Exploring the intersection of (Service) Design, Agile and Lean

Together with our colleagues from Redfront (UK), we started a new initiative: MoDAL. MoDAL is an exploratory project at the intersection of Design Thinking, Agile Methodology and Lean.

What core principles underpin the broad purpose of each approach? What are the commonalities and conflicts? And how does greater cross-fertilisation inform specific applications?

Judging from our experience working with people from these fields and quite a few conversations over the last two years there is a great potential to be uncovered. 

To dig deeper into this conversation, we are happy to announce the first few steps: 

Upcoming events and workshops

Berlin, 22 October

A kick-off event, bringing people together and starting the conversation. Read more here and and sign up for notifications. Places are strictly limited.

MoDAL Drinks: Join us at Frollein Langner on 22 October, from 20:00 onwards, for a more relaxed discussion. Tickets.

Cardiff, 20 November

Service Design Global Conference,  Workshop around the convergence of Design Thinking, Agile Methodology and Lean. Conference workshop outline.

Creating the Future of Banking

From June 17-21 WorkPlayExperience was invited to be part of the Hellobank co-creation workshop exploring the future of banking. Hellobank is an initiative of Cortal Consors Germany's leading online bank. 

This co-creation workshop by Cortal Consors is an innovative new format in terms of customer involvement. Prior to the workshop, 1500 questions were collected from their own customer community and condensed into the biggest 3:  

1. How can banking wow the customers?
2. How do I mananage my money fast and simple? 
3. How can banking be more personal? 

These were the starting points for a week of ideation and sketching. Facilitated by the capable Ron Hofer of USeeds, a team of experts (which Markus was part of) and designers spend one day on each of these questions.

The whole workshop was streamed live, so the community could contribute anytime using the chat function on hellobank.de. Fabian Klenk, aka The Avatar, wore a live webcam all the time. It was through him that many meaningful interactions between the ideation teams in the room and the community were possible. It was amazing to see how an online community could enrich, ground or even completely change discussions in the room. Surely a format that is well worth exploring more. 

Each day we generated an amazing number of ideas that were then condensed into 6 presentable ideas  which could be voted for by the community over night.

On Friday, we were able to present 6 ideas to the community, Cortal Consors and the public. But what is the actual outcome of this workshop? From our perspective there is more (and that might be the most valuable of them all): 

Apart from the actual project ideas the community and the co-creation team raised some valuable questions about the role of banking in people's lives. Most of them not easily answered.

Markus selected two inital question blocks that proved insightful for him (caveat: other participants might have different opinions):

• For meaning: Are we working with a bank because we like banking? Or are we working with a bank because the bank can help us to reach our own individual goals and make our lives more meaningful? And how does this change the way a bank advisor needs to talk with their customers? How do we make sure this happens in an authentic way even though we might have to scale? How can we help customers proudly show who they are especially through the choice of their bank and their investment portfolio? 
•  In good times and in bad: How do big life events affect people and how can the bank support them in these situations? How can the bank be a trusted partner when times are bad (emotionally and financially)? E.g. how can the bank support me and my family in case of my death? Before? After?

But most of all, it is the very idea of cocreation and the active involvement of the community in the future of the bank that might prove the most valuable. It helps both the bank and the community of its customers to understand more about the complex world banking and finance and from this understanding create awesome products and services that help us achieve what matters most to us and our lives. 

Eure Fragen sind die Antwort! Unser Ziel: Die neue Art des Bankings erfinden. Dafür brauchen wir ihre Fragen! Wir möchten Wissen, was Menschen beim Thema Banken beschäftigt. Mehr erfahren unter: http://to.cc/hellobank

We have been recognised by the prestigious Core77 Awards

We are proud to have been recognised by the prestigious Core77 Awards. Our Global Service Jam project was chosen from international nominees, being awarded the Runner-Up prize in the newly launched "Services" category.

When we launched the Jam in 2011, we were thrilled (and often congratulated) about being featured in a small article by Core77. Two years later, being awarded this major prize by the same organisation is a real honour.

"The Jam" is a  global, face to face event where people of various backgrounds voluntarily spend 48 hours designing new services, learning new skills and new attitudes, meeting new collaborators and having a great time. The Global Service Jam and it's sister events are non-profit volunteer activities organized by an informal network of service design afficinados, who all share a common passion for growing the field of service design and customer experience. The Jam has a staff of none and a budget of nearly nothing.

Commenting on their decision, the Prize Jury said, "the Global Service Jam is an initiative significantly contributing to the spread of service design culture among students and professionals. Its worldwide diffusion, due to the easy adoptable and original format, has brought to the creation of a huge and passionate community of designers. The challenging format, highly engaging and motivating, has contributed to add services to the global design agenda."

However, the Jam is not just a WorkPlayExperience achievement. We have been able to mobilise a global network of Jammers, Hosts and supporters in more than 350 Jams worldwide. They have enlivened and expanded our basic idea - not to mention the contributions made by committed Jammers who travelled to JamJams in Gothenburg, Nuremberg and Sao Paulo. This award belongs to them too.

The Jam idea continues, with around 90 cities expected to join the next Global Sustainability Jam coming up in November. WorkPlayExperience also use jamming as an innovation and awareness tool in their consultancy work for large organisations over the world, from Herzogenaurach to Canberra.

Links: 

• Core77 Design Awards Project Page: 
• Core77 Design Awards Category Honorees

Public workshops Summer 2013

Are you curious about service design or human centered innovation? We are happy to announce two events we are co-hosting with some awesome colleagues – both leaders in their fields:

17. July 2013, "Schöne neue Welt" – Wie aus kollaborativen Prozessen kreative Ideen entstehen (MaximiliansForum Munich, with Die Krieger des Lichts, in German)

In cooperation with one of the leading creative forces in Germany – Die Krieger des Lichts – we are going to explore the new commercial opportunities of co-creation, new digital life and work environments and megatrends like democratization of information for todays businesses. 

How does the customer of the future look like? What are her or his needs? How can we efficently create new work and business models to meet those needs?

Following our motto "Doing, not talking" participants will create hands-on future strategies and testable prototypes.

More information and sign up: http://www.bayern-design.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1049%3Aschoene-neue-welt-wie-aus-kollaborativen-prozessen-kreative-ideen-entstehen&catid=176%3A001-bayern-design-programm-artikel&Itemid=811&lang=germani 

23.-26. July 2013 This is Service Design Doing - Executive Summer School Berlin (with Marc Stickdorn as part of the DesignThinkers Academy)

In cooperation with our Associate Marc Stickdorn – the co-author of the award-winning service design book ‘This is Service Design Thinking’ – we created a hands-on introductory workshop to the field of service design.   

From the announcement:

"In this summer school you experience the power of service design thinking first hand. You’ll not only become familiar with the fundamental tools and methods of service innovation, but also learn about the strategic design process. The tools of service design are easy to grasp and easy to use, but are rooted in business reality and bring powerful clarity and insights. They can be used to design unique services or service components which will stand out from the competition, or to optimise existing services around what the customer really wants – cutting away wasteful effort and concentrating on a unique customer experience across various on- and offline channels."

More information an sign up: http://www.designthinkersacademy.com/summerschoolberlin/

More info about this book at http://ThisIsServiceDesignThinking.com Animation created by http://Explainimate.com - Explaining Services through Animation.

Service Prototyping

Service Prototyping - for many this is the final frontier in service design and service development. On Tuesday, 12. March 2013 we gave a presentation on that topic at the Fraunhofer Workgroup for Supply Chain Management, in Nürnberg (Flyer in German)

​Here's a few links to some of the projects and papers we touched upon in our talk that we hope you find useful:

Links

• Markus Hormeß, Adam Lawrence: Beyond Roleplay - better tools to steal from theatre, Touchpoint Magazine 3.3 – an in depth explanation of the investigative rehearsal, a key service and experience prototyping method: http://www.service-design-network.org/content/touchpoint-vol-3-no-3​
• Stephanie Houde and Charles Hill: What do Prototypes Prototype - a seminal paper to better understand prototyping in the first place. A must read! http://hci.stanford.edu/courses/cs247/2012/readings/WhatDoPrototypesPrototype.pdf​
• ​ServiceDesignBerlin: Bringing ideas to life – the dimensions of prototyping. After the "what" here's the "whys": http://service-design-network.org/sdnc/germany12/program/servicedesignberlin-bringing-ideas-to-life-the-dimensions-of-prototyping/
• Jeff Pollard and Byron Steward – Case study of service prototyping at McDonalds, talk given at SDNC 11: http://service-design-network.org/conference2011/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/01/01_JeffPollard.pdf
• And, as a bonus, another great case study: The cardboard hospital

Exploring formats of Jamming - the Jam-Jam in Sao Paulo

As well as running 3 global Jamming events, at WorkPlayExperience we use innovation jams and similar pressure cooker formats in our work. Like many Jammers, we are deeply interested in refining and improving the techniques of Jamming. So in February 2013 we travelled to Sao Paulo to meet with with around 40 Jam organizers and jammers from all over the world. We wanted to reflect on the experience of the previous global Jams and ​actively work on tools and structures to make the next one better - "Jamming the Jam". 

We call this format a Jam-Jam - a jam to make innovation jams better. A Jam-Jam is partly a retrospective or post-mortem - but more importantly it takes the insights and turn them into something useable straight away, using the resources and time (the weekend and nothing more) we have. 

Although it's always the usual Jam mixture of playfulness and hard, hard work (perhaps more so than most Jams), the structure of the Jam-Jams is different every time. In the last Nuremberg JamJam in 2012 we were lucky to be able to use the fantastic facilities of the Fab Lab Nürnberg and the Co-Working Space ​Nürnberg. So we decided to build our experiences as an full sized exhibition with the walk-through corresponding to the actual journey of a jammer during one of the Jams. This was a great way to share experiences in a non-linear way, instead of sitting through a presentation by each of the dozen or more Jams represented at JamJam. The exhibits showed  open questions and insights from the jams at the beginning of the weekend, and they were updated  as we created more tools and assets along the way.

In Sao Paulo we tried another structure, as we were especially interested in different ways to facilitate and document Jams.

​At a ​Pre-Jam-Jam​ on Friday, we got to know each other while sharing, reflecting and generating first insights in an unconference format.

The ​Jam-Jam​ itself (Friday 17:00 to Sunday 14:00) was divided into four 4-hour mini-jams, each facilitated by a different team, and documented by another group. Each minijam was followed by a reflection session, looking at the results of the 4 hours, but also examining the facilitation and documentation methods.

​We certainly got a whole lot done to help the whole Jam community, and many of the projects led to improvements which were implemented in the 2013 Global Service Jam one month later. But the reflective meta structure let us experience some very varied facilitation styles and learn how different they can be without loosing sight of great results. 

What we learned

We experienced everything from self-facilitated Jams, to high pressure minute-by-minute countdowns. There's no room here to cover everything that we learned, but let's say every style had its advantages. Jamming is not a case where "one-size-fits-all", that's for sure. While a very structured approach seemed to resonate well with service design newbies, styles with less interference worked better with experienced jammers. Even then, many "expert" Jammers found it hard to hit the (rather relaxed) deadline with no facilitation at all...

We are so proud to be part of this awesome community of jammers. Thanks to everybody out there, especially the folks who travelled to the event, from near and far, our friends from the Sao Paulo jamming community and the wonderful hosts Design Echos, who made this an amazing experience.​

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