Building service design leadership capabilities for the future, today
Uncertainty and complexity aren’t going away — this will remain part of the mix for many organisations trying to make sense of their space. While some things may get better, even as other things worsen, leaders must respond on time and play the role of positive change agents in the midst of chaos, leading the organisation to create a better future. Leadership from the perspective of service design can be vital to create clarity and a vision.
Future Leadership Skills
In these unpredictable times, to survive, lead, and create the future, it is essential to make sure that leaders imbibe service design principles and build and apply these ten future leadership skills:
Maker instinct: The ability to exploit your inner drive to build and grow things, as well as connect with others in the making. How can you draw out your inner maker instinct and apply it to your leadership? Future leaders — working with others — will need both a can-do and a can-make spirit.
Clarity: The ability to see through messes and contradictions to a future that others can’t yet see. How can you communicate with clarity in confusing times so you’re simple without being simplistic?
Dilemma flipping: The ability to turn dilemmas into advantages and opportunities. How can you improve your skills at dilemma flipping so that you succeed with challenges that can’t be solved and won’t go away?
Immersive learning ability: The ability to immerse yourself in unfamiliar environments and to learn from them in a first-person way. Do you have what it takes to learn by immersing yourself in new physical and virtual worlds that will take you out of your comfort zone?
Bio-empathy: The ability to see things from environment point of view — to understand, respect, and learn from nature’s patterns. Can you learn from nature and use that wisdom to inform your leadership?
Constructive depolarising: The ability to bring people from divergent cultures toward constructive engagement. How can you calm and improve tense situations where people cannot agree?
Quiet transparency: The ability to be open and authentic about what matters without being overly self-promoting. How do you lead so that you inspire credibility and trust?
Rapid prototyping: The ability to create quick, early versions of innovations, with the expectation that later success will require early failures. How can you do rapid prototyping that allows you to fail early, fail often, and fail cheaply — while learning along the way?
Smart mob organising: The ability to create, engage with, and nurture purposeful business or social change networks through intelligent use of electronic or other media. How can you organise smart mobs using a range of media, choosing the best medium for each communication challenge?
Commons creating: The ability to seed, nurture, and grow shared assets that can benefit other players. How can you create settings within which both cooperation and competition may occur?
Moving beyond a new list of skills, what kind of leadership development or training can prepare us for the future? Leaders need to shore up the skills that are enduring (see below), but “immersion” is the key to learning the 10 new skills.
What’s staying the same? These things endure with leadership:
Get There Early: Leaders need to build the skill and organisational capacity to know when to move.
Physical and Mental Discipline: Leaders must develop physical and emotional energies that work for them — and inspire others.
Active Attention: Leaders need to filter out noise and distraction, stay centered, and learn to see patterns.
Readiness Discipline: Leaders can’t predict, but they can prepare.
Urgent Patience: Leaders need to discern when people are overloaded or when they’re overly confident — then adjust the pressure and urgency accordingly.
Story-telling and Listening: Leadership will continue to be about discovering and telling engaging stories to make sense of a situation and imagine a future.
Humble Strength: Leaders are needed who will act with courage and clear intent, in an authentic, engaging, and self-effacing way.
Synchronicity: Leaders need to find meaning in coincidence and make connections between today’s experience and future possibilities.
The biggest challenge leaders face is their ability to scale up the teams and capabilities as the role of design becomes more strategic across different sectors. This means the service design community needs to adapt to the changing demands of future leaders. Change can only happen through continually rethinking, adapting and discussing how services can be delivered in a better way.
Systems leadership facilitates a clear vision for everyone
How can you bring strategic value not just to your team but on a systemic level through facilitating conversations?
For those of us who have been working in strategic design for a significant amount of time, there is evidence that leaders need to influence change and create a shared vision from within their teams and outside their span of control.
You can’t just be an expert in one area. It takes having a mindset around thinking holistically about everything that impacts users, your organisation and the ecosystem. This involves always considering who is being impacted and getting them involved. What situations affect successful outcomes, where could there be a disconnection in the service?
Service designers should be complementary to other departments. Your ability to support getting design out of its echo chamber and woven into the business’s DNA is key.
As the world becomes more complex, it is essential to create the right conditions for everyone to thrive by changing their mindset, and ethics around how they work and develop the right skills to take action.
The service design community must empower people across the organisation to act more like systems thinkers. As enabling people to think holistically is a mindset that embodies service design. As your roles often involve designing and influencing things that are invisible to other stakeholders.
Demonstrating that you have a systemic thinking approach and excel at navigating the big picture to zoom into the details to drive and deliver what is most important to create impact. Is it a must in service design leadership roles rather than a nice to have?
“At no point should thinking beyond their particular service or organisation be seen as outside the remit of multidisciplinary, agile and delivery teams. To shape better outcomes to understand how their work fits into a bigger picture of system change" - Ben Holiday, Chief Designer at TPXimpact and Author of Multiplied
A good leader understands the importance of systems at different levels.
Complex systems involve more concrete issues such as policies, processes, governance, and metrics. They include any aspect of the organisation that can be measured, and most times, they shape the whole system. In some cases, such systems can get messy and complex because cultures and people's egos can always get in the way. Using your role as a lead involves supporting your team’s curiosity, capabilities and creativity to get strategic and start thinking big to design change.
If service design leaders, can help with one thing, it’s going to war against linear thinking and help others connect the dots around the service.
In complex environments, linear thinking is limited and dangerous to any organisation!
Good service design naturally leads to change!
When your organisation is facing uncertain times, how can you inspire your team, leaders and other stakeholders?
Service designers are in demand as they are naturally in the best position to navigate complexity, influence leadership and start dialogues that can get things done. As the industry begins to understand the value of service design, expectations are beginning to rise.
“Influence is something you build overtime. It takes trust, experience, and demonstrated success to obtain the trust of people in the organisation, especially the stakeholders. And one of the best ways to influence is listening to understand” - James Field, Service Designer at Ferguson Enterprises
When starting as a leader, you need to find advocates. Find the people who will open doors for you. You constantly need to challenge your team, stakeholders and yourself as you do not have all the answers and need to consider the changing world. It is not enough to get buy-in from one stakeholder!
To be valued as a design leader, there needs to be the right balance of action and influence at the strategic level. What is more important than your role as a service leader within an organisation? It can involve balancing the need for good design and the strategic need of the organisation at all times.
“A good design leader needs to be interested in understanding other people’s perspectives. What is happening in this other person’s head? needs to be a burning, energising question that leads them to try to understand their team actively, the people they’re designing for, and their stakeholders.” - Indi Young, Founder of Adaptive Path
You can start by listening to the people you work with, so you’ll better understand their problems. That's where you can start building empathy around what they need.
Finding different perspectives through listening deeply to other stakeholders helps you understand their range of reflection on problems or ways a service can be improved. By connecting all of these points of view from people impacted by the service, you can get insights from multiple viewpoints.
Preparing the right environment to support your teams and other stakeholders to become open and solve real problems. Balancing your passion for your craft and being empathic can invite others to share their perspectives.
Survival - Most companies have a poor understanding of service design and how to get the best out of the discipline on projects and throughout the organisation. In most cases, organisations might hire outside service design in the form of contractors or design agencies as they heard a competitor had done something similar in the past. This will rarely support long-term success as these processes and tools are foreign to the organisation's culture. As a leader, you need to listen to the needs of different stakeholders and work with them to understand how service design can make a difference. Starting with a smaller project that proves your work's impact can lead other leaders across the business to involve you in more strategic work. Caution this can be a marathon and not a sprint. Balancing empathy, resilience and long-term vision are key.
Settle - You have started to settle into your role as a leader. Service design is starting to be used inside the organisation, with more stakeholders learning about it and being involved in the process. There is a majority of stakeholders within the business that are still critical of the long-term value of service design and does not see design as a strategic priority. In order to become an effective design leader, you will need to develop a centre of excellence with the right skills to start scaling service design in areas of the business that need it the most. Scaling service design to other departments can’t be done alone, it takes a team. You will need to be willing to evolve your team as the demands of the business and industry change.
Success - Service design is starting to mature across the organisation. Teams, departments and leadership have embraced and understand how your department can bring value from a strategic level. Yet, there is still some work to do. Being able to see what is missing currently and what is likely to happen in the near future across the business, processes, systems, policies, technologies and people. As a leader, you need to involve as many people in the business to see any gaps and connect a whole problem rather than the parts. There might already be a business case to build a multi-disciplinary team to help articulate the true value of service design to all parts of the business. The grand presentation you share at Townhalls and quarterly company gatherings is as important as your one-on-one coffee with individuals. The ability to have a common language with different stakeholders and understand how you can both work together is the goal.
Scale - Shared values and ongoing conversations that support the business commit to a connected line of services/ products as an ecosystem. Contradictory to most viewpoints, service design should not lead every project. Service design has the opportunity to lead in part of the journey but allows others to lead. I have seen the best results when every department is strategically aligned and communicates regularly. Everyone with non-design roles should be empowered with the mindset, tools and methods to succeed with or without your team.
How to Sharpen Your Future Leadership Skills
You may be wondering what specifically you can do to develop your leadership skills for the future and the uncertain world we live in. Are you ready to lead through a crisis, and if not, how can you be?
Rate your readiness. How ready are you to lead in the future? What do you need to understand better, learn, and practice? Honestly assess your future leadership skills and abilities.
Immerse yourself in the future. Preparing for the future requires immersive learning experiences that give you the chance to operate in situations that don’t fully make sense, and in which old models, behaviours, or skills aren’t enough to succeed. You’ll want to seek out experiences that place you in unfamiliar, often uncomfortable, situations — and that push you to learn something that you’re identified as necessary to face the future. Use a learner’s mindset to get the most out of these experiences.
Reflect back on your own leadership journey. Even as you look forward, we advocate looking back at your life. What experiences and choices have influenced your leadership ability and style? What from your background could you revisit or bring forward to address the future? Perhaps you tried something that failed but might work now. Or a long-forgotten past experience or connection may offer insight into future directions for you or your organisation.
Return to the present. You’ll gain great insight and develop new skills by immersing yourself in the future. Wisdom comes from where you’ve been in the past. But you must return to the present. Take what you’ve learned, and apply it today to make a better future.
Again, if the future holds both danger and opportunity, the question really is, Are you listening for the signals and learning the future leadership skills you’ll need?
This article was co-authored by Dr Vidya Priya Rao
