Service design leadership can be the responsibility of one person, or many, but it takes a whole organisation to improve a service over time, and crucially, make sure it stays that way. 

To be able to have a good services in our organisation, we need service literacy

Most bad services don't happen deliberately.

In our most pessimistic hour, it might feel like all of the mismatched processes, obtuse rules or confusing processes we have to wade through have been created to test us, but very rarely this is the case.

Leadership of service design can come in many different forms. It can be either something that is explicitly in your job title and is known and asked for by the organisation, or it can be a role you've taken on yourself in the absence of any formal support to do it.

I spend a lot of time silently assessing organisations by looking at their bathrooms.

That might sound like a strange thing to say but bathrooms are wonderful places to spot the indicators of good and bad service design and hints of a wider culture

We’re living in a post-truth society.  An age of fake news, increased online scams and anti-right tech founders spouting hate speech or bowing to alt-right state leaders. 

Trust matters right now when it comes to services and the organisations running them

Back in late 2024, Pat McFadden (the Minister for Intergovernmental Relations of the United Kingdom) outlined ambitions for the reform of the state in the UK by using a test and learn approach. 

This marks a global shift more broadly I’ve been hearing from organisations. How can we take a different approach to delivering better and make our services more efficient to deliver? But do this in a more iterative way where it’s not a large scale transformation project. 

Closing a service

Recently I learned that my favourite bookmark service was closing, pocket.

It is/was so handy to save things to read later, with a browser plug-in and an easy to save feature embedded on my phone. I will miss it.

On closing their service, it feels like they thought about the process.

It was easy to understand what was going on and they produce simple guidance, they made a service to export my data and download it as a CSV that came directly to my email, and they gave me plenty of time to do this. (It’s still open until October)

When you are designing a service, how do you develop your first concepts and come up with ideas for improving existing services?

You might work this out in your head, do some sketching, look at other services, go for a walk. Here are some prompts we’ve developed to help you generate new and interesting ideas for services