in that scenario of trying to share knowledge, that is the outcome that we're trying to achieve there by setting up whatever system it is you're going to use. But listening to those potential blockers to what would stop us from achieving that outcome.

‍

allows us to actually increase the chances of delivering that outcome. And, you know, we're all as guilty of it as each other, like, you know. So talk to me, Kate, around what you're doing at the moment, because there's a few other areas that I wanted to learn a little bit more about, because what strikes me about you is there's a level of humility around you don't want to call yourself a service.

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Gerry Scullion (46:14.804)

in a two level. What did you study in university? Like what's your background and sort of thread into where you are now? Like, you know, talk to us about that.

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Kate (46:27.092)

So I subsequently did a Masters in Human -Computer Interaction, was my looking for what is the closest academic like background that our work can come from. And it was interesting, of my reasons for that were interesting. Originally, I studied geography, which kind of fit back in the late 90s.

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Gerry Scullion (46:42.487)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (46:49.304)

Thanks.

‍

Kate (46:53.386)

It's sort of irrelevant except that, my God, for anyone who studied geography, it gives you really solid grounding in quantitative and qualitative research, which, my God, has been so helpful. Like, fear, no fear about data, no fear about stories, no fear about sense making out of things.

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Gerry Scullion (47:00.556)

I was going to say.

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Gerry Scullion (47:10.764)

history as well, like the history and geography is.

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Kate (47:13.58)

Yeah, well, it makes me look at the Peak Districts in different ways. Just enjoy it. No, but look at the plates. Look at the sedimentation. Anyway.

‍

Gerry Scullion (47:23.734)

Absolutely. Like the background to the fabric, everything like I can see geography being a really nice stepping stone to surface design. But I want to hear your thoughts.

‍

Kate (47:32.758)

Yeah, it's not as irrelevant as it might sound, I think. But from them, know, was early days. We didn't have professions of research, design, things like that, or at least it was probably more graphic design or marketing or maybe strategy was your choices. And I sort of fell in a bit of the deep end through a series of steps.

‍

Gerry Scullion (47:36.417)

Hmm.

‍

Gerry Scullion (47:44.493)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (47:48.514)

Yeah, psychology.

‍

Kate (47:58.86)

I was always working with organizations that did things on the internet in the very early days, just by chance. So I worked for technology companies, gaming companies, I worked for telecoms companies. And one of the first sort of big chunky roles I had was making a telecom service work online. So for the first time, having a registration form to sign up to get your landline services from this billing.

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Gerry Scullion (48:03.604)

Okay. Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (48:15.116)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (48:25.144)

really?

‍

Kate (48:28.632)

customer support and I was based in the contact center. I don't know, we could possibly think of it as a service owner type role now, but it transcended everything, which is probably why I think in these ways now. So I had a number of roles that sort of straddled leadership operations, design, decision -making about pricing, for example, like we wanted to work with you switch and others, you know,

‍

Gerry Scullion (48:37.484)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (48:54.338)

Yeah.

‍

Kate (48:58.392)

It's a partnership deals like the whole lot. And it was, that, you know, I had several jobs in several different industries, but about that, that sort of same approach. And it was, it's not obvious what the role was. was sort of maker and doer of stuff. And then at some point it was like human centered design. If we make the things easy, if we make the things good, if they are compelling, we shouldn't need to spend millions on marketing and sales because it should just kind of work.

‍

Gerry Scullion (49:08.61)

Hmm.

‍

Gerry Scullion (49:24.588)

Yeah.

‍

Kate (49:26.766)

So that was where my professional interests stepped in. And then I went to did the masters and yeah, then spend time in -house and in consultancies and doing freelance work more in human centered design. And then the last 10 years had been more about leadership while in an organization structure to get this sort of stuff happening by default everywhere more seamlessly.

‍

Gerry Scullion (49:29.814)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (49:37.442)

Yeah. I love it.

‍

Gerry Scullion (49:48.728)

I'd love to get your thoughts on the leadership side of things, because we identified, you know, the last 20 years, whatever it was in the UK and leadership having a really important role like the Francis Moller piece, you know, really giving an elevating design in the conversation to allow the early people in GDS to to make ground like Sarah and Lisa and.

‍

You know, there's a bunch of them that really kicked off that whole kind of that whole piece. But I know people will be listening, saying, well, look, you know, I want that in my organization. I want leadership to, you know, be that leader that we want to become more human centered to become, you know, more service orientated. They want to be able to speak our language so we don't have to say.

‍

This is why research is so important. Like there's so there's so many people out there that email me saying, what advice do you have on this? What's your perspective on on that? Like if you're working with design leadership, you've written this fantastic book, which, by the way, folks, there's a link in the show notes to pick a copy up. It is a fantastic book. But what what advice? What would you say to those people who want to try and, you know, get their organizational buy in the leadership buy in whatever you want to say?

‍

What steps do you think if you had to give a response to people on that email and you to do three bullet points, what would they be?

‍

Kate (51:23.503)

I think the first is understand the context. You're never going to get a group of very disparate leaders, all with entirely different agendas that kind of come together as often to be entirely behind one thing that's anything, let alone all being united and having a shared view and level of sophistication about what we mean by human -centered design. So firstly, that's not going to happen. Secondly, there are always

‍

Gerry Scullion (51:33.901)

Yeah.

‍

Kate (51:49.718)

individuals among that leadership team, among the executive directors, among the non -executives. There will be individuals that have come from other organisations perhaps where this is much more a default way of thinking or much different. So sort of do the work to find out who those individuals are. Sometimes a non -executive director will come into government, they've had much more commercial experience where

‍

where that kind of relationship between if we do ride by our customers, customers buy things is a bit stronger. In other cases, government's far, far ahead of the private sector. So it depends, but there's usually one or two people who instinctively this works for. So find out who they are, have coffees with them, ask for their advice on how you broker conversations across the organization on how you sort of raise awareness, raise understanding. that's second bullet point. Third bullet point is...

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Gerry Scullion (52:20.365)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (52:37.57)

Mm

‍

Kate (52:45.678)

Find the people who, you know, probably couldn't give a fig about human -centered design. I know what it means. It's some alien speak, but they've got a major problem or a major pain that would be helped by a more human -centered or service -orientated approach. And don't explain to them what the difference is, but come in and say, okay, you are an operational director.

‍

Gerry Scullion (53:04.588)

Yeah.

‍

Kate (53:12.918)

You are being slammed by the number of contacts we're coming in. That's really interesting. I really care about that problem. Can you tell me more? Can we do this? Can we do that? Have you tried this? How would you want to try that? How can I help you get support in order to try that?

‍

Gerry Scullion (53:17.197)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (53:30.22)

Yeah, absolutely. I love I love that. I mean, it's it's really refreshing to hear all those different pieces. And someone said to me, I don't know when it was. This is the problem I have, by the way, in the podcast, when you have so many conversations through this medium, there's no sort of unique ways of identifying who said these certain things. But if you're in an organization where you don't have to sell yourself, that should feel somewhat uneasy for me. I'm more home.

‍

Kate (53:49.762)

Mm.

‍

Gerry Scullion (53:59.222)

when I have to try and work and understand, that's the kind of the designer where I am because I tend to have gravitated towards the work that I can have to support them and help them grow. It's like the early stages of setting up service design to succeed, which is most of the people who listen to this podcast, they want to try and improve those scenarios for people interested in this. Like, you know, Kate's book is really fantastic in that pieces.

‍

around really giving you the practical advice and how to think about a service and within the organization and how to talk about it. What's the key selling points that you have? And I could read it off the back of this, but I'm not going to do that. Right. When you say to people why you wrote that book, walk me through the journey on the question that you were hoping to answer by by creating it. And also, if you had to write it now in the context of you probably wrote it.

‍

years ago and it came out last year. What are the bits you'd like to add to it now that you've learned something more probably since its release?

‍

Kate (55:04.598)

Yeah, good question. I think I wanted to save people some time and effort and frustration. So all the people who are working on services, be they service designers, be they architects, be they technologists, product managers, whoever they are, that perhaps are newer or less familiar with giant organizations and the sort of baffling but also sensible ways in which they work, how to give practical advice so that everybody can just

‍

do some sensible things faster or understand some things better, or at least have a sort of arsenal of things to try out. So I'm not pretending it's a silver bullet. You try this thing, there's 11 chapters, just put those in place and every organization will be magically, amazingly great. Like there are known things that work, try them out, see which ones work for your organization. So that was the motivation. And like you, I, you know, I'm, I'm impatient.

‍

Gerry Scullion (55:36.002)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (55:43.554)

Yeah.

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Kate (56:01.202)

and or rather I favor efficiency. So don't have everybody struggle with the same things. Like here are some things that are known, deal with those things and then pick a load of new stuff, which I haven't thought about that's hard and then you focus on those things. So it was a desire for sort of furthering that, I guess. There's also just I've spent a lot of time in a lot of different large organizations and there are some really common things that happen, whether it's government or I work quite a lot with private sector too. There is real commonality. So it's just born a frustration about.

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Gerry Scullion (56:16.556)

Yeah.

‍

Kate (56:30.338)

let's try and do some things that are sensible to get ourselves out of at least the things we know about. And then there'll be a bunch of new challenges. So it was really, that was the motivation.

‍

Gerry Scullion (56:35.33)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (56:41.153)

There was one point that I'm going to come to some, there's two questions in the community, but around the metrics within services, when you're working in organizations, you mentioned even public service or private sector. Are there any pieces that you want to talk about a little bit further on the metrics is the metrics is the metrics that we use.

‍

to measure our success, like one of the key pieces is from my perspective is you get a baseline and you try and improve it by the use of our work. But what's your perspective on how to approach those conversations? How do you how do you go about it?

‍

Kate (57:25.038)

So, we've been running a course on how you define success for a service. And it's interesting because I'm not that obsessed with metrics. Like I'm not scared about numbers, it's more what it does is give you a common focus so that you can bring lots of different people together to work better together to sort of move the emphasis. So that's why I'm more into this. And I think

‍

Gerry Scullion (57:35.351)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (57:42.551)

Yeah.

‍

Kate (57:50.946)

You know, people make the mistake of either thinking, well, the only metric that matters is sales or the only metric that matters is cost cutting. And sort of making the distinction, no, no, no, you're, trying to get a good outcome here. And then you're trying to measure and manage the time, cost and effort involved in getting that outcome. So one comes before the other. So I think breaking metrics down on those two parameters and by outcome, I can mean, you know, what works for users, what works for the organization.

‍

Gerry Scullion (57:58.839)

Hmm.

‍

Gerry Scullion (58:12.194)

Yeah.

‍

Kate (58:19.466)

so those, those two things, and I don't know if you've seen, but just in the last few days, I've got a free email course on the, the benefits. It's trying to support better conversations. So, it doesn't, you know, it's, an introduction, but it's about how do we, yeah, how do we have better conversations around why bother doing any of this? So for some people, like we should be more human centered. It's like, yes, of course we should.

‍

Gerry Scullion (58:19.672)

percent.

‍

Gerry Scullion (58:25.733)

I've seen it. it's so... my, did I what?

‍

Kate (58:49.696)

It's instinctive, it's common sense. For others, it's like, yeah, but not at any expense. And for others, it's like, what are you talking about? Actually, that's nothing to do with what we do. My view is something entirely different. So it's about how do you make the case that is persuasive, compelling and clear. And even if it's just to support some better conversations, like that's what it's designed for.

‍

Gerry Scullion (58:51.863)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (59:00.663)

Yeah.

‍

Gerry Scullion (59:06.818)

Mm

‍

Gerry Scullion (59:11.212)

Yeah. One of the pieces that I'm actually working on as a side project is a cost to serve model. So it sits and given away like I demoed it in the This is a community last week to get some feedback and get some people using it so we can get some feedback. whenever I've presented at organizations, the eyes go up and they go, they're like, that's interesting because.

‍

Kate (59:18.487)

Hmm

‍

Kate (59:27.139)

great.

‍

Gerry Scullion (59:39.424)

Organizations in my perspective, I want to get your thoughts on this as well. They've got a singular perspective on how people are going to get that job done. But I take it from a human centered perspective in terms of the meandering kind of process that they go through and how much that meandering costs to get the outcome. So it's research led. But we also have an idea of the time, energy and focus that are acquired from the organization to deliver that.

‍

that outcome. So it's not a case of like reducing the meandering. So like people can't meander. It's really just having a metric to to understand. But I want to hear your thoughts on say they have that metric. What advice do you give to organizations where they don't just look at it and say, OK, we need to reduce that cost all the time. So too often it's it's kind of like austerity and design. They're like, OK, well, cool. If it's 100 euros.

‍

Kate (01:00:31.681)

you

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Gerry Scullion (01:00:38.488)

Let's try and see if we can get it to 95. Let's try and get it like, so the job was done quicker. And I want to understand your thoughts around that whole kind of perspective of, know, cutting costs to deliver the outcomes.

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Kate (01:00:52.043)

Yeah, and I think that's the risk if you present it in isolation and it's the only number that people are focusing on because it becomes a race to the bottom. Yeah, absolutely. How many staff can we get rid of? How can we make this happen? And then you inadvertently can cause massive other problems elsewhere. And the worst case is if they're now hidden from your silo, your bit, because you've just shoved

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Gerry Scullion (01:00:57.142)

Yeah, the only metric.

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Gerry Scullion (01:01:08.77)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (01:01:15.607)

Yeah.

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Kate (01:01:20.034)

the costs and the problems on elsewhere. And you think you've cut costs for yourself, but you've just added them somewhere else. So I think never having that conversation in isolation, especially not for public services, but really for all of them. when it's really important what you're trying to achieve by the service existing. And I suppose if you kind of break it down, you know, sort of looking across at the whole point of the whole service and then looking at sort of the different purposes of.

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Gerry Scullion (01:01:22.584)

said.

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Gerry Scullion (01:01:26.232)

some rest.

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Gerry Scullion (01:01:34.423)

Mm.

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Gerry Scullion (01:01:38.896)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (01:01:46.412)

Yeah.

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Kate (01:01:49.632)

individual parts. Yeah, what do you mean by serve? Do you mean get rid of this person? Do you mean get rid of this call? Or do you mean something quite important has happened? Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (01:01:52.738)

pages.

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Gerry Scullion (01:01:58.346)

Yeah. How do we serve? Yeah, I mean, like that's the other metrics are up for grabs, but the one that, you know, the cost it's having in the organization is one thing, but the cost not to do it this way is when you when you reframe it. And there's lots of other metrics that we can include on that. And I did have another point that I want to try and ask your perspective on that slipped my mind.

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But I'm sure it might come back to me in a minute. Now, I have a question from the community and for people who are members of the community in this is a city. They get transparency around lots of the interviews that are coming up. And here's a question. I was going to move this mic over here. It's from Richard McMurray. Do know Richard McMurray? He runs he runs the journey management community within the this is a city community. Questions for Kate.

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Kate (01:02:44.632)

Might do. Sensibilia.

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Kate (01:02:53.069)

Great.

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Gerry Scullion (01:02:55.394)

That's plural, by the way, just so you're thinking you're going to get off the hook after one. one, what stories do you have when trying to bring clarity to organizations when they are so siloed?

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Gerry Scullion (01:03:11.17)

Dun dun dun. I did put a nice video up there in the community as well. I Kate. I don't think it UX Brighton, it? Is it UX Brighton? I don't know where it was. UX Conference? UX Brighton. You're like this.

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Kate (01:03:24.28)

yes.

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Gerry Scullion (01:03:26.498)

That's the video and the thumbnail. Lessons from service design catering. a lot of people watch.

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Kate (01:03:29.108)

Alright.

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It doesn't translate for anyone who's listening, but the odd positions you can find yourself in in a video still that then persist on the internet for decades.

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Gerry Scullion (01:03:43.51)

I'm doing I'm actually doing a mimic of Kate's pose in the thumbnail where it's better than life. How dare you? I've got no hair. I don't look like a fish. So in regards to stories.

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Kate (01:03:48.494)

They look like a sort of fish with arms.

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Kate (01:03:58.471)

So stories, like it's common everywhere because the minute you're part of a team, you think about that team and you therefore become a silo. So it's not like silos are inherently bad. Sometimes people try and create silos in order to give a team focus and remove the interference from elsewhere. So it's not all teams and all silos. It's when the people involved.

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Gerry Scullion (01:04:03.01)

stories.

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Gerry Scullion (01:04:17.645)

Hmm.

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Kate (01:04:26.4)

are part of something that's rather connected, but not seeing it in this way, that is more of a problem. And I think, you know, it's, they look at journey management, so they're probably thinking, you know, the kind of the external person trying to do something is the thing that can kind of tend to glue it together. So yeah, of course, spend some time thinking about what's going on on the outside of our service that then links us all together. And I was having an interesting conversation around

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Gerry Scullion (01:04:32.087)

Mm.

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Kate (01:04:55.454)

know, formats of journey maps, service maps, things like that. And making sure that the people involved in the service can, are sort of owning them, using them. And I was like, yeah, so it's not, it's the sort of, it's the knowledge of, that people have who are actually involved in the service. That's the most important thing, the view that they end up with more than is anything else. And often the only common

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like universal piece of software. If that's a thing that you're going to have to end up using after you've put out on walls or whatever else you're doing is often Excel. But the point is, can you do enough that feels like people can kind of see connections, like walking your way through what's actually happening? And I'm reminded of, know, John Seddon's work and looking at kind of failure demand across his approach to the Vanguard method of sort of focusing in on.

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what happens from start to end of a particular case or a particular thing happening through the organization. But that's often eye opening if people go and look at it, but not always. Some people have already got a really good grasp of it actually. What they're not necessarily seeing is how it could work better or the ultimate effort that lands on somebody else as a result of it. So all that they've asked for the same thing six times. So there were things that are not always visible. I don't know if that helps answer that question particularly.

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Gerry Scullion (01:06:18.208)

Yeah, no, absolutely, absolutely. And second question again from Richard Murray in this one. practical tips or plans do you have for making changes in a week or a month brackets taking it from the UX Brighton talk? So does that make sense to you that question?

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Kate (01:06:39.298)

what practical tips to do what in a week or a month.

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Gerry Scullion (01:06:40.984)

tips or plans do you have for making changes in a week or a month?

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Kate (01:06:46.762)

Okay, great. The talk might have gone into some things that you can do, perhaps, but...

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Gerry Scullion (01:06:49.346)

That's the question. I don't know.

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Gerry Scullion (01:06:55.446)

Yeah, you can that one out. don't mean you can cut that one out. We've got editors. We cut that bit out because that question didn't really make full sense. But is there anything else before we put the edit back in? And unless you want to focus on before we wrap it up.

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Kate (01:07:14.729)

You asked me what else I put in the book. I didn't answer it at the time, it doesn't matter.

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Gerry Scullion (01:07:17.986)

yeah. Well, yeah. So, I will do. So just going back to a question that we had there beforehand where we saying you wrote the book, you probably wrote it during the pandemic as well, did you? Just thinking, you know, it's during the pandemic. my God. It was a therapy book. So you wrote it came out last year. And what were the thoughts that you had like since you released it? What would you change or what would you add to the book now that you've had the

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Kate (01:07:29.1)

Mm. Yeah.

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Kate (01:07:34.914)

Ha!

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Gerry Scullion (01:07:47.052)

the benefit of time.

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Kate (01:07:55.163)

I'm fairly practically minded. so, you know, if you go to a conference and you have like amazing inspirational ideas talks and I love them, but I really benefit from it. Someone goes, do you know what? We made one of these, then we did this and then we tried that and that didn't work. So then we did this instead. And that was really helpful. Like, thank you so much. I can sort of lift and work with that and do something with it. So I want the book and it is, you know, it's mostly around that.

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Gerry Scullion (01:08:02.924)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (01:08:17.111)

Yeah.

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Kate (01:08:22.072)

But I think for like a second edition or another version of it, I would want to get many more real stories from operational teams, from design working within these spaces on ongoing services. So doing continuous stewardship of services. What are the tools, habits, ways of working, very practical things that organizations have got in place? There's a few of those stories in the book, but I would want to double down and bring loads.

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Gerry Scullion (01:08:40.6)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (01:08:46.476)

Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (01:08:50.986)

I'm not. Yeah. It's a really nice way to bring this conversation to a close, because if anyone does want to get in touch with case about any of the stories that they're currently experiencing in the organization that might want to share with case, you can do so. What is your website? Is it the service or?

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Kate (01:08:51.756)

of more to life, I think.

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Kate (01:09:09.965)

would love that.

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Kate (01:09:14.338)

the servers org .com. Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (01:09:16.866)

So go to the website and there was another URL like you mentioned earlier on about your email course.

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Kate (01:09:29.226)

Yep, silos2services .com

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Gerry Scullion (01:09:32.12)

Great domain, great domain, Genesis and domain. saw it and I was like, great one. Absolutely fantastic. So what can people get out of that email course?

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Kate (01:09:37.557)

Hahaha

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Kate (01:09:43.379)

It's the central arguments for how to position being more service orientated. So what's in it for your organization? What outcomes could you get? Assuming that doing, you know, designing services that work better for people is not sufficient by itself. What are all of the things that that leads to that an organization would be interested in?

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Gerry Scullion (01:09:49.538)

Nice.

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Gerry Scullion (01:10:02.956)

Yeah. Yeah, awesome. Kate, I always wrap up every conversation I have with people by thanking them for their time, their energy and their vulnerability ultimately to be put on the spot and being recorded doing so as well. And so I really, really, really, really enjoy speaking with you this morning. And if people want to connect with on LinkedIn, do you accept, you know, LinkedIn connection requests like that you do so people?

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Kate (01:10:28.044)

Yeah. Yeah.

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Gerry Scullion (01:10:30.146)

connect with case and you know blue sky what's blue sky

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Kate (01:10:31.97)

I'm in blue sky as well. It's like where lots of design -ery people, particularly in the UK government, have been moving to in place of X. So it's become this kind of quite lovely magical community. It's in like the early days of Twitter.

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Gerry Scullion (01:10:42.442)

Gerry Scullion (01:10:47.576)

So it's called Blue Sky, isn't it? Okay. I might have to set an account up over there and bomb our people with podcast links. I'll be blocked by the end of the day. Kate, listen, thanks so much. It's been a lot of fun and best of luck with any of the work that you're doing at the moment. And if you do get a second edition of the service organization, you're always welcome to come back on the show.

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Kate (01:10:56.513)

Hehehehe

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Kate (01:11:00.471)

Definitely do that.

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Kate (01:11:13.548)

Wonderful. It's been a pleasure, Jerry. Thanks so much. I'll see you soon.

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Gerry Scullion (01:11:18.424)

Hopefully.

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