In November 2017, the SDN community came together in Madrid, for our milestone tenth annual Global Conference. Amongst several themes which underpinned workshops and presentations across the three days, one stood out: Service design at scale.

Change in large organisations takes time, and is challenging. You may follow all the best practices, but inevitably there will be employees who don’t want to change, leadership teams with differing priorities, and the realities of legacy systems. But change at scale is possible.

The theme of the 2017 Service Design Global Conference in Madrid was “Service Design at Scale.” Over the course of three days there, I saw four themes emerge that point the way for the discipline to scale.

As the service design field becomes more successful at solving complex challenges, there’s one elephant that’s getting hard to ignore: User-centred design is inherently a bottom-up approach, in which we extrapolate insights from individuals and apply on a large scale.

Lab.our Ward rethinks the maternity ward experience through human-centred design and interdisciplinary collaboration. It has brought together architects, service designers and product designers, as well as healthcare providers and community members to design a smoother and safer maternal and new-born care journey in low-resource settings.

The discipline of service design has demonstrated its value in enabling both industry and the public sector to transform the value, effectiveness and experience of their services for customers and citizens.

Relevant content is a critical element across all channels of a service. That is why a good content strategy is of crucial importance. At Informaat, service design and content strategy go hand-in-hand.

When I look back at the Service Design Global Conference in Madrid, the theme that sticks with me is the gap between design and business. If we want to scale service design, connecting design thinking and doing to the reality of business is crucial.

What does it mean to ‘design at scale’ in a 132,000-employee organisation? Two years ago, BBVA, one of the world’s oldest and largest banks, launched a grand experiment to find the answer.

In January 2016, a small team called ‘Digital Customer Experience’ started its work to create a joined-up and consistent digital customer experience for Tesco PLC, the world’s third-largest retailer and the UK’s biggest employer.

Pick up any business magazine today and you will probably read about the bleak future of business process outsourcing providers. Genpact in particular, one of the world’s largest with almost 70,000 employees, saw the emergence of automation and machine learning as an omen of the future.

In the summer of 2017, an online fashion retailer approached Sparks Grove UK with a challenge: amidst rapid growth in the business, how might they use their Tech teams’ entrepreneurial culture to create and drive new change initiatives across the organisation?

Banking will become the epicentre of endings as it creates infinite beginnings. Despite the banking industry’s excitement around recent technology and pro-market legislative changes, what will start to become a differentiator in the financial services industry is not how a product starts, but the quality and conclusiveness of its ending.

Over the past few years, design sprints have become a staple of cross-disciplinary service creation processes.

“Our greatest challenge is not our ability as designers to design a service, but the ability of the organisation to deliver that service.”(1) — Louise Downe, 2017 Service Design Global Conference, Madrid

Business Origami is a particularly useful tool for designing new services and for exploring new opportunities to extend existing services in complex systems that involve multiple organisations and multiple stakeholders.