Introduction

This is a book about survival hacks for the workplace that go beyond Service Design skills and tools.

The big idea is simple. Once you start working as a Service Design professional, what makes you a more advanced service designer is not so much having better Service Design skills or tools. It’s about being a better team member. It’s about working better with the humans that are within the organization.

Why I wrote this book

It’s now more than 10 years that my biggest focus is to bring people to Service Design. A lot of my work is about making Service Design easy. That’s also why most of my writing is in a very straightforward, bar-like, down-to-earth language, with some swearing in it. Because that’s how people who are down-to-earth speak to each other.

And something happened over the years. Some people who discovered Service Design through me are now coming back and saying: “You introduced me to Service Design. Now, could you bring me to kind of an advanced ninja level of Service Design?”

So the reason for this book is to collect some thoughts from my own experience of being what I would call a medium level service designer. I’m not someone with 50 years of experience, because I’m not yet 50 years old. But I’m slowly arriving at the age of 40, and that comes with some medium level learnings. I want to give that back, so that the people who discovered Service Design through me can bring their practice a little bit higher. With the same easy language and the same straightforward approach they used to discover Service Design in the first place.

What makes this book different

This book is really meant for Service Design professionals. The books in the Service Design Principles series are intended for any person doing any type of service work: the receptionist, the team member, a dentist, a small shop owner, anybody. This book is different. It’s made for people who work as design professionals.

The other difference: this is not an introduction book. It’s a book for people who already know the basics of what Service Design is, who already have some experience, and who want to go further.

And no, this book is not called “Advanced Service Design”. In fact, at the start it was. But I wanted to downplay that element. First of all, I’m not so sure there is any advanced Service Design. Sometimes there is complicated Service Design, where people make it way more complicated than what it needs to be. That’s the human tendency: we like to make things way more complicated than they need to be. I didn’t want to go in that direction.

Instead, this book explores other skills, outside of Service Design, that you slowly build once you become a Service Design professional, because you notice that they make an impact. So instead of saying “this is the advanced crazy stuff”, I wanted a more humble touch. This is the medium level. It’s for people who already have started and want to go a little bit further.

How to make the most of this book

This isn’t a typical business book with only one big idea. You know, those American bestsellers which have everything you should know already in the title, and then most of the book is about the origin stories of the big idea. That’s not what this book is about.

This book is a collection of tips and tricks, put in categories. It’s not a linear book that you have to read exactly in the way it is offered to you. Take a chapter that resonates with you and explore that one. Or have the book next to your toilet seat, and whenever you visit the throne, read a bit. If you want to read it from start to finish like a usual book, that’s totally okay too.

One other thing: this book is not meant as a recipe that you absolutely have to follow as it’s written. These are starting points based on the experience of someone. There are parts that will fit your own context, and there are parts that won’t. Maybe some parts will just be interesting moments where you think “oh, this guy is weird”. And that’s fully okay.

This is a biased book

Let’s be very clear. I’m not saying this is how all people working in Service Design should work. This is a book that shares a collection of tips and stories of how I survived my years working both in small agency settings and in-house, within organizations made of thousands of people.

The bias in this book is not a bug. It’s a feature. What I offer here is one perspective. Hopefully this motivates other people to share their own perspective of what intermediate or advanced Service Design is.

Many books out there, business books, personal growth books, even Service Design books, tell you “this is the correct way of doing things”. This is not one of those books. This book offers pieces of advice. And as with any piece of advice and life story, you get to choose what you take with you and what you leave on the side.

For who this book isn’t made

Like any book, this book is not made for everybody.

• People who don’t know anything about Service Design. You need some experience to benefit from the tips and tricks in this book.
• People with 15 to 20+ years of experience. I assume most of you already came to many of the same life experiences and tricks that I came to in my years of work.
• People looking for tools, methods and AI stuff. This is not a book that teaches you specific methods or how to use AI in your work. It’s about skills, mostly social and business skills, that make your work as a Service Design professional easier.
• People who work fully alone. A lot of this book is about working with other people. If you work alone, a lot of it is irrelevant for you.
• Team leaders. This is not a book about the managerial side of Service Design. If you’re into journey management, design operations or leadership, there are other books for that. This is a book for people who are in the trenches, doing the hands-on Service Design work. It’s a book for team members, not team leaders.

Non Service Design skills that will save your ass

There are specific skills that are not usually taught deeply in Service Design trainings and that make you a much better Service Design professional:

1. Project management
2. Business modeling
3. Psychology
4. Mental health
5. Politics and negotiations
6. Being able to ask for help

Obviously, we could add 200 other very important skills. But in my own life experience, these are the skills that I either suffered the most from when I didn’t have them, or that helped me the most when I got them.

Back in the days, a very large organization I worked with defined a list of over 30 criteria that make a good professional. Very detailed. But it often generated conversations where professionals felt this was an impossible goal. How can somebody be good at 30+ different skills? That’s why this book focuses on just a few. Make progress on these five or six, and that will make the most impact.

But you might ask: five or six, that’s still a lot. What would be the one skill to work on first? I recommend you focus on one of the most boring ones, but maybe the most important one: project management.

Because if you learn how to manage a project properly, other team members will feel that you are reliable. That when you say something, you do the thing. That you have your shit together. And having your shit together means people trust you with more interesting stuff. They accept some of your crazy ideas more easily, because they know that if you say it, you will do it. Project management, in a weird way, is a skill that buys you a lot of goodwill.

That was quite a lot for an introduction. Let’s get started.

Business skills

Project Management: Be on top of your shit

In organizations, we often tend to prefer reliability over creativity. As Service Design professionals, we bring a lot of creativity, innovation and provocation. So we need to become better at the reliability side of things.

Service Design work is often orchestration work. We depend on each other. We need systems that ensure that important promises are kept, because we all rely on them. That’s basically what project management is about, and that’s what we’ll cover in this chapter.

Project management creates buy-in and goodwill from others within an organization. If people feel that you are reliable and that you have your shit together, there are more chances they want to collaborate with you. Project management is the art of getting your shit together and making sure you can keep the promises that you make.

Train in project management

There are simple things you can learn by training. Choose your flavor: classical project management, Agile, Scrum, and so on. You can even choose ways of managing projects inspired by Holacracy or Sociocracy.

You can also ask the people in your company that you look up to because they manage projects well: what is their flavor of project management? Maybe learn that approach. Or look up to the executive assistants and ask them how they manage all what they have to manage.

In short, learn those skills by reading about them, doing a course, or asking the smart people who already do it properly around your organization. Me? I learned a lot of my project management skills from my good friend Patrizia. Back in the days when we were working in an agency together, she was a project manager who taught me, by example, a lot of the skills I’m going to share in this chapter.

Build a good base system: tasks, calendar, messages

If you manage well your calendar, your tasks and your messages, you are already a great project manager.

The reality is that there is not one system to do this. But it is important to have a system. There are many approaches out there: GTD (Getting Things Done), bullet journaling, and so on. Mine has changed over the years and evolved with the different phases of life I’ve been in. When I was not married and working within an organization that had a setup, I used that setup. When I was married and did freelance work on the side, I had to invent my own setup. And when I got a kid, and a much richer life, that setup changed again.

What I’ve learned over the years: it’s not so much about which system you use. It’s about committing to one system for long enough. So read about a few of these systems and choose the one that resonates the most. If you want a very solid basis, GTD is maybe one of the most bulletproof systems out there, because it really takes into account your tasks, your calendar and all your messages.

And your system can be very simple. I had a colleague who managed his tasks and commitments on an A4 printed piece of paper. That guy was one of the best project managers I’ve worked with. No fancy technology, no smart reminders, just some dumb A4 sheets. But he had his system and he committed to it.

Build the end result and validate it first

At the start of a project, you want to create clarity about what is really the end goal. Often that is described in a project brief or a kick-off meeting. The problem is that it often stays on the level of words. And one same word can be interpreted in many different ways.

As service designers, we can turn words into something tangible through prototypes. Make tangible the vision people have at the start of the project and show: “it could look like this”. Then make people agree to that direction. The key is to validate that direction with the key decision makers.

For example, when I had to do research projects, I built a dummy version of the final report. It had placeholder texts, but it had the structure and the number of pages that I imagined could be used at the end. That allowed me to go back to the decision makers and say: “At the end you’ll have a report that looks roughly like that, that answers these questions, has this structure and goes into that much detail. Is this what you guys need?” People would give feedback, we would adapt it, and get an agreement on the final output. Even if nothing was yet done in terms of research.

This allowed me to see very early on that there was an aspect of depth that was not needed, or an argument they were looking for that was not part of the brief. All this becomes clear once you make it visible, not just with words, but with a prototype.

I did the same with a big strategy work, where I asked the CEO and the COO of that organization to envision how the strategy would look like. Not yet the content, but the shape and the form. Is it rather like a business card with a short vision statement? Is it more like a 200 pages document? Or something in the middle? Prototyping the end at the start of the project helped a lot to streamline the project.

The magic is not only in making the prototype. It’s in having the conversation about what is missing, or what elements are unneeded, in what people envisioned.

Block time to get shit done right after meetings and workshops

Your work calendar drives a lot of what you do. Each meeting and each workshop generates a new set of tasks. The danger of a day of back-to-back meetings is that you end the day with a shitload of tasks. Each meeting might generate three tasks. Five, six, seven, eight meetings in one day, and you have 15+ additional tasks at the end of the day. And no time during that day to work on them. And the next day, there are again meetings and workshops.

One simple approach that works quite well: for every meeting, block at least half an hour right after it to do the small tasks right away. Right after the session is the best moment, because you still have all the context fresh in your head. We know from psychology that switching context makes you slower. By staying in the same context, you finish the meeting and then, bam, you work on the tasks. The small things get done right away, and for the bigger things you schedule the time to work on them.

It’s also pretty smart, from time to time, to block full days of work with no meetings, no anything, just to work on one key project that you know will generate a lot of work.

Some calendar tools can automate this so that you automatically have a buffer time after meetings. A good trick also: never book meetings right before lunch or the end of the day, as you will not have that buffer time.

Use a good deadline

Humans work very well when they have deadlines. There is this lovely metaphor: a guy is told he has one hour to cut a tree. For half an hour, he prepares his tools, looks at the tree, makes a plan. Then, in the last half hour, he cuts the tree. If you give that man 35 minutes, he grabs his tools very fast, looks at the tree, and gets started right away.

Deadlines force a team to finish something. And they work well for many types of people. For procrastinators, deadlines help them get going: they will wait until the last minute, but then they get the stuff done. Organized people love a good deadline because it helps them prepare in advance and feel ready. A good deadline also helps decision makers, because they know when to expect things.

A good deadline also helps to set what the result will be. If the time is short, it can’t be a big result. To me, a good deadline has a precise number of what you want to get out at that moment. “Until next week, we will have made three simple prototypes.” That helps a lot in defining the quality, the complexity and the quantity of what needs to be done.

A good deadline is a good motivation tool for everyone. And it’s a good tool to verify if the work can actually get done. It’s only when you say “we’ll get it done at that time” that people start to really look at their calendars and their commitments, and realize if it is not possible.

Give fake deadlines

Sometimes the best deadline is a fake deadline. Depending on the organization and the people you work with, you might want to give deadlines that have a bit of a buffer. So that if somebody breaks the deadline, if a surprise happens, if someone gets sick or forgets something, you still have time to fix the situation.

That’s something I learned from my good friend Patrizia. What she did, which was very strong: she never made us feel that it was a fake deadline. She had two deadlines. The deadline of what we had to give to her, and the deadline of what she would give to the client. Two different ones, with a bit of buffer.

In my experience, one or two days maximum of buffer is perfect. You still have a bit of pressure to finish the work, and yet just enough of a buffer.

Accept people won’t do their work: remind them, give them space

Most of us are not good at knowing how much time things need, how many commitments we have in parallel, and how to manage all the surprises that come in the middle of our lives. So we have to accept, as Service Design professionals, that most of the promises people make about what they’ll deliver at a specific time will be broken.

Instead of being pissed about it, we can manage it:

• Send friendly reminders. Remind people in a lovely way: “I’m excited to see the thing tomorrow!”
• Offer space to do the work. In workshops or meetings, I often block time where people can actually do the work that comes out of the workshop. They already have that time blocked in their calendar, so everybody gets the work done right away.
• Offer drafts and templates that make it easier to do the work, so that people just have to fill in their part.
• Set reminders for yourself to check in. If you ask a question to someone by email, add a reminder one week later to check if the person answered.

In the end, it is normal that people won’t always manage. It’s part of our job to have a system that ensures other people actually do the work.

Ask: “Is it in my brain or your brain?”

If you’d be a fly on the wall of our family home, you would often hear this sentence between my wife and myself: “Is this in your brain or in my brain?”

Over the years, we had quite a few issues where suddenly one of us got grumpy, because they felt it was clear that the other one had to do a specific task. But that other one wasn’t clear about it at all. So now, whenever we speak about something that might have a task behind it, we end the conversation by asking: okay, but practically, are you doing it or am I doing it? Who takes the responsibility? For us, that question is: “Is it in my brain or in your brain?”

At work, this is a very important question to ask too. After a meeting, just verify: is this something that you commit to do, or something that I commit to do? And there is another quality to this question. My wife and I have very different ways of making things happen. So the question also clarifies in which style the work will be done. In your work relationships, make clear who has the responsibility of doing something, but also in what way they will do it.

Nothing is urgent

If you’re working for most service organizations, nothing is truly urgent. If something is not delivered on time, nothing will explode.

This is a lesson I learned, again, from my good friend Patrizia. Clients would come to her and say “we absolutely need this at the end of today”, meaning in two hours. She always managed to say, very clearly and gently, that she understood how important and urgent that task was, that she would plan it for the earliest time possible, knowing it would take a few more hours to have a good quality control on it, and that therefore the work would be delivered tomorrow. And most of the time, people would say: “Perfect! That’s beautiful! Thank you so much!”

In fact, this is one of the rules to avoid being scammed: if someone is pressuring you to do something right away, it might be a scam. At work, it’s basically the same thing. Whenever someone says “right away, now, now, now”, most of the time, it can wait. You just have to give back to the person that you understand it is an emergency to them, that it is something very important.

And sometimes, a good trick is to show them the trade-off: “If I take your emergency, I will leave this other thing undone for today. Which one should I focus on?”

In short

Having your shit together will buy you a lot of goodwill from others. To have your shit together, you need to manage well your tasks, your calendar and all your messages. And you need to understand that all the commitments people make to you need a little bit of care and reminders from your side. Because everybody is overwhelmed.

As Service Design professionals, our task is often to work with many people from many different fields, departments and industries. Managing our emails and calendar is as much part of our work as running a workshop, doing interviews or creating a prototype.

Business Modeling: Speak Excel

Service Design work is often expressed in the Venn diagram of desirability, feasibility and viability. That last bit, viability, is often over indexed within organizations. Especially big organizations love big numbers. They love their Excel spreadsheets, they love their budgets, and they love hard data.

Understanding business modeling and finances, and being able to speak as if you had an Excel spreadsheet in place of your brain, helps you speak the business lingo. It’s the lingo used by a lot of decision makers, and it fits the culture of a lot of organizations. That’s what this chapter is about.

This is a short chapter, as it’s one of the skills I still want to continue to develop. Remember, this is an intermediate Service Design book, not an advanced one for the all-perfect service designer. It’s based on my experience, and I have a little bit less experience on this front. But I still have a few lessons that I’m happy to share.

Train in business language and way of thinking

Doing an MBA or an EMBA is obviously a good way to learn all the aspects of business. Yet that’s something that takes quite a bit of time in your life. It’s also something I never did myself. There are very good alternatives out there that give you some of that knowledge.

To me, the tools and resources that have been the most useful in making a bridge between my design world and the business world are the ones from the team behind Strategyzer. They are the people behind tools like the Business Model Canvas and the Value Proposition Canvas, and books like “Testing Business Ideas”, “High Impact Tools for Teams” or “The Invincible Company”.

If you’re totally new to the world of business, I highly recommend starting your exploration with the “Business Model Generation” book. It takes a design approach to building business models. A good middle ground between a very creative design way of thinking and a very numbers way of thinking.

Find your numbers guys

As I said, I haven’t made the biggest progress on this side of the skills. But over the years, I’ve learned to always bring in, on big projects, someone who can support me with the finance and numbers side.

When you feel you’re not strong somewhere, sometimes that’s perfectly fine. You don’t have to be the perfect all-rounder. You can build a team around you. To me, the place where I need the most help is the finance and numbers side. So if you’re like me: find your numbers guys within your organization, and buy some favors so that you can bring them on board.

Start with numbers

A good project brief has a few good numbers that tell you what the limits of the project are. A financial budget: how much money can we spend, invest, use? These numbers can also be impacts, return on investment, outcomes that will be produced, or negative impacts, like the maximum CO2 that should be generated by this project.

If the brief you have lacks numbers, make sure you clarify what are the numbers that set the frame of the project.

But sometimes your decision makers don’t even know these numbers, or they don’t want to reveal them. A good friend of mine has a good trick for those situations in a sales process. To make a good proposition, you need to know how much money the organization has in the wallet of that project. So when he asks “what’s the budget for this project?” and people say “oh, just make us an offer”, he pauses. And then asks: “So, let me ask you. How would you feel to bring to your finance team or your boss a bill of 150k? Is that something that would feel reasonable?” And suddenly the person reacts: “No, no, no, no. That’s way, way too big. I rather had in mind…” And that’s when the person gives you the number they had in mind. Or that they maybe didn’t have in mind, but that your provocation helped them clarify in their head.

So with any number: if there is a number missing, throw a number on the table to see the reaction. Obviously, a number that fits you. And start a negotiation on what should be the numbers for the scope of this project.

There is another angle to starting with numbers: in projects, check the viability side first. For many projects, it makes sense to start by looking at the numbers of the service first, and asking yourself questions like: “How many people do we need to participate in this service for it to be viable?” or “How much money do we have to save to reach the goals?” Doing some financial modeling at the start gives you an even clearer frame and scope for the Service Design project you will do.

Translate it in numbers

A lot of our work as service designers is done on the qualitative side of things. Obviously, it’s good to evangelize the organization about the power of qualitative data. Yet that takes some time. And while not everybody is evangelized, it’s sometimes smart to be able to translate your findings into numbers. Or at least to find the numbers that you can share with decision makers who have, as part of their brain, an Excel spreadsheet.

How do you do that in practice? When you pitch an idea, I recommend to always pitch it on at least two dimensions: the story side and the number side. Whoever is in your audience, someone rather emotional and intuitive, or someone very factual, they will both be on board with your idea.

When it comes to translating things into numbers, there is some creativity that can come into it. Numbers don’t always have to be money. The number of smiles generated. The number of contacts. The time spent in a service. These are all indicators of something. And they sit well in a graph and in an Excel spreadsheet. Think about what numbers would be interesting in your case, and allow yourself some creative KPIs.

In short

Many people in organizations are trained in working with numbers, Excel spreadsheets and numerical data. Therefore it’s important for us, as Service Design professionals, to also be able to speak that language. We can learn the language, or we can get translators to help us. And whenever we speak, we should be able to translate what we say into a language that can be understood by people speaking the language of numbers.

Politics: Don’t just do the work

As I said in the introduction to this book, as a Service Design professional you quite quickly realize that only a part of the work you do is actual Service Design work, meaning research, prototyping, ideation, implementation. The other side of the work is convincing people, managing your project, managing the shitload of admin that comes with it, being in meetings and all of that.

And within all of this, there is one key skill that people often hate, but that is a very important one: politics.

In fact, this chapter and the next two are a take on different sides of the political game within organizations. This first one is about the pure politics. The second one is about how to play with your influence. And the third one is about the internal communication bit. But let’s start with the ugly political side.

Accept that work is politics

I think that for a lot of Service Design professionals who come from the creative side, from the design side, accepting that work is politics is something very hard. But until you accept the reality that putting a bunch of people together always leads to politics, you can’t really play and work at the same level as the people who have already realized that.

So instead of saying “oh, I don’t play in the internal politics, the power wars and all that”, realize this: by not participating in it, you’re doing a form of politics too. Maybe you want to cast a vote, instead of staying on the sidelines by not casting your vote.

Be present on site

If your organization allows for hybrid work and is not a fully remote organization, it is smart to be present on site.

Why is that? When you are present on site, you get to benefit from the water cooler conversations. These conversations that happen in the corridors. You get to hear key information that you will never get in an email or in a Slack message. And you get to see how people really feel. Which you don’t see in a status message on Slack.

Obviously, I’m someone who loves remote work to get shit done. It offers deep work sessions where you can work in an undisturbed way, which is not the case in a big office. But even for someone who loves remote work, being on site means I get to participate in and listen to the conversations that happen outside of the official communication tools.

Speak about the work you do

One thing that happens often in big organizations, and strangely enough even in small ones, is that many parts of the organization tend to work on the same problem at the same time. Why is that? Because people are smart. Once they realize that something is a problem, they get working. The problem is that people forget to say that they are already actively working on that problem. And what happens is duplicate work done by different parts of the organization.

Even worse: sometimes the problem you have noticed has already been resolved by another team a few years or months ago, but it’s not visible for your part of the organization.

That’s why speaking about the work you do with as many people as possible is very important. It creates that moment where people say: “Oh, but we’re working on that too. I think you should speak with Bob from finance, this is something he worked on a few months ago.” By speaking about the work you do, you learn who else is working on this and what work has already been done. So that you don’t reinvent the wheel, and so that you don’t duplicate work.

Spot the cursed words

Every organization or team has its own trigger words. For example, one day I realized that a team I worked with had such a bad experience with an agile coach, that whenever someone mentioned ways of working inspired by agile methodologies, they would have an extremely strong gut reaction. They would suddenly refuse whatever would come out of that conversation. Just because of the triggering word “agile”.

So it’s important to spot these triggering words. Words that, in just one second, will break the trust people have in you. Not because of what you did, but because of what someone else did in the past, using that word as an argumentation for their own shitty work.

Before using new terminology linked to a specific practice, I’d recommend you first ask people: “What’s your experience with Agile?” Maybe they will tell you “I don’t know anything about it”, or “I read a book about it, sounds interesting”, or “we did a project once and that guy fucked us up”.

At the same time, there are also blessed words in organizations. Words that, whenever you use them, make you look like you’re really part of the gang. For example, one of my clients always described their staff internally as “co-workers” and never as “employees”. So whenever I worked with them, I always made sure to describe staff members as co-workers. If I didn’t, I would either get the remark “that’s not how we call people here”, or people would see me as a true outsider who doesn’t understand the culture.

A good friend of mine has a routine when he starts working on big projects with a new client. He asks them how they call things around here. “How do you usually call a branch here? Do you call it a branch? A local entity?” By doing that, he learns the local lingo of blessed words and can use it in his presentations and communication, even with people of the organization he never met. They will see the blessed words that signal he already knows the culture.

Say it in different ways

Psychologists, politicians and Service Design professionals are really good at one thing: whenever they hear something, they are quite good at reframing what has been said and saying it back, to make sure the other one feels understood and heard.

This is a very important skill, and it’s also a bit of a political game. By being able to re-say what has been said in a briefing, or reframe a problem that has been given to you, three things happen. One, you make sure people know that you understood them. Two, you give the person the opportunity to correct you, so that you fully understand what they say. And three, it forces you to do a synthesis that ensures you really understood the things that were said.

Find the third door

Alex Banayan has a metaphor in his book “The Third Door”. If the thing you want to get into is like a discotheque, there are basically three doors. There is the front door. That’s the door with a gatekeeper, a big guy who decides if you get in or not. You have to wait in line, behave in a specific way, pay to enter. Then there is the second door. That’s the artist door, the door of people who are well networked and know somebody on the inside. And then there is the third door. That’s the kitchen door. Maybe it’s the window of a toilet that is slightly open. It’s the door that nobody looks for, but that still helps you get in.

Within organizations, you sometimes have to look for the third door. An alternative way to get buy-in from someone, or to be able to do some work.

Know when not to ask for permission

A big team lead once told a staff member: “Please stop asking me for permission about stuff like that. Because in my role, if you ask me for permission for this, I will have to say no. Or I will have to verify. But if you just do it, then it’s okay. It’s not something that important, I can just let it go.”

The art of internal politics for us as Service Design professionals is to know when we need to ask for permission from legal, finance and so on, and when it’s best to make a bet, make a provocation, and be ready to ask for forgiveness if needed. Because sometimes, by asking for permission, we’re making the work of the decision maker harder.

Roughly said, we can use the one door versus two doors way of thinking. For things that can be reversed quite easily, the two-way door problems, you might not always ask for permission. But for things that are one-way doors, where the consequences cannot be erased or reverted, you really should always ask for permission.

Make others do the trade-off

Remember, in the chapter about project management, I shared the fact that nothing is urgent. Sometimes urgency is a negotiation where you make the other do the trade-off. You tell them: “I’m happy to do this right now. So which of these other five things that I should do now would you like me to drop?”

Revealing the trade-off that needs to be made is a pretty smart negotiation technique. You help the person who is requesting something from you to see the consequences, in a way that still leaves them the power.

Don’t ask why

Service Design professionals are trained in the five whys and looking for root causes. But one thing we sometimes don’t realize is that asking the question “why” can make people feel questioned. It feels as if we’re questioning if they really know what they are doing.

Instead, you can ask questions like who, what, when and how. You still explore the deep reasoning behind something, but through other angles, where you are the one looking dumb by asking the question, and not the person in front of you. You still get to learn the root causes without making the other one look dumb.

This is a tip that comes from the book “Never Split the Difference”. And it also comes from personal experience, from when I was on the other side, and consultants came in and asked the why question so many times that it felt like they were questioning if we just had our shit together.

Say all the negative things people might believe at the start

This is another negotiation aspect from “Never Split the Difference”, and one I think many of us have experienced as kids.

When I was a kid and one day didn’t do my homework, I didn’t wait for the teacher to come to me and ask for it. My strategy was, before the ring that said the class started, to go directly to the teacher and say: “I’m so sorry. I didn’t do my homework for today. I really messed up things today.”

The idea here is that when we work with others, they might have preconceived ideas about us that will make the rest of the conversation harder. Instead of waiting for them to come with that, we come up front and say: “I imagine you believe that…” or “We have been late and we didn’t manage that well.” This makes people feel respected, because it puts the problem directly on the table. Usually people then say something like: “Good. At least you’re clear about the problem. So now let’s find a solution.” If you don’t start with the negative stuff people might believe, the conversation will turn a lot around “yes, but you were late” and “no, you didn’t manage this”, when your goal is to find a solution for it.

In short

The first step for being able to work the politics side of work is to accept that work is, in fact, a place of politics. That then allows us to observe how others do their own political work, steal their tricks, and even look for inspiration outside of our workplace, like in books.

Play the influence game

So now you know that playing the political game is an important part of the non Service Design skills you have to play as a Service Design professional within an organization. And within those political aspects, there is a whole side of lobbying and influencing that is also key.

In this chapter, we’ll see how you can be a positive lobbyist within the organization you’re part of. For example, by spreading positive rumors, telling your boss who to congratulate, and helping people shine. So don’t see lobbying just as the work done by guys in the tobacco or petrol industry to make the world even shittier than what it is. See it as a way of spreading good news within the organization in a gentle way.

Be the chocolate guy

For years, when I was working in a big organization, I had a routine whenever I went to the HQ. I would buy a huge box of Swiss chocolate. Yes, I live in Switzerland, we all basically love chocolate. And I would start on the fourth floor and go down until the basement, go into each of the offices and say: “Hey, do you want a chocolate?” Just offering chocolate to anybody who wanted one.

The goal was that if one day someone received an email from me, with my face in it, they would say: “Oh, Chocolate Guy is writing to me.” They would already have a positive experience of me, even if they didn’t know me.

And, as an introvert, giving out chocolate like that gave me a structured social excuse to meet everybody. I didn’t even have to do much of the talking, because people would then ask me questions. Maybe on the second or third time I came to give a chocolate, they would say: “But who are you?” Then I would give my name. Another time they would ask where I work, and I could say in which department I’m working and what type of work I do. And I could ask the same questions back.

Obviously, I’m not recommending that you do exactly the same thing. But find a way to go around your organization, open every door, offer something nice. That creates a first positive experience with people before you even need it. Plus, it’s always nice to receive some chocolate.

Help other departments and teams

As Service Design professionals, we often have to work with other departments and teams to make the service ideas work. So we often have to ask other people for help. But we can also offer help.

In fact, one of the best ways to get help from someone is to play the reciprocity game. If you have already helped someone a few times, they will feel even more happy to help you out. Because you’ve proven that you’re not just someone who’s profiting from them, you’re actually someone nice. Just like in the neighborhood, where you know that if you ask your neighbor for some salt, they can come back to you to ask for some eggs. And there is no counting. It’s small little favors that we don’t count, just because we want to help each other.

So whenever you see someone from another department struggling with a project, and you feel you could give a hand for one or two hours: do it. Just because it’s nice. And maybe because one day you’ll need a favor, and it’s going to be easier to ask for that favor if you already have helped.

Help people shine

Maybe this is a thing of Swiss culture, but in Swiss culture there is a bit of a rule which says: always praise in public, always criticize in private. Whenever someone made a mistake and you have to give them a tip on how to do better, don’t do that in a public message that everybody can see. Speak to them in private. But when it comes to saying that someone did good work, do it in the middle of the room so that others hear it. Do it on the intranet or in a Slack channel so that everybody sees it.

This idea of helping people shine is also important for your key decision makers. You need to give them elements that help them shine with their bosses, their partners, their clients. Give them the arguments, the stories, the tools to help them shine.

Tell your boss who to congratulate

For years, when I was working in a very big organization, I sent my boss a little report every two or three months on how things were going. In that report, I had one section called “one person to congratulate”. There, I mentioned the name of a team member or someone from another department whose work had helped me or a project I was involved with. And I explicitly said it would be nice to congratulate that person.

This creates a lovely ripple effect. First, it helps your team members who are not so good at showing their own work. Plus, it helps your boss have something nice to say about work that is invisible to them. And once the boss congratulates the team member, that person feels seen and even more motivated. And if the boss says “Daniele told me that you did some very good work, thank you so much”, it even shines back on you, which smoothens the relationship with that person even further.

Spread positive rumors

Rumors spread extremely fast in organizations. But usually these are negative things. Things where we start with “did you know that Bob…” and then say something nasty about him.

Knowing that rumors spread very fast, for years I’ve been playing with spreading positive rumors. I frame things that people do well within the team, things that are unknown, in the same way. I say “did you know that Bob…” and then I say something nice about them. Same starting point as a classical rumor, but it spreads out something positive. Because the more trust there is between team members in a workplace, the easier the work between all of us becomes.

Get people prepared outside of the official meetings

There is a metaphor that explains how business is often done in a Swiss context. We say that a meeting is often just a theater piece that has already been rehearsed in one-to-ones before.

What this means is that in Swiss culture, people often have one-to-one conversations before a big important meeting, where they already prepare themselves, spread the information, and get some agreement beforehand. So when the big meeting arrives, most of the communication has already happened.

I think this is something we as Service Design professionals have to get better at. Those of us who want to play exactly by the rules might imagine that the official meeting is the moment to present the work. But in fact, we can get people prepared outside of these moments. That can be an elevator conversation where we share some key information. It can be inviting someone for lunch or a coffee, and sharing a few things to get their opinion beforehand.

Lobbyists do that very well in government. They hang out in the corridors around government. They hand in documents, offer coffee, explain things. So that when people are back in the big decision room, they have the information that the lobbyists believe would help them the most.

Let people know what you want

Let people know what you want, and let them say what they want.

Often at work, there is some negotiation happening. You might need something from a department or a team, and they might need something from you. In these moments, being very clear about the fact that this is a negotiation makes things easier. For example, in conversations with other teams and departments, I’ve said stuff like: “I have a lot of flexibility on these criteria, but there is one criterion I can’t change, which is this point. For the rest, we can find a way.”

And then I ask the person to tell me what elements are extremely important to them, to look good within their organization or for their goals. And what are their non-negotiables. So that we know what is the part we can negotiate on, and which parts are already set in stone that we will have to work with.

Behave to be copied

People copy each other. So do what you want others to do for you.

One day, I was in an office being yelled at by someone. For very good reasons. And my instinct told me to answer by whispering. Slowly. Calmly. And suddenly, something magical happened. The shouting guy in front of me calmed down and spoke normally. We could have a civilized conversation.

This shows there is a weird tendency in humans to mimic what others do. Have you ever seen couples walking in the street? They walk at the same rhythm, with the same foot up and the same foot going forward. Left, right, left, right. It feels like a dance. They mimic each other.

Knowing that people mimic each other, the way we behave is a tool we can use to influence others. We can play in the way we’d like others to play with us. As another small story of mimicking: I’ve noticed that whenever I send calendar invites in a specific form, writing what the goal is, the preparation needed, and so on, or whenever I send emails with subtitles in them to make the reading easier, then suddenly, people write back in that same way.

In short

Politics and lobbying don’t have to be something totally dark. You can use the practices that lobbyists use for something positive. Spreading positive rumors. Making sure the people who do hard work get congratulated. Helping your colleagues and boss shine. While always giving, from time to time, a little chocolate.

In the end, knowing that small gestures have an influence makes us realize that, within our work as Service Design professionals, the way we show up, the way we come with empty or full hands, the way we offer half an hour or not, is also part of our job.

Internal communication: Make the work understandable

In our deep dive into the political side of Service Design work, we explored that yes, politics is part of the workplace, and that yes, we can play a positive influence and lobbying game. Now, in this chapter, I want to share a few tips and tricks around internal communication.

Sometimes, as Service Design professionals, we are perfect at understanding the needs of our customers and communicating in the best way with them, so that they feel understood and see how the service works. But we forget to apply the same level of care to the communication for our decision makers, our team members, and the wider organization we are part of.

That’s why I believe internal communication is a key element of making Service Design projects successful within organizations. Especially larger ones. It could all be summarized with this idea: have a communication plan where you spread the information of what you’re doing and make it visible, so that others see it.

Have a communication plan

As service designers, we are often quite good at blueprinting and making processes. We can use that exact same skill to make a mini communication plan for our project. A communication plan that is not just focused on the end users, but also on the internal stakeholders, decision makers, team members and other departments.

There are maybe two categories to think about in your communication plan. First, the classical communication things you share on an intranet, in Teams channels, via email, at an internal event. But also think about the word of mouth, the one-to-one human communication. Who in the team will speak about what, with whom? So don’t just have a communication plan focused on spreading information to the mass, but also on spreading it in a one-to-one, personal way. Over a coffee, a lunch, or a short meeting.

Show your work

In his book “Show Your Work”, Austin Kleon showed a lot of creative professionals the value of showing your work to the public. It’s a way for potential clients to see what they could do with you. It also forces you to reflect on your own work, because to present it, you have to think about how you want to present it.

I believe the same is true for showing your work internally, within the organization you’re part of. Especially with Service Design work, which is often confidential and under NDA: you can’t show much outside of the workplace. But within the workplace, you really can show it.

Why is that important? Because most of the work done by service designers is pretty invisible to others. By showing your work, you make visible what you are doing, and you help people realize that some change is coming. Service Design projects are often linked with some internal change. As a change management practice, it’s good to let people know in advance what routine might change in their life, so that they can prepare themselves, maybe voice some concerns. Concerns which will then help you do better work.

Showing your work is also helpful for the people around you. Your team and your boss will realize what your contribution to the team is, and that you are a valuable member of it.

One weird thing that has happened to me over the years: in many of my jobs, people have often said “wow Daniele, you’re working so much, it’s impressive”. In reality, I don’t feel I’m working more than my colleagues. Sometimes I feel I’m even working less, just because I do fewer hours, because I’ve made the life decision to spend a lot of time with my son. But I try to make as much as possible of the work I do visible internally, so that people realize what work is done.

Don’t overwhelm people with your ideas

Over the years, I’ve noticed that people are already overwhelmed with information internally. Every other department has a lot of information to share, and we all get lost in a tsunami of information. Between that, the newsletters, the other emails, and what we get from social media, there is an overflow of information. In such a context, it’s important to reduce the number of things we share.

I found out that three is a good rule of thumb. Being able to say “this project does three things” is a pretty strong way of pitching an idea. Also, at the end of a presentation or a communication bit, being able to say “this is the most important information to remember” is a very practical thing to do. There is information you share as background information, but not all of it is what you want people to really, really, really remember. It’s our work to reduce what we say to a top three, and then remind people what is the one priority in that top three.

Add adjectives to black box terms

Within organizations, we often use professional lingo with words like strategy, infrastructure, communication, collaboration. These are what I call black box terms. What someone understands as “collaboration” can be very different from someone else. One person might mean asynchronous work done via Slack, when someone else feels that the only true collaboration is sitting together in a meeting. Same for “strategy”. One person might think of a 300 page document based on an analysis made over five years, when someone else might think of a co-creative democratic process.

The problem with these black box terms is that people have such different expectations of what they mean, that when you use them, you are not sure what image you create in people’s minds. That’s why adding an adjective in front of them helps. Say that the collaboration will happen “via a tool”, or that the strategy will be “a small one”.

Choose project titles wisely

This is a tip I learned from a course on project management. A bit on the same lines as the previous section: a project title really creates an image in the minds of people. The same goes for the name of a committee or a workgroup.

Choosing a name for a project, a committee or a board is like a mini branding project. You really have to think about what expectations you are setting with that name. It’s a good 15 minutes invested to decide what should really be the name of this project or committee. You can use the rule of having an adjective in front of the project name to make it clearer. Or you can reference the company’s culture or history, to make it a little more poetic and create images in the minds of the people who will receive that email.

Have a good metaphor and repeat it

Sometimes a good metaphor, meme or visual does much more to spread an idea than a good presentation or video.

For example, in a research project I led around the administrative workload of frontline workers, I came up with a small doodle: a person receiving a tsunami from the sky, obviously unhappy about it. And on top, in the sky, hidden behind some clouds, a bunch of HQ workers with a big smile, each one putting in one drop. All these single drops felt like one big tsunami from HQ to the frontline worker. Even if each HQ staffer felt they contributed one lovely drop of help, and didn’t understand why people got so pissed about their one tiny drop.

This image was very easy to pass around, and to draw again and again on whiteboards. Images, metaphors and memes like that spread an idea much further.

Use the tools given by your organization

Your IT team has already set up an intranet, a messaging platform, diffusion lists for emails. Your HR team has maybe set up an all-hands meeting. Your leadership team has maybe set up some review moments. These are all tools you can use for your internal communication plan. They are touchpoints in your big plan to communicate your work.

So don’t reinvent the wheel and look for new tools. Look at what already exists. What are the recurring meetings where you could get five minutes, or where you could grab people in the corridor after? What are the underused tools that you could use for your communication?

Repeat ad nauseam

In college, I had a history and French teacher who had a very particular way to make us learn. He often repeated the same information again and again, from class to class. And the pieces of information he repeated were the ones he would then ask about in exams. Just by the sheer fact that he repeated the same information again and again, we got it, and were already prepared for the exams without even having to prepare.

The Hollywood industry back in the days had a similar rule: the rule of seven. It meant that before buying a ticket to see a movie, a person would have to hear, see or read about that movie seven different times. Maybe even in seven different places.

I believe we can learn a lot from my history teacher and from the Hollywood industry. It’s not enough to shoot one mass email and believe that everybody in the organization now knows about us. Because, let’s be honest: who hasn’t opened an email from another department, quickly scanned through it, said “nothing for me here”, and deleted it? That’s why we really have to think about multiple touchpoints when we communicate internally.

Change the color

We were working on a big project, with monthly meetings with the board. It was a slow process with a lot of work. The board felt we weren’t making enough progress. We disagreed. We felt we made real progress, but that we failed to communicate it strongly.

So when they told us we really should change course and push harder, we continued at the same steady pace we had. With one big change: for the next presentation, we changed the layout of the presentation and the color scheme.

The feedback that came after that meeting with the new colors was astonishing. “Wow! Now you really understood our feedback. We see that you worked much harder on this. Congratulations!”

Sometimes the problem is not the content, it’s the form. That moment was a good reminder for me that sometimes, just changing the colors a little, making the presentation a bit nicer, is what is really needed. Because yes, internal communication matters.

In short

In these three chapters around politics, we explored that yes, we have to accept that political work is in fact also Service Design work. We understood that we can use lobbying for good. And we have seen that we have to be as good at internal communication as we are at external communication. Which means we can set up a communication plan, multi-touchpoint, with good metaphors and clear namings. And sometimes with just a spark of color change that makes a big difference.

Human skills

Psychology: Remember this is just a bunch of humans

Often we think that work is something totally different from the rest of our life. But in fact, it isn’t. It’s exactly the same. It’s still a bunch of people who are together, trying to survive together and make something together. Just like having to convince your two-year-old to accept to brush his teeth at the end of the day. It’s all about being with people.

So knowing how to play with humans makes work easier. Because in the end, most of the work is not doing the work, but making the relationships at work that enable the work.

This is a thing I learned quite early in my design life. When I was working as a graphic designer, I put all my efforts into making the best brandings and the best visuals possible. I thought the work would speak for itself. And I totally forgot that I needed to onboard my clients into understanding what the work I made for them was, and why it matters. That’s when I realized that doing the work itself is only one part of the actual job. There is doing the work, and then there is the task of making the work accessible, meaningful, understandable for others.

And that’s where psychology comes in. Because psychology is the art and science of knowing how people think and how they behave. In this chapter, we’ll explore how remembering that your colleagues, your boss and your partners at work are just humans will make your work much easier.

Train in psychology

In Service Design, we learn to be empathic and listen to others. But we don’t really learn how humans work. That’s what the science and art of psychology teaches us.

Personally, I’ve had the chance to have both a dad and a brother who are psychologists. Just being at family dinners, hearing them speak about their work and share their tips, made it possible for me to learn quite a few things about the psychology of humans.

How can you learn some of the basics of psychology that are actually helpful for Service Design professionals? First thing: forget about Freud. Maybe that’s the first name that comes to mind, but for a Service Design professional, understanding anything about Freud will not be helpful. Instead, I recommend you explore one of these three fields: person-centered therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), or motivational interviewing.

Person-centered therapy is really good for us because it is based on many similar key ideas: people are smart, people have reasons to do the things they do, and our work is to serve them. It has a lot of the same philosophies that fit very well with a Service Design mindset. There is this idea that you don’t need to give people advice. You just give back and synthesize what they told you, in order to enable change in them. Which is exactly what we do with interviews and reframing.

CBT fits us quite well too. If you have ever worked with the idea of nudging, that’s exactly something that comes from the world of CBT, maybe more precisely from behavioral economics, which uses a lot of CBT elements. CBT is a set of tools that helps people overcome challenges with a good process. Which feels a lot like what we do with our backstage thinking in Service Design.

And then there is motivational interviewing, the approach I like a lot. It understands that when people need to make change happen in their lives, it’s not so much a problem of information, but a problem of motivation. People are ambivalent: they are in situations that feel both good and bad for them. Even if it feels bad, there are still advantages in staying the way they are. The job of the motivational interviewer is to help the person see all the motivation she already has, and help her express it in words.

This fits very well with Service Design. I often feel that most organizations already have all the talent and all the tools in them to make big changes happen. What they lack is the motivation, and what they have is the ambivalence that keeps them from changing. Seeing organizations through a motivational interviewing lens changes our perspective as service designers: from people who have to bring new tools, new ideas and new people, to people who create the conversations that make others realize they already have all they need to make the change happen.

You might say: “But Daniele, you gave me three options. That’s way too much for me. Where should I start?” Then I highly recommend you start with motivational interviewing. It builds on the work of Rogers and person-centered therapy, and yet has a bit more guiding elements, which fits our role. We listen and reflect back, but we’re also there to sometimes guide the organizations we’re working with. There is a very good and affordable introduction course on motivational interviewing, all in video, with the founders of the field. And if you want to explore behavioral economics, there is a very good, simple and straightforward course on edX.

Don’t be a dick

Making shit happen is not an excuse for being a dick. That’s one of the big disservices of the myth of Steve Jobs and the Apple story. Steve Jobs made it possible for Apple to create some legendary design pieces. And he famously was a dick. So in the design community, there is often this idea that if you want strong design outputs, you need to be like Steve Jobs. You have to be a dick. But there are a ton of organizations out there that work without dicks in them.

Plus, if you’re reading this book, you are not the CEO of the organization. Or maybe you didn’t read the introduction that said this book is not made for CEOs and team leaders. If you are one: welcome, this is a good time to close the book.

More seriously: in your role as a Service Design professional, you are often not in a position of power. You get buy-in from others not by shouting louder, not by being the loudest voice and the most painful person, but by being the opposite of that.

There is a saying: people don’t remember what you do, but how you make them feel. Which means that at work, even if the work is important, even if things are slower than what we wish, being a gentleman in adversity makes others at ease with you, and makes them more willing to work with you again and again. Shouting matches and dick moves might help you for one project. But they will create the memory that working with you is a pain in the ass, and people will avoid it as much as possible.

A good litmus test when it comes to Service Design work with other people is to ask the question: not “would I do that to my colleague?”, but “if my colleague was a friend, would I do this to them?” If the answer is no, you might want to change that way of working.

No one is a dick

In the previous section, I shared that being a dick is not the best strategy. On the other side, it’s always good to believe that people are not dicks. Even if people act like dicks, there are good reasons for them to do it.

At work, we are a bunch of people who often don’t know each other, and who don’t come from the same cultures, the same generations, the same upbringings. So work is basically a place made to fail. There is very little common ground between people, and we have to create it.

So when it feels like someone just did a dick move, remember: people have good reasons to do things. Maybe what is being a dick in your culture is what is normal in their culture. Maybe they had a bad day. Maybe there was something that was important to them. Maybe they are under pressure.

My strategy has always been to try to understand why people act like they do. Because usually, there are very good reasons for them to work that way. And once you understand the deep reasons why people act in ways that might feel dickish at work, you can work on the real issue. Their fear. Their pains. And then suddenly their reactions totally change, and you can work together. Instead, if you just go into reaction mode, most of the time it blocks the whole project. Or it makes you see the other one as a dick, and every tiny thing they do, you will read it as done with an evil mindset.

An important note here: sometimes you have to play in a way that would feel like being a dick in your culture, so that it is understandable by another culture. In that culture, it wouldn’t be acting like a dick. It would be acting like a normal person.

As a tiny example: Swiss people are pretty famously non-assertive and extremely polite. When we go to a bar and want a drink, we don’t order a drink. We ask, in a very gentle way: “May I get a beer?” It’s not even “I’d like to get a beer”. It’s a question, with a lot of doubt, about the possibility that I may, if the person is in a good mood, get a beer. In the middle of a bar. Which is pretty absurd if you look at it like that. Compare that to Germany, where people enter the bar and say: “I will get the beer.” That’s what they say to the waiter. Not even a question. Not even an order. Just the information of what will happen.

For the German, the Swiss guy is totally absurd. And for the Swiss guy, the German is totally acting like a dick. Is it the case? Absolutely not. Sometimes you have to play the translation between one culture and the other. And what is true for some Germans and Swiss Germans is true for many of the relationships we have at work, between all the subcultures and generations at play. There are a lot of different ways of saying the same information.

So remember: most of the time, people are not dicks. They have good reasons to do what they do. Find the root cause. And when the root cause is culture, sometimes you just need to translate what you want to say from one culture to another.

Spend more time with the ones you hate

At work, there are people we don’t understand or don’t get along with. There are even whole professions we don’t understand. Maybe the marketing guys rub you the wrong way. Maybe the IT people with their very technical lingo piss you off. Maybe the business guys with their complicated Excels make you want to become a monk.

With these types of people, one of the best ways to work better with them is to spend more time with them. Because there is something magic: friendships, and therefore good collaboration, often build for one very simple reason. We spent a lot of time together.

In fact, Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, seems to have found that it takes between 40 and 60 hours to create an early friendship, between 80 and 100 hours to go from a basic friendship to being properly a friend, and around 200 hours to become a true good friend.

The more we spend time with someone, the more chances there are that we start to like them, and the more chances there are that we understand them. And if we like someone and we understand them, it’s pretty easy to work with them. So it’s not just about spending time with the “enemies”, but spending time with the people we don’t understand, so that we slowly understand them more, and can then work better with them.

This research is something I experienced myself, at work but also in family settings. In my own family, for years I was much nearer to my dad than to my mother, simply because we didn’t spend that much time together. When the pandemic came and I had a newborn, we came up with the idea of calling each other every day, so that she could see her grandchild. My mom and her grandchild built a relationship, which was the goal of these calls. But the one thing I didn’t have on the radar: by calling her every day, we suddenly had much more in common. Because we spent much more time together.

Learn how to deal with common human tendencies

Many of us have traits that are well documented and very well understood by psychologists. Some of us have ADHD. Others have anxiety. Some others have a tendency to get burned out. Others have a big ego and need to show their superiority. Many of these traits are extremely well documented, and there are a ton of articles that can help you know how to better work with someone who has a specific trait.

For example, as someone who is not neurodivergent and doesn’t have ADHD, when I started to work with designers and other people who have ADHD, I was a bit overwhelmed. The way I interacted with them didn’t work out well. But once I understood what it means to have ADHD traits, how the brain works in these situations, and how it reacts to tasks, deadlines and things like that, I was able to collaborate much more easily with these people.

For that, it’s quite useful to get to know people a little more personally, so that you can research how to work with people with specific traits. There are also some nice personality tests that can help for better teamwork, because they show how people have a tendency to work and solve problems. Once you understand how someone usually solves problems, you understand when that person will be helpful, and when it’s best to go to someone else.

Separate the content from the tone

We all speak in different ways. Some of us are more assertive, some put everything between the lines. Some joke a lot, others are very serious. Some speak in a very academic language, some in a very down-to-earth language. You can say the same thing in so many different ways. What’s important at work is to understand what people tell you, and not so much how they tell it to you.

It’s not our job as co-workers to educate people on the best way to communicate and how to be polite. Our work is to get our tasks done and to make the collaborations happen. So a lot of our work is to separate the content from the way it was expressed.

To do that, it’s very helpful to give back to your colleague the content that you understood. What was expressed maybe in a bit of a dickish way, but was a very interesting point, can be given back as just the interesting point. The other person can then tell you if you understood them well, maybe correct something, and you got the information you needed.

Plus, a weird thing happens when you take back just the content, not the form, and give it back in a very calm way. If the person was a bit aggressive, it usually brings them down in their emotions too. Because you’re giving back a very neutral tone.

This reminds me of a workshop where someone gave feedback in a very aggressive way, also questioning my way of working. I reacted just by giving back the content, without the aggressivity. Suddenly the person said: “Yes, that’s exactly the problem I see.” Then I could suggest something and ask: “If we do that, will that solve the problem for you?” And the person said: “Yes, perfectly.” That person went from someone who was aggressive to someone ready to collaborate.

Note that different cultures speak and work differently

It’s not just personalities that make us say the same thing in different ways. It’s also cultures. Original cultures, but also company cultures and spiritual cultures.

I already shared the example of the Swiss German and the German: one speaks in a more assertive way, the other puts the content between the lines. But this can also be seen in tiny things, like the importance of timing. In Swiss culture, the country of watches, if someone tells you to come at 12, people will be exactly there at 12. In my Italian culture, time is a bit more flexible. What could be seen as a sign of disrespect in one culture, coming 15 minutes later, was maybe a sign of respect in the other culture.

That’s why having a basic understanding of different cultures helps. For that, there is a great book to explore: “The Culture Map” by Erin Meyer. It’s a summary of the different cultures that exist around the globe, and how each one of them likes to get work done.

Ask people what’s their love language for work

In relationships, there is this idea that people have different love languages. For example, my wife might be a hugger and express love through physical gestures, when someone like me, who likes to show appreciation through practical gestures, will do the dishes to show that I love her. In relationships, that often creates tensions. When people don’t know the meaning of a gesture, they might say “you’re always cleaning”, when the person was meaning to express, through a practical gesture, “I love you”.

I believe the same happens at work. There are small professional gestures, like writing a very detailed briefing, sending a calendar invite, writing an email instead of a Teams message, that might be signs of appreciation we don’t understand. That’s why I find it very interesting to ask people what is their love language, their favorite way of getting work done with others.

Some people feel appreciated when they receive a very clear and detailed document. Others feel appreciated when you call them. Others just want a few bullet points from you, no fluff, no more details, just a task. As Service Design professionals, we have to work with a lot of different professionals. Knowing how to adapt our communication to the professional love language of each makes people want to work with us more.

In short

The big idea of this chapter is that we have to remember that the people we work with are also humans, just like our family members, friends, partners and children. But with one additional twist: we don’t have the same shared culture as we have with family, and we didn’t spend as much time with our co-workers as with our friends. Which means we often lack a common understanding, a common language.

So the people we’re working with can feel weird or dickish, while they are not. It’s our work to find out why they act like this, to create a new common language, and sometimes to just translate what we mean from one language to another.

If I had to recommend just one practical action: start a training in something related to psychology. My recommendation is a course on motivational interviewing, given in video by the founders of the field, and pretty affordable for what it is.

Mental Health: Think long term, don’t burn out

Until now, we spoke a lot about the political side of work. In this chapter, let’s take care of our brain and our mental health. I’ll share a few tips and tricks to think long term as a Service Design professional.

Obviously, I know there is a generational thing. When you are in your 20s, you are in a go-go-go mode and you want to experience as much as possible, even if it means little sleep and not the best life hygiene. Then, when you get a little older, you suddenly realize that you can’t live like that for the next 50 years, and you adapt your lifestyle. I imagine that in the next 50 years, if I’m still here, I will learn a lot more and have an even more drastic take on mental health. But as this book is meant for people who have started their work experience and are maybe slowly over the days of all-nighters, I hope there are a few lessons here that might be helpful for you.

Train in mental health

Mental health is like any other topic. It’s something you can learn about and train yourself in. For me, one of the best resources I got over the years is the book from the founder of Headspace, called “Get Some Headspace”, and the meditation app Headspace. This book and this app have done a lot for me in taking care of my mental well-being. If you want to go further, the topic of positive psychology is also one to explore. It offers a lot of perspectives not just on how to fix issues, but on how to lead a beautiful life.

Wait before saying yes

There is a moment in your life where you have to say yes a lot, because you have the time and you want as many learning opportunities as possible. But when you move forward in your career, you have to learn to wait before saying yes.

Because saying yes is way too quick. We say yes to a deadline very easily because we didn’t look at our calendar very well. We say yes very easily because we are way too excited in a conversation, because we mimic the excitement of the person next to us.

One rule that has helped me a lot in taking care of my mental workload: don’t say yes directly when someone asks for something, be it help on a project or a deadline for when the work will be done. Instead, I try, focus on “try”, to say something along the lines of: “Let me come back to you in an hour, or tomorrow, with my answer.” This gives me enough space to think a little more deeply about what makes the most sense.

Look where the grass is shittier

Every workplace is weird and has its aspects that don’t work well. And when we speak a lot with the people within our own company, we tend to forget the beautiful parts of the organization where we work.

That’s why I often like to speak with people from other industries and fields, and hear about the challenges they have within their organizations. You realize quite quickly that the grass is shittier on their side. By this comparison, you realize how good you have it. And also how many of the problems that feel specific to your organization are in fact problems that are true for any organization of the same size. It helps you realize that some problems are not problems of the culture of your organization, but just problems of humans being together. And that makes life a little bit easier.

Don’t start right away, ask the old guys

When you start a new project, there is an excitement to get started: start the research, set up the project, and so on. Over the years, what I have learned is that often there is already someone who has done similar work around the organization. But nobody knows about it, because it got forgotten. Or it is used by just one part of the organization, and the rest doesn’t know about it.

That’s why I recommend that before you start, you ask around. Ask people who have been in the organization for quite a while for a bit of context about the issue. Has somebody done that in the past? If yes, why is it not used today? Also ask people in the industry in general, who are maybe not in your organization: how is it usually done? Maybe ask people outside your department how they do it. Because as fun as it is to create a new project, it’s really painful to notice that you’re redoing work that has already been done.

Let people know why you suck

When someone gives you a task that you’re not good at, it’s okay to say that this is not a task you’re good at. That this other person might be better at it and might do it faster. And that, if needed, you could get trained in that specific way of working, but it will take you a little time to get properly trained.

That ensures you don’t do work you truly suck at and that makes you miserable. And if you really have to do that type of work, you at least get the chance to be properly trained in it. For example, when it comes to finance aspects, I usually say this is not something I can do alone, but that I’d be happy to do it with someone else. Because I’m not a statistician, not a quant guy, and not a finance guy.

Wind down over weeks before holidays

The worst thing that can happen is to bring work to finish in your holidays. Therefore, you need to prepare a little for holidays. Having a reminder in your calendar that in two weeks you start holidays, and another one week before, is quite useful to notice that you have to close things before you leave. Also, having a bit of buffer time blocked, to get the things that absolutely need to be done before you go done, is a practice that has helped me quite a lot.

Calendar blockers will save your ass

Blocking time to do hard work and move a big project further is something that helps me a lot. It’s a tip I already covered in the project management chapter, where I told you to block half an hour or an hour after each meeting or workshop. But you can do the same with big slots in your calendar, just to ensure you have days without meetings, where you can do the work you have to do. And the beautiful thing: you can then say to colleagues, “so sorry, I already have a thing in my calendar on that day”.

You can always say no and later

I shared in the project management chapter that there are no real emergencies in most organizations. At the same time, we can always say no, or later.

I’ve been quite impressed over the years by how many professionals feel they don’t have the power to say no. Often I told them: “But you can say no.” And they told me: “Yeah, but then I would be fired.” At least for people in the Service Design profession, where there are quite a lot of jobs, this is not an impossibility. Being fired for saying no to something that is not the right thing to do at that moment, and that could put you in a burnout situation, is a very good reason to be fired. Obviously, this is something I can say as someone who works in a country with social safety nets, where finding a job is not impossible. But when you are in this blessed situation, you always can say no.

And strangely enough, you get even more respected by leaders and peers when you say: “No, sorry, can’t help with that.” Or: “No, not right now. Let’s do that later.”

Tell colleagues this is not your war

I’ve worked in companies where there is way too much to do. There is always a new project, always a new opportunity to fix something or do something lovely for the humans we serve. And yet, we just get paid for a certain amount of work. So in a world of endless possibilities, it’s quite important to be able to say no to requests for help.

One way I’ve found over the years that has helped me a lot: when I have to tell colleagues no, I tell them why. Especially when it’s something where I say: “Sorry, I can’t help you with that, because that’s not something that is in my priorities. This is not my fight. But I’m happy to support you in this other way, in this fight which is important for you.” And then I also explain what is the fight that is the most important for me, in my team or in my role within the organization. It’s a no with a clear explanation of the why behind it, and with an offer of an alternative.

Have a personal policy

As a Service Design professional who has also worked as a freelancer, I have some personal policies. This is something I learned from Marc Fonteijn, who shared with me how being able to say “I can’t do that, that doesn’t fit my policy” is a much easier conversation than just saying no.

For example, when it comes to high conflict situations, and people want me to do workshops in very high conflict situations, I tell them that I’m a workshop facilitator and not a mediator. I refuse to do workshops with people who hate each other. Before I can do a workshop, there needs to be a certain amount of basic respect in the room. And to build that, there needs to be work done with a mediator first. That personal policy has saved me from a few very crazy projects, which I have seen explode in the hands of others. And which then went into mediation, which worked out well.

In short

It’s impressive to see how much being a Service Design professional is about a bunch of skills that are outside of Service Design. But it’s also impressive to notice that mental health is a foundation that helps us do all of these other skills. Because if we are overworked and burned out, our brain won’t work. This basic hygiene, and knowing how to say no, are very important aspects of being a Service Design professional who is there for the long term.

Remember to ask for help

You are arriving at the last chapter, just before the conclusion. Hey, well done!

Before we go to the conclusion, there is one last skill I want to share with you. One more non Service Design skill that will save your ass as a Service Design professional: remember that you are, in fact, not alone in this.

You can always say you need help. You can ask colleagues, other departments and even people outside for help. There are even robots and tools that can help you out. This chapter is just a lovely reminder that you don’t have to put all the pressure on your own tiny shoulders, and that you can share it with others.

Say you need help

Often in the workplace, no one will suggest help if you don’t ask for it. Because if they do so, it might feel like a judgment that you might not have your shit together. But when you ask for help, it doesn’t mean that you don’t have your shit together. And in fact, it’s not heard like that. Often, it’s rather appreciated that you ask for a little help.

This is something I learned over the years. At the start of my career, I had a bit of professional pride and didn’t ask my bosses for help. Slowly, I learned to go to them when I was in a situation where I didn’t know how to make a decision. Or when I found that the deadline was just impossible to meet. Or when the requests were too big. And again and again, I noticed that whenever I asked for help, they were happy to be in the role of the helpful boss. The one who can say: “Let’s keep the deadline but reduce the work.” Or: “Let’s move the deadline one week later. That’s okay.” But none of that would have happened if I didn’t stand up to say: I need help.

Ask colleagues

Anybody is happy to give half an hour to help a colleague. Again, we just need to ask. Remember that you don’t need to know everything, and that there are colleagues who can do in 30 minutes what you would do in 4 hours. It is fully okay, and even more interesting for the business, that this work is done in 30 minutes by someone else. Because in the end, that means you get to do other work. So don’t forget to ask your colleagues for help.

Ask other departments for help

That’s one we often forget. Asking colleagues and maybe your boss is a bit more natural. But going out and asking someone at IT to give you a hand is maybe less usual. Still, you’re from the same company, so it’s perfectly okay to ask for help. And people can always say no.

Ask people outside of your organization

This is maybe the strangest and most uncommon place to ask for support as a Service Design professional. But you can ask other Service Design professionals to help you out, or people who have an expertise outside of your Service Design world.

In the past, I’ve asked on LinkedIn if someone could connect me with a change management expert who could offer me 15 minutes of their time. I’ve called colleagues who work in other organizations to share the plans I had for a very big project I wasn’t sure about.

In fact, if you are a Service Design professional, there are a lot of communities out there to help you out. adplist.org is a website where you can find mentors in many different skills that are very useful for work: marketing, leadership, UX, Service Design, and so on. Circle is another community which might be very interesting for you: a community of in-house service designers, led by Marc Fonteijn, the host of the Service Design Show. And then there are all the Service Design Network (SDN) local chapters, where you can find other service designers more than happy to share their own experiences, tips and tricks.

Ask tools for help

Sometimes we don’t need help from a human. A robot can help out, or a good old tool. Especially these days, with the large language models, it’s quite easy to get some help from a tool.

In short

In this super short chapter, I just wanted to remind you that you’re not alone in this work. Even if you’re the only Service Design professional within your organization, you can always go to your boss, your colleagues, other departments, people outside your organization, and even a robot, for help.

End notes

How to continue from here

In this book, we covered quite a few skills that are non Service Design skills, but that are still important to grow as a Service Design professional in your organization.

We spoke about the fact that psychology is important. We covered that project management, and getting your shit together, will get you a lot of buy-in and trust from others. We saw that being able to understand business models, speak in numbers and translate our work into numbers can help finance teams and decision makers understand and believe in our work. We realized that whenever there is a bunch of humans together, there are political games, and that work is not just about making the work, but also about accepting to do the political work. We saw that we can use lobbying tactics to positively influence other team members and departments. We saw that we often forget to communicate as well with internal stakeholders as we do with the end customer, and that a good simple communication plan can do wonders. We also realized that thinking long term and taking mental health into account is what makes us valuable team members in the long run. Because nobody wants someone to burn out and to have to take over their work. And in the end, we remembered that we’re not in this alone. We can ask for help within the organization, from other departments and team members, outside of it, and even from robots.

So yes, we covered quite a lot in this tiny book about intermediate Service Design. But how do you continue from here?

My first recommendation: revisit the action questions of this book, and transform each one into a task in your own system. Maybe you want to import them in your to-do list and set them up for in one month. Maybe you want to add a calendar event with the answers you wrote down.

And if you don’t have a system in place, and maybe even if you have one, I recommend you use the website futureme.org. It’s a little web service that allows you to write yourself an email that will get sent to you in the future. For example in one month, six months, or a year. There, you could write a little letter to yourself, just like this one:

“Dear Daniele,
A few months ago, you finished a book on intermediate Service Design. Here are the top three things that you learned from it. Maybe you forgot about them. That’s okay. You’re a busy man. I just wanted to remind you about these three key learnings.
And I want to suggest: what is one of the things from this list that you could put in place in the next week?
Greetings from the past,
Daniele
P.S. You look awesome today.”

So now is your time to write your own letter to your future self, based on this little template, with the top three learnings that you made.

One thing to remember

Yes, we covered quite a lot in this book. But if I had to pick one thing to remember, this would be it.

Remember that your work is not only about the actual work you do, but also about all the tiny political things that you do or don’t do. And to become better at these internal politics games, look at how others who do it well do it. Learn from them. Ask them questions about how they do it. Because that political side of the work is as important as the Service Design work itself.

Thank you

A big thank you to you, the reader, for having spent some time with me today. I really appreciate that you decided to spend some time with me instead of watching some cat videos on TikTok.

Thank you also to my lovely wife, who makes it possible for me to have days where I write books, just like this one.

And a big thank you to all the people who, over my life, inspired me with their actions and showed me what it means to be a professional in the wider sense of this term. Thank you to Martin, to Patrizia, to Pascal, to Romain, to Loris, to Danny, to Olivier, to Jean-Marc, and to all my other colleagues, partners and friends who taught me by their example.

Impressum

This book has been written on Thursday 4th of December 2025, on a day where I was sick, in bed, and bored to death. I wrote this book by recording audio notes that were then transcribed and cleaned using the Notion meeting notes tool, with Notion AI and Claude Opus 4.5. This book has been typeset using the ReedSee Studio app, and is printed and shipped through the print-on-demand service lulu.com.

This book is under a Creative Commons license, which allows you to share, adapt and duplicate anything from it, outside of the illustrations, without having to ask for it. As long as you mention the original author and you don’t make money with it.