How service designers can reduce the fear of failure
How to work inside an organisation without letting the organisation get in your way
Working in an organisation has some challenges. You need to understand the company’s goals and values, and align your actions with them. You need to be able to demonstrate the value you deliver, even if this means justifying how you can support the corporate strategy with design thinking. And you need to communicate your ideas to people who might not have had a chance to develop an understanding of design or service design yet. These are all things I’ve been doing as a service designer for a long time, but they seem even more important when working inside an organisation.
If you’re working in an organisation that doesn’t have a service design function, or if you’re new to the world of service design, then this can feel like an uphill struggle. You may even feel like you’re on your own.
But the truth is, there are lots of people around who are interested in how we can improve the way we work. There are also lots of tools available to help us do this more effectively and efficiently.
The challenge of working inside an organisation is that there is often no single authority that makes decisions about what the organisation does and how it does it. This makes change more difficult, because everyone needs to be on board for any change to happen. It also means that you have a lot more stakeholders who have opinions about your work.
This can cause problems because people don’t always agree with each other. The same person might have different priorities at different times — for example, when they’re tired or stressed out. And some people will be more sensitive than others to change — they may feel threatened by it, or worried about losing their identity if they start doing things differently from before.
The key thing to remember is that people are not always rational beings. They make decisions based on emotions as well as facts, which means we need to understand how emotions affect behaviour in order to design good products and services.
This is what you can do:
Service designers have a unique opportunity to understand the needs of their customers, and use that knowledge to improve their products or services. However, they can sometimes struggle with knowing how best to do this.
The fear of failure is one of the biggest reasons why people don’t start new things. It’s far easier to stick with what we know and avoid taking risks, especially when it comes to our careers and financial security.
If you’re trying to change someone’s behaviour, then you first need to understand how they feel about their current situation. This will help you identify the real problem that needs solving.
The first step is recognising that fear of failure is a normal part of the human condition, and acknowledging that it’s not going away any time soon. We all want to be successful and avoid failure, but sometimes we need to take risks in order to achieve our goals.
If you’re working on a new project at work (or even if you’re starting your own business), there are some simple strategies that you can use to help reduce your fear of failure:
- Find out what the business goals are, and what problems or opportunities they are trying to solve. Take a look at your competitors too.
- Identify the type of customer that would normally use your product or service, and their key characteristics: age, gender, location, lifestyle and so on. For example, how many children do they have? Are they married? Do they own their own home?
- Think about the steps that people follow when making a purchase decision (often referred to as the ‘customer journey’). How does your product fit into these steps? Is it difficult for people to access your products or services? Where is the pain point?
- Get into the mindset of your customers by imagining yourself in a similar situation. What decisions would you make? What questions would you ask? Try putting yourself in their shoes…
How can you elevate your value
(on the eyes of your stakeholders)
Working as a service designer in an organisation is not easy. You do not know if your work will be appreciated; you do not know what is the next task, you can lose your job any time.
In the first place, it’s important to understand what your stakeholder needs. The more you know about them, their goals, and their problems, the better you can build your product and make it valuable for them.
To elevate your value on the eyes of your stakeholder, you can:
- One of the key ways to elevate your value on the eyes of your stakeholders is to map all existing systems and processes related to your product within the organization. This will help you identify any problems with existing systems and processes, and make sure you’re able to clearly communicate how your product will solve these existing problems.
- Another way is to make a brief describing key results of your work, which we will get after delivery of the project (for example, increase in sales by 10%). This brief can be used internally as well as externally — it helps you explain what you’re doing and why it’s important, but also serves as a reference point for both yourself and others if questions arise later on down the road.
- You can also involve more people in a decision making process around the product development process, so that there’s greater buy-in from those who need to be involved. You’ll want to do this earlier rather than later — it will help you understand their expectations from the design process as well as build trust between all parties involved.
- To give more responsibilities to the client side: they should make their own documentation, follow up on their internal decisions and so on… Let them feel more responsible for their decisions and actions.
I learned a lot from the experience of working with a certain client. I realized that we, as a team, didn’t do enough to involve our client in the product development process. We were too focused on delivering what we wanted to deliver and not enough on what they wanted to see delivered.
We also did not do enough to make sure that our client was aware of the process we were going through and the changes that were being made along the way. This led to some confusion at times, when our client would ask questions about why certain decisions were made or why certain features were implemented in a certain way.
It was a big mistake because they weren’t really involved in the process and therefore couldn’t feel responsible for their own decisions, which led to some problems at the end of the project.
We need to be more communicative with our clients and make sure they are informed about what is happening with their project throughout every step of its development cycle.
