Health and safety might have had a point…

In every organisation, there’s an accident book. And in most, there’s a procedure for capturing “near misses” — the *almost* accidents.
Why? It’s used to learn, and take preventative steps.
Today, after a meeting where I caught what was nearly a service disaster, I realised that it needed the same attention, because it was exactly that — a near miss.
In public services, we’re good at talking about “lessons learned”, but in practice (caveat, this is my experience), we wait until the end and make reflections on a macro level.
Which is great, but it doesn’t help us sell the day to day of service design.
Traditionally, we’re qualitative rather than quantitative creatures. We can sell efficiency and better experience easily at the beginning of a project, but it can be hard to measure our exact value at the end, especially when it’s a new service for the organisation. But what if we could show a client or project lead all of the times we’d steered things away from the cliff and back towards the road? The difference between as is, and would have been? As service designers, it can be much of our day to day — we put our Clark Kent glasses back on and get back to our post-its. And it’s not that we have super powers, it’s simply that we look from a different angle. We see the detail and the big picture. Maybe it’s the glasses. (sorry).
That part of the job that we don’t even think about, is one of the key places we can add value on a project.
It’s not applicable to every project in equal measure, but it’s important for those ones that you had to elbow in to. You know the ones — the ones that were happening with or without you.
Today, I started a service design near miss log.
It isn’t exciting yet; it’s an excel sheet with questionable fields and a few lines. I want to test how/if it works, if there’s value in it, and whether I might surprise myself with what I do or don’t change. I suspect it’ll have a few iterations.
I’m starting from the hunch that by recording the little things, I can learn, share, and measure consequence. Of course, that depends on me remembering to update it.
I’ll keep you posted…
