For 12 months, the Department of Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) Innovation Lab has led an internal service transformation design project for a programme that aims to better support labour market integration for Canada’s Indigenous Peoples. Complexity in the desired future state made it a promising space for bottom-up innovation through service design.

When designing services, the fundamental challenge is people. Organisations don’t change – people change. In complex systems such as within the public sector, people are even more critical as they are relied upon to make decisions in an unpredictable environment rather than being able to follow predetermined activities.

American colleges and universities inspire their students, conduct game-changing research and contribute to their communities, but there are major demographic, technological and economic changes affecting higher education.

In today’s modern, complex business world, it’s not enough for service designers to only focus on delivering the concept of a new service – they must also address its implementation. This article describes an easy-to-understand and intuitive model for doing so, based on Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’.

As designers it is our responsibility to surface and navigate the tensions and complexities of social change and transformation. ‘Theory of Change’ is a methodology for revealing design questions, bringing together insights, stories and evidence, enabling constructive exchanges of knowledge and values, and testing boundaries, contexts and scale.

Designers and lawyers share a high affinity towards creative problem solving, although their approaches in doing so vary widely. In a recent legal design project, we were given the opportunity to bridge both worlds and change the working culture of German law firm Streck Mack Schwedhelm.

Staying on top in an ever-changing and increasingly complex world has become a necessity for any organisation wishing to be future-proof. Investments in change management and transformation initiatives are therefore becoming more and more valued. Organisational prototyping provides a lean, hands-on approach to incorporating change in a pragmatic and sustainable way.

In this article, we highlight that going from service design to organisational designing means switching from complicated to complex problems. We show how designers can reframe complicated problems to uncover the deeper, complex issues that caused the problems. Solving complex problems, however, requires a different approach.

In this article, we discuss that service designers are particularly well equipped with skills and tools to create change in organisations and can do so more explicitly by applying a flywheel capability model to their work.

When Bill O’Brien, ex-CEO of Hanover Insurance, was asked about leading transformational change in his own company, he said, “the success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor”.1 How can we use self-awareness as a tool to become more effective as service designers?

From the wide body of knowledge on organisational change we have selected three theories and models that should be known by anyone working in the field of service design. These theories can be used to understand people’s behaviour in the context of service design projects and to define activities to influence that behaviour.

Innovation drives change. Change requires innovation. Innovation and organisational change are so intertwined it almost feels disingenuous to untangle them. By the same token, service designers are increasingly using their superpowers in humancentred innovation and design projects to empower leaders, managers and employees in system-wide change processes.

Organisational approaches to change usually follow a traditional process, in which the achievement of businesses goals and technological change are favoured over the cultural change that is needed. Often, they overlook how employees are emotionally equipped to deal with change.

Whereas a lot has been written about the usefulness of empathy and when to practice it in service design, very little is said about the actual practice of applying it. This article will introduce practical, in-depth, science-informed, actionable and verifiable tools for the practice of empathy as it is relevant to service design.

Service design and agile practices are leading approaches to create and deliver value. Here, we present a successful case where both approaches accelerated the implementation of new service experiences, supported nation-wide scalability and created a new organisational culture.

It took less than a minute for our stakeholders to disregard two months’ worth of hard work. Halfway through a change management project, we had created an opportunity map that visualised our research. We felt confident the map – meant to help stakeholders prioritise their initiatives – was a prime example of service design. So why did our deliverable fail to move our stakeholders?