Refresh, rejuvenate and retain. Investing in people to solve the problems of today and rise to the challenges of tomorrow.
22.04.2025
Thanks for signing up to hear from us. We are incredibly grateful for the support we have received since Anja and I set up our venture last year.
We hope we can bring you thoughts, inspiration and insight into the trends and signals we detect that will help you develop the skills and capabilities of your people to thrive in challenging times.
For our first letter, we’d like to give you an insight as to why we feel educating and training people in the tools and methods of service design is so important to organisations.
Over the last ten years Anja, through her consultancy Prospect and myself through my work in-house with Cisco and Barclays and then as Head of Service design at the Royal College of Art (RCA), have trained organisations of every size and type across business and the public sector with the tools, methods and process of service design. Whether it’s in the context of digital transformation, or reducing complaints, finding innovation, improving customer experiences, setting strategy, or starting on the sustainability journey, we have found the tools to be incredibly effective, impactful and inspiring to the people who take part.
Service design might sound like a bit of a niche subject to have your accounts department, product managers, senior management team, engineers and software developers take part in but what we’ve found, and been told, is that it makes people inside an organisation feel energised, connected, creative and focused on their customers, how to give value to them and therefore ensure a business or organisation thrives.
In the last few years this has been true of the incredibly diverse range of organisations that we have worked with. These include national financial bodies and high street banks, fire and rescue services, the travel and hospitality industry, car companies, technology giants and tech startups, consumer goods and social housing providers, management consultants, toy companies…we’ve trained it everywhere!
To be clear, we are not specifically training designers in these organisations; we are training the product managers, the front line, the support systems, the supply chain, the developers - everyone who plays a role in helping a company or organisation do what it needs to get done.
Service Design training works!
When organisations develop and integrate service design skills, research has measured the impact: IDEO in 2022 showed that 70% of companies using service design reported increased market share within 18 months. Research from Qualtrics and Bain shows that service design practice can increase customer satisfaction and NPS by 20% and that addressing root causes of customer issues reduces churn by 15–25%. This is tangible and highly valuable stuff.
Before we describe in more detail what happens in service design training that seems to be so effective, we’ll try and capture the impact and transformations we have seen.
1. Collaborative creativity drives customer-centric solutions
When teams collaborate, embrace creativity and share a focus on customers, everyday problem-solving becomes an engine for innovation. Unlock fresh perspectives, build customer trust, and transform how your organisation delivers value.
2. Rejuvenate
Investing in people creates a culture where individuals see their unique role in the bigger picture. By nurturing and developing skills with a collaborative mindset, organisations build passionate teams who innovate, share their knowledge, and march together to create impact.
3. Customer insight as a superpower
Embedding customer-centric methods across the organisation turns challenges into opportunities. Teams gain clarity to act on insights, build unique offers and build customer loyalty by answering real customer needs.
4. Proactive innovation replaces reactive “same old”
A culture of shared creativity dismantles “siloed” problem-solving. Teams gain freedom to experiment, collaborate across roles, and turn everyday challenges into future-focused solutions—ensuring the organisation leads rather than follows.
Which leads to people who can unleash their capability, make better decisions, feel empowered to be creative, feel valuable, energised, refreshed and committed to positive change for the organisation.
Investing in your people.
We don’t need to tell you that not everyone is thrilled to have a day or two of training. But listen to what people say about our service design training. “The best training experience I’ve had.” “The perfect balance between theory and application” “Inspiring and practical”.
We don’t think that strategically important projects, solving current or future challenges or getting good ideas and new thinking into your organisation should always require external resources. We’ve been there and there is some amazing talent in external agencies, and often they can shift the dial where everything else has failed. But we believe in the value of developing the resources inside an organisation, investing in the people you have to inspire and reenergise them with new tools that they can bring to every challenge, not just the big shiny projects.
With a modern next generation workforce keen to be creative and be valued for their ideas and energy, perhaps it’s not surprising that LinkedIn data shows an average length of stay in a company for a graduate in their first employment is 18 months, with those who began working between 2010 and 2015 staying in their first job for an average of just 1.1 years, citing poor work culture, lack of career progression, and misalignment with their values. That’s expensive if you’ve spent that time training and preparing them for higher things. And for those who’ve been with you for the journey and who understand your organisation, investing in people with longer experience can unlock their energy and create thriving, collaborative cultures where the wisdom of experience and the creativity of youth can bear fruit. This is not just our experience: Gallop reported in 2023 that teams with design training have improved retention rates of between 30–50%.
So now+next is not a consultancy. It’s an informative, forward-looking, education, training and mentoring experience for change makers in leadership teams, product and development teams and across the organisation. We provide them the tools to work together to solve the problems you have now and the challenges you will have in the future. That is, of course, why we’re called now+next. We solve the now, and look forward and upwards to the next.
What do we do, what happens?
We’ve clustered the three main types of interaction that organisations ask us for.
1. Executive Briefing – learn what’s happening when organisations use service design and see how you can benefit.
We show leaders and senior managers what they can gain from these techniques and tools, why it’s important, and share the impact and results that service design has brought to others, and the mistakes of those who haven’t.
In a world about to be swamped by the possibilities of AI, the key remaining differentiator is creativity. In January 2025’s World Economic Forum on skills, global industry leaders placed creativity in the top five skills they look for. Harnessing the human benefits of technology, driving incredible innovation from greater insights of customers and creating truly collaborative cultures that deliver change are vital to a 21st Century organisation.
2. Masterclasses – try the tools.
We take people through the processes, step by step so they can taste how the methods and tools work and how to apply it to their own challenges and future opportunities.
Developed from our experience teaching service design at the RCA and for corporate clients, these workshops, from 2-day to 1 week sprints and 8 week bootcamps open people’s eyes to real customer centricity. They provide experience in using the tools to gain insight, unleash individual creativity and educate how to collaborate to create customer experiences and a service approach to satisfy customers and create better businesses.
3. Mentoring and Advising – supporting teams through their projects.
Giving on-going support to live projects, handholding, providing real-time advice when needed as projects progress or hit problems. We use our experience to help them get unstuck or go deeper.
Next Steps
These are challenging times. Businesses need to cut costs and improve their efficiency and resilience. Organisations look to drive greater engagement with their audiences and customers. Social change and the climate crisis affect the decisions we have to make and call for new skills of creativity and empathy. We believe that design is an essential skill for everyone that can enhance decision-making and deliver positive impacts across every aspect of an organisation. Training in the tools, the application and the approach to problem solving, collaboration and customer centricity transforms your people into customer-obsessed innovators who drive revenue growth, reduce costs, enhance sustainability and future-proof a business.
Research shows that investment in training pays off in 12–24 months, with compound returns as design capabilities mature. Design is not just a department; it’s a skill and a mindset that can transform an organisation. Design skills aren’t just a “nice-to-have” - they’re a driver of innovation, sustainability, profit and happier organisations.
Talk to us if you’d like to bring service design into your organisation or talk to some of our clients who are on the journey.
Sources: McKinsey, Forrester, IDEO, Bain, Deloitte, Gallup, Ellen MacArthur Foundation.