We think we know services — after all, we interact with them daily — but only when trying to improve their designs do we understand their true complexities. There is growing pressure for services of all kinds to not only provide expected outcomes, co-create value, and have lasting experiences but also be more sustainable. Stricter rules and regulations require us to show our designs are not careless or negligent, in terms of their adverse impacts on the planet and its people. But how many of our services meet these sustainability standards? And how to audit, review and evaluate them, let alone to make sure to improve and validate their compliance?
There are also social implications, as seen with the troubles of some well-known platform firms, facing regulatory action because of their negative impacts on for instance housing, traffic and labour markets. Good services, gone bad: If we define good in terms of 'working well’, ‘delivered seamlessly’, ‘personalised customer experience’ or ‘high growth and profit’, and bad in ‘not effective’, ‘costly’ or ‘inefficient’, then there is another side of the coin. In the coming years, every organisation will face pressure to sincerely focus on long-term value and positive impact—on not harming society and the planet.
This provides an enormous opportunity for anyone involved in service design and delivery with the use of 6 new skills this training focuses on:
You will learn: How to go beyond blueprints and journey maps to critically review and audit the design of a service with the use of specific building blocks. How to find gaps and conflicts in the designs that create unnecessary costs. How to identify the negative social and environmental impacts if such costs increase further. And you will learn it all in the language your (internal) stakeholders understand – the language of benefits, costs and risks. Because then, you can not only participate, but also lead or guide the type of discussions towards a more sustainable service design and delivery. That includes discussions on future-proofing services with climate resilience, leveraging new technologies to improve profitability and sustainability, and translating ‘good services’ into sustainable practice, leading to the kind of goodwill and trust that organisations will need in the years to come.
For whom?
You will receive a free ecopy of the book ‘Thinking in Services | Encoding and Expressing Strategy through Design’ which you will read during the course of the training. You will follow a series of four live sessions, each lasting 90 minutes, combining open discussion, debate, and lecture formats. You will have the opportunity to discuss, exchange feedback, and collaborate. Learning with and from your peers is one of the guiding principles of our learning activities.
All lessons are online, and live sessions will take place via Zoom.
Schedule live sessions
Session 1 - Tuesday March 25, 2025, 14:00 - 15:30 CEST
Session 2 - Tuesday April 1, 2025, 14:00 - 15:30 CEST
Session 3 - Tuesday April 8, 2025, 14:00 - 15:30 CEST
Session 4 - Tuesday April 15, 2025, 14:00 - 15:30 CEST
This interactive training is worth 4 SDC study points.
Service design, strategic design, organisational design, futures thinking, social design, business design, design thinking
Majid Iqbal (United States) is the Managing Director of Structural, an agency pioneering innovative analysis and design approaches to improve infrastructure and service quality while minimizing negative impacts. He authored ‘Thinking in Services’, a groundbreaking book on strategy implementation through service design.
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