Take your career to the next level and learn how to lead and scale user-centric change across complex organisational environments
The course
Leading Service Design is a live 2 day course split over two weeks that will prepare you to lead user-centric service design in any environment
You’ll learn how to expand the scope of your impact, win buy-in for large-scale transformation and lead teams and stakeholders to deliver complex, organisational-level change
What you’ll learn
Identify the difference between user-led change and more traditional organisational change approaches and learn how to realistically transition your organisation to a more user-centric method of change
How to assess the user-centred maturity of your organisation and identify blockers and key areas that need development to enable user-centred approaches to grow
Understand your current scope of influence, its limitations and areas where it can be expanded, creating a clear roadmap on how to do this within your current environment
How to expand your work from a single product or service focus to a portfolio or programme approach, working at a leadership level to set the strategy for user-centered design and leading teams and portfolios of work across your organisation
Understand your relationship eco-system, your organisation’s leadership style and communication needs, and put together an engagement and communication plan for your work that will bring people with you on the journey
What are the roles of a user-centered design leader working on services
How to design governance, organisational structures and ways of working that enable better service delivery
How to apply the learnings of other organisations who have successfully become user-centred and apply these learnings and stories to your own work
Construct a strategic plan to develop your organisation's ability to deliver better services and grow user-centred capability
Who this course is for
This course is for user-centred practitioners and change-makers looking to take the next move in their career to lead service design and transformation across teams and organisations, creating the conditions for transformative change and good service design and delivery at scale
If you are a user centred practitioner who is new to service design and you are looking to build confidence in taking a service design approach in your work you may want to start with our Agile Service Design course.
If you are already an experienced service design leader and want to focus just on your stakeholder leadership or business case writing skills, you may prefer to take our one-day Stakeholder Leadership or Making the Case for Service Design course.
This course is suitable for:
User centred advocates looking to understand how to lead teams at a strategic level across organisations/sectors to design and deliver good services
Experienced user-centred practitioners looking to step into a leadership role, moving from project based work to leading people, teams and programmes or a wider portfolio of service design and improvement
Leaders currently at the start of, or in the process of a business transformation that will impact the design of services
Anyone tasked with supporting complex organisations through strategic change and needs to build long term user-centered design capability
Anyone tasked with growing and leading a user-centric approach to improve outcomes for the business and users.
Anyone wanting to build confidence as a design leader whose work covers the design and delivery of services
Your trainer
Lou Downe is the author of Good Services, the bestselling book on how to design services that work and the founding director of the School of Good Services. They are the former Director of Design for the UK Government where they founded the discipline of service design, growing a 2000 strong team of designers into one of the largest, and most influential design teams in the UK - winning a Designs of the Year award and a D&AD lifetime achievement award.
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"This wasn’t your typical leadership course. It was a deep, practical dive into what it really takes to lead user-centered transformation at scale."
Digital Transformation Leader
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"I highly recommend this course to anyone interested in leading design teams to effect change within their organisation or for their clients"
Senior Service Designer, Amirald
Course content
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An overview of the main blockers and barriers that inhibit teams and organisations from designing good services
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An overview of how aligning organisational purpose with user needs can deliver on business outcomes
Reviewing the purpose of your organisation and alignment with the services it offers
Reflect on the need for radical change in your organisation, from small-scale improvement to radical and innovative change
Understanding the scope you have in your role and what freedom and constraints are in place in defining the service offer
Reflecting on the shared understanding of your role in delivering on the strategic ambitions/intent of the organisation
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Understand the key capabilities an organisation needs to enable good services to be designed and delivered
Learn from other organisation’s case-studies about the common pitfalls of large-scale user-centred transformation, what works, what doesn’t and how these apply to your organisation
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How to create better digital and service literacy in your organisation and greater connection to the practicalities of delivery for decision makers
How to create the infrastructure that will enable your organisation to more easily create better services through design systems, service patterns and shared data
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How to break the cycle of short term decision making that sacrifices long term objectives
Learn a variety of approaches to encourage strategic risk taking by design
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How to create structures and ways of working that will enable empowered decision making and problem solving
How to overcome and mitigate organisational siloes through collaboration
Ways to create ownership and responsibility for service delivery from service ownership to cross organisational measurement
Exploring how we might develop the capabilities needed for good service design and delivery
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Recap the key capabilities for service-centric and user-centred organisations
Map your organisation’s level of user-centred maturity and identify the key challenges to delivering good services
Understand how well your organisation is currently delivering its objectives and how those objectives work within a wider context of system change
Review your organisation's current priorities and direction, its objectives and capacity
Identify key opportunities to improve the conditions of service design and delivery within your organisation
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Identify the difference between user-led change and more traditional organisational change approaches and learn how to realistically transition your organisation to a more user-centric method of change
Looking at the different roles and responsibilities of user centred design leadership and understanding what might be needed in your organisation, what you do and don't feel confident doing and what your organisation has tasked you with doing
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Understand your relationship eco-system, your organisation’s leadership style, power dynamics and communication needs
Learn how to deal with conflict and negotiation when navigation permission for change
Explore different approaches to engaging and communicating with colleagues and decision makers
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Understand your current scope of influence, its limitations and areas where it can be expanded, creating a clear roadmap on how to do this within your current environment
Identify the difference between taking ownership and influencing others to own problems
How to expand your work from a single product or service focus to a portfolio or programme approach, working at a leadership level to set the strategy for user-centered design and leading teams and portfolios of work across your organisation
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Learn how to construct a realistic program of work that will develop your organisation's ability to deliver better services, scoping your work from short term service improvement to long term transformational change
Understand the different types of influence you can have on your organisation and learn different methods and techniques for service transformation
Learn how to set and communicate a vision for change
Understand how to build a team overtime, and the skills needed that can support you in the delivery of your strategy and plan
Beyond individual user-centred roles and teams, explore how to create a plan for growing capabilities across your organisation
Explore approaches to setting up and steering a vision and a variety of ways to brief teams
Design governance, organisational structures and ways of working that enable better service delivery
Understand key strategies to overcome the uncertainty surrounding big strategic change
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Learn tools and techniques for self and team-care in service transformation
How it works
All classes are delivered live and online in small interactive classes. Course participants have the opportunity to work on a service or case study of their own so learnings can be put into action immediately
This course is 8 hours in total and each module is made up a mixture of teaching from your trainer, individual work and group discussions
There are are regular breaks throughout the day and lunch is a 30 minute break in the middle of the day
Our course takes place on Zoom in English with live captioning enabled with Zoom’s speech to text auto-translation in the full range of languages supported by Zoom
The slides are available in advance for pre-reading
Courses are not recorded as we want to ensure people feel comfortable to share their case studies in the joint sessions. We do not allow AI meeting note takers as we we wish to protect the privacy of information shared by course participants
What you get
A two day live course with Lou Downe, author of Good Services, including access to a members area including the tutorial slides and course worksheet. Alongside this you will get:
Access to our Good Services discord community
A 10% shop discount on products
A certificate of completion
