Service Design Show

Here is a hot take, empathy is becoming "theater"...

I mean, it's that feeling you get when you receive a "hyper-personalized" yet clearly automated email saying "We are so deeply sorry to see you go".

To me, it just feels insincere. Actually, it even feels manipulative.

Instead of a genuine connection, it’s a performance designed to "manage" me, not help me.

As every business out there is in a race to automate and integrate AI, the actual human connection is often the first thing to get outsourced.

And when we try to paste humanity back onto technology, we often end up in a digital uncanny valley.

So, how do we push back?

How do we remain "stubbornly human" when the systems around us only care about efficiency?

That is the battle we explore in the latest episode of our Inside Service Design series.

In this conversation, I sit down with two service design professionals from very different worlds: ​Jeff​, who works in the highly digital fintech space, and ​Emilie​, an Innovation Partner at a faith-based nonprofit.

Despite their different contexts, they share some great insights on keeping the "human" in human-centered design.

Jeff breaks down the concept of Empathy Theater and challenges us to spot when a friendly tone in a digital interface crosses the line into manipulation. And Emilie walks us through a future scenario where VR headsets are the default for education, forcing us to ask: how do we design for belonging when we are physically apart?

So, if you are tired of seeing the human element get optimized out of existence, this conversation will give you some strong arguments you need to stand your ground.

Quick question: Have you received an email recently that felt like "Empathy Theater"? If yes, send me a quick reply with "Guilty" (bonus points if you can share the example)!

I'm trying to get a sense of how widespread this is becoming.

Enjoy the conversation and keep making a positive impact.

Be well,

~ Marc

--- [ 1. GUIDE ] ---

00:00 Welcome to October Round Up

05:00 Emilie's Service Design Journey

07:30 Jeff from Interior Design to FinTech

12:30 Jeff's Biggest In-House Design Challenge

15:00 Challenges in Non-Profit Design

18:00 Emilie's True Measure of Success

20:00 How Jeff Measures Success in Long-Term Projects

25:00 Emilie's topic: Education in 2038

29:00 Jeff's topic: Keep Things 'Stubbornly Human'

33:45 The Circle Reacts to Insincere Digital Tone

36:45 How Emilie's group responded

39:00 Emilie's Hopeful Reflection on the Future of Design

40:00 The Practical Tweak Jeff Made

43:00 Emilie's #1 Hard-Won Career Lesson

45:30 Jeff's Hard-Won Lesson in Service Design

46:30 When Jeff Stopped Focusing on Deliverables

51:00 Why Beautiful Artifacts Don't Impress Executives

53:00 How to Stop the Treadmill

54:30 Emilie's Question to the Audience

55:30 Jeff Answers the Question He Wants to Ask

57:30 Emilie Answers Her Own Deep Question

59:00 Final words of wisdom

--- [ 2. LINKS ] ---

We often hear the "mantra" to move fast and break things...

But what happens when the thing that breaks is you?

For many service design professionals, this is the reality of their calendar: back-to-back meetings, a rush to deliver, and very little space to actually think.

In many organizations, there is a culture that views this busyness as a badge of honor.

But our guest in this episode, Rachael Dietkus, has quite a different -and healthier- approach.

She has a rule written on a post-it note right next to her desk: "No meetings before 10 AM".

This might sound like a luxury, doesn't it?

But Rachael, who's a licensed clinical social worker and designer, argues that rules like this are actually a professional necessity.

Rachael is the founder of Social Workers Who Design, where she is bridging the gap between the deep, ethical frameworks of social work and the often frantic pace of design.

This is an eye-opening episode where we explore why service design might be missing a "manual" that social workers have had for decades.

You'll hear about:

• Why we need to move beyond just empathy to genuine care and compassion.
• The importance of having a structured "safe space" to process your work (social workers spend at least 1 hour in supervision for every 40 hours of work!).
• Why setting hard boundaries is actually a sign of competence and professionalism, not weakness.

So, if you sometimes feel the weight of the work is getting too much and you're looking for ways to create a healthier, more sustainable work environment, this conversation offers practical clues.

As we are almost wrapping up the year, it's an important reminder that reflection on our work isn't a nice to have, but a healthy habit we should all embrace.

Enjoy the conversation and keep making a positive impact.

Be well,

~ Marc

--- [ 1. GUIDE ] ---

00:00 Welcome to Episode 242

04:00 Making Care an Integral Part of Practice

09:00 Recognizing Care (or the Lack Thereof) in Project Pacing

14:00 Difference Between 'Careless' and 'Care-full' Design

17:30 How Rachel's Path to Care Began

26:30 Human Rights and Social Work Foundation

38:45 What Design Can Learn from Social Work

46:15 Radical Act of Slowing Down

52:30 Practical Steps to Build Spaciousness & Combat Workaholism

57:45 Setting Boundaries

1:01:15 Boundaries as Professional Resistance

1:03:45 Takeaway She Hopes You Get

1:05:15 Piece of Advice

1:05:45 Question to ponder

--- [ 2. LINKS ] ---

Okay, we are pretty good storytellers... but are we telling the right story?

As service design professionals, we nail it when it comes to what I call "Horizontal Storytelling".

We can walk anyone through the customer journey, step-by-step, building empathy for the user's pain and frustration over time.

But here is the somewhat inconvenient truth: As you might have experienced, your CEO or CFO often doesn't know what to do with that story. They are looking for something else.

They need "Vertical Storytelling".

They need to know how a specific pain point on the ground connects up to the strategic objectives of the business. They need to know the ROI. They need to know if the needle is actually moving.

In episode 8 of the Journey Management Playbook series, Tingting Lin and I are closing the loop.

We are moving from doing the work to measuring the impact.

If you’ve ever struggled to justify prove that your journey management efforts are actually influencing the bottom line, this episode is for you.

We dive into:

• How you can translate customer empathy into business language to get buy-in.

• Why you can't just rely on churn or NPS as your metrics, and how to find early warning signals that prove your work is having an effect now.
• How to connect your solutions back to the original business challenge to see if you actually solved the problem.
• And how to start measuring impact today without having to wait for perfect data integrations.

This episode provides the missing link between "making mapping a journey" and "driving business outcomes."

What is the one metric you struggle to track the most? Send me a reply or leave a comment on YouTube, we’d love to know where the biggest data hurdles are for you.

Enjoy and keep making a positive impact!

Be well,

~ Marc

--- [ 1. LINKS 🔗 ] ---

👉 Playbook Slides -

Service design, so what...

That's a question still many people around us (rightfully) ask.

And let's be honest, they'll probably keep asking it for the foreseeable future.

It will take a very long time before our field becomes a household name, which I doubt it ever will.

Now, it’s easy to get frustrated about this, to roll our eyes every time someone questions the value of our work.

But that frustration isn't going to get us any closer to creating the impact we know we can.

A much more productive approach is to prepare for these questions, to have our answers ready before they even get asked.

This also helps us to better recognize when we end up in situations where, no matter what we say or do, our message about service design just stand a chance of resonating.

We do everyone a favor by acknowledging this. Sometimes it's just not the right place or the right time.

But where do we learn which stories to tell, when and to whom, and which stories we should avoid?

Well, we can take some clues from Mark Howell, our guest this in this episode.

Mark is a seasoned professional who's led some of the largest in-house service design teams I've heard of. This achievement becomes even more impressive when you consider he did this in industries not exactly known for their human-centered thinking.

In our conversation, we explore how Mark used tools like a "service design quality assessment" to have the right conversations with stakeholders. We talk about how he learned to identify the red flags that signal it's time to find a different project, and we dig into the key role community plays in building a successful service design practice.

I'm really excited about this episode because we just don't have many examples of people who have scaled service design teams to these kinds of numbers. And we have even fewer who are willing to share the real learnings from that journey.

So, if you have the ambition to grow service design, this is a fantastic conversation to get some best practices and hear about the pitfalls to avoid.

What stuck with me from our chat is recognizing that sometimes you need to take a step back instead of just trying to push forward (and burning out in the process).

I would love to hear from you: What's a key signal for you? What's the clue that gives away that it's time to stop pushing and find a different battle?

Enjoy and keep making a positive impact!

~ Marc

--- [ 1. GUIDE ] ---

00:00 Welcome to Episode 241

05:00 Positioning Service Designers

09:00 Cracking the Organizational Nut

13:30 the 3 disciplines to drive perspective

20:00 His Take on Journey Mapping

25:30 Lessons Learned

29:00 The Red Flags of a Failing Project

31:45 How to Spot Red Flags

34:30 The 4 Quality Indicators

40:00 Defining the Indicators

46:00 Collecting Design Quality Data

48:30 The Design Community of Practice

56:45 Aligning with Product Manager OKRs

1:02:00 Question to ponder

--- [ 2. LINKS ] ---

Have you ever thought about...

What a therapist, a grandma, and an organ donor teach you about service design?

I know, this might sound like the start of a strange joke, but it gets to the heart of a big truth about our work.

We invest a lot of time perfecting our journey maps, blueprints, and personas.

But as we know, the challenges we work on won't be solved by a deliverable.

They're solved through invisible "tools" like subtle influence, creating space for others, and building strategic relationships.

So, where do you find these tools? Well, this episode is a great start.

This episode is part of our "Inside Service Design" series, where we explore the real, unpolished practice of driving change from within organizations.

And just like in the previous episodes you get to hear two brilliant in-house professionals, share some of their most powerful, non-traditional strategies. This time we're joined by Irina Damascan and Gina Mendolia.

Gina walks us through her concept of "Setting the Trap" for engagement, and how she draws inspiration from the roles of therapists, coaches, and even grandmas to master the art of creating space and enabling teams to connect the dots themselves.

Irina introduces a powerful model for influence she calls the "Organ Donor Chain," a strategic way to build networks of reciprocity by doing "favors" that enable change across the organization, often in unexpected ways.

I have to say, it was refreshing to hear about effective mental models that go beyond design-as-usual, which aren't just theories but truly help to design better services.

Want to add some (unconventional) tools that help you drive change to your toolkit? Grab your notebook and join us for this conversation.

What's the most unconventional place you've found inspiration for your work? Maybe a different profession, a hobby, a movie? Share your inspiration in the comments on YouTube and let's continue the conversation there.

Keep making a positive impact!

~ Marc

--- [ 1. GUIDE ] ---

00:00 Welcome

04:30 Who is Ben

06:00 How Heydn got his role

07:15 What Heydn is currently doing

08:15 Ben working at a financial services firm

10:15 who Ben is reporting to

11:30 where Autodesk sits

13:15 what a good looks like for Heydn

16:30 indicators of success

17:30 what success looks like for Ben

23:30 Why Context Determines Your SD Strategy

27:00 Ben's topic: the first 90 days

30:45 Heydn's key takeaway

35:00 Making Your Map Complicated on Purpose

37:00 Ben's takeaway

43:00 the last time he has done the first 90 days

46:45 Heydn reacting

48:45 Learning things the hard way

51:00 Ben's hard lessons

55:00 what keeps him motivated

57:30 what will Heydn get back there

1:00:00 Ben to summarize

1:00:30 Heydn's final words of wisdom

--- [ 2. LINKS ] ---