Maybe you missed it, but a recent piece in Fast Company positioned service design as an essential capability for growing businesses today. However, the truth of the matter is that there still aren’t enough experienced service designers to go around. Most of today’s growing businesses who need service design are looking to hire senior service designers, not junior ones-because service design has the potential to be a highly strategic, direction-shaping, capability that can reposition a business, fuel top line growth, and catalyze an entire workforce.
Rapidly Growing Need for Senior Service Design Talent, but a Lagging Supply of Seasoned Service Designers
Service design is still a nascent skill set in the US, and most US-based service designers have less than five, if not less than three, years of direct experience designing, managing, and scaling services. A simple job search for the title “service designer” with the qualifier “5 years of experience” yields dozens of full-time service design leadership roles at companies like Gensler, Fidelity Investments, Amazon, Walgreens, and, Airbnb, just to name a few.
But the supply of seasoned service designers simply cannot meet this kind of demand. When I attended the Global Service Design Conference for the first time six years ago, all of us could fit in a single room and there were maybe 75 self-identifying service designers in attendance. I’d gander to say that today there are less than 150 of us worldwide who have more than 5 years of pure service design experience, i.e. experience that truly qualifies as designing end-to-end service experiences or doing service design full-time. That’s less than 3 seasoned service designers per country if we’re only considering Europe and the US as outposts for our work. And forget Australia, South America, Canada, Africa and Asia in that number. All of the world’s seasoned service designers simply cannot fill the demand we’re seeing for our capabilities. Accordingly we need solutions that go beyond a talent grab to keep pace with the vast demand for services thinking and services leadership across the public and private sectors.
Enter Service Design Coaching
The reality is that the world needs service design coaches as much as it needs service designers. With the demand for talent vastly outpacing supply, simply hiring service designers isn’t a viable strategy for scaling service design into large organizations. Kerry Bodine, one of the most prolific speakers and writers on service design also thinks so. Here’s what she had to say about it in her closing address at the 2017 Global Service Design Conference: “[I]f our goal is to fully scale service design, the several hundred people attending the annual global conference can’t try to OWN service design. We have to let go and accept—no, embrace—the fact that other people will practice it (imperfectly) and inevitably adapt core service design methodologies and deliverables to meet their own needs, mindsets, and capabilities.” Bodine went on to make a call for more service design coaches: “to scale service design, we need more coaches to support budding service designers within the context of real world service design projects.”
As a seven-year veteran of the service design industry and an authentic leadership coach, I couldn’t agree more. Service design coaches can position, package, and deploy the capabilities of service design across a whole organization through a focus on culture change and adoption. They can concentrate on the end users of services thinking: the line workers and middle managers of corporations, the people with the real power to deliver service design thoughtfully at-scale. The service design coach’s prowess comes from being able to operate outside-in, coming alongside the powerful, important work of in-house designers who take on big initiatives and dig deep into specific services and touchpoints. The service design coach will help executives and business unit leaders build the behaviors and mindsets that will support and catalyze a service designer’s work. Likewise, the coach will help a company’s service designers better position and harness their skills as they build a culture to welcome the service designers’ full potential. The service designer needs the service design coach to shepherd strategy and support ‘block and tackle’ initiatives that protect and honor his work. And every company who’s thinking seriously about investing in service design should consider a coach as part of its overall services strategy. After all, a 2007 study by PriceWaterHouseCoopers and the Association Resource Centre found that the mean ROI for companies investing in coaching was 7 times the initial investment, with over a quarter reporting an ROI of 10 to 49 times. Now imagine that kind of potential impact paired with service design!
Want to hire me as your service design coach? Learn More about my new Service Design Coaching offering and schedule a time to chat.