Daniele Catalanotto
Author - Daniele Catalanotto

Meeting Change Manager Christian Bessembinders opened a conversation about culture, service design and Pippi Longstocking.

Let’s first talk about Christian. I’ve met Christian on Twitter. Christian is one of the first people who started to comment the tiny pieces I wrote about our profession. With the time we talked on Twitter. We told each other that if one day we would be in the same city we would need to have a drink together. It happened during the Service Design Conference in Amsterdam. We meet for a coffee on the morning and started to chat about our common interests.

Christian Bessembinders is a smart guy working for KPN Werkplek, a telecom company here in the Netherlands. He has a big passion for Service Design. He brings design thinking and all this stuff into his company with a few other like minded colleagues.
During our conversation Christian asked me how I do this little sketches that I often do for my articles. I offered to give him a little crash course. Christian responded with a quote of Pippi Longstocking:
  

Never tried that before, so I think I should definitely be able to do that.

Christian trying out some sketching tips
Christian trying out some sketching tips
Culture is the problem
This quote could be the one of a prestigious design thinker. There is so much truth in this tiny sentence. As we continued chatting and drinking we started to talk about this mindset. The problem we face in companies today is not a problem of skills. It’s a problem of culture. People learned from the early days at school to think in boxes. They learned to first listen to the adults, then learn, then do, and not the other way around. In a way, what we have to share with our colleagues around us is not the service design skills and methods. We first have to bring people back to the mindset of Pippi Longstocking. We first have to we bring back the kindergarten fun way of thinking in the culture of entreprises. Then we will be able to go further and create a service design mindset.
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