Embedding Service Thinking In Organisations

Jason Bootle at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/IAkUvn6cA64

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Mirror, mirror on the wall

[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Jason Bootle. I'm here to talk about embedding service thinking in organizations for UXDX EMEA. Today you're going to learn about how we have been embedding service thinking at Babylon, and I'll be giving an example through a project called the Product Working Group. If you're new to service design and service thinking, I'll give you some definitions, and show how we've structured our organization around service thinking and how design outputs can align and empower people in your organization to embed service thinking within yours. And finally, you're going to learn how, working in partnership with senior stakeholders, you can realize your vision and deliver the best experience to all your users.

[00:00:50] Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has the best experience of all? Mirrors reflect reality. They don't lie. Well, unless you're going to a funfair and you're in one of those halls of mirrors with the weird ones, or if you're a vampire, maybe. Well, actually, I think it's probably reflecting a reality you don't really want to know about. That's it: mirrors play back a reality, and you have to take ownership, process it and figure out what's going on. Let's just park that thought for a moment.

Babylon and the experience design team

[00:01:29] I work for Babylon Health. We're a healthcare company. We were founded in 2013 and have since delivered millions of clinical consultations and artificial intelligence interactions. In 2020 alone, we delivered over 2 million clinical consultations and about 3.9 AI interactions. We work with governments, health providers and insurers across the globe, and we support healthcare facilities from small local practices to large hospitals. Our mission is putting an accessible and affordable quality healthcare service in the hands of everyone, and it's a great mission.

[00:02:13] I work as part of the experience design team at Babylon, and there's a team of over 50 of us covering many disciplines: design systems, accessibility, user research, product and service design, behavioral science, content and localization, and design operations. And we're hiring, so get in touch, check the job board. Our goal is to understand and design solutions for the people we serve, and the people we serve are our members, our patients and the clinical providers that deliver the service across the world. As a result, our experience design team spends hours each week talking with these people, understanding their needs, so we can create a very personalized experience for our members no matter where they are in the world, whether that be in Rwanda, in rural Mississippi or in London. We do this so we know that we're building the right things for their needs.

[00:03:10] This reminds me a lot of the quote from Peter Drucker, the Austrian American management consultant, educator and author: "The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer." Now, some would argue that the purpose of business is to create money. And yeah, there's truth in that, but really you create money by creating value, and you create value by meeting the needs of people. If you're working in government or nonprofit, if you don't focus on your customer, on the users, on the people you're raising money for, the people you're serving, you will fail. The charity will fall. Governments will be voted out. At Babylon, if we're not meeting the needs of our patients and our clinicians, we're in trouble as well. And we need to meet those needs globally.

What a service is, and what service design does

[00:04:09] So what is a service? "A service is something that helps someone do something." I love this quote: like learning to drive, buying a house, having a holiday. At Babylon it's "I want to get well, I need care." It's been interesting that over the past decade there's been a shift away from products towards services. Many companies have moved to that. Think about companies like Netflix or Airbnb, even Tesla: although it's a product, there's a service attached to it. DeWalt is another one, the power tools, where you subscribe to the tools, and if the tool breaks or there's a better one, it gets swapped out. Products move towards services.

[00:05:01] Service design is about the shaping of an organization's resources to result in better outcomes for users. In our case, our users are our members, our patients, care providers, doctors, nurses, and our care enablers, the support teams, the operations that deliver the service. Service design looks at the end to end: where does the user's journey start and where does it end? But we're also looking front to back. We're looking behind the scenes, and we're looking in front, where the interactions are happening with the users.

[00:05:44] With service design there's a lot of systems thinking involved. Everything is connected, and we're looking for those connections. If you change something at the start of the service, what does it mean further down, and vice versa? And if you think about clinicians, doctors are doing a similar thing. They're looking for connections, they're looking for opportunities. They're looking at the holistic picture of what's going on in your life that could be influencing your health.

[00:06:14] I was chatting to a colleague about superpowers. Each profession, each discipline has a superpower. What is the superpower of a service designer? It's dealing with that fuzziness and that complexity, identifying connections. We like being in those fuzzy, complex areas because we have an ability to visualize that complexity with simplicity.

How we embed service thinking at Babylon

[00:06:46] So how are we embedding service thinking at Babylon? Well, I'm glad you asked. The first thing to start with is user problems. I mentioned all the users that we have, patients and doctors and support, and you really want to love their problems. Don't love the solution. We want to get into that problem and really understand what's causing it, so then you can look at all the different ways to solve it.

[00:07:21] The next thing is measurable outcomes. How do you know you're doing a good job? I talked about that complexity: everything is connected, that systems thinking. If you make a change somewhere, how do you know it's made the right impact? You need to have measurable outcomes. What does success look like? Are you measuring the right thing?

[00:07:46] The next thing we've been doing is structuring our organization around experiences. Amy Keeling is our VP of Design, and she's set us up as a centralized partnership. This is based on the work of Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner. Our team is focused on member and clinical support experiences, end to end, partnering with feature teams and with product and engineering. So there's this partnership where we own that experience. We set up our teams around engagement, managing your health, getting care and getting treatment.

The Product Working Group

[00:08:27] So let me tell you about a problem we had. I mentioned earlier that we have this Product Working Group. We had a north star vision at the start of the year of where we wanted to go with the experience. When you have a vision, that's great, but the hardest part is how to start iterating towards that vision and how to set off. It was suggested we set up this Product Working Group, and what that was, was getting key senior leadership across the service: marketing, product, engineering, clinical operations, XD, experience design, research, and design and content.

[00:09:01] We wanted it to be an opportunity to be a mirror to the organization. Oh, hang on, there's that word, mirror. We wanted to mirror to the organization what the experience looked like. The outcome we were looking to achieve was alignment across the organization, across that experience. We wanted to unblock any barriers to delivering the best user experience.

[00:09:33] Now, Babylon is a big company now. It's growing very, very fast. I've worked in some smaller companies, and even in smaller companies you're going to have some misalignments. You can see from this quote: we've grown fast, so there are going to be glitches, and there are going to be times when things are just not quite gelling. So we were keen to knuckle down and get that alignment.

What we learned: design outputs and skills transfer

[00:10:02] So what did we learn from the Product Working Group? There are three things I'm going to talk through, and I'll be focusing on one in depth. The first thing was around design outputs. As a service designer, as I told you, we're trying to map complexity. We're trying to visualize complexity, and mapping allows you to understand the as-is, where you are. If you don't know where you are, you can't figure out where you need to get to, and that allows you to map future states. We do this through a variety of mapping techniques: service blueprints, journey maps, story mapping and ecosystem mapping. I'm not going to go into depth, but if you want to catch up with me afterwards, we can talk about those.

[00:10:48] The other thing we did was create a taxonomy from this, and that's a common language to describe things. When you've got a big organization, you want someone in Wolverhampton, when they talk about onboarding, to know exactly what it means, as does someone in Rwanda or Missouri. We wanted the whole organization to have a common language, and we did that by creating this service taxonomy. This gave us that wayfinding, that navigation, shared understanding.

[00:11:25] The next thing that we learned from the Product Working Group that allowed us to embed service thinking in the organization was skills and knowledge transfer. We were creating these design outputs, and this allowed us to take a leaf out of the book of surgeons and how they learn: see one, do one, teach one. So we created these assets, which could then be used by other teams: the taxonomy, and mapping templates for people to take on. The commercial team has used it. User research teams have used it in usability studies, product designers, product. Fantastic.

[00:12:09] And these things tap into different learning modes: visual, auditory, reading and writing, kinesthetic. See one, do one, teach one. You can build these, and it starts to really embed the service thinking and the wins across the organization. It's been tricky. There's a lot of work to get that rolling, inputted and fed back, but it's reaped rewards.

A collaborative environment

[00:12:34] The final thing I wanted to talk about in depth was a collaborative environment. Now, this is difficult, I kid you not, in many organizations. We wanted to be that mirror again. We wanted to be showing, not telling. We wanted things to be self-evident, and people to make the connections themselves. We wanted that ownership. Self-evident, like a mirror.

[00:13:00] That's hard when you're dealing with senior leadership. Sometimes you can have egos. Now, we don't have many egos at Babylon, thankfully. We have some, like any organization, but we wanted people to leave their egos at the door, and we wanted to create a safe space for open discussion. I've been in places where there's been rivalry because of the way that the KPIs have been set up. There's annoyance and whatnot. And you get seagulls coming in; you may have heard of seagulls, people who come in and swoop and poop and then leave. And HiPPOs, the highest paid person in the room, who everyone's worried about saying anything in front of because they're going to upset them. It's challenging, but we wanted that conversation. We wanted that discussion. We wanted people to see the experience, make up their own minds, and then start having that open discussion: how are we going to unblock things and move it on?

[00:14:02] It's not easy, but we've done it. We've got really good engagement from senior leadership, and they're invested in these meetings, and we've done that by creating value. Looking back at my career, I've had these sessions with senior leadership and realized I've just wasted people's time. I haven't used their time and their skills to the best. We talked about superpowers earlier. What is senior leadership good at? The ask: unblocking things, making decisions, moving things on. We've made sure we've built these meetings around that. What is the ask? What do we want from senior leadership? We want to be direct.

[00:14:47] We've also learned that rescheduling doesn't work. Sometimes we've had clashes. You're dealing with lots of busy people across the organization, and people can't make it. We tried rescheduling, and it made it worse; we got fewer people coming. Keep the diary date in the calendar and record things. If people are engaged, they will watch it, and you can watch things on double speed nowadays, so that's all good as well.

[00:15:13] The last thing really is understanding business. If you're going to enter this space as a service designer, you're looking at the end to end, you're looking at the front to back. You need to have a good understanding of how business works and what the goals of the business are.

Rules of engagement and facilitation

[00:15:33] Before these meetings, we've made sure we've had some rules, which I think is really important. We have rules of engagement, we've had a clear agenda and we've had outcomes, so people know in advance why they're coming and what they need to bring to the table in those sessions. When you're facilitating, it's really good to have silence. You want to create that space for discussion. You want everyone to have a voice. You want to keep time and keep people moving on, and you need to up the energy. You need to make it enjoyable. It's been a hard enough year as it is, so let's have fun with these meetings.

[00:16:16] And as part of moving things on, anything that's outside of the outcomes we're trying to achieve, we've parked, focusing on those outcomes: "Okay, we'll follow up on this later. This is another discussion." As a result, we've reviewed actions. We've kept an action log and we've reviewed it, because we want to make people accountable. If this is going to be a useful meeting: you said you're going to do something. Did you do it? Practice and be prepared, 100%.

[00:16:52] And finally, as part of that collaborative environment, we needed collaborative software. We've been in a pandemic. We're in a conference now and we're not face-to-face, unfortunately, hopefully next year, but thankfully there's lots of software now that's allowed us to do that. We're a global company. We have people in America, in the UK, in Asia, Africa. You need that software to collaborate, to get together. So we've been using Zoom, Miro, Figma and Slack, and they have good usability. We've run onboarding [?] sessions to help people quickly understand how to make comments and leave Post-it notes and things like that.

Challenges and conclusion

[00:17:38] We still have lots of challenges to overcome. This is an iterative process. We're still learning. Getting the right people in the room sometimes, and also making sure the focus addresses the whole end to end and everyone in the room is weighted right. As a product and engineering team, we can often focus a bit more on that and forget a little about the operational and clinical side, but we're addressing those things, which is great.

[00:18:12] In conclusion, we've been embedding service thinking by focusing on user problems and measurable outcomes, organizing our team around an end-to-end experience, and empowering people to create shared understanding through design outputs. And we've created a leadership forum to mirror and own the end user experience. I'm really proud of this work. There are lots of people involved whom I haven't been able to shout out, but it comes back in this product quote: "The bigger picture has become clearer, not just individual views of the product. It's helped me identify who to work with rather than hurdles to overcome."

[00:19:03] Mirror, mirror on the wall, who has embedded service thinking best of all? Thank you. If you'd like to get in touch about working at Babylon, hit me up. That's on the job board. Thank you very much.