Johnny dollar hi Johnny.   Why not come out here to nice warm sunny southern, California Johnny and get away from all that freezing New England Whether you said we're sure I did so where did I end up hunting for that killer? 7,000 feet up in the mountains where I nearly froze my ears off I am only just beginning to fall out. So I say it again Charlie.  How another assignment This time right out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Yeah matter of fact It's over near an old stamping ground of yours Lake Mojave Lake Mojave say no more I'll pack a razor a clean shirt all the fishing tackle. I can find and be on my way and 38 pistol maybe you just telephone hamprad over at Lake Mojave resort to have a room for me and What was that last crack you slipped in there bring along a what? Just kidding is all Johnny. Oh, yeah What kind of an assignment Charlie meet you here at LA International give it a whole story Yeah, I think you'd better CBS radio network brings you Mandel Kramer in the exciting adventures of the man with the action-packed expense account America's fabulous freelance insurance investigator yours truly Johnny dollar Expense account submitted by a special investigator Johnny dollar to worldwide mutual insurance company Los Angeles office Following is an account of expenses incurred during my investigation of The mixed blessing matter Expense account item one 199 27 for a cab to Bradley field a plane to New York then a jet to Los Angeles Thanks to good connections. It was only about 6 p.m. Pacific time when I arrived at LA International Airport True to his word Charlie Warren was there and waiting after helping me load my luggage Including the fishing tackle into a rented rental car. He led me up to the flight deck restaurant and we ordered cocktail Your health Johnny may we never grow old while drink to that I can use this I'm the little man who's had a busy busy day. So let's eat drink and be married Johnny. Oh tomorrow.  Oh, you mean that crack I made about being sure to bring along. Yeah, it's honest engine Johnny I was only kidding about you were honest engine. Oh, you said that but it got you curious enough to come out here Didn't it well thought of a chance to break up a long hard-winter with a little warm water fishing is what got me out here Nothing else, but So if you want to make up for the freezing I took on your company's behalf last time and keep me happy Johnny I told you I'd make up for that and I will I telephoned your friend hampratt and told him you'd arrive there sometime late tonight He promised to have not only a comfortable motel unit for you But a boat and 75 horse outboard complete with electric starter Electromagnetic drive a tank full of gas and a bucket of live bait sounds great It works for as soon as you can get yourself out on the lake and that's really my boy We'll be at the crack of dawn tomorrow morning Johnny just telling Isn't the fishing over there supposed to be a lot better in the late afternoon What is that supposed to mean? How's about another drink before we order the food huh Charlie another the same Johnny, okay? All right Charlie. Let's have it Worth it. I don't know what you mean the reason I am not supposed to go fishing tomorrow in spite of all your sweet talk Did I say that but didn't you or I meant to not tomorrow morning is all why not? well There's just one little thing maybe you ought to sort of take care of first one little thing Yeah, like arson or murder burglary embezzlement one little thing like that. Oh, sir. What then? We'll just pick up some money over at our branch in Kingman. You know our man over there Jake Kessler No, I'm very well But don't tell me you're gonna pay me off in advance. Well, no not exactly But that well let Jake tell you what it's all about what the money's for don't you know let him handle it He's the one that seems to be worried how much? About 40,000 what in cash, you know to pay off a retirement policy Charlie what's the hitch Johnny all I know is the payments do it's been okayed by the company and for some reason Jake doesn't want to Or can't make it himself. Why not? Well, you know Jake the old worry ward. Well, sometimes his worries pay off Well anyhow after a good night's sleep at Mojave going over to Kingman, Arizona pick up the dough and deliver it Then you can spend the rest of the week fishing on expense account. Okay pal Sure, sure Okay Why not? There's only one trouble with it trouble. What do you mean?  You'd feel doubly bad if you learned only then that there was something you could have been doing about it All along in less than 10 years the number of college applications will have doubled Now support the college of your choice and for more information about this problem and what you can do to help write higher Education box 36 times square station New York 36 higher education box 36 times square station New York 36 Jake Hessler over there in Kingman, Arizona is quite a character. He's about 55 Tall angular long-legged well tanned by the desert Sun His office there on the main street is on the second floor above the Conroy, Mercantile Hey, what happened to you I made a gall dang fool of myself Johnny sit out. Tell me what happened After all the ribbon I've took from these natives over the years about that the clothes I wear Well yesterday morning. I finally took a dare and tried getting up on top of a horse. Oh And what happened? God darn quitter ended up on top of me. Oh Busted one ankle threw a knee out of joint So I got to be carried up and down those stairs by a couple of the boys the mercantile and all in all I'm a gall dang mess Can't even drive my own car. Oh, well, Jake all I can say is I'm sorry And that's why I have to send for somebody who could represent the company officially to pay off old man's blessing when he Suddenly up and demands the whole thing in one hunk of cash. Did you say blessing? Yeah Name's Barney bless. Mm-hmm 41,000 cash, and I'm sure glad you're the one that sent to do it for me like I asked them to You were you're supposed to the company got suspicious to Johnny suspicious of what Jake? Well about why in spite of Setting up that policy for him to get paid off something every month after 65 and for as long as he lives Now he wants it all at once. What do you think there might be something fishy about it? That name of his doesn't ring a bell No, I don't think so You're old enough to remember prohibition all the bootleg and racketeering in those days. Why sure well Barney blessing Was a gunman back then But he never got caught. Oh Then about a year ago. We moved out here to worked out hunk of land the other side of Hackberry Mm-hmm him and a fellow named a harry Higby and a beat-up old dog named a Vicki or who is this Higby just a friend of Barney blessings friends not on your life hated him You see that Higby back in those days. Well They called him the twin Yeah, he was the reason Barney never got caught. I don't follow you He was just a hanger on he wasn't a killer. He wasn't a much used to that mob except for one thing Higby looked so much like Barney blessing that when Barney was sent out to do a job Then they had plant Higby some place where a lot of people had see him would swear that he was Barney So that he was kind of Barney's alibi right He was how come they could never pin a thing on Barney. I see Well, why did he bring Higby along out here? Well, don't you see Johnny?  Well, that's just a trouble. He's 65 right now And Johnny the old coot must have read all the fine print Why you say that all of a sudden now that I'm all Busted up and can't get around anywhere all of a sudden he telephones me from Well, wherever it is he gets to a telephone where there's demand we pay him off in cash Deliver it to him in hand. That's the way that fine print reads in hand But you don't want to pay him off. No, why not? What's all this old fired big hurry about all of a sudden? Why this sudden change to wanting the whole thing in one lump sum without letting us know beforehand? Have you seen him and talked to him at all since he moved out here?  I just never got around to it never even met him Well, who round it does know him Jake not anybody He or Higby or whichever it was used to come here to Kingman for groceries at first But for now on on to a year now. There's been no sign of him Jake yeah If you've been able to have yourself holed up to this office every day you could have got out there to Barney Blessings ranch Well So what well so instead you sent for me? Why? Johnny Johnny do I have to lay it out to you go ahead? Well, you just ought to know by now that I have me a nose for trouble and when I think of what Barney was once and How he said over the phone that if I showed up at his place to give any argument showed up without the money Well, uh, Rascal, I think you pulled your accident on purpose that you're scared Probably for no reason at all. You just want me to stick my neck out for you. I tell you I got an instinct Always have had and it's always been right But now Johnny if you know if you just want to duck out of this one duck Yeah, stay away from those two ex mobsters and go over to the lake and do some Quiet fishing instead. Well, okay, Jake. Just tell me how to get there By our golly Johnny. I Knew you wouldn't let me down. Mmm. So now here. Yeah Here now You'll have to take this along with you. That's the 41,000 dollars in cash money At the bank delivered to me just before you got here I thought that kind of payoff had to come from the main office of a company like yours. I wish it did But you know worldwide immediate payment on any claim at any place in the world. That's the slogan Yeah, that's why even a little local office like this one has to come up with it That's why I can't give Barney Bles in any argument. Well, if I do find any grounds for your wild suspicions or whatever they are Maybe I will now you listen Johnny. Yes, Jake well here Here's the receipt and so on that he'll have to sign Okay, no wait a minute now is that a copy of the policy itself there? That's right Well, how about if I borrow it for a little while Jake just long enough to have somebody make a copy of it And you are thinking the way I am aren't you am I? So here Just in case I well I had this extra photo stat made for you good. All right, Jake Give me some directions and I'll be on my way sure But now Johnny well Well, like you say, maybe I'm all worried up about nothing at all. Sure you are but Be careful anyway Will you Johnny? Sure Jake had told me the ranch was near the old mining town of Hackbury population about a hundred But from Hackbury, I had to take a narrow crooked dusty little road some 20 miles further to the foot of the Cottonwood Mountains Believe me.  I'd say all of it surrounded by a barbed wire fence except for the driveway up to the house Thanks to half a dozen windmills busily pumping water old Barney had managed to make himself a tidy little farm with vegetable gardens enough to supply all his needs and then some And over in one corner fenced off by themselves were a dozen or so beef cattle making the most of a surprisingly green lush growth of alfalfa The house sitting there in the middle of the property was a small but well kept building of concrete block as I pulled up and stopped The front door opened just a crack And then slowly a man emerged an old man weather beaten but husky and healthy looking As I started told him he slowly raised and aimed a high-powered rifle at me Don't you see that's time out from there. There's no Christmason. I saw the sign That's what you're doing buster. This is my property now get out Your property hmm. That's right then your Barney blessing. That's right So what now you get out sure if you don't care about getting your insurance money Oh, that's better you saying you're that Jake Hesler. I talked to on the phone. No, I don't sound like him Who are you? My name is dollar Here now watch it. What what you're reaching for my credentials You want to lower that gun and have a look at them you say dollar. That's right Johnny dollar right again.  What you doing here? Well, if you put down that gun, I'll tell you when I'm ready. Okay Jake Hesler is laid up. He couldn't make it. So I've brought your insurance money and my 41 grand Where is it right here? Mr. Blessing? $41,000 okay, okay, give it over to me and then get out of here before you sign the papers for it The receipt and so on. Are you kidding? Come on inside here. I don't trust you until I get the dough. Let me see them papers Put them here on this table. All right. Here you are If you're Barney blessing, just go ahead and sign them. Don't you want to see my identification or something? Make sure who I am. Well, that depends after you've signed Here now watch it As I was about to say here you can use my pen you're pretty jittery aren't you mr. Blessing I don't like strangers around here. See no I can see that. Well, are you going to sign? Only I'd say I get my money. Don't you come any closer? All right. All right Okay Bar you always have that much trouble signing your own name you're talking about Yeah, okay now Before you sign those others watch it. I don't like the way you keep reaching inside your coat that way I don't like the way you keep waving that rifle around now. Look What's the matter? Just compare your signature with the one here on the policy What do you expect after all these years after all these years you've had to practice what are you talking about? Will you put the gun down for a minute? No, sir?  He'd be Harry Higbee Dirty rotten blackmail What do you want to know for what's he got to do with it? They called you the twins didn't they so what so much are like that nobody could tell you apart Certainly nobody out in this country ever knew which was which now wait a minute You saying I ain't Barney blessing. I said where is he this partner of yours? Well Okay, so I'll tell you Dirty chiseled stooley. I finally got fed up with him. I throw them out You didn't yeah, it cost me. Oh, but I paid him off and made him get out of here Okay Let me sign the rest of these here papers so you can give me the door and you can get out one more thing They know what what about the dog? huh Well, I mean Vicki. Well, whatever her name was What's that sticking lousy flippant hound dog got to do with it? You say that about her after the way you brought her all the way out here from Chicago, wasn't okay? Okay, okay, so I'm all upset on a color Vicki died a couple of days ago At the barrier. Oh, you didn't You don't believe it look outside the window there at the back See that mound over the place where I laid the poor little pooch away Mr. That mound of freshly turned earth is one of the first things I noticed when I drove in here You know something I Like to see what's really under it. You know something dollar. I don't like you I think you're trying to pull something on me. I mean I won't stand for that to see this You think I don't know how to use it.  I Guess I haven't much choice. Have I you've got no choice go ahead Well, how about this and I'm out of my hand. Well, I don't make a move You listen and don't forget that I'm holding a gun now. Okay. Okay, you were Maybe I got excited. I'm sorry Let me sit down. Oh It's like the rest of papers. You can give me the money and get I'm afraid not not yet Not until you've done a little digging for me outside with that mound of earth is No matter don't you believe me?  We'll see Now get going Satisfied now See dollar It's only what's left of poor old Ricky. Yeah Yeah, I see In spite of the size of the grave Vicky was a big old dog Well, you're satisfied now No, we go back Wow Looks pretty convincing with fool almost anybody, but I think you better dig a little more No, no, sir. No, I won't I said dig now you go ahead and dig. Oh, no, I won't do it I showed you vicky's body and doesn't know it's whatever may be underneath it that I want to see now dig now Listen you listen.  I give up. I give up Don't you see dollar? I dig mr. Higbee dig Do it Jake didn't you? Well, just a hunch Johnny and even if it was the right one. I didn't know how I could prove it But that's feeling I had a couple of punks like them and nobody around here could prove which one was really which and with all that money at stake well Johnny I I Just I just kind of had me a hunch is all and Jake It looks like that instinct that knows for trouble of yours is something that you had better hang on to I've done it because of a call from back in Hartford I again had to miss out on the fishing but I'm gonna keep trying you can depend on that Spent the count total including mileage in the rental car in the trip home for 97 40 yours truly Johnny dollar Oh, here is our star to tell you about next week story next week a case that could be marked top secret That blows wide open in more ways than one Join us. Won't you yours truly Johnny dollar really Johnny dollar is written by Jack Johnstone Produced and directed by Bruno Zirato, Jr. Music supervision by Ethel Huber Johnny dollar is played by Mandel Kramer also featured in our cast where Louis van Rootman is Harry Higbee Lift carpenter is Jake Hestler Maurice Tarplin as Charlie Warren be sure to join us next week same time same station for another exciting story of yours truly Johnny dollar Art Hanna speaking


It's not uncommon that as a service designer, you end up in an environment that is strongly product focused, whether that product is an app or maybe even a car. In this episode, you're going to learn how to successfully make service design work in these environments. So if you're interested in that, make sure you stick around. Here's the guest for this episode, let the show begin. Hi, I'm Christian Adlot. This is a service design show, episode 128. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are the invisible things that make a difference between success and failure, all to help you design services that make a positive impact on people and business? Our guest in this episode is Christian Appelt. Christian is the head of service design at Polestar and Polestar is the manufacturer of one of the most iconic electric cars at this moment. Christian's task is to lead and scale service design within Polestar. And due to the success of Polestar, they are quickly growing, figuring out how to successfully embed and organize service design within this context is an interesting journey. And in this episode, Christian is going to share some of his most important learnings with you. You're going to learn why it's important to build a common and shared language across all stakeholders and how to actually do that. And we'll also dig into the never ending challenge of how to demonstrate the value that you're bringing as a service design team to the business. If you enjoy conversations like this that help you to level up your service design skills, make sure to click that subscribe button and that bell icon to be notified whenever a new episode comes out. So that's all for the intro. And now let's quickly jump into the interesting conversation with Christian Appelt. Welcome to the show, Christian. Hi, Mark. Good to have you on. I think this is going to be a really interesting episode, at least for me, because I've seen which topics we're going to discuss. Christian, you have a rich history for the people who haven't looked you up and linked in yet, could you give a short introduction of who you are and what you do these days? Yeah, absolutely. Currently, I'm working at Polestar, Polestar Performance AB, heading up a unit we call Service Design Unit. And before I came to Polestar two and a half year ago, I was at IKEA and before that at SKF, a ball bearing manufacturer. In both cases, I was focusing on innovation and innovation leadership and for the people who don't know yet who or what Polestar is. That will, of course, change in a few years. Everybody will know it. What is Polestar? Polestar, it's a new electrical vehicle company, performance brand, very much design focused. And it's really exciting because we focus a lot on new business models, business to consumer. That's where we started. So we sell cars directly online and also keeping the customer journey close to us. So we have that customer relationship with us all the time and not just an OEM. We're going to talk a lot about service design within a car manufacturer today. But before we dive into that, Christian, I want to go over quick rapid fire question around with you five questions and the ideas to answer them as quickly as possible. Let's start with question number one. Christian, what's always in your fridge? That's good. It's milk and it's butter. Milk and butter. OK. There are so many books behind you, but which one are you reading right now? It's actually, yeah, it's actually this one. I got it from from your one of your talks here. Orc design for design orcs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Peter Murals. Yeah, very recommendable. Yeah, I agree. Question number three is which superpower would you like to have? Mind reading. Mind reading, yeah. Become an anthropologist and you'll get you'll get quite far. Close to it. What did you want to become when you were a kid? I was actually I wanted to be like exploring biologist and going in deep into the jungle and exploring new medicines and stuff like that. OK. Your career took an interesting turn. Finally, you're all about service design these days, but do you remember when you first heard about the term or got in touch with it? Yeah, it was maybe six, six years, six, seven years ago. You see, I think it's really interesting, these topics, because you suddenly realize that you have done or worked with service design all your life. You have this holistic approach where you move from from really abstract levels down to details up and back and forth and up and down. So, but as a as a topic, it was actually only six years ago. And I've heard many stories of people saying I've been doing service design for years only just to recently realize that there is a term for it. So that sounds sounds like a very familiar story. Christian, when did Polestar sort of get when did they start? When did they start the company? Yeah, of course, it's Polestar where does it come from? It was an engineering company working on how to tune a car, racing cars and also conventional Volvo cars. And it was it went from that brand into a wait a minute. We have an electric car coming up in originating from Volvo. So it was Volvo who bought that this tuning company and then moved it into the electrical vehicles space and focusing on performance, performance EV brand. So the reason why I'm asking this and the reason why sort of the context or the heritage of the company is important because often when service design gets embedded into an organization, it's not from the start, right? It's often and especially in a manufacturing oriented environment. Like service design isn't the first thing that a company establishes. And I want to talk with you today about how did service design evolve with this within Polestar? What are some challenges? What are some opportunities that you see? So let's dive a little bit into that and maybe the first question is how did service design get into a company that is all about manufacturing features and cars, tangible stuff? Yeah, I think if we look specifically at Polestar, we're really lucky because we have a CEO, Thomas Inglat, who he's a designer by heart. He's the head of design in his set and was set in Volvo and he became the CEO of Polestar. And if we go back a few years, like three years, when it was apparent that we would be this EV brand and started out on, OK, we're starting out with marketing and things like that. Before that, there's been some pioneers really looking into the customer journey of performance EV car brand. So it's actually has had service design. We've had that with us all the time, design thinking approach. But then really quickly, it was all about go to market and getting all those MVPs out there. So we moved from really hard focus on search design then to product organization and now we're kind of moving back and having the customer centric approach when we have these real customers with us. And one of the questions that I get often and that is also addressed in that book, Org Design for Design Orgs, is where do you place service design inside an organization? And again, especially in organizations, that that's probably very much oriented on the tangible thing. Can you can you share a little bit? Where is it now? Where has it been? At Polestar, we're kind of located, so to say, in the digital organization. But we have not had so much focus on the organization as such. It has been an organic growth. We've expanded really quickly and it's been focused on what do we need to do? What do we need to accomplish and just do that together? But now we're moving into a kind of scale up of the company and then we need some more structure and more structure to define what needs to be able to scale. So before we dive into that scaling part, I'm really curious, you're sort of part of the digital side of the company. Why is that? I can make some assumptions, but I'm curious what your take on that is, how did that evolve? Yeah, so as I said, it's very much an organic development and doing things together. And we talk about Polestar being a truly digital company in the sense that it's not like we and them are taking over something that should be executed. It's how do we build that together with the stakeholders that are responsible for different services towards the customers? So I think it's just almost a coincidence that what has happened because you could actually, at least from my opinion, you could put it in business development or marketing or digital. Or, yeah, any place as long as you collaborate and have alliances within the organization. So with regards to alliances, you mentioned also to me that there is a customer experience team. How is your relationship between service design, maybe the digital team, the customer experience team? How is that currently operating? It's, I would say, a joint venture in the means that we're working totally together. We have set up team sessions like weekly meetings and things like that, where we look into challenges that we have both from digital and customer experience team. And we kind of, we could look at it as the customer experience team provide the direction and the tools on insights and analytics and so on. And the service design team is the executors, the researchers, the explorers and the ones who facilitate the finding the right questions about what should we do now? Or later or not at all? So I'm curious. And I would love to hear if you can share an example of what is it that the service design team actually has done or worked on? Like what is a, quote unquote, typical service design challenge within Polestar? Yeah, we have moved a lot from focusing on the digital products as such. Since they have very much been in the piece and then. Sorry to interrupt you, but a digital product is. Yeah, sorry. So it's the, yeah, you have your own nomenclature and stuff like that. But it's the interface that you have with the customer being digital. It could be on a website, an order page or a product page or or a tool that you use when you sign up people for a test drive or. The individual digital Dutch points, right? Exactly. Yeah. OK, so it's been very much about them as such. And then then we have kind of moved further upstream and also kind of on a higher level when it comes to a holistic approach closer to actually what do what do we need to accomplish here? Not just in that this kind of section or micro journey, but from a more holistic perspective of the company and looking into different areas we have we have managed to to pull the stakeholders with us and make make them use of service design as a competence for strategic decisions and so on, prioritise things. When should we do things or not and so on? That sounds like a dream to a lot of service designers actually being able to be in that strategic position and be able to help influence decision making. Again, I'm curious. Is there a recent example or project where you felt that service design really contributed to making a smarter or a better decision? Yeah, we just kind of the last year here, especially the last six months here, we've we've seen where it's referenced. You see how how business stakeholders or key stakeholders, as we call them, use design thinking and and service design language talking to each other on on when to to do what and so on. So it's more or less everywhere, but at the same time, there are also different different stakeholders that are more aware and less aware. So it's we talk a lot about how can we lift the floor for for everyone and of course, it's a bit sensitive for me to kind of dive into specifics and so on. But there are a lot of it's when we help the key stakeholders ask questions, they are often they are looking for for solutions. But as we kind of take them on this journey, they start to explore things and start to ask questions. And then there's as we kind of always wish for people to ask the right questions. So that's really rewarding in the work that we do. And it's also something that have grown the awareness inside the company and also, yeah, how we communicate and so on. Now, you have a team of about how large is the team? How would you? Yeah, so we we call it the service design unit. Yeah, it's a plus plus plus 60 people. OK, it's not it's not just service designers. It's business analysts and digital designers, UX, UI and so on. So yeah, yeah. The reason why I'm asking that is, OK, let's say it's a service design unit of about 60 people. One of the questions that a lot of designers struggle with in a business context is how do you justify having 60 people, 60 designers in a company?  So that conversation will be a lot easier. But how do you how do you show your relevance to the business? Yeah, so it's maybe I should kind of state that it's we're not 60 plus service designers as such, but everyone is aware of service design and has a different levels of understanding and awareness and so on. So I would say we are like 12 dedicated service designers. And it's actually about you need to show your result. You can't just talk about it. And it's easy to get in. I've seen that when I was at SKF and when I was at IKEA and things like that. It's easy that you you talk about it, what if and so on. But you need to really find these right questions and and make them actionable. So you actually get something out. You can't present a report. You can't present a report or a finding an insight without making it actionable. And then you suddenly get the whole cloud of options which you can choose from. And that makes it easy for key stakeholders to to decide then they don't want to have to have open questions, even if they have been part of bringing them forward. When they need to go forward, they need to make a decision and that's on on what they can act on. And what I'm hearing you say presenting an insight isn't enough for stakeholders to act upon. There needs to be a piece of advice like basically based on this insight, we would recommend to do X, Y and Z. Is that what you're saying? Exactly. You need to understand what what what do we want to accomplish. And and through those questions narrowing on and through those questions narrowing on on on where we would like to go. And it needs to be an optional scope. You can't just have one one direction or one decision. You need to to be able to in time or in effort and things like that or things that you can act on. And and when you're able to do that, when you're able to when you know together like we're trying to increase conversion or increase retention or all those other business metrics and you're able to connect an insight that you have from the service design project to how that could help your stakeholder to actually do that. That's when your business value is justified. Is it as simple as that? Yeah, or it would be nice. Yeah, I know. There's all this but or however you need to actually remove risk as well. Because if you want to do something, it's an assumption always. You can't know until afterwards. So then you need to remove the risk as well. So how can we what is the least thing you can do to test this assumption? And that's also a journey in itself to to remove it from OK. Being is if it's a big opportunity, then suddenly you try to look into the business case of it and it kind of grows and grows. And then when it grows, the activity, the risk increases. So you need to minimize the activity to show the validate it as quickly as possible. So yeah, this is where again, a lot of service designers get stuck because there is always a level of uncertainty, of exploration, of risk. And that's not what most managers are in the business of. Most managers are in the exact opposite like scaling, standardizing. How do you even get started? Yeah, that's this is, I think, as you say, this is the continuous challenge of service designers and kind of innovators as such to to move from from kind of or actually move stakeholders into the being comfortable with the uncertainty. And if there is a high risk of of jeopardizing what is currently, then then the economic sub of decisions tell you that you should not make the move. But if there is if you can show metrics that you your you will actually not reach your your goals or your your your where you would like to be or it will be really bad. If you don't make this small, small change, then you will end up down here. Then Conaman has said that it's three times more likely to make that decision going forward if you kind of understand what would happen if you would not do it. Right. Yeah. And this is one, at least from if I'm interpreting this correctly, showing the price of not doing or not investing in service design, like making the opposite business case, we don't know what what the potential benefit will be. But we know if we don't do anything or keep on the same track, like the project, right? Is that exactly? And that's where metrics come in as well. So you have qualitative and quantitative metrics that can help you with that and identify sources of metrics like customer support, social media, or just talking to customers. And you need to let that talk for you as well. What is the relationship between qualitative and quantitative metrics within your unit? It's actually the customer experience team that has defined that setup and also provide all the tools. So we have set up dashboards of metrics that we use to identify challenges and where we can act on it. What is in that dashboard just without raising any company's secrets? Yeah, but everyone has like net-moting scores and so on. But also kind of the most the most common questions from customers, the most frustrations and things like that, where you take the temperature of the customer relationship and kind of massage that information to so you can actually get something out of it. Because there's no value in data if you can't make sense of it. You need to understand what you're looking for. That's everyone can kind of dig into that. What is the what is who sees this dashboard within the organization? Who has who is exposed to it? It's the CX team, which uses it as a strategic tool, but also in conjunction with key stakeholders that are responsible for different areas where we have identified or targeted them as stakeholders. And I can imagine that this is a great lever sort of to see if you're actually having influence that you I love the idea of just having the most common questions or the most common complaints. That's like a really tangible quote unquote metric that you can work on and that it's visible and that it's agreed upon that this is something which is important to the entire organization. Yeah, of course, you can start to work with the data then that over time it will be different questions, but it will also be different questions on different markets and so on. You need to understand that you have different maturity of especially in the EV sector. You can see that in countries where electric vehicles are really established, the maturity is much more different than other markets and so on. And you need to act on them locally. I'm already and now we're getting into a very tactical stuff, but I think it's really crucial. Like maybe in the ideal situation before doing any service design work, people should think about setting up a dashboard just to have an idea of what the thing is that we want to influence together. And often it's very in service time project specific. This project wants to influence this, but it it stays like in a very small pocket rather than seeing if you're actually influencing the thing that everybody agreed upon is important. Yeah, I think you're touching upon the area of transparency. How do you make insights transparent and available for all stakeholders in the organization? And that's something that we have realized quite recently. We were looking early on into what are the artifacts of the service design and using them as a metric on how mature the organization is. But we had challenges in different teams producing customer journeys and so on looking slightly different. And if it's not your topic, you have difficulties reading it or understanding it and using it as a reference as well. And that's where we have brought in different tools in the organizations like Mirro and Caster Lens and AHA and so on. So what do those tools solve in this situation for you? I think they solve a common language, an anchor point for discussion and reference. So everyone agrees on the same way of picturing what you're talking about. And then it's much more easy to talk about things. It's like all those canvases that we have. They create a common language for us. It might not be the perfect visualization, but it's at least the same. And we can see the same thing and understand that we come to the table with different perspectives and can use the same language. So rather than having conversations where you have to translate what somebody is actually seeing, you can skip that whole part and actually get into the stuff that's inside of the whatever artifact you present. And that must increase speed, efficiency. Everybody is happier. Yeah, why are service designers seem to be so scattered with using tools? I think if we look at it, it's actually not that many tools that serve us very well in that matter.  And before that, we've done diagrams and things like that from different collaboration tools to even PowerPoint or Excel and things like that. But we need to have even using the same colors and things like that so people can subconsciously understand what we're talking about. And I think it's about maturity in the organization or as you talked about before, you're a small team and then you start to create your own language. But if you need to be part of the whole organization then you need to start to communicate and things like that. And that's also something that we've joined up with the internal communication explaining on how we work and the benefits and value of the work. Yeah, that's something that I found really fascinating and interesting when we were preparing this talk. You started collaborating with the internal communications department. I think that's a super smart move. But can you explain what is it that you actually do with the internal communication department and how did that relationship start? Yeah, sometimes when you talk about strategy and things like that, you describe strategy as an intent. But actually, when you look at the truth behind things, most strategies are emerging strategies. So this is an emerging strategy based on an opportunity where we have a colleague joining the communications department, very interested in design thinking, and then reaching out. And when we included her into our organization and then also we have a thesis or a master student in the organization. Together, they started discussing this.  We also work with OKRs and so on. And wait a minute, that's something that we could pick up. So organically, it was an opportunity that showed itself and an interest from persons that we nurtured, so to say. And what is happening? What is the synergy between a service design unit and an internal communications department unit? Yeah, so to be able to create a fantastic company, everyone needs to talk to each other. And we need to create transparency on how we work and so on. So they are very much helping us with that journey and also telling them the story of how we use service design to find opportunities and then following up on how you actually do that and so on. And then following up on the perspectives of service design and the value it gives. So I found that really important. Or actually at IKEA, we did the same when it came to innovation. So it's really important if you're kind of struggling with creating awareness of something you only have so much bandwidth to do things. So you need to find someone to collaborate and make alliances with. I, when I was still doing service design projects long, long time ago, I said that I think 40% of my actual work is communication, capturing what we do, creating a compelling story around that, making sure that people get our, it creates awareness. The reality I think is that often we're just too busy doing the actual work that we sort of neglect the documentation part, the capturing of the story, the capturing of the moment. And then we arrive at the end of a project and we have a deliverable, but nobody has seen the journey. Nobody has seen how it evolved. And we sort of miss those opportunities. Well, people who are in communication, it's their job. They're even much better at it than we are to capture and communicate those stories. So yeah, I hope it's working out for you because I think it's a really smart move. Yeah, it's, I kind of came upon it in SKF, in IKEA and so on. But it's really powerful, you can make it into a habit after every kind of session that you do with your teams and so on. You interview each other on kind of what, almost like a retrospect on what did we do good and what has this given us and so on. And I have a really interesting testimonial that colleagues of mine captured at IKEA were the ways we worked. We worked a lot with design sprints and so on, where there was an external party joining us as an expert and having a testimonial that I've been working with over 40 different companies and the work that we did now in a week, it typically takes like seven to eight months for other companies to do when they do like ordinary pre-studies and so on. So those testimonials can be really, really powerful. And then that draws people towards you and want to collaborate with you. Within the organization, it draws attention within the organization because you're communicating results, you're communicating benefits, you're creating interest and curiosity, right? Yeah, exactly. So it's about making people curious about what you're doing. Yeah, yeah. Now you mentioned already a few things of what has changed and evolved over the last few years like a common language, using the same tools, a dashboard which sounds really good working with internal communication. Has your approach evolved or changed in other ways next to the things we already mentioned? I think it's been more clear. So in the beginning, it was very much organic work and just doing stuff. And as you said, you put so much effort into just do a lot of things and then understanding what matters and being more efficient in how we work, how we communicate, how we, all that has been a journey for us. And now we're entering into a new phase, so to say. We've put a lot of things in place and suddenly we're having a new reality in front of us. How would you describe the new reality? What does it look like? How is it different than the current reality? All reality. So up until now, we've been a well-defined team of all those competences that I talked about before, search designers, business analysts and digital designers who were appointed different tasks together with different teams and so on. And now when we move into a new setup, a new organization, we move in the search design nurse into the product organization, the digital product organization. And if you kind of read what many are writing about challenges in organizations and so on, that typically would not work. But we have an ace up our sleeve, so to say, with our CEO who's very design-driven. We have the CX team and then also defined alliances around what we call journey managers. So you kind of lift up that competence to another level where we have actually establishing an alliance with those who own the customer journey, so to say. Okay, and that's going to be a new role where people are just like maybe a product owner, you'll have a journey owner. Is that like the shift that's going to happen? Exactly. And they will work very much in collaboration. And also we have defined domains of products and so on. So the service designers will report on a domain level that is almost corresponding to the journey manager level. So what could be a domain level? Is that like trade-in or repair or like those kind of domains? Yeah, exactly. So ownership is a broad domain, but in the ownership domain, you have handover and services and things like that. So we have many microjourneys kind of making that area up. In the customer life cycle, you have different stages and within those stages, you have a lot of journeys or microjourneys and people within that same life cycle stage are in the domain. Okay? Yeah. So where do you hope this will end up in three years? Like you're always in the transition, it's always moving, but what's the future vision? Yeah, so three years is a really long time. I know. We've done this in less than three years. And within the next year, we will have this fully working and we will have service design as a strategic tool for making decisions on what to do and what not to do and when and so on. And within three years, we will have people referencing a poll star. This is how you should work with service design. That's my ambition, at least, or our ambition. Your ambition. And you'll be on the show more often. Awesome ambition, that's really ambitious, which is good. Now, we've primarily talked about the things that are working or the things that are going well, but I'm sure that there are also things that you now in hindsight think, well, maybe we could approach it differently or this is a big learning, this was maybe a big mistake. So imagine you could start all over. What is the one thing that you maybe would do differently? Yeah, it's always easy to be smart in hindsight, but I think maybe the customer journey part. However, it's about all those factors allowing you to do that. We got in our customer experience officer in the executive team and that was actually what kicked off everything to actually allow us to work further upstream and things like that. So I think if I would have the influence, I would make sure that we had a kind of designer apart from our CEO then, but in the executive team as well as we have earlier that would have helped us a lot. But it's from an hindsight, it's organically moving forward and I think it's about moving, capturing the opportunities and using service design on yourself and how you work rather than kind of looking at all the difficulties and things like that. And all that changes opportunities for you and that's what service design is all about, I think, capturing those opportunities. Yeah, and I think this is becoming more and more prevalent that where that you see that you can scale service design from their ground up to a certain level, but then you hit a glass floor, glass ceiling, it's not a glass floor, it depends on which level you are, but then you really need support from the top. You need leadership to open the way to actually get it to the next maturity level. Yeah, you can't talk about people don't understand you, because it's your job to make people understand you. So you need to make those alliances and create those insights and perspectives and also understand what other perspectives there is because there is not like one side, it's a double-sided balancing between. Now, a question that just came to my mind, I have a strong opinion about this, but what is your take? Is there, are you in a product industry or are you a service industry? Yeah, I think that's a balance as well. My personal view is that it's a service industry and it's the crux that no one has actually yet found the essence of how you move that perspective, because as soon as you have what you define as a product, as soon as you have someone using it, you're serving someone with that product and as soon as you have a relationship to that person who use your product, then it's a service. But if it's just sell and forget, maybe you could talk about it as a service, but then it's actually also a service because it's about providing that disposable or kind of product. So I'm all focusing on being a service, whatever you provide to someone that someone is using. I'm really curious, if you had to summarize our last 45 minutes, what is the one thing you hope people will remember from this conversation? I think I hope people remember that it's all about finding your way and you have that perseverance in yourself and also finding the alliances that you need to move yourself forward. Coming from innovation leadership and innovation management area, it's not about an idea, it's about what you make out of the idea, it's about the doing and then you need to find ways that suit your environment. There's no kind of silver bullet for anything that is always something that is specific with your organization that you need to take into account and use the service design on yourself, on your own organization to move it forward. Thank you and I can add one more thing to that. I recently had a call with somebody and he asked me if doing a design sprint would help to convince the CEO of the value of service design and I asked them what is on the agenda of your CEO and it was in this case, it was really about hiring people and my question was really simply how is this what you're going to do or whether you're proposing going to help your CEO's agenda? If you want to sell service design, if you want to show the value of it, you need to connect those two things and it's exactly like you said, you just need to apply your own thinking and see your CEO, manager, boss, whatever, as the customer and then everything becomes so much easier. Yeah, show it by doing and not just talking about it.  Christian, I'm really looking forward to what's going to happen within Polestar in the coming months, years. I hope you'll be able to live up to your ambition because that would mean great things for the entire field. Who knows, maybe we'll be back in a few months together and doing an update on where we stand. So thanks a lot for now for sharing where you are with the service design show community. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Awesome that you made it all the way till the end of this conversation. I really hope you got something useful out of it and if you did, click that like button because that helps to get this conversation in front of other service designers like you. And if you haven't done so already, also click that subscribe button to be notified when new episodes come out. Thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you in the next video.


I am thrilled to welcome you all to the four-day week discussion which I'm very glad we're having on a Wednesday instead of a Friday because then maybe no one would have shown up. I'm Adam Grant. I'm an organizational psychologist and author and I've been fascinated by this question of why do we work the amount that we do for a long time. I study work for a living but I don't think it should necessarily define us and it was about a century ago that Henry Ford, not exactly known for his enlightened views on management and taking care of humans, reduced the work week from six days to five because he found that people were more productive, morale went up, there was more loyalty, there was lower turnover and he said it was good for business and then we could start to wonder well why are we now stuck on five days? Was that ordained from on high or is this in fact a human invention that deserves to be rethought? A lot of organizations around the world are rethinking the work week right now. You've seen the trials by the Icelandic government, by Microsoft Japan, there's a New Zealand insurance company that's been doing it for years and the data are really encouraging so far. It's still early but for the most part performance has either gone up or stayed the same and people end up having more time to live their lives and if there is a silver lining of COVID it has to be that we rethink our priorities right that we may decide we don't want our jobs to be the center of our lives and we want to plan work around life as opposed to vice versa which too many of us particularly in the West have done for too long. So the purpose of the panel today is to talk about is the four-day week actually viable? If so what should it look like and how do we make it happen because I have met some people in Davos who do not think we should even work as few as six days so I think we have some minds to change. Let me start with social entrepreneur Hilary Cottum. Hilary can you give us some history and walk us through how did we get to five days a week and where should we be going? Okay so let me say to start off that the question was necessity or luxury and I think that this is a complete necessity for environmental reasons, for human well-being flourishing reasons and also for economic reasons and I think what's really interesting is that you know when you ask me about history is that we think time is immutable but if we look at the history of work it changes so we used to live by prayer time some societies still do then we move to agrarian time a lot of us in the West still have school timetables that are stuck on that old-fashioned agrarian time which is really problematic then we move to industrial time which you've referenced which was really complicated I mean the reason that we have you know in Western Europe and maybe in the US kind of big clocks in our town squares is because the biggest problem industrial leaders had was getting people to work on time because working to a clock was such a kind of alien idea and now of course we've internalized the clock but in you know when industrial time started people thought that there would be radical experiments and one of the most interesting is Kellogg's in the 1930s and what happened in the 1930s in Kellogg's is that Kellogg's it was one of the biggest factories the breakfast cereal he offered his workers six hour shifts from eight hours for exactly the same pay and what happened was that people flock to Kellogg's journalists the administrators of the Hoover you know the Hoover administrators social scientists there are amazing household studies of what happened because everybody thought industrialization would lead to less work of course you know Keynes was writing about how his grandchildren would have 15 hour days and so what's really interesting is that at Kellogg's productivity went up dramatically accidents went down you know the economics of the of the company really changed and people's lives improved and when the when the kind of household studies people went people said that they had quote more life that what was amazing was that they could fit in taking care of people they had time to make things they made their own culture they ran their own sports teams you know things fitted into their lives and you know what what we know now is that in fact that wasn't the kind of experiment that stuck we probably don't have it's very interesting why not which we probably don't have time for but you know even before the pandemic the ILO and WHO said that work was killing us and for the last two years I've been running workshops with workers in kind of post industrial places and what they ask for is not a four-day week what they ask for is a rethinking of the linear life with less work so I think it's a necessity but it doesn't go far enough because four days is a kind of may I say a male solution to this problem because basically it doesn't think about care because as we all know care of our children or our parents or just being with friends doesn't happen in four days it happens around the day so what we actually need to do is rethink the boundaries of time between work and care between learning rethinking the linear life of course doesn't mean just the work study kind of in blocks and maybe we need some new boundaries so that we do have time to play and to be and and so on so a four-day working week a necessity a start but I think not the picture I think I think we could get on board with that I do want to just be to be really clear now how many days you think we should be working total though are you advocating for a two-day week a one-day week how much work do you think is ideal well that's a really difficult question but I think a starting point would be that we work the equivalent of four days over seven so we're not talking about adding more hours we're talking about having more time to be and I mean one of the things that we should talk about is the climate agenda because there is very good research that shows that if we work less we don't travel so much and we we make less intensive consumer choices you know because we're not time poor and we all know that wealthy people are those who are using you know more carbon and so then we're not using so much more carbon but I don't know maybe I mean people want to work at different amounts it doesn't need to what we need to is regulate a floor and then people some people love their work and they might want to do more but for most people in the world work is pretty back breaking and so we need to think about that starting point excellent so I'm going to go down the line for the first round of questions and then we'll mix it up you're in this precinct you run manpower group you've been piloting a lot of different ways to if not shorten the work we can at least give people a little more flexible the other opportunities tell us about that yes no you're right grab and Adam and and you know what's really nice about a session like this is I get to be playing the role of an enlightened forward-looking leader now since we're in a closed session like this we can all be clear that you have been carried into this kicking and streaming by all my colleagues you know led by Michelle or head of people and culture who's been talking about implementing a work my way strategy which is really responding to the desires of workers and our employees which is to have more time for their life and you know I think that's been a really good evolution I would say unusual at first but I think we can see that this is what our employees are looking for more control more choice I'd have to say though that the four-day work week discussion you know I am I see it as part of the desire so clearly expressed during the pandemic and will be expressed will be one of the lasting legacies of the pandemic that workers in general desire more flexibility so they have more choice we think this is one of the lasting legacies of the pandemic I would say though that as soon as knowledge workers are involved we talk about these revolutions in the workplace four-day work week or you know flexibility there are many professions nurses airline crews doctors truck drivers that are already working in compressed work schedules producing the output that is requested but in different regimented schedules that are not traditional five-day 40-hour work weeks and I should add working from home where you can now have this notion of remote working and flexibility 60% of the workforce in most developed countries don't have the luxury of that experience and actually they've been working way more during the pandemic because we needed them as essential workers to keep the economy going so on the one hand I'm delighted with the discussion I'm absolutely in favor we have a great scheme at manpower group that we're now working towards and I think that's the way we're going to be doing business going forward giving people different choices trusting their judgment it's not necessarily an individual choice though because being in a company is a team sport so teams will have to decide how best to engage and when to be together when not for what purpose no point in coming in the office to have a zoom call but you want to have time to collaborate but at the same time I would argue you know this needs to be equitably distributed across many categories of workers not only knowledge workers not only those that can work from home but people who are in production lines who are driving trucks who are in warehouses who are manufacturing otherwise we'll have a bifurcation of the workforce and an unequitable distribution of this this very valuable benefit and that is truly something that all workers are looking for I want to reinforce something that you just said which is we've had a lot of debates about remote and hybrid work over the last couple of years but if you look at the data there was a Wall Street Journal survey earlier this year showing that the flexibility people want most at work is not choices about where they work it's choices about when and how much they work yeah right more than a chance to work from home or anywhere people want flexible hours which I think is what we're here to discuss right so Anne Marie Slaughter you have been at New America at Princeton at the State Department in the U.S. you've had a lot of policy roles can you help us look at this from a macro perspective because it's easy for me as a psychologist to say yes from a micro standpoint I will get better work out of people in six focused hours than eight unfocused hours but how would this change society how does the world look different if we go with four days a week so let me start my saying I think of it as 32 hours distributed as necessary and I actually think there's lots of experimentation I know there are places that do two eight-hour days and then some four-hour days that obviously you can do five six-hour days or one day off so just putting that out there and then to the the larger question and it builds on Jurgen's point that Jonas is sorry Jonas's point that different categories of workers have very different needs so when I first started writing about flexible work what I heard from were lots of people who were working minimum wage and and didn't have defined hours they were working on just in time scheduling web with time software that meant they often didn't have enough work so the first thing I want to say from a societal point of view is this yes for knowledge workers fine for many other workers this is a nightmare that what they want is predictability they need to know when they're going to have childcare they need to know they're going to have enough hours to actually make it and unless we address that this simply increases the inequity that we already see so dramatically much much much further so start with that whatever we do we have to also recognize that we've got to make sure that everyone is able to work enough hours to have a living wage beyond that though I do I think I think there's a revolution here in agency and that is good for society and I'll use the example of an academic as a professor at Princeton I had to be in the classroom you will notice maximum five hours a week now for each of those hours I had a lot of preparation but that was on my own time I also had to show up of faculty meeting and I had office hours the total not more than eight hours it was up to me how I work to get that done I also had to produce research it was up to me most academics work really hard but we work on our own time all right if we need but certainly if you need to be somewhere for your children or if you simply want to work out every morning whatever it might be the focus there is much more on task than on time and that to me is the larger social revolution and it's the management revolution it is so much easier to manage according to presence rather than performance you were there 12 hours you were there 14 hours you were you know you had your jacket hanging over your chair and I saw your light burning you have no idea if you actually got your work done so but thinking about tasks means we really have to prioritize what needs to get done and what like half of my inbox maybe two-thirds of my inbox should actually be burned right it is not productive work it gives the illusion of productivity but it's not I'm productivity is me sending things out where I've decided this is really important work or doing the work that takes more time so I do think it would be far better for society again thinking about all of society I think it would give us time to be whole human beings Hillary and I've written a lot about what we call sapiens integrus so there's homo economicus this mythical you know human being that is rational all the time and driven by a set of utilities and then there's whole human beings who also have care and connection and other good things I think it would be good for all of society but I also think this increase in agency of here's what we need done now you figure out how best to do it this reminds me of one of our deans who complained that I didn't go to enough faculty meetings and I needed to put in more FaceTime and so I FaceTimed him I also would really like to know the physics of how to burn email but that is for another day I know I was sort of having this nice image of it just like self-destructing yeah like it's mission impossible which really captures the rage that you feel about all these intrusions into your life Ahudal Rumi as a minister you have embarked on one of the bolder tests of a shorter work week can you tell us about I think it's four and a half days some opted for four and half some opted for four but before I start Adam if you allow me this concept of the shorter work week I kept my eye on it for many years giving my previous role as minister of well-being in in my government and I saw there were many trials around the world since 2008 but something shifted in the past two years I think as Yonah said this may be part of the impact of COVID and the pandemic where people had went through a roller coaster of change they worked from home the line between the personal and professional life blurred and then when they started going back to the organizations or reboarding in the organization there was a tension there was more demand for flexibility well-being discussion about mental health and also more demand or with the tension between the remote and the physical work I see more of the implementation around the world in the private sector rather than the governments and I can understand that because governments usually are slow they have rigid systems in the UAE I think we are creating the the government of the future we always push boundaries and we're not afraid of experimenting with with new things and maybe we are the first country in the world to institute the shorter work week government-wide and employees are given the flexibility to work remotely or manage their working hours on flexi times this decision was triggered by four reasons first enhancing the well-being second strengthening the family bonds and the community relations because people will have more time to take care of their families whether men or women and they will have more time for recreational activities the third one is economic because when people have a longer weekend they can spend more and this will benefit the local domestic sectors and also to better align with the global markets but also we were supported to move ahead and I can mention some of the factors that really supported us in this implementation first discussion on well-being is advanced in the UAE we started in 2016 developing a national well-being strategy that was even before the pandemic and had the honor to work on that agenda main pillar of that agenda was well-being at workplace we had we developed the tools and the guides for that the second as Anne-Marie mentioned we focus on results not clock and clock out productivity at the heart of what we do we have systems to measure the performance of entities and individuals third we had the right digital infrastructure which allowed us to provide services 24-7 regardless of the hours or the working days which is really essential for governments because some of the early trials around the world failed because of the complaints from the citizens because of the disruption in the service delivery and the fourth thing is that we had agility in our HR system we were able to move fast and we were supported by the leadership and maybe I can share later with you some of the early data that we gathered from this implementation and what we learned from this experience we would love to hear about those data now especially because there's some other governments here in Davos that could benefit from your expertise thank you Adam we started the implementation in January 2022 we planned it very well because you know government entities are sensitive to change so we have to do a lot of coordination to make sure schools hospitals government entities they are on on board so some of the early data that we gathered are really promising 70 percent of employees reported that working they are working more efficiently prioritizing and managing better their time during the week reduction 55 percent reduction in absentees which is wonderful and 71 percent of employees reported that they're spending more time with their families and let me share a funny story with you about this and how people adapt to change because this might benefit also some of the organizations that thinking of implementation when I went to office on Monday morning after the first long weekend I was so excited and happy to ask my colleagues how was their weekend and I was shocked some of them were lost some of them were angry say uh uh we don't know what do you mean you don't know we don't know what to do with the extra time that we have a time so they needed some time to adjust to the extra time that they had and now they're spending more time with their families and also 95 percent of students reported that they enrolled in more extracurricular activities during the longer weekend to support their talent or hobbies so the results are promising but we are still monitoring the implementation to make sure that objectives are met and that we can adjust the policy as we go forward it reminds me a little bit of something that happened in brazil not long ago at semco where um there was an observation that people by the time they get to retirement age are often not mentally or physically able to take full advantage of it and so they started to retire a little program where you could buy back a day of your week and they expected that it was going to be people in their 50s doing it most popular among people in their 20s and 30s so I think there's um there's something here so we have heard I think a very strong case for the well-being uh family climate economic benefits of shortening the work week I just love to get a sense of the room and the panel so let's uh let's start with one question which is can you just hold up the number of days per week that you currently work let's ask the panel to do that and also those of you who are physically in the room with us hold up however many days you work currently I'm a hypocrite but okay okay I'm seeing a lot of six and sevens out there um two hands would be the clue and then how many days ideally would you be working moving forward what you want yeah what I want I mean I could work four to five yeah of course it can be flexible you can go like this if that helps you all right so I think the majority both of the panel and of the room is working a lot and wants to be working less even if they love their work yeah so what are the obstacles to moving toward that world and how do we overcome the resistance I'm going to open this up whoever has thoughts where where do we go next and I will cold call if I have to but I know you all have thoughts no no go ahead no you go well I was just going to say that I think that what Gould said is really interesting that we do have to kind of relearn how to use disposable time and we did see this in the pandemic we saw people you know beginning to take up knitting or baking and we began to kind of use our leisure time in different ways but I also wanted to come back to a point that both of you made which is that I read this analysis recently that actually Keynes was right that over our lifetime we do work 15 hour weeks it's just that as you said we have it all at the end of our lives and one of the most interesting experiments that I've seen is in Scotland where in the state is and it's interesting that the state can be a mover of these examples is asking people with very difficult work like you're a grave digger or a rubbish collector so in the state you can only apply for those jobs when you're young and then when you're a bit older you do sort of kind of slightly easier work and then at the end you become kind of a community worker janitor that's kind of so so you can also sort of spread the load in that way which I think is really really interesting it'd be amazing if work and family didn't peek at the same time in our lives well exactly but but we are our own worst enemies aren't we I mean I think that's the or at least here in Davosville like not necessarily everybody lets me but isn't the the the source of the happiness and the delight with the ability to work in new and different ways um the ability to choose how you want to work that works with your life and different people have different circumstances so for some people getting the extra day the formal extra day you only work four days as opposed to five you know may give them a lot of disposable time that they can do other stuff in and they'll be delighted with that whereas other people may say you know what dropping off kids at bus and picking up kids at bus priority number one if I can work my way around that and I fix that I'm delighted and I'll be happy to work you know on a on a Saturday to catch up on stuff I didn't have time to do before because you know I I saw some interesting research recently in in the US as you know we you know we we don't have a lot of vacation but there are some companies as part of as part of their new employee offering say unlimited vacation is the benefit expecting people to be delighted and you know what the outcome is when you give unlimited vacation in organizations that treasure a lot of work people take less vacation because the cultural environment is you know it's not not seen as rewarding and or being rewarded so so I think it's the notion of choice that gives the benefit and and the delight at least when I think about this from my perspective you know that I enjoy working you know when I can and when I'm interested in different topics but it can happen you know all the time at different times and I have time to do other things as well I feel the same way and I feel like I should disclose I work part of a sixth day because nobody else is working then and I want everyone else to go to four so that the fifth day will be like that so I will say at New America we you get six weeks paid time off so that includes everything and you can only roll over two of those weeks so if you don't take four weeks you're just leaving money on the table you will not cash it out when you leave but that's how strongly I believe that fundamentally I put this on my out of office in August that I can do 12 months of work in 11 months but not in 12 months you give me that one month off and really off I mean yes I read I do I do the kind of thing that I never have time to do but I don't do email I don't do your sort of standard stuff and that recharges you I mean again you you need that for for your productivity your creativity all of all of that so I actually think even in the United States we desperately need to change change that but this question about it does come down also to what we value in in how people spend their time so in the Atlantic article I wrote a decade ago I pointed out that if you had a man in your office who got up at four to train for a marathon and then came into the office and worked a regular day he would just be wow you know look at that discipline that's really something very much impressed the woman who does that and I know many who gets up at four to make sure the lunches are packed all the stuff is organized getting her kids ready and then comes in is actually regarded as less than if she's spending time on care so the question is and and you could you could think of lots of other hobbies in the same way what do we value the United States really thinks that how hard you work is the measure of your moral worth and in fact I would argue that caring for your family is and of course work supports a family we're all we're all aware of that but that the time you spend on emotional caregiving is just as really if anything it's more a measure of moral worth but at the very least it's equal so we all if we're going to think about time off we have to not undercut it by thinking only some things or sneaking that work on the weekend is what really defines about you know a human being we admire as opposed to a really well-rounded human being a human being who has many hobbies or really spends that time on community or family care wow being a hard worker does not make you a good person you heard it in Davos I work hard and I expect people to work hard but that doesn't mean working all the time far from it all right I'm looking at time I want to make sure we have time for lots of audience questions so let's begin we have a hand I just want to remind everyone that questions do end with a question mark thanks everyone hi I run a news organization that reports about conflicts and disasters around the world so we're very busy so I work a lot and appreciate all this thinking but I suppose you can switch down to four hours or four days a week but if if everything around you is still moving at the same pace it's impossible you're you can't so you know you need the whole society to slow down and that's a much bigger challenge than telling your employees you can work four days a week so how do you tackle that piece of it can I just try um so in the UAE the shorter work week was implemented for government we did not implement impose it on private sector what happened interestingly interestingly that 50% of the private companies followed the decision and even some of the global companies who have offices in the UAE took that practice and applied it in their offices across the world so I agree with you those there should be a coordinated effort from the private sector public sector to make it easy and for people to adapt for whether they have children in school or they're working in the private sector or the public sector so this is also a lesson learned from the UAE I wonder if that would work in reverse if a bunch of private companies started will governments follow I think we have we have a bunch of hands right over there please thanks very much I'm John Neil I'm chairman of Unipart group you know I think we've all learned the benefits of flexible working and we've all enjoyed it and there's a lot to learn from it and if you ask people would you like to work less hours it's pretty easy to say yes but maybe have to ask them another question which is you work in a western economy which is in deep debt so and most most western economies are certainly the UK is the US is if you ask another question which said well you can work four hours a week less but not so much money for education not so much money for healthcare sorry we can't spend any money on climate change or you could work four hours more and maybe we have a chance of fixing climate change and all the other things maybe you'd get a different answer and I just wonder what the thoughts of the panel are on that question so can I just ask a clarifying question you're assuming you'd get paid less no no no no you'd get paid but you'd be the same amount as now you exactly so the taxes tax revenues would be the same no the tax would be up because you mean but by and large the GDP is a function of how many hours we all work over simplification so if people are working more hours there's a greater GDP a greater tax take and therefore more money that can be spent by the state on providing benefits for people so you know the reason it's a controversial point is because we all kind of like the idea of working less hours and being more flexible but there's an economic cost to it so if you just ask people would you like to work less yeah sure I would but would you like to pay the consequence of that and then a more controversial question is if we asked you to work more hours but you'd get these benefits what would be the answer and that's the question I'm really asking for the views of the panel and I realize it's a little counterintuitive in an environment where we all like the idea of working less and working more flexibly I think our panel is rejecting the premise of the question well I think what you're getting at is you know the drive for productivity and I think assumed in all of this is what Anne-Marie said is 12 months of work done in 11 or 10 or whatever whatever it is because by the same token if you think back 100 years we were working 70 to 80 hours a week and productivity then took off because we're applying new technologies and our output increased so we created prosperity through growth but not by working more hours we actually reduced the hours almost by half if you think about this from an agrarian move and you Hilary you talked about the agrarian move and then into the industrial era and our capacity to produce wealth you know doubled or more than doubled many many times many many times over and I think the premise of this discussion is you know with the help of technology in different ways of working we are going to be able to create prosperity but not by working more hours but by increasing productivity in the way that we interact with innovation and technology so I think that's sort of the starting promise because I think everyone agrees it you know you can't lower productivity productivity needs to continue to grow but I think the great example of how quickly you can switch on stuff that we never thought we could you know remote working and technologies it's not as if all the companies suddenly bought zoom in one week you know we all had the technologies but we used them you know infrequently and poorly you know working our normal lives and then suddenly one day we couldn't go to the office and the very same technology suddenly was the lifeline that saved all of our businesses and we could continue operating in in new ways so the shift when forced can actually be dramatic and can be very very quick as well can I add to this I mean I think you know it is true that all the experiments show you know within reason that if you work less you are more productive so we do reject the premise I think of your question but the other thing is I think what's really important is how expensive this overwork is so this is why the ILO and WHO their data shows that work is killing us because if you work too much you have you know societies are dealing with a massive mental health crisis they're dealing with all kinds of chronic disease crises because we're not kind of you know out and about and walking so we're kind of suffering from different chronic conditions so there's there's a huge amount of particularly state expenditure that is dealt that is actually addressing too much work because you know I mean unfortunately the kind of work that is too much is not represented in this room because we are all kind of knowledge workers and leaders and so on but but for most people this is a kind of huge issue and then the other thing just to go because Anne Marie raised the really important point of equality but you know one of the biggest differentiators in what happens to our children is does anybody have time to help them with their homework yeah so if you have two parents working you know as all the families that I work in in the kind of work I do really really long hours they don't have time for that it's a massive marker of inequality that is then marking the next generation and we have to think about this is sustainable over generations we have a question in the front and while the microphone is on its way this is a good time to say that WEF actually has a framework on what good work looks like and if you take a look here I would just highlight a couple of things on here obviously inclusions there flexibility is huge but we're also talking about health and well-being being part of the responsibility of an employer and I think that that has come on the radar in a big way in the last few years and the cost of burnout for cardiovascular disease for depression and anxiety and a whole host of other psychological and physical conditions I would estimate four outweighs the benefit of whatever extra hours we are putting in thank you me now the rabie I'm the editor-in-chief of newspaper called the national it's a 24-hour media outlet so like heba I think about this is wonderful but we have to cover the shifts so one of the two problem question one is that we could give people four day weeks and reduce the hours they're working but we have to find people who are equally skilled because it would have to be shift system and the time when we're looking at a real search for talent but also the fact that there's 100% employment rates in a number of countries how are we going to find that given the crunch that we're in and the expectations post COVID and in addition to that not working would include not reading email is that possible for the majority of people who are not leaders who can actually delegate down can you switch off and is reading your email and keeping your eye on work and what's happening still considered work because I think even understanding what work means changes from person to person but I'd really focus on the on the having the talent because you think again about doctors we don't have enough doctors to do really drastic surgeries if they start taking more time off that has a real impact who wants it I mean I have a lot to say but I feel that I've said a lot about this but I mean I think one I think I mean obviously when you look at different professions I mean I challenge your doctor point I mean in the in the British health service we don't have enough professionals because it's like pouring water into a leaky bucket because the working conditions are so stressful and so long that everybody is leaving so we just can't train or steal enough people from other countries to keep our health systems going but I think what's really interesting is that you see big worker gains in technology revolutions but they have to fit with the technology so one one big gain in the last one was the weekend if you told people they were going to have a paid weekend people would have also said but hang on a minute like the production lines need to run seven days how is it possible to pay people for two days off this is never going to happen and yet it has happened and it's been rolled back and what's interesting about digital technologies is asynchronous so we should be able to think about how we kind of dovetail in new ways and we just haven't kind of I don't think we've imagined it enough now I you know when I run my workshops people they they reach for this and then if they're kind of lawyers or their design clients or their journalists they say but hang on a minute you know this person expects always to see the same person or so part of it is normative there may be some professions which is why I think we need to think about the non-linear life like you may do your job meaner for like 10 years and then you may need to kind of think about doing something else because it's simply unsustainable to kind of you know be brilliant in this way for that long so I think that that's because just I want to say one other thing is I think that this is not an individual thing this is a social thing like we need societies that give people time to rest to retrain so it's not about you know rewarding the individual we have to think about how we change the norms which is why I think your work is so interesting because you know you've been doing it at the state level to kind of say you don't have to do this but this is the new norm and I think that's very interesting I'll just add one quick point to this which is I also wonder if we need new models for shift work since a lot of people in this room are thinking about that I invested in a startup recently called a team that's trying to reimagine how we organize our work lives and they've taken the builder economy and said look if you're a software engineer or a designer you can team up with the people that you most want to work with and then you can work on projects together and these projects come out and you can rent your skills out to the highest bidder or the most noble purpose as opposed to working for one company I wonder why we aren't doing that in more kinds of work right this is what what uber drivers do you don't have assigned shifts you have tasks that need to be done and then there's a pool of people who are available to take those what if all of our jobs were organized like that we wouldn't have jobs I guess but we would have projects and we would have a lot of flexibility around it and I would no please no no I mean I would I would push all even further job shares yeah I remember at the national security council one point two young mothers both with you know relatively very young children they would have been very happy to share the job so that somebody was on because yes it's the national security council no no no we can't do that they would take half money they didn't need they had you know leave of various kinds there are all sorts of ways you can think creatively about how to cover what needs to be covered and on email I was looking I was looking for my phone to see if I have it on my Kindle but I just bought a book on the world without email email is killing us right I mean there's just no way we need to know what is happening all the time and respond all the time so I actually think that's a separate conversation and a separate reform that we won't be going through I'm going to email you about it later other questions from the room right up here please thank you Stephika thank you hi uh Henry Beza Manila I run an educational company there but I'm also half French and we we did implement a 35 hour working week um and I was just curious what your thoughts were a on that experiment and b on the role of government legislation uh because the theory in the time in France was if you wait for people to come up with it if you wait for companies to legislate it's going to take too long we're just going to impose it on everyone else and obviously lots of backlash but it pushed through so I'm very curious what your thoughts are on legislation in general and in the French example if you have any thoughts thank you you know I think that that's a great example of you know the the gentleman had asked a question about a change that wasn't driven by productivity improvements but a societal desire to work less with the theory that if you take 40 weeks to 35 lots more jobs will be created on the 8% unemployment rate at the time in France is going to come down because more jobs were going to be created none of that happened what happened was that everybody continued to work exactly the same amount of hours because you're in France though we're all tracking this which means all Frenchmen have eight weeks of vacation so you extended you know not more people got into the workforce no more jobs were created but people have difficulties frankly in France to manage schedules that are overlapping we have a lot of frontline people that are three or four people in the office you know there's a lot of coordination between who's on vacation and who is not so as not to break the 35 hour work rule and getting everybody that legislated time off so as far as the intention was concerned it is considered to be an abject failure actually wow so Ohud tell us how we can make this a success can you fix France for us I'll talk about the way so you know Adam I see the four-day work week as part of a bigger fundamental changes that we are witnessing in workplace yeah and this change is unavoidable fast-paced and continuous and I think the governments can play a role in being the role model and champion the changes in workplace because I think the pandemic and the disruption caused by the pandemic is giving us golden opportunity to reimagine the legislations the redesign the work that was invented 100 days 100 days 100 years ago and have more agile and flexible systems in the UAE we mandated on the government we did not mandate it on the private sector but then the private sector when they saw the government leading they opted to implement it in the private sector and not just in the UAE but in the world so I think the government can play a role in showing I think entities they need data they need numbers so we need to do a lot of assessment and publish numbers to convince also leaders whether in the public sector or private sector to adopt the the new norm I think there's no u-turn it's just going forward and many of entities will adopt the shorter work week perfect segue to my closing question in the minute we have left we didn't really answer the question of how are we going to get more people on board with a shorter work week can I ask you each to give us a sentence if you have one piece of advice for the room on how we can make work a slightly smaller part of our lives what would you suggest and I'll just start by saying don't count it out until you run the experiment pilot it let's actually see what happens you know in in in labor markets that are constrained in terms of workers workers are making the choice for us they're joining organizations that will provide flexibility and choice and working their way or working my way is really the way to attract and retain talent so I think it's a little bit of an academic question because I think it's going to be reality this is how the world is going because workers want this to happen we've proven that it can be done and it's moving in that direction and I would say for the managers who are worried about it because I find it's much more the managers than the workers manage to task identify this is what I need done this is when I need it done by this is the quality I need and then just see I'm a social entrepreneur and I find that the pushback often comes from small businesses is often an idea that big business can do this but small business can't and what I've done is I've used an organization called Timewise UK for my hiring Timewise has women who basically want to work predictable flexibility I hire from them immediately I have a fantastic workforce that share that norm so there's not like one person kind of dropping off their kids and then everybody else begins to adjust so other younger workers might not have children but they certainly want to see their friends this can't just be about whether you have children or not and so this this immediately begins to kind of shift the norm so you know make it a make it don't do it a one person thing hiring that way for a cultural and it can happen everywhere let's focus on the purpose what are we trying to achieve here I think it's the well-being and flexibility so this can be achieved by a shorter work week or by other tools that can be the answer for the the purpose and for governments I think the non-negotiable is service delivery to public we we cannot we cannot jeopardize the service delivery so as long as we providing the services the right service to our people then we can adopt any solution well we have a range of views on the ideal amount of work but I think we're all aligned on the idea that we want to make choices about how much we work and that ultimately people should be evaluated not on the time they put in but on the contributions they make thank you all