Harry Vos
Harry Vos
Sep 9, 2018 · 1 min read

Trust is key.

As consultants, you see problems others aren’t able to see or describe. Service designers have a particularly different lens by which to view people, culture, processes and tools. The honest, open parts of you want to point out the problems as you find them.

However, doing this early on can be threatening, and undermines those who failed to spot these problems. Their particular lens might not lend itself to see problems, due to perverse incentives in organisational culture or how people see their roles.

Before speaking out, you have to create a safe space, where it’s ok to admit to not seeing or speaking out about problems.

Ralph recently talked about design consultants needing to start by fixing problems that people want solving, to build trust in a user-centred, iterative design process. These problems might even be the wrong problems to solve, and you might be thinking the real problem lies elsewhere. But fixing the small problems can add up to fixing the wider problem.

At first, I questioned the need to waste time fixing things you know are the wrong problems. But I eventually concluded that changes to services get delivered at the speed of trust. What might seem like wasted time initially, is often necessary to create the space to work on the real problem.

Thank you Emma for sharing your knowledge. We need to be reminded of these things regularly.

    Harry Vos

    Written by

    Harry Vos

    Designing services that work for people, business and the environment. Likes beer and collects records.