Having spent many years either running a successful design consultancy for major global clients (Anja) or setting up and leading design teams in-house and teaching students and training organisations in service design (me), we realised over a few glasses of wine that we really enjoyed sharing the methods and tools of service design with organisations to solve their problems, prepare for future challenges and be creative, happier people. And that’s what we’ve ended up doing.

 

We’ve worked with some fabulous people over the last 12 months, often in ways we hadn’t expected when we set out. We always teach students that it’s good to reflect and learn so, on reflection, here’s what we’ve seen and what we’ve learnt. 

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AI is a powerful design tool. 

This time last year we feared that service design was on the ropes. The impact of tech layoffs in the US seemed to send a shadow of fear across many industries who, being short sighted and pretending that everything would be all right if they went back to their knitting (spoiler alert, they were wrong), fired their creative thinkers and service designers as if they were a luxury. That made me mad (See “Shame on you", January 2025).   

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But guess what? Service designers are being recruited, re-recruited, trained and are risen again. It’s so heartening to see so many “We’re hiring” posts on LinkedIn. In-house teams, management consultancies,  transformation teams, public sector and government and, hush, whisper it, design consultancies too. You want holistic human led system thinking to unravel legacy mess? You want to do proper problem solving to solve no longer fit for purpose processes? You want to facilitate a workshop to explore the value and envision your strategy for AI? You want to get rid of customer complaints and compete in undifferentiated markets? You know the answer don’t you: get a service designer. 

 

It’s true that the name is in flux: “customer journey manager”,  “system designer”, “service strategy” and many more have cropped up this year. We love them all because they’re all service designers really and we don’t care what we call it. From the Bank of England to telcos to social housing and local authorities, service design is growing again. 

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But…

To temper our optimism in seeing so much service design activity, it’s still a gigantic struggle to land service design practice in organisations steeped in established practices, happy to assume rather than find out about their customers, unsure about what service design is and what value it will bring them. 

 

We’ve worked with passionate teams of service designers who struggle to find their place at the table. It’s been wonderful to bring teams together and not just develop their service design skills but strengthen their confidence and articulation to walk tall in a corporate world. Service design is nothing without collaboration, facilitation, infecting the mindset of everyone in an organisation to get insight, find the problem, prevent the disaster and expense of poor decision making and design and deliver it right. And we’ve seen and heard of a lot of truly terrible decision making in this last 12 months. But service designers need to build resilience, an ability to articulate and co-create with their colleagues to make sure they are seen as too valuable to fire when things get tough next time.

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Busy means…

We’ve trained in 2-day Masterclasses, 5-day and 8-week bootcamps, week long live sprints, created the content and delivered 12 and 18 month apprenticeships (with ESTU Global) and spoken at conferences across every industry in many countries. We’ve seen how service design training transforms business owners and helps them solve their problems and thrive. We’ve seen disparate teams come together to combine their skills, gain confidence and raise their game in large corporations.

And they still say nice things like “...there couldn’t have been a better duo to bring the magic that you have. I’m excited to see the service design team use the knowledge, tools, and newfound confidence you injected, in their work going forward.”

Thank you Anna.

 

And then, AI.

In this time of tremendous technology revolution, we’ve seen how AI liberates people and unleashes their creativity, giving them the means to rapidly articulate new ideas and innovations, build on customer insight and data buttressed and evidenced by AI at greater scale. We fundamentally believe that AI is a great enabler of our creativity and we are proving it as we guide and explore as both trainers and as increasingly as consultants, which we didn’t intend to do but seems to have happened. 

 

In all the noise and turbulence of AI, we have found ourselves working at the bleeding edge, helping making tangible the value and supporting humanity with the guard rails that are needed to ensure a safe, secure and massively impactful Agentic AI revolution. Every relationship manager, doctor, engineer, contact centre , corporate executive and SME  owner with their own army of AI agents enhancing accessibility, productivity and delivery at incredible speed with the agency to reclaim our human value and refocus on our creativity and purpose. It’s exciting and a little scary that we find ourselves not just designing the interaction of digital experiences and services but working out how Agentic AI, where AI does the job rather than providing you with answers, can and should work. There is every opportunity that this could go wrong, but we’re excited that we are both leading incredibly innovative projects that will transform life and work in different ways. It’s a responsibility but one that every designer strives for. 

 

We definitely live in interesting times. Anja and I are excited to be alive, training brilliant people whether they are business analysts, in procurement and purchasing, in telecommunications, fire and rescue services, financial or the travel industry. And working with developers, inspirational leaders and many, many smart people in bringing new ideas to the world.

 

Who knows what’s next for now+next?

I might write another book and we may even get round to running another Masterclass in the next few months. Watch this space, tell us if you’d like to talk to us about training your wonderful people or join our next Masterclass. See you soon.

 

Clive and Anja

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Talk to us about Service Design Training 

 

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