Thinking in Services

We think we know services - not a day goes by without using them - until we have to design them. It is then that their realities confront us, teasing us sometimes. While services have always been 'designed', the qualities of their designs are more important than ever, given how much more we depend on them. Thus the need for deepening our understanding of what services are, what they can be, and why they fail - often in unexpected ways. This book reveals the surprising design of services - their internal structure or 'DNA' - through simple diagrams. It introduces a language and format for describing the concept of a service with clarity and depth. And, it provides the principles for implementing strategy through design.

Majid Iqbal is an expert on policy, strategy, and design. As an advisor at the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate he co-founded a special unit called XLAB; developing new approaches to complex problems and methods for visualizing systems, services, and transitions. He cut his teeth in sales and product management, before moving to teaching, consulting, and design. Since after Carnegie Mellon, Gartner, and PwC, he has been on a mission to bring more clarity to the concept of a service, as it relates to implementing policy or strategy. His other voyage of discovery is about cooking and patterns in food across cuisines and cultures.

This book introduces a powerful design language that appeals as much to creative professionals and programmers as it does to accountants, engineers, and lawyers, with the belief of raising the bar by lowering barriers. Raising the bar in design requires multidisciplinary efforts that are easier without standard language barriers. Design is the ultimate expression of policy and strategy, and expressing design in the form of a code makes it possible for every layer of the service enterprise to execute the design (code) in a fast and parallel manner to deliver what has been promised at a much lower cost. For that purpose, the book introduces a system and method that go beyond blueprints and customer journey maps, to broaden the appeal of service design for strategists, economists, and budget analysts. This patented system and method has, until now, only been available to a few large government and commercial enterprises, (Boeing, United HC) through consulting projects or 2-day workshops.

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