Communication and sharing are as important as high quality work

Executive summary

• Doing your job of the highest quality is just as important as communicating it to the rest of the organisation (internally).
• Proper use of communication channels will allow others to learn from you, benefit from your discoveries and also build your position in the organisation. Don’t take this opportunity away from them.

As service designers, product designers and researchers, our roles go very much beyond day-to-day projects. Our job is not only to deliver value or design solutions, but also to mentor, educate and share knowledge within the organisation in the most effective and scalable way.

Suggestions from a manager that we can share knowledge even more widely should be interpreted as a signal of trust and encouragement to promote our work.

Reality shows, however, that sharing content or communicating successes and small discoveries does not come easily to us. We don’t have the time, the motivation or the idea of how to do it. And when we finally decide to speak up, the next challenge is to cut through the noise of all the internal communication in the organisation.

Nevertheless, we cannot give up. Because even if we design the best solutions for customers and employees — if few people in the organisation know about it, who will learn from our insights and experiences?

If we aren’t sharing, others aren’t getting the value of what we bring to the table — a holistic, insight-driven decision making process that could benefit the whole organisation.

This decision to continually postpone engaging in education, mentoring or sharing findings within others means that we do not take an active part in a discussion that is going on — whether we join in or not.

Education is something that can take up a lot of our time initially, but can give it back later. By building good practices or knowledge bases, we can help others in a scalable way. By providing templates and instructions, we enable others to act independently, without being obliged to be present.

At a recent meeting of the Circle — a group of in-house service designers, I asked Helene Schalck, Carlos Chavez, Judith Buhmann and Marc Fonteijn what they thought about communicating their activities, sharing lessons learned or feedback. This is what they shared:

How to start?

Be clear with your intention.
Decide if you want to:

• report on progress
• give your opinion
• collate the opinions of others and comment on them
• ask questions or ask for feedback

Think about the publication channel.
In our discussion it emerged that it would be best to publish on external platforms and share internally with colleagues (for example, sharing to an internal communication platform like Slack). This will allow us not only to share your knowledge internally, but also to create your content publicly. If communication is typically internal, use those tools provided by the organisation (slack, blogs, confluence, presentations, slides).

Make it happen
Mobilise yourself for action. You can ask someone to do something with you (which is how this blog post came about). Follow Helene’s idea and and if your own article is too much to start with — comment on those that already exist.

Ask ChatGPT for help
And finally, here’s a great tip that Marc gave us. Ask ChatGPT to prepare some templates for short messages — ‘posts’. This way you don’t start with a blank page, but have to fill in the empty spaces and adapt the content to your style. This will get you started.

Now there are no more excuses.
Let us know how it went.

Karolina, Helene, Carlos, Judith, Marc.

Photo by Tamanna Rumee on Unsplash