The past years have seen plenty of discussion around the terms ‘service design thinking’ and ‘service design doing’. In this issue, we feel it’s time to get a better understanding of ‘service design leading’.

In any organisation, many disciplines work together to deliver value. Corporate structures often silo these disciplines, but there have always been instances of open collaboration. When looking at design and business, we argue that it is time to revisit the current state of opportunistic appropriation of each other’s approaches.

Recent events have shown that the current situation can change unexpectedly. Looking from the future to the present allows organisations to recognise these external shocks and gives them the ability to anticipate rather than react to future challenges using a methodology that combines four design approaches to create strategic planning.

As service design has become increasingly established, it has presented persistent challenges to service design managers and design leadership in general. The demand for service designers often outstrips supply, and building a diverse team capable of handling the breadth of service design work is easier said than done.

Through our work as a consultancy at the cross-section of design and business, PARK has met and worked with hundreds of design and business leaders. Through many engagements, we have come to recognise the characteristics that guide design leaders in making the ever-maturing role of design successful.

Strategy-oriented design has gained traction in Brazil over the last 20 years. In the wake of the Design Thinking movement, companies are hiring service design specialists as consultants or creating dedicated service design teams within their organisations. This article presents a case study focusing on the implementation of a service design innovation centre at a large international digital payments technology organisation, IDPTO (pseudonym).

We live and work in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world. The pace of change and increasing frequency of destabilising events mean that, within many sectors, there is increasing interest in developing more long-term, adaptive strategic visions that will better equip organisations for this VUCA world.

Digital technologies can drastically improve the way services are provided when done correctly. However, for this to happen, there is a need for customer-centric leadership, especially in the public sector, in which the meaning of ‘customer’ is less clear. So, what is customer-centric leadership and how does an organisation develop it?

We live in a historical moment when every company will need to transition towards sustainable growth and a zero net CO2 world. Service designers can play an essential role in reimagining and driving the industry shift and facilitating dialogue between design and business.

Numerous firms have compounded their success by employing service design, but there are also several firms in which service designers struggle to unleash the potential of this critical skill due to organisational factors. This article discusses how to organise and motivate service designers to gain the full benefit of their competences.

What do service design and leadership development have in common? A lot more than you might think. After nearly a decade of working in leadership development, I transitioned to a career in design. During my transition, I worked on experiential leadership development programming for university students, and I became increasingly fascinated by the parallels between the disciplines. service design and leadership

Nowadays, the positioning of a company relies on its ability to build empathy not only with clients but above all with employees by monitoring their emotions and behaviours and involving them to understand their expectations of the organisation.

By helping executives get more value out of analytics, service designers have an opportunity to use their core strengths and step in as de facto leaders. To guide practitioners, this article presents a novel framework for the application of service design to the analytics domain.

This article lays out a framework to use when conducting design research in unfamiliar contexts to uncover actionable insights – the wildflowers – by ensuring that researchers are able to form bonds of trust and respect with participants that lead to meaningful conversations.

Nick de Leon is a pioneer in service design education in the UK, having established an academic programme at the Royal College of Art. In this interview with Touchpoint publisher Prof. Birgit Mager, he shares the path he's taken until today and talks about ways of ensuring that service design activities and outputs find real traction within the business world.