Systems and services, service blueprints and system thinking

So I think this all about balance, in the traditional card a man juggles two coins held in an infinite loop. So you are trying to balance what I would consider two aspects of design. The customer/user side and below the line of visibility all the systems and processes. From the beginning designers have worked on the best tool to bring these two sides together.

In his book Living with complexity Don Norman writes,

‘The only way to solve the complexities services is to treat them as systems, to design the entire experience as a whole. If each piece is designed in isolation, the end result may be of separate pieces that do not mesh well together.’

The examples Norman shows in his book is by Susan Spraragan a research scientist at IBM in 2009. Although he credits Lynn Shostack at the Bankers Trust company in the early 1980’s for coming up with the idea of Service blueprints

But even at this early stage, people were exploring the idea of onstage and backstage. So what the customer saw going on and the myriad systems and processes going on behind the scenes. I see that Don Norman even called his chapter, ‘Systems and Services’.

In 2016 Mike Laurie published a great post on medium Using Systems Thinking to Design Better Services where he discussed the influence of system thinking on service design. I think he is now at Lloyds bank. I am aware that they have developed a system thinking approach there.

At Energised Work a colleague of mine was Trevor Lea-Cox, who was the most advanced ‘system thinker’ I have ever met. We both knew there was a common ground between our worlds, but we never had a chance to really explore a common language and vocabulary.

Whats the overlap between service blueprints and system thinking, especially bearing in mind you are probably trying to build a resilient, robust, scalable software platform, that fixes your current pain points but can be adapted easily to meet your future touch points.

At Energized Work we explored the concept of ‘full stack service design’. It was a project very much driven by the users needs but constrained by the technology platforms used to create that experience. So for every touch point we had to be able to have epic story cards which were a slice through the full technology stack.