What is service design leadership?
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. It could mean you lead a team of user centred practitioners, or it could mean you’re in some sort of service or program delivery role.
This year we launched a brand new course to help aspiring service design leaders advance their career, but we had a really tricky job to do first - defining what a design leader is.
We talked to people in our introductory Agile Service Design course about their career aspirations, we listened to experienced practitioners and existing service design leaders in our advanced courses about the types of roles they’re playing right now to get a better picture of what this looks like.
The Yellow Rattle plant is key to starting a new wildflower meadow in the UK as it’s root system makes space for other plants to thrive amongst the more hardy grass around it. Much like a good leader makes space for the work of others to thrive.
What we started to see was a pattern of 4 distinct ‘types’ of service design leadership that are being practiced right now:
Types of service design leadership
Idea leaders
Inspiring and agitating the organisation to deliver better services through compelling narratives or strategies that capture people’s imaginations
Technical leaders
Providing reliable technical advice and consultancy on the best possible way of designing and delivering services
People leaders
Leading and inspiring communities of designers, user researchers, product managers or other user centred professions and providing the support that they need to do their best work
Delivery leaders
Overseeing the design and/or delivery of services, or operational team/s. This could be a whole program of work or one service
Some people were doing multiple different roles, others had created a niche in just one area. Some people wanted to do one type of role, but felt stuck in an organisation that wanted another kind.
What became obvious from our conversations was that it was rare to find a person who either wanted to, could, or crucially had the time to do all of these different roles, but that each area was vital to ensuring that your organisation can produce services that work.
For example, if your role is solely ‘ideas’ and ‘technical’ leadership, but there aren’t other people in your organisation to take on the burden of delivery or people leadership, then there would be a disconnect between ideas and delivery. If all we focus on is people leadership, in the absence of deep technical expertise or idea leadership, then we will have a skilled community of practice without direction.
In a nutshell, you don't need to do all of these roles yourself, but if no one else is doing them, that can become a problem.
Knowing what kind of service design leadership you want to do is important. It’s so easy in our careers to fit the mould that our current job requires, only to realise we’re doing something that doesn't suit our skills or interests.
It’s also important to recognise that not all service design leadership looks the same in every organisation, there is not one career path that we should aim to follow, and certainly not one type of role we need to hire within our organisations.
We might need a director of customer service that takes a ‘delivery leader’ role, but that person may need support from a ‘technical’ or ‘people leader’. Splitting out the different component parts of service design leadership can help us to see where our strengths lie, and where we need to ask for help or build formal and informal alliances.
Whatever type of role a service design leader does, they will be spending their time balancing the immediate need to provide short term pragmatic change with longer term work that will create better conditions for service design to thrive in the future.
What does a service design leader do?
Service design is an established role with a long history, but, as an industry we have surprisingly little clarity on what the role of ‘leadership’ in the field looks like.
Partly that’s because it takes so many different forms as we can see above, there’s a big difference in the types of things we’ll be involved in when we’re leading a team of designers vs. a product or service team. But this lack of clarity on what the role actually involves either gives us the impression that moving into leadership is simply a matter of time and experience and not necessarily skill (which certainly isn't the case) or that leadership of service design is switched from 100% design to 100% management as you pass some sort of invisible threshold into ‘leadership’ (also equally untrue).
As a service design leader, the materials you are using to design with are different. You may be involved less in the practical design of a service, but you are often still designing. Your role doesn't just become people, budget and risk management as you progress.
There are specific skills to leading service design that are needed for each type of service design leadership role we might do, these need to be learned just as we’d learn any other part of our practice and don't just magically appear as we gain experience.
So, what exactly do service design leaders actually do?
What we've noticed in the past 5 years of running the School is that there are 8 areas of influence we have when we lead service design. These will dial up and down depending on the type of service design leadership you’re doing, but it’s likely you’ll be involved in some way in them all.
Things we design as service design leaders:
Governance
Adapting the way decisions get made with new governance structures
Finance
Improving how and where money gets spent
Structures
Creating new roles, changing roles and reporting lines
Capability
Building the skills and abilities of teams, individuals and the whole organisation
Mindset
Strategically intervening with long term morale, belief and incentive structures
Legal
Changes or negotiations with laws to allow for better work to happen
Policy and Strategy
Creating and contributing to policies and strategies that create space for better services
Services
Providing strategic and technical advice, guidance or leadership on service design and delivery
Service Design Leadership is a 2 day course split over two weeks that we’ve designed specifically to help aspiring and existing service design leaders to develop these skills and understand how to thrive in the type of service design leadership role they want.
If you feel like you’d like some help to do that, come join me and a like-minded group of people who are also on that same journey in one of our upcoming courses.