Hello World Camp Kochi and welcome to my talk how better performing websites can help save the planet. My name is Jack Lennox and this talk is being delivered remotely. My hope was that I would be able to do this live but unfortunately we've had some issues get in the way with the internet and so this is a pre-recorded version but rest assured that I only recorded this a few hours ago so you are seeing this almost live and I will be around afterwards to answer any questions you may have on Twitter and maybe in some other format we'll see how that works but I'll certainly be following along as this gets aired. So as you can probably tell this is going to be a talk about sustainability and the internet. This is what's at stake this is the the blue marble that we all live on and I'm going to introduce this by talking about how I came across this topic. This is a project known as Blackhole and this came about I think in 2007 was when it was first launched and it came off the back of the idea of how much power could Google save if it had a black background instead of a white background. There's quite a long story to it and there's some interesting data around how the newer types of screens that we're using these days actually use more power to produce black than produce white so it kind of applied more to CRT monitors and the older monitors that we used to have than it does now but there's a whole thing it's it's really worth checking out it's quite an interesting project. And then bringing us up to the present day or more or less the present day earlier this year a university in the UK carried out a study of YouTube and we're looking at design changes that YouTube could make that might cut the CO2 emissions of the platform and I'll talk about that a bit later on in this talk. A bit of a background about me I've been working as a kind of freelancer and then within agencies and then within startups from 2009 to 2013. Since 2013 I've been working at Automatic and I've been on the webpress.com VIP team since 2016 actually that data's wrong and I should have updated that but never mind. And then another really kind of strange thing that's become a part of my life is that I've become quite political and in 2017 I stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Green Party of England and Wales and actually as we speak I'm doing that again. So we have our general election which some of you may know about on the 12th of December and where I live I am our parliamentary candidate for whatever that's worth. So having seen projects like Blackhall I first became more involved in the idea of the sustainability of the internet at the Mozilla Festival which is an annual event which kind of rotates around it's actually been in London for quite a long time now but it the idea was that it would move around and I think it's due to move next year. It's a big open source festival and I attended it in 2017 and saw a talk by a guy called Chris Adams who has done a lot of fantastic work on internet sustainability and he held this session called how to build a planet-friendly web and it piqued my interest and I went along and heard a lot of the information some of which is now in this talk that I'm going to present to you and a lot of that's evolved as well since 2017 but I haven't really thought about the internet not being planet-friendly so it was a really kind of interesting thing for me to hear. The problem as you may have guessed is that the internet has an enormous carbon footprint. To give you an idea of how big there was a study as part of the Greenpeace click clean campaign which I'll talk about again throughout this talk in 2012 they estimated that the IT sector has the if it were a country it would be the third largest country on earth by its electricity consumption and this electricity consumption is rapidly growing. This was carried this was part of a study in the journal Nature carried out earlier this year and as you can see the internet is forecast to be using up to 21% of projected electricity demand by 2030 and you can see how that breaks down here it's quite scary and the reason this is bad is that the world's energy mix is not very clean basically we're producing a lot of carbon dioxide for the electricity that we use this is a fantastic project called the electricity map there's a link in the slides and I will share all these slides so don't worry about trying to follow along too closely but electricity map org they're gradually getting more and more data so you can see there are a few states within India that are now being tracked they sort of come on and off it depends if the API's are available and what information they can get but yeah this kind of gives you a sense of how we're not producing energy very cleanly some countries are doing quite well but lots of countries aren't doing so well including the UK I'm sad to say sometimes we're better because this is also live data so when the winds are blowing and a lot of our offshore wind is being active then our carbon intensity gets better the internet produces about 1 billion tons of CO2 every year and to put that into perspective that's about the same as global air travel which is quite bad and because of that energy mix that I just showed you the internet is the largest coal-fired machine on earth or it can be thought of at least in that way which is quite a scary thought. This was put into stark contrast by Mozilla again they didn't they do an annual internet health report and they did one in 2018 where they shone a particular light on this problem and one of the quotes in that article is that sustainability should be a bigger priority especially as the internet expands into new territory. Now as a world many of you will probably be aware of the work that's going on to try to deal with this big CO2 emission problem and the climate change that it's causing the Paris Agreement is the kind of the thing that everyone is now working together on or almost everyone it's that's been in place since 2015 there is one country that sadly is not currently involved in the Paris Agreement however the good news there is that there's a project called America's Pledge which I think is primarily led by Michael Bloomberg and this basically represents more than half of the US economy and population still keeping to the pledges of the Paris Agreement so that is still kind of being followed by almost every country and half of the country that more than half of the country that isn't currently involved. There are more closer to home there are other efforts going on within our industry specifically to try and sort this out so one of the best ones of the best campaigns that I'm aware of is the Greenpeace Click Clean campaign where they look at all of the big internet companies and hold them to account for their sustainability and you can download the 2017 report I believe there is a new one due to come out there wasn't one last year but there is a new one that they're working on at the moment but it's really good to look at the one from 2017 and all the work that's been going on since then. Poorly performing websites are bad for the environment I'm afraid to say and this gives you some idea of how this problem is getting worse so this is a graphic showing page bloat as you can see in 2011 the average web page was just under a megabyte and at the start of 2017 the average web page had grown to just over 3 megabytes and this graphic kind of breaks down what's going on there so you can see in 2011 the vast majority of the weight of a page was images there were some scripts as well mixed in with that and then everything else is really quite small you can see in 2017 images are taking up a lot more but also there's new contenders coming in that really didn't factor in 2011 like video and I think this unfortunately this graphic this data isn't being tracked in the same way so we can't actually look at exactly what it's like now and I'll explain that in a bit but I would imagine video in 2019 is an even bigger chunk a much bigger chunk than it was in 2017 but there's some other interesting things going on there so you can see a lot more JavaScript is coming down as well now as we download webpages so a projection that was made when this data was taken from the HTTP archive was that the average web page by last month would be about four megabytes the HTTP archive switch from using averages to me to median as a measure so we don't actually know for sure if that's the case but looking at the way the median has grown it probably is the average web page probably is now about four megabytes which is pretty big so coming back to that University of Bristol study that University in the UK that I was talking about they studied YouTube and they were looking at design changes that might reduce the energy usage of the website and therefore reduce its environmental impact and the paper you can actually go and read it if you like it's actually not too bad it's not too long and it's quite interesting to read through all of the things that they considered and how they came with came to the conclusions that they come to but the they focus on some very interesting ideas which I hadn't previously heard about and so the first one of those is sustainable human-computer interaction now sustainable human-computer interaction is where you design services that promote more sustainable behaviors so this is an example of a website which has actually recently been rebranded it was really it was called loco to it's a website for booking train services across Europe and one thing it does is it shows a carbon calculator as you're checking at the point that you're actually buying the ticket showing you how much co2 you're saving so this is like a design design factor which would hopefully promote more more sustainable behavior by making you realize that in the process of traveling by train you're saving co2 versus flying co2 emissions within the UK there's a website called well this is great Western Railway which is one of our railway operators and they have a similar thing although instead of using the European thing of comparing it to flying they show you how your co2 emissions compare to going by car so you can see there's that there and this is again this shci sustainable human-computer interaction idea there's an app called MoBike I didn't know if MoBike are in India yet but I know they're in I think it's a Chinese company they're in lots and lots of countries now and this is one of these bike renting apps and one thing I like about MoBike is that they show you how much carbon you've saved by taking bikes as this is from my my personal account and I just noticed this when I was using the app I quite like this and then there are other ways that this sustainable human-computer interaction can work so you can see on this website Untold which is a coffee roaster that at the point of check out you can potentially pay for a co2 neutral delivery now this does this kind of is an offset thing so there's still some complexity in the extent to which this is necessarily that good but it is at least promoting the more sustainable behavior like a better option potentially for people that are buying coffee but yeah there's ethical things about whether it's right to make this like something that people feel bad about make them pay for it I'm not saying this is a great way of doing it but it's an interesting idea so another idea that's hit upon within the paper is sustainable interaction design and this is where we actually change the way that our products are designed to make them use less energy so the thing that the paper highlighted was that if YouTube switched off video playback while watching music videos there's potentially quite a significant energy saving and therefore quite a big emission saving as well now many of you probably aware that one of the things that people use YouTube for now is just listening to music and most of the time when people are doing this the video is still playing and like no one's actually watching it and it doesn't need to be happening interesting the YouTube have actually packaged this in the premium service where you can turn off video playback so it's kind of strange because you pay money to get less but the paper was saying that this is something that YouTube should make standard because it would save potentially a lot of energy if you could just listen to things rather than have to have the video playing so this now comes to the niche that I'm interested in and what we're going to be talking about which is sustainable web design and the real point here like if I haven't made this clear already is that every byte transferred represents energy being consumed now if we want to try and understand how much energy is consumed by the data we're transferring there are various things we can look at one particular thing here which I find interesting is from the ACEE which is the American Council for an energy efficient economy they did a study in 2012 and the link is on this so if you want to look at this yourself that's you're very welcome to and this kind of shows you how much power goes into getting the bytes down the wire or over the wireless networks to your device and I'll cut a long story short this is how they break it down so it can vary a huge amount depending on how you're actually getting this data but this is a this is an average estimation so you can see almost half of the energy is the data center providing the content to you and then a significant chunk probably about a third is your just over a third sorry is your device that's kind of the thing you're using to download to view that data or watch the video or look at the images or whatever and then about just under 15 percent 14 percent that's the transportation that's all of the switches and relays and everything else that are in between you and the content you're getting from the data center and to cut a long story very short it basically comes down to about five kilowatt hours per gigabyte so that's about five watt hours per megabyte now let's do some math let's kind of work out what this actually means so an unnamed VIP client one of our clients I was working on their homepage takes about 10 megabytes to download which is pretty big as you know from earlier that's more than double the average and so I thought it'd be interesting to work out roughly how much co2 is produced by working out how much power it takes us to get that bit of content to us so this is just loading the uncashed homepage now unfortunately Kerala is not currently on the electricity map but the neighboring state of Kanataka is so I've taken their carbon intensity which is actually pretty good it varies quite a lot I've noticed from looking at electricity map that there's a lot of solar energy in Kanataka and so that means that when it's sunny obviously the carbon that you know the energy production is quite low carbon but it it changes overnight when it gets dark for obvious reasons so anyway the point is 255 grams of carbon dioxide are produced for every kilowatt hour of energy that comes out of Kanataka at this particular moment in time which was 545 a.m. I think that's UTC anyway doesn't matter so let's do some maths so the way we can do this we can first work out how many grams of co2 are produced per watts because we're not talking about kilowatts when we're looking at webpages it's you know as I said it was a watts per megabyte so we divide 255 by a thousand which gives us 0.255 grams per watt as we know it takes 5 watts to sorry it's 5 watts per megabyte so that we know that there are 10 of those so that makes it 50 watts to get our 10 megabytes so we can now multiply our 50 by 0.255 which gives us 12.75 grams of co2 our 10 megabyte web page produces 12.75 grams of co2 each time it's loaded and I have added the caveat that that's when it's uncashed so on on repeated views it wouldn't be as much but to put this into perspective the American publishing industry estimates that producing a page of paper takes between four and five grams of co2 so loading this web page once is about the equivalent of two pages of paper that's a very simplistic example but it kind of shows that actually digital services have a much bigger carbon footprint than we might be thinking you know we have this whole thing there's obsession about like not printing things off and people put it in their signatures please don't print this email and all that kind of stuff but it's actually very interesting to realize that by sending say a 10 megabyte attachment on an email that's like two pieces of paper every time you do it in terms of co2 another interesting thing to think about here is that the average laptop uses about 30 watt hours so it'll get through 30 watts in an hour so given the owl page at downloading that one page once was 50 watts that's like an hour and a half more than an hour and a half of using the average laptop sustainable web design what what does it mean how can we think about it so I've kind of tried to create a model here of ways that I think we can apply this to the work that we do and so it's cutting digital waste improving user experience and using renewable energy so let's focus on that first one cutting digital waste what does this look like there's this really interesting idea called the rule of least power which I only came across relatively recently but it's something that Tim Berners-Lee has been talking about for quite a long time and it's one of the one of the ideas that the internet is kind of based on so computer science spent the last 40 years making languages which were as powerful as possible nowadays we have to appreciate the reasons for picking not the most powerful solution but the least powerful and this is one of the kind of guiding ideas behind html the idea behind html is that it's a really simple language which means it's really easy for devices to download it it's really quick to pass it's very easy for such engines to crawl it it's very easy for you know it's theoretically easy to make accessible because of the way it's semantic and the way it's laid out and obviously it's evolved to be better in all of those different ways but it's not a complicated language and it's not a complicated protocol at its basic level so a translation for how that what we can think of when we're doing our our work as web developers and people who work on the web is that we shouldn't use jQuery when we don't need to for example that's a load of extra weight and also we shouldn't use javascript and css will do we often see tricks that are in javascript for things like drop-down menus and there's ways of doing that now with css there's a really great website called you might not need jQuery.com I recommend checking that out as a starting point if you're not familiar with it and a translation of that translation is that we should be transmitting as few bytes as possible in any way that we can so obviously there are extremes to which you can take this and i'm going to talk about that as this talk goes on but there's loads of different ways which i'm going to highlight that we can put this into practice for example we can simplify the user interface do we really need background videos social media embeds or carousels and i've picked on these three things because these are three things that various studies have shown users don't generally like background videos are generally you know most users would rather a site just loads quicker than there's some fancy background video playing social media embeds there's been various studies of websites that found that by removing the social media links from their articles their articles were actually shared more often on social media and so people generally don't like those buttons that people feel they need to stuff everywhere and then carousels there's a website called should i use the carousel.com i won't give away the answer but check it out it's quite funny we also then want to be focusing on reducing code so we want to be creating lean html we want to be avoiding divitus and unsemantic stuff you know all these extra elements that don't need to be there try to cut that down as much as possible keep it as clean as possible and obviously each individual element is not necessarily that big but if you're building a plug-in that has a gallery or something in there are loads of ways that that's going to get multiplied and multiplied and multiplied and so we it's it does matter to try to keep these things as lean and clean as possible and the same applies to simplifying our css there are obviously all these fantastic css preprocessor languages that we use now things like sass but we have to bear in mind that things like sass produce css which is can get quite messy sass has got better and better at this but there are still things to be thinking about when you're nesting and you know keeping your sass relatively sane if you're using sass and looking at what css actually gets produced and then finally using less scripts and there's loads of ways that can that can go on obviously not using javascript if you don't need to but also thinking about sorry i'll stay on the slide also thinking about the services that you enqueue and if you're using a library for something you know and then you're loading it on every page when maybe it's only needed on one page or all sorts of things that we can be thinking about with that so this is a quote that i really like from a guy in the uk called hayden pickering the most performant accessible and easily maintainable feature of a website is the one that you don't make in the first place and i would add sustainable to that list of things as well another concept which we can look at with some of our code is something called tree shaking there's a particularly a good way of doing this with css there's a tool called purge css and this will actually check if you have unused css on your website there are also coverage tools now within chrome and i won't go into them in this talk but if you look up google chrome coverage it will show you where you have unused javascript and css on your pages this article is fantastic there's a link to it by sarah diane talking about how she removed 250 kilobytes of css with this tool with with purge css what's particularly amazing about that is that her original css bundle was 259 kilobytes and she dropped that down to nine kilobytes with this tool it's pretty amazing as i'm talking about using last script which i was saying earlier things like the twitter follow button uh people you might not think about this but this button weighs 50 kilobytes and a plain sex link uses almost zero bytes and again to put this into perspective in 1969 when nasa managed to get a man on the moon they had about 50 kilobytes of data storage to play with and in 2019 that gets you a twitter follow me button images i won't go into too much detail there's lots of great talks on webpress.tv about this use the correct image compress images as much as possible and lazy load them if any of these things are not things you're familiar with if you just google you're going to find all sorts of information about what you could be doing here again with fonts i won't go into detail but we should be sub-setting our fonts for the characters we need we should be sparing in how many fonts we load preferably maybe maximum three preferably two preferably one sometimes zero you could just go with the system fonts um and serve them only in the waf2 format if possible and it's important to realize that webpress has been pretty good here for example the wp admin dashboard no longer uses any um fonts that need loading it just uses system fonts uh and it's pretty cool if there's a there's some good uh there's a good post about the process that led to them doing that which i think is is great back and stuff again i won't go into detail these are kind of googleable things but use https over http to h sorry http to um use engine x with fast cgi cache if that sounds really technical and you don't know like that requires server level access there are plugins like wp supercache which you can use on pretty much any hosting i'd highly recommend checking those out and again look at gzip and brotli compression some hosts enable these by default but not all hosts do and it's worth looking into whether your host does or not all of this is covered in a lot more detail in a fantastic tool called web performance 101 by a guy called Ivan akulov i'd highly recommend checking this out it's like a it's a talk as a website that you can just scroll through it's really nice next we want to be focusing on improving user experience now the thing is this is kind of all the things that we already talk about and there's probably going to be oh i think there are other talks at this work camp that are going to be covering these subjects so search engine optimization and accessibility first mentality and following rest practices in theory all of these things play into making our websites more sustainable and the reason for that is that when people have to waste time looking around your website because it's hard to use then they're wasting energy like every extra page load that doesn't need to happen is a page load we should be trying to prevent so improving user experience saves energy alongside all the other things which are great about improving user experience so making websites accessible and following best practices mean that people are going to get to the content quicker so finally using renewable energy this is the third idea well the third concept i think is really important with sustainable web design so this is the green web foundation which is probably the best directory of green web hosts that you're going to find it's not brilliant and it's great for finding certain things but for example i was trying to see if there were any indian green web hosting companies and there are two listed on the green web foundation website but neither of them seem to be active maybe they were active at some point but they're not anymore unfortunately so i'm there may well be that that doesn't mean there aren't any green web posts in india and i have had a look and i'm so far been unsuccessful but there may well be some so i'm not saying there aren't any but in the absence of a green web post in india a really great article i recommend checking out is this how to build a low-tech website by low-tech magazine this is an amazing website that is hosted on a raspberry pi on a balcony in the spanish city of Barcelona and there's a solar panel on the battery that keep the web keep the site online it's a fascinating read there's all sorts of other really amazing techniques that they've used to make the sites as sustainable as possible and to make the images as small in size as possible there's this old fashion dithering technique they've used which kind of looks like those old games from like the 1990s and the 80s actually as well but yeah definitely check this out it's really cool coming away from sort of local web hosts within the WordPress space dream host is one of the hosts that is listed on the green web foundation's directory and they have a load of information on their website about how they provide green hosting and the offsetting they do it's not all coming from renewable energy but yeah they explain it it's really worth checking it out on the kind of enterprise level if you do want to be doing big enterprise stuff Google is the best company in terms of their sustainability credentials I have other ethical issues for Google so I'm not saying they're a fantastic company at everything they do but certainly from a sustainability perspective they are pretty good and Alphabet the parent company of Google is actually the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy on the planet which is pretty cool so putting this into practice and taking it to an extreme I know I'm actually slightly running over so I'm going to go through this as quickly as possible I have a little project which I highly recommend everyone checks out I took this really far I went with no images no sidebar no embeds no menu navigation and almost no additional HTTP requests this project is called Sustee WP and it's www.susteewp.com I took underscores the base theme that was produced by automatic and has kind of become a standard for building themes for WordPress and I basically just removed almost all of it and made it as lightweight as I possibly could and this was what I ended up with so you can see we end up with with the compression that's on the site we end up with about three kilobytes of effectively html two and a half kilobytes of css and five hundred and eighty eight bytes which is the svg that are all kind of speech bubble with the leaf inside it so it's six kilobytes of transfer and thirteen point eight kilobytes uncompressed so that's gzip and broccoli which are compressing those assets as they come to you wherever you are this does pretty well this is the google lighthouse tool for auditing to see how performant your site is and as you can see it does very well on all of these things there is actually an accessibility issue with the menu because the menu loads on its own page so I know that's not actually perfect and that is something I've been meaning to fix which I haven't done yet I'm quite bad at just making a project and then abandoning it but I haven't abandoned this I just need to come back and do some more work on it it also does very well on web page test this is another tool you can use for seeing how your site's performing I'm guessing a lot of people will be familiar with this but as you can see it's a straight a's on this one as well and you can see you get a time to first byte of point one six one seconds which is pretty fast for time to first byte you rarely get sites that are much quicker than that so in summary it's 93 lines of html two and a half kilobytes of css three requests per page the css and the svg logo zero kilobytes of javascript and 0.01 grams of co2 per page view to get an idea of how your sites are performing there are some other tools you can use I highly recommend ecograder this has a whole lot of information and is produced by an american agency called mighty bites um which is yeah they're a great company highly recommend checking them out and check out this tool another new tool on the block is website carbon which is produced by an agency in the uk called whole grain digital you can type your url in and it will give you some fun stats about how much co2 your website is producing and then coming back to that coffee roaster I mentioned at the beginning there's a service called cloverly and they do carbon offsets on demand this is kind of a separate thing but if you are thinking of building some of those things into your services if you are delivering products for example and you maybe want to have people offsetting the carbon of the delivery this is something you could maybe look at it's quite interesting in the real world people always say to me oh well you know um yeah these examples are great but like I've worked for my boss and you know there's there's no way we can actually do this like it's all great in theory but there's no way this can actually be applied to the work I do well I would counter that with webperf.xyz which is this great article performance leaderboard um I highly recommend checking out the website they show you a whole bunch of top publishing companies and how fast their fastest articles are at loading and therefore kind of implied in that is how few kilobytes they're using so I took the top example from thought company so the thought company this article which has images it has all sorts of you know all bells and whistles of a typical website and this page loads in 201 kilobytes now when you compare that to the 10 megabits I was talking about at the start that's pretty impressive 0.2 megabytes gov.uk this is the big um it's an enormous website a network of websites that the British government have um it's they've one of the good things that has happened in the in UK politics uh in the last sort of 10 years or so is that a lot of money was spent on the government digital services program which employed lots of very good web developers and web people to do lots of work and make basically completely overhaul all of our services that you can do online long story short the homepage for gov.uk only that only takes 417 kilobytes to download whole grain digital the company that make website carbon they've recently renovated their website and it loads in about 213 kilobytes this is Justin Tadlock's exhale theme Justin Tadlock is obviously a legend in WordPress theming and he's been really focusing on performance recently um and this new theme the demo homepage is 423 kilobytes there's images and everything else in it low-tech magazine that example i showed you there's might sound quite big at 435 kilobytes but if you check out that page it's actually there's like loads of images and all sorts of other content in there so to fit all of that into just under half a megabyte is quite impressive and this is one of my favorite examples this global warning website this was put together for the 10k apart 10k apart challenge where you have to fit as much as you can into a 10 kilobyte project um it's just 11 kilobytes which considering that that's only just under double like basically my project but does way more there's like animations there's all sorts going on with this it's really exciting and i recommend checking it out there's a link in the stuff at the end in conclusion we need to set performance budgets i would say that 500 kilobytes per page is a good starting point if you can't quite keep to that that's that's fine but we shouldn't be producing home pages that take 10 megabytes we should be adopting the rule of least power and most importantly no one will care about the websites if we're all fighting over water this is a serious issue and we should take it seriously everyone should sign this petition this is for the sustainable servers by 2024 this is being run by the industry highly recommend reading about it there's a link at the bottom everyone should sign the sustainable web manifesto there's a great conference that's all about this so if this really interests you it's going to be going on next year this is actually quite an old screenshot but yeah sustainable ux i spoke at the one that happened this year that in february of this year it's going to be going on again next year and i highly recommend uh that people get signed up if this is of interest to them there's a great slack community um and a community of people that care about these issues at climateaction dot tech and in conclusion sustainable websites are more performant more user friendly more accessible more server friendly and more planet friendly we're hiring if you go to wpvip.com slash careers if you want to come and work for us i think i actually have closed the thing down i've probably just completely murdered uh your language and i'm really sorry but this should say thank you very much and i hope it does but uh if there are any questions i'm available on twitter and you can also email me jack at automatic.com and i think that's all that's my oh this is my bibliography yeah so if these slides will be available and you can download all of the stuff that i talk about from these links um this is where this will stop i may now be live in the room in some way answering questions or i may not and i'm sorry i've run over slightly thank you very much i hope you have a fantastic word camp and i hope to see as many of you as possible in person at some time in the future thank you


In this episode, you're going to learn how you can effectively deal with the way organizations currently operate and how the design process works. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hello, this is Fritje Wegener and this is the service design show episode 132. Hi, I'm Marc and welcome back to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the service of service design, what are the things that make a difference between success and failure, all to help you make great services happen that have a positive impact on people and business. In this episode, we're going to explore why design often seems incompatible with how organizations currently work. So here are some examples that I'm sure you're familiar with. For one, the emergent nature of the design process where we're totally okay, not knowing at the start what the outcome will be versus how organizations are looking for predictability at the very start. Another classic is that we as designers want to dig deeper and reframe every challenge at the start, while most organizations just value implementation and want to get things done. And here's one more that I'm sure you're familiar with. We as designers embrace failure and want to experiment a way forward. Well, many organizations are there just to optimize things and do things as efficiently as possible with as little mistakes as possible. The good news is that there's already a lot of knowledge about how organizations operate and why they operate the way they do. We as a design community can take this knowledge and use it to our advantage to overcome the challenges we experience every day. So if you sometimes feel a bit frustrated about the seeming incompatibility between design and management-led organizations, this episode will guide you in the right directions where you might be able to find answers. If you enjoy exploring topics like this, don't forget that we publish a new video every week or so here on this channel. So if you want to keep growing as a service design professional, make sure you click that subscribe button and that bell icon to be notified when new episodes come out. So that's all for the intro and now let's jump quickly into the conversation with Fridjolf. Welcome to the show Fridjolf. Hello there. Hey, awesome to have you on. This is going to be a conversation that I know a lot of people will be interested in. It's a topic that has been covered on the show lately quite often and we're going to chat about organizational design and the challenges around organizational design and hopefully also find some better questions and maybe even find some answers. But before we dive into that, I'm really curious if you could give a short introduction about who you are and what you do these days. Absolutely. I'm Fridjolf Wegener. I'm finishing my PhD at the Delphi University of Technology, the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. And I kind of combine my backgrounds in organization studies. So I studied business in Amsterdam Innovation Management in Rotterdam and design. I also studied three years in Delphi and tried to combine these to kind of like have a perspective on organization design and I'm really inspired there by pragmatism. And so I think part of this is about organization design but I think also part of this is a bit about pragmatic design exploring what is a pragmatic approach to design actually. And I think that's kind of like the topics mixed together. That's super interesting. Pragmatic design organizational. You don't have a typical design background but you sort of merge into design. I really like those ingredients for the rest of the conversation. But the listeners know who have been part of the service design show for a long time that before we dive into that we do a rapid fire question round. Five questions and your task is to answer them as quickly as possible so that we get to know you a little bit better as a person before we head into the actual topic. So are you ready for question number one? Absolutely. What's always in your fridge? Oatmeal. Okay that's a popular one. Which books are you reading at this moment if any? I don't know. I'm reading a lot the discord novels for sleeping. Okay well if they are good we'll add a link in the show notes. What superpower would you like to have? Make people see the consequences of the actions far down into the future. Okay great. What did you want to become when you were a kid? Oh that was the usual firefighter, policeman, doctor. I really wanted to become a trauma surgeon on a helicopter but I also wanted to be the helicopter pilot. It's a super common. I haven't heard that one that often. And finally when did you first get in touch with service design? You've been in touch with design in general for quite a few years. Do you recall when you heard about service design? I think for me it was really when I was thinking about okay what's the place that might be most interested in organization design and I was thinking that that should be service designers because they're closest to organization design but they're not yet doing necessarily organization design so that was really the reason. Organizational design and service design are super closely related I think almost not entirely interchangeable but there are a lot of overlaps. What's also good to mention and we didn't do that in the introduction so far. You also run a podcast right? Yeah I'm involved in a podcast talking about organizations so it's a podcast about organization and management and what we do is we kind of like read the classics about organization studies and management but we try to do it in a way that that's also relevant for practitioners. We've been doing that for a couple of years I think it's a really nice way if you don't know yet so much about organizations and about management it's a really nice way to kind of like drop into specific topics. We have a lot of episodes by now so you can really kind of like pick and choose what you're curious about. I'm also a bit involved in the out of the blue podcast of the faculty of the design faculty in Delft. I think that's also a nice way to kind of like explore hey what's the latest research and design doing what's the faculty doing so I think that's both of them are nice ways to kind of like keep in touch on the topics that I'm working on. What's the title of your podcast? These are the two podcasts. So what's the title where can people find them? Oh I'm sorry so one is I think just talking about organizations.com and the other one I think it's on the website but I can just give you the links. We'll drop the link in the show notes. Okay awesome so when we were preparing this chat one of the things that I found really interesting is that you mentioned like organizational is an organizational design isn't new it's just the fact that designers are getting into actual organizational design and that's a good thing because there is a lot of material already that we can sort of study and read and learn from and bring into our practice. Now how did you get on the path of exploring organizational design and especially from a pragmatic perspective? Yeah so I think so the reason why I didn't continue on Delft was there was a moment where I had to calculate how thick a table had to be for a person of 200 kilo to sand on it and then for a person of 200 kilo to jump on it once and then how often would the person have to jump for the table to break and I was like I don't care about that like I care that it doesn't break I don't find this calculation really interesting to do once interesting yeah to figure out how to do it but not not again and what I realized when I was in Delft still was that I was really curious much more around the team processes of the design team I was much more interested in how the designers work together with the business people with the marketers etc but back then I didn't realize that there's a different kind of design that tackles these kind of questions I thought that I was not doing design anymore that I had to do business and organization and that was also one of the reasons why I left here but I somehow I never really came across the term organization design until one of my former supervisors in Amsterdam a fluidic and she she she mentioned organizations and that that's what I was interested in like and then I looked at it was like oh yeah that is actually what I'm interested in and that's kind of like how how how it all started yeah and what's the pragmatic angle because you sort of emphasize that aspect yeah so I think so it at first it was separate from each other because I so while I was doing a master I was working at a big high tech company trying to to combine the practice of innovation management with the theory on innovation management I was really frustrated because I realized like these are really different worlds and they barely have anything to do with each other and so I already had this drive to do research that is practically relevant so that that's there's a pragmatic side and only later did I realize that there's actually a really important person in design namely tonal schoen who also had looked at pragmatism to understand design better so the whole notion of design inquiry but also notions like reframing etc like all of them they can relate back to to pragmatism and so I'm really interested in in this pragmatic approach to design that is quite distinct from from the way that say engineers approach design the way that also say consultants or managers approach organization design as a kind of like top down planning process and really much more highlight the yeah the the aesthetic aspect of design the emergent aspect of design and realizing how often that actually conflicts with with how organizations are now are designed exactly yeah and that's I think sort of the core of the thing that we want to explore the conflicts the roadblocks the incompatibilities between the way organizations work most our organization work these days and how the design process works and rather than getting frustrated and I've been there a lot of times like you want to show the value of the design process you want to show that it really can help progress towards a certain goal but you run into all those organizational challenges and as a designer you often don't fully understand why they are incompatible why they aren't moving in the right direction that you were hoping for and we said there are a few that I think a lot of designers will recognize so let's let's explore them um is there do you have a favorite one one roadblock a challenge that you found a lot of designers run into I think so one one really big issue I mean we have that like anytime we have companies involved in teaching we have we have the same issue that they're kind of like expect to know beforehand what you'll get out at the end that's like a very common thing and I know like when I go to the baker and I I say I want to have a bread then I want to get that bread at the end of that process I don't want them to like re-design the bread as we you know as I'm buying the bread so I get that but what people don't realize is the consequence that you basically you can't design anymore because basically the client already designed something and they're just asking you to implement that right that's not a point yeah this is this is classic right we I think we've all been there uh you you know that the design process is emergent you know that as soon as you sort of engage in the design process you will learn things that will inspire the next step in the design process and that's how you work you will sort of improvise uh and you use the knowledge you gained in the previous step to inform the next step but you are dealing with clients who want to see at the start how the entire process will look like right that's and how do we overcome that how do we deal with that and maybe so I'm jumping ahead of myself why is that why do organizations work in this way where where where is this coming from so in in my research what what I've come across is that there's really there's very different perspectives on design and and I think in that sense like engineers they also design it's just they design in a different way and I think they mean something else with the word design but at the end they also have a design just just like that like designers have um and I think the these ideas around design as planning they have been really influential in the way that we organize and they're the way that we went so uh uh Herb and Simon who actually got his Nobel Prize uh for for the work around these kind of ideas um he pointed out that uh you know people are not sort of say uh perfect the computers that can like uh calculate everything uh that that even though we we we would like to be rational this this rationality is is bounded and so first he applied that to organizations later he applied that to to design uh kind of like developing his perspective on design science but these ideas they've been really crucial in in how a lot of managers have been trained and in how a lot of consultants approach their work and and it's really it comes down to this idea that you can first define the problem uh then you can define the solution and then it's just about implementing that solution exactly any any good designer knows that yeah that that might be be possible for problems that you already kind of understand but for really challenging difficult problems it's it's more complex than that so maybe it has to do with the the nature of the problems organizations had to deal with in the past and to some extent of course today and the nature of the challenges that designers typically want to work at or at least can add value right there's there's a difference there yeah yeah i think that's a difference so that that with with all the all the existing theories on on organization design you can really relate them back to the problems that the companies had in in that period but then if you if you kind of like look at the literature basically since the since the 1980s there hasn't really been a lot of new theory on organization design of course people have worked on organizations but not radically new theories which is before the internet before globalization really really uh hit off so yeah so the and and i think uh this is the thing about organization design uh that we are dealing with a situation where uh there's a structure there's a process there are people who work in a certain way and what we want to do in an organization design perspective is adapt that modify that to fit the challenges that are more uh relevant these days right that's that's the transition and the question is how do we enable that transformation how do we enable that shift so from that angle i'm curious like what have you found in your research that we can offer in this situation so you're dealing with managers who are focused on um planning implementation and and want to have this predictability because that's what they've been thought this is where their kpis are um yeah and then we come in as a designer talking about this emergent process what do we have to offer to these people um so i think one thing that that uh that uh i see a lot uh the student struggling and also the sort of say the professional designers struggling is how do you convince a client of something that isn't there yet because there's there's no amount of data that that can show something that isn't there yet like that's that doesn't really work so the challenge really is is is to to build build a case for something that that is not there yet and that's sort of say what one of the things that i really like about pragmatism and the pragmatic approach to design is really highlighting that it's not it's not about how things are it's not about how things should be but it's about exploring the possibilities it's about about exploring what what maybe and i think that that the the role of design is is really exploring this what what maybe it's it's not that it has to be that uh it's not necessarily what is already but but it is kind of like this this conditional like it this might work uh and then the thing that that really i think gets gets design going but that's really difficult and organization design is experiments so where you don't just think somewhere in the meeting room with all the big heads be that the consultants or the top managers and then you think up a new structure for the organization and then you say and we're going to implement it like this etc etc but uh that you really explore through experiments these possibilities that that you feel out there and and and how to how to go about doing them and i think one of the most important shifts there is kind of like shifting away from let's plan something for the future but instead take a design approach and and kind of like start in the now while imagining how things might be but really explore okay let's let's let's manipulate like experiment let's see how things could be different i get that and at the same time i'm thinking about situation situations i've been in in the room where um like out of the 10 people in the room like one person would be open to this and the rest is um i wouldn't say risk adverse but they um they look for guarantees they look for predictability they aren't that much like their incentives aren't to explore what could be and their their incentives are about let's do the thing that we're doing today just better faster more efficient have you from a pragmatic perspective have you found what can designers do in that situation do you just give up and look for different clients um i think that there's there's always a realistic chance that that you really want to make sure in the beginning when when you're meeting look for the very first coffee for the very first talk that you're kind of trying to understand what kind of organization i'm dealing with here uh and realizing for example that incentives that's part of organization design so in a way what you're looking at here is bad organization design and finding a way to make the client kind of like realize that and so what what i've seen my students do and i thought that was that was quite interesting that they're basically after just a couple of weeks in the company they would just make a presentation and just kind of like give them a mirror and like this is what i see your companies like this or your companies like that and it's not to you know piss anybody off it's not to say uh this is this is i've done research and now i can i can tell you what the truth is no no it's just a way to get the client to kind of like reflect on on who they are as an organization um and i think the the the way that that goes against that is experience show people sort of say what it would mean to to work in a different way so instead of trying to make it right away into a huge project for for several years try to break it down and try to find a way okay let's just let's just try this a week let's let's let's give us a sprint to try let's let's make it really small let's just have the client experience the process because i think at the end the the experience and and the experiments they can they can really do things that that all the talk and all the great slides so it can do they really yeah get people kind of like out of the current current frame and and and allow them to see things differently yeah so it's really hard to quote unquote convince people of this new approach on paper and through words uh going through that experience is much more powerful and but that almost creates a catch 22 like they still have to make a leap into doing something that's different they still have to trust you to try it out even if it's for a week yeah have you seen what helps to help them make that leap even if it's just for a week because if a like i there is also a difference between being an in-house service designer versus a consultancy right there i i understand there's a different dynamic but still what if yeah what i've seen my students do so let me just give you this one example so i had a student who was looking at a high tech company where they were realizing that the technology people and the business people they were not really you know in touch they they were not really getting along and so a lot of ideas from from from the technology side didn't really end up in in a business case didn't really make sense from that side and so there was a feeling we need to bring these people together and and what i read a like with that student was that so the problem manifests itself quite late in the process but he felt the solution should be much more ahead in the process and so he took a a meeting that was quite early in the process and and he redesigned that meeting and i think it took him i don't know like four months or so to get them to just do one experiment with that meeting and then they did i think in the end three three experiments with that meeting and afterwards the client was like you know what i wish we would have done that much earlier i wish we would have done that 15 times and it's really like getting them over this hurdle to try something new for the first time yeah what i'm hearing you say in this story is like you first have to see a problem and you first have to highlight that problem because i've seen so many designers try to advocate design just for the sake of design without actually saying like this is going to help you be a better company by solving the challenge you have there and i think a lot of companies don't realize which challenges they have and if you don't highlight a challenge like then design is a solution to a non-existing challenge and then like it's it's super hard to quote unquote sell it yeah and so one of the things that that i really took from pragmatism that i think is super interesting is the idea that how important doubt is so if your client doesn't doubt the current organization design how can you do organization design and so and and it's something else than selling a solution yeah it's it's really about you you kind of like need to to get them into a conversation that that creates doubt on their side into their their existing ways of working and it might be it might be too difficult at the beginning to get them convinced that if you define beforehand what you get you cannot get anything that's really designed or that's really innovative that might be a difficult sell in the beginning but it's they really need to doubt the current situation they need to doubt the current way of organizing and if they don't doubt then it's going to be really difficult to change anything i have exactly the same experience and it's on my paper over here like one of the best strategies that i found to get people interested in doing something else is by creating doubt about the current way the current approach um how do you create doubts what's the end um so basically it's it has to be on the one hand it's it's uh it would be that people don't know what to do anymore so you you use you you delve into the situation and you kind of like try to get out of the situation the quality that's problematic it's so the the point being that is it's not the problem over here but the situation is problematic but you kind of like try to to to get what is the problematic quality of the situation and more specifically what is keeping say in this case mark uh from being able to do something about the situation so either you are like okay either there's this thing to do or that thing to do i don't know which one to do or you really completely don't know anymore what to do but it's really about the the doubt in the end is about what should i do and that you kind of like get to this point where there's an opportunity and and the space created to explore i don't really know what to do in this situation and i think that in in too many organizations uh people are almost making careers but just right away having an answer and right away knowing what what the problem is and what the solution is and that's kind of like how they how they exhibit power um and acknowledging publicly collectively we don't know is really difficult uh but also really powerful this is i think the quality of uh designers and design in general that we are very skilled at navigating the uncharted territory so the moment somebody says i don't know like my my uh i don't know my eyes lit up and i think okay this is a great opportunity to explore and i have the confidence that we'll arrive at something good at the uh at the other side and i completely recognize what you're saying about uh that solutions and answers are more valued than asking questions right within organizations now related to this another challenge that we sort of spoke about earlier was uh reframing the problem and this is i think also a classic uh challenge within the design process you encounter clients who approach you with um maybe not even already a solution in mind but already answers to the direction where the solution should be going into and in the design process we advocate for well let's let's ask the five wise let's understand why this is the problem before we actually start solving this um but to my experience not every client is open to redefining re-exploring reframing the problem have you found similar challenges uh yeah absolutely maybe that's as always what i say that that's like if you study design it's like one of the first things of course that you learn like whatever the client thinks is the problem and it's a solution it's not the solution or it's not the problem because else they wouldn't be there so and and and how how do you do that and i think it's one thing to hear that in a lecture hall at the beginning of your of your of your design studies it's something else to actually be at a client that is big that could make you a lot of money and then from the very first meeting to kind of like poke them to realize is this actually the problem and really more importantly that to understand that what what is a problem is sort of say a situation where you don't really know what to do next uh so it's it's it's not that there's just a problem out there but the the situation is is the problem and you are part of the situation and i think what what a lot of companies then don't realize is that the the problem is is as much about you as about sort of say the other stuff in in the situation and kind of like that therefore like you need this this reflectivity to to explore so how am i part of this problem how is the way that i relate to this problem how is the way that i look at this problem how is the way that i that i pick out things in the situation that i think are relevant how is that already part of the problem and that that is really difficult and therefore it's it's it's really important as as designers to kind of like understand what what is actually meant with frames and what does it actually mean to reframe and and not just to take it as oh it's just a way to be creative yeah it is it is creative but it's it is deeper than than just having new ideas and then uh you encounter you get like you said in a conversation with our client uh how do you pivot or make them interested or create the space to redefine reframe the actual challenge i think it's it's a big part of this is actually just making them aware of how they currently look at the problem and making them aware of that is only like it's it's it's a way to to look at the problem i'm not saying that it's illegitimate it's not the wrong way but it's just just realize it's one of the ways to look at this and uh i think what's what's really strong here is is metaphors so uh analogies could also work but i think metaphors maybe are a bit looser that that you that you try to to look at the situation from different perspectives so say if you was that person of say if you were that person uh if if if this wasn't a solution of this this wasn't the problem how would you how would you else look at this and so kind of like to to to challenge the the the client to to on the one hand kind of like explore their own experience but also to kind of like challenge them to to come up with a different way of looking at this so i think this relates to what we just said about creating doubt and your client might be right about what the real problem is they might be but the thing that we want to try to do is to show them that there might also be other opportunities other things to explore and see if they are interested enough to explore those other opportunities and i think and i'm curious if you've seen similar things the question i tend to ask clients is how certain are you how much are you willing to gamble that you're right like what if we spend i don't know 10 20 percent of our time exploring the other options and figuring out which one is uh the thing that we actually should be solving versus going all in into your current situation and figuring out that the end that it was not the way forward so i used to have those kind of conversations but have you seen similar approaches to getting getting unstuck like getting a client unstuck and getting them open to reframe i think so one one thing that really works well of course is is storytelling and i think in in in these kind of cases what what can work well is is that you kind of like give the client the stories that show them so i've had clients before where where it worked like this and i think the most drastic thing is that that you can just say hey so you know you're the client i'm i'm i'm the designer if you if you want it like this that's okay but i i would think based on my expertise and my experience over three months we're gonna have a situation like this you know i'm i'm okay with this you're the client that's okay but it's it's just my experience is that this might happen and then you have a very different discussion in three months later when when what what you had predicted is actually happening and and to add to this like i think we should put it even more forward that this is our expertise like you can hire just like you said you can hire us to implement your solution but you're not getting all the value and the added value of hiring a designer because a designer can help you to figure out and to minimize risk that that you do the wrong thing and and if a client isn't interested in that like you should really doubt if this is the person you should be talking to yeah yeah no i think that that's something that is really difficult and it's very easy to say as as someone working in a university and having a relatively secure job in that sense um but i think there's there's really a point for working hard to come to the point where you can start to be a bit more selective of your clients and to be able to say like hey like this is based on my my expertise i i don't see how this would work so finding a way to kind of like put lightly tell the client that i i don't see this working and i think especially when you talk about organization design that's even like the service design really is difficult enough but i think organization design is there's even more politics involved and so if you're if you're trying as an external consultant without the proper buy-in to to to change things that's gonna be really difficult so when you uh say proper buy-in what are we talking about in this case um so i think that that that top management buy-in should be there i think that's obvious in the sense of they they literally buy you in so to say um but also the the buy-in of of not just the the clients external to that company but also the the users in in the in the company so realizing that any service design and any any organization design also touches upon the employee experience and thinking about that experience and thinking about how how can we also design for that experience and how can we how can we sort of say improve both at the same time and and involve the employees in this process and again this to a sort of extent feels like a catch 22 like if you don't have the buy-in from the top um you you won't be able to get this going but to get the buy-in from the top you have to start somewhere right yeah yeah yeah a big question mark around my head yeah yeah um so i i'm at the end of the day of course um i my my my expertise is is uh more around the theory of organizations a bit the theory of of of of of design so at some point i'm also reaching what i what i don't know yet um what i just know in in in what i've what i've done in in my own field work but also what i've done with my students is you need to find the people that that have this curiosity and at the same time they that have the cloud in in the organization i think what what designers also need to learn if the the bigger your projects get is how can i coach a client who's not so good yet at selling internally maybe in selling better and that can be um uh like that that that say the students present themselves i mean that that's that's that's an easy one uh so also when when i was doing my uh my bachelor thesis at at a big uh high tech company i was also in the end the one presenting to to the director of of of that part of the business uh and i think that that creates a lot of space because the students are they just have a different status than say a normal employee but i think it's it's it's really about trying to to find the people that have this openness but i think also the the yeah really the the designers they they they need to not just trust on on the political skills of the person that is kind of like their main contact in the company but also really understand much more into the company what's going on here what what's the playing field so that is partially understanding the organizational design it's also about understanding the organizational cultures understand political games and trying to see how can we help in this situation to to better get this convincing process going yeah and i think this is the second super practical thing i hope people take away from this episode it's like the first thing we said about creating doubt the second one is about helping your client to actually sell these ideas internally this is this is super practical and you can you should become a partner an ally rather than somebody like a client and and someone like it shouldn't be a transaction you should be on the same team and you should understand that your client is probably also somebody who is trying to change things within their organization and you can support them like they need your support and this is a something practical you can do yeah absolutely yeah now the other thing you mentioned was about experiments you mentioned experiments already a few times yeah why do you feel that the role of experimentation and experiments is so crucial so i'm trying not to be db too academic but but really roughly speaking so you have can i have kind of like an a rational approach to things so where you where in your head you you come up with the best way to do things etc and then afterwards you eventually do things you can be really empirical in the sense of you can really look at at current experience and and and try to learn from that so not be too busy with with the great ideas but really see okay how are things actually going but there's a third way that kind of like combines both and that is that's the role of experiments so where you also look at how things are but where you also think about uh sort of say other possibilities but where you really in practice try to see okay how does that actually work and uh pragmatism uh so of course it's it's actually a a big big philosophy um and pragmatism kind of like highlights a different way to approach experiments so when i'm talking about experiments i'm not talking about a lab experiment but i'm much more talking about yeah what what we would call design experiments what others might call more something like field experiments so where you actually out in the field and you try things differently but it's really about sort of say doing things and seeing what reaction comes uh and kind of like comparing that to but how what did i think what what would happen so it's it's a different kind of logic uh of that and that a really important part of experiments is the stakeholders that you design experiments together with the stakeholders that you think beforehand already about okay so let's let's figure this out together so if we were to do this how how would this go and and and especially how how would an experiments and the results out of the experiment actually convince anybody in this in this company um so let me give you an example so i was i was working in a in a head company and and one of the things that happened there is that that clients were complaining about packaging the packaging that that the products were coming in at that moment and so they they spent quite some money on on redesigning the packaging and the the the boss of of that that business unit looked at the packaging didn't like it and basically throughout you know quite a big sum of of design work just because he thought he didn't like it even though they were concrete customer complaints and and and and really the problems also in in in selling the products based on the packaging and for me there was it was an interesting moment in the sense of like okay so there's there's quite a lot going on here there's there's they've done experiments they have have the the the contact with the client and and the customers all of that and still it doesn't really matter in the end if someone at the top can just on a whim decide i don't like this packaging so yeah that's that's part of how organizations work the uh power dynamics the the the politics um and the the way i try to describe experimentation is by thinking with your hands uh and seeing what happens i like uh the metaphors of the improvisation theater you put out a joke you see how the crowd reacts and then you you put out another joke if we go back to what we started this episode with the incompatibility with how organizations currently work like there are there is a lot of incentive on being efficient like doing things the right way uh increasing quality experimentation isn't about efficiency like it's it's it's exactly the opposite how do we how do we deal with this incompatibility yeah i think this is uh the the notion of uh effectiveness versus efficiency and then there's even a third one efficacy which is it's even talked about less and i think it's realizing like just because you're doing something efficiently it doesn't mean that you're doing the right thing and it's it's it's really about that uh and i think so what the way that engineers approach design of course is is is unless they design engineers is optimization and then efficiency so to say is is really close but that doesn't fundamentally change the thing that you're doing it just makes it better but it doesn't like qualitatively it doesn't really change and i think so what i what i find really interesting with with experiments is like it's it's the interesting experiments are not the ones that are successful the interesting experiments are the ones that fail in interesting ways so it's they don't it's not that they're either successful or they fail it's really the the ones that fail in ways where you're like what just happened wait why why why did they do it like this like what's going on here and and really delving into these kind of moments so like in a way what what you're looking for in in design experiments is is this kind of like interesting failure that shows you that certain uh hypothesis certain ideas certain assumptions that that you have are actually not right and and you're trying with experiments are kind of like you're trying to tease that out and try to see okay how things are actually have you um have you seen uh tools methods designers can use to create this space for experimentation and i think one thing i've seen a lot is just don't don't ask for permission just just do something and then see what happens but i'm curious if you've seen in your work if if there's such a strong focus on um doing things better instead of figuring out what the right thing is to do that this creates tension which is in a lot of cases almost it's very hard to overcome but i'm curious if you've seen ways to actually do that i think so i'll answer this a bit differently so um also from from from pragmatism one of the things that i find really interesting is that that pragmatism has a has a perspective also on on on how humans are and basically what pragmatism tries to do is it's it's not really problem solving but let's to make to say simple they try to understand humans through problem solving they try to understand how how humans solve problems and therefore how humans are and the same can be applied to organizations as well so that you look at like how how do people solve problems around here if there's a problem like do they go to someone is there like a committee that that like what's the way that this organization deals with problems and and what's the way that this organization learns and i think it can be helpful to kind of like point out to the organization like so where the new idea is coming from and realizing that also often the expectation is that somewhere in a in a meeting room someone suddenly has seen the lights and and that suddenly knows how to do things and and what i find really interesting to to to find out is that in in japan apparently they they have a way of of that they call it managing by walking around where they highlight that the work is happening on the shop floor so as a manager you better be on the shop floor because that's where the problems are and that's also where the solutions have to be and so don't stay in your meeting rooms don't stay in your office because that's not really where the problems are and that's also not really where the solutions are and so i think in that sense kind of like also making the clients see hey you there's there's a big bit of a gap here about how how you as an organization learn but i think the other thing is is realizing that experiments can be super small as long as you kind of like for yourself have thought about okay what what what do i expect to happen and also maybe maybe quite importantly what would show me that it's not the way that i think so kind of like what what success what's failure here and then kind of like explore okay what what actually happened and and what does that actually mean so this is again super interesting highlighting the gap between the current approach and the deficiencies in the current approach and then this creates an an opportunity to bring in a different approach which which could be more experimentation a challenge that is related to this is you talked about failure in a lot of organizations there isn't a culture to allow failure you mentioned when things fail in an interesting way a lot of people in organizations don't want people don't want things to fail at all this is something also that we have to take into account when we're thinking about redesigning or designing the organization the existing culture yeah so I think one thing that that we have to realize is that a lot of what we think is organization of what's management is just one way to look at this and that a lot of that relates back you know just the way that we talk about school as just a way to to get children to to work in industry in factories it's it's similarly also the way that we organize and manage is still really very much related to kind of like the the industrialization and what what was important there and what was important there was so to say the division of labor the predictability etc so there you really wanted things you know you want the people at the top that that that knew what the control things they knew knew how to predict and plan things but that is of course let that that works well if things are more or less stable of course back then also things were not stable but but maybe they were sort of say instable in in in in less complex ways than than nowadays and if if the environment is changing so quickly and your organization inside is not changing so quickly not so flexible that's a really big problem and so the way that that still organizations are designed and like with organization design also mean the way that we teach managers the way that we educate managers the way that we structure MVAs etc there also these implicit ideas about how to organize how to manage how to design organizations and and and we we really also need to address these things and and where people used to make sort of say a career by by being always right that that we also need to find ways to have people make a career because they acknowledge that they were not right and because they were willing to learn and because they were willing to experiment and and and do things differently and and kind of like as an organization also realize like you need different kinds of people for different kinds of situations and and therefore only picking one type is not going to be beneficial down the line I don't know if that's a question but yeah well what I'm getting from this is that we are currently in a transition phase from a very manufacturing and factory oriented process and an industrial age process still into a different way of working into different challenges and this has been going on for a few decades already and with the transition will probably continue for a few more decades and this like this makes it challenging because unless you're a startup who gets this right from the very first day in many other situations you'll have to deal with heritage as a designer you'll have to facilitate this transition you'll have to accept that you're taking into account ways of working that people have been doing for many years and it's just part of the of the game now I'm heading towards the end of the conversation I'm curious like if we understand that this is part of the game what are some of the things that or what are some of the areas designers could start growing more into to make this transition easier to better facilitate this transition so what is the thing that we now overlook maybe which is like an easy opportunity for us I think I think in a way designers already have lots of what they need to design organizations and I always point to if you if you design a workshop you know how to design organization because a workshop is a mini organization there's maybe not the predefined purpose goal in the sense of the other people might but but at least there is you have people that are collaborating to achieve something that something might emerge out of the workshop might be defined beforehand but but if you know that already then you already know a lot about about collaboration but I think what what designers still really need is is a better understanding of organizations and so where do we find that well so what I found really interesting is so ethnography as as an approach of course I mean it's it's it's busy with with understanding cultures you have designed ethnography you have organizational ethnography and so one of the ideas that I'm that I'm working on is is what about organizational design ethnography so a kind of ethnography that allows you to understand the organization but also gives you the insights that you need to start redesigning that organization and so I've been working quite a lot with with my students on trying to help them find really practical ways to better understand the organization better understand kind of like the in that sense kind of like the matter that they're dealing with if they're trying to to redesign that organization but it's it's really kind of like developing an empathy into the organization that goes beyond just the single people that you see and seeing them only as individuals but starting to see them as as as social as as as a collective as as being tied together so instead of only looking at oh this person is like that and that person doesn't get it that find ways to to see the bigger picture and and I think that's really something that can start from day one that's the worst first time you talk to a client the way that you when you look at their website like all these interactions can give you really rich insights into the organization but you kind of like need to develop a sensitivity to it and I think the other thing is you know the way that that's a you and I we look at a phone or we look at a laptop or we look at whatever I have here and and we see the design in that and the same thing we need to start seeing the current design of an organization and that that's not you know the design is not something necessarily that that you can see but that you kind of like understand okay what are the different parts here and what are the processes and how are the interrelated and and that's really difficult but I think we we need to develop the sensitivity of of where the organization is now and especially also what the organization design is now what I'm what I'm getting from this conversation is that me maybe take too much for granted the ability of our organization to implement and execute on the solutions the outcomes of a design process and we're sort of starting to learn the hard way that if we make that assumption a lot of things out of the design process will fail so it's smarter to actually also start thinking about the delivery of or the environment that needs to execute on the things that come out of the design process rather than just assuming that it will happen yeah but I think what I'm what I'm proposing here is is more radical in the sense of that you cannot have implementation or delivery a delivery later the organization is there it's already there and you're already starting to redesign at the moment that you that you start having different kind of meetings different kind of kind of activities and and see it much more as a continuous process where you're not designing something for over x number of years but where you really starting now and you have an imagination of the future but you really need to start in the now and that requires basically that implementation delivery is like the same moment that that you're designing almost because because you're exploring ongoingly how to do things differently and and that's why I like the for example the theater metaphor like the implementation of the theater is the execution of the theater like of course you have a screenplay you have a script you have those kind of things but the moment people experience the theater is the moment that it's actually performed and I think in especially in service design it's mostly the same you don't do service design you don't upfront and then you execute on it like service design is is the implementation and I think that's one of the major like if I have to make a distinction that's the biggest difference between how organizations work and how the design process works is they used to produce stuff that then gets sold and implemented while designers work in a much more theater oriented way where the thing that it's where the value is coming from is implemented designed at the at the same moment and those two models will need to transition but I think there's there's maybe one distinction that's really important so I think a really effective way to do experiments is role playing so I want you to act in a different way let's explore what's possible I give you a role with that role comes new behavior let's explore that new behavior together but it's still you know it's it's not you're not directly on the shop floor because you're not right away in the production process let's still create a kind of a space called that says with whatever where we can fail in interesting ways so so it should be very close to to implementation actually doing it but I think it's still beneficial to have it in that sense a bits that that you have kind of like the boundaries around it that allow it to to to fail without the rest fading and I think in that sense role playing is is is super powerful because people are kind of like used to oh okay you know oh I'll read this role oh I do that yeah okay I could do that but that gives them kind of like permission to behave in a different way I think there is a still will be for a long time a lot of friction that will experience as designers bringing in a different approach and trying to get people who are used to work in a different way thinking a different way to lean towards this if you had to summarize our conversation what would you say how would you summarize the last 50 minutes I think so I I I'm a bit of stickler with with the word so what I what I really design so organization design is old but the design of organization design is just a metaphor it's just a plan what we're looking at is when does design become organizational and that's organizational design and I think as as designers we have to think much more and realize much more when does our designing change organization and that there's already a lot that we do that's already really powerful with that so it's not that design has to change completely but it's there are certain skills that we need to understand and develop and I think that's understanding the current organization and really understanding the current organization design and being able in a moment with a client where they're behaving in a certain way understand oh that's the organization design talking that's the incentives and that's exactly what we want to deal with and then finding really ways through experiments to to get them out of this reframe them and help them to see things differently if people want to dig deeper into this topic what are some good resources that would get them going I think there's a nice introductory book by Naomi Stanford on organization design she's writing a new edition on it and I think for any kind of designer interested in organization design I think that's a good first read but what you have to realize it's a very distinct perspective on design that might not really feel that design but I think it's a good way to get into that topic I think the work of Donald showed where when he writes about the organizing inquiry can be can be really interesting but that's like 40 years old but I think it's still very relevant it's a very different perspective and there's a book called managing as designing it's also a bit older from 2004 from Stanford but I think there's a lot of really interesting essays in there that can give you a different way to look at this and that's of course academic literature and you can just look online on on into my work that I'm that I'm working on that should also give you a good idea of what what organizational design could be awesome and those are really good things and then we'll add all the relevant links in the show notes and I like books that are 40 years old and are still relevant today I recommend service designers to read books that are not about service design but about other topics so these sound like very good resources I think that's all we have time for in this episode if people want to continue I think I can only refer them to your podcast there are probably a lot of good good material over there also the link will be in the show notes thanks again for addressing this topic I don't feel like we're done but at least we are raising attention to something that needs to that there where there is an opportunity for us as a design community to grow yes exactly and please please reach out with with your question so I'm really trying to do research that is practically relevant but for that I need input from practice for that I need to engage with practitioners so if you have questions about organization design if you struggle with things especially around the topics that I discussed please reach out and let's find a way to engage on this awesome that you made it all the way here I really hope you enjoyed the conversation and if you did make sure to click that subscribe button if you haven't done so already thanks a lot for watching to the service design show if you want more make sure to check out the next video I've got lined up for you see you there


Today we're going to replace this piece of wood on this saw because you can see it's getting all Just that cardboard stuff So let's put a real piece of wood on here Okay guys, so that is 20 by 22. I've already got the wood mark We're going to go ahead and cut this off.  I've got a Plastic grocery bag on the back to catch some of the sawdust So let's go ahead and kick us on. I've got everything I believe set where it needs to be so Let's cut. Let's do it again. Take the saw off of the stand All right There's only two screws left holding it on on the back side here. I can take you around now Okay, I forgot to tape my bag on that's what happened, duh Okay so we're gonna take these two bolts these two screws out here and Let me see. Let me grab What I need to take them out with I'll be right back. We got what we need here.  All right, we've got a lot of Sawdust here, not sure I'm gonna clean it up Let me grab a bucket Okay, go ahead and take these screws out all the way around here. I'm gonna be putting they might be all right No, we put new screws in it.  Let's get the new piece of wood on it Okay, guys, what we got going on here is these screws are gonna be a little too long that's okay because we'll just cut them off and I'm gonna set this under here So they will go all the way through so I don't Put a screw in my air hose did that one not recently, but it has happened I'm just gonna eyeball this. I don't know if this was even put together right it doesn't look like It was who heads off or the cut the tips off. All right, I'm just gonna try these nippers here My grinder has mysteriously Come up missing. So we use this it's starting to start and get some thunder outside It's not raining yet. I Got a Saturn sitting out there in the driveway will not start. I ran some codes on it It's coming up the O2 sensors bad. It's another really lady Shatter neighbor right around getting no two sensor and they gave her the wrong one Would have been so much easier and I'll be doggone find out where the hell it is I'm gonna set this back up on here close it ain't gonna be perfect But I like to be close as I can get it want it to be right above the legs To hold the weight better bottom Thing to it there bottom shelf, but these screws aren't gonna work We'll have to get some different screws. Let me find some different screws, but it does have a bottom shelf But it's real flimsy. So I'm gonna make another I'm gonna make a bottom shelf for it, but probably not today So let me get some different screws Okay, I found some screws. I got three that match ones of Phillips that matches, but it's a Phillips here comes a rain it sounds like and Like I said ones of Phillips ones a number two Square and this part of it is done. I'll blow it off and press there probably hit something here, too Yeah Hitting the metal underneath. It's not a big deal. I'll just drill it out. That's what we'll do hang tight Okay, here we go. I'm sure I've got here somewhere I don't know if that did anything, but we're gonna find out if we can all Probably had to put a washer on that That's the way these were they wouldn't the ones I took out wouldn't all the way in that's probably why I gotta get something tight That's wet the washers on there. Let me see if I can find Some washers. Okay. I got a couple washers here. I got a flat washer and A lock washer. It doesn't need a lock washer, but I couldn't find I Didn't want to like washer it up a whole bunch, you know make it look Any worse than it already does and this is not a number two. It is a number three bit So go It's a little bigger. Oh, yeah, that's what I'm talking about. There we go Do the other one. I'm guessing that's the problem.  There we go Come on nice and solid Like I said down at the bottom here Now it's sitting right out there.  I'm gonna use some more of this. I'm gonna use that one as a template And I'm gonna put it down here and you just screw it on through the bottom But I'm not gonna do that today. I just wanted to bring this bring it along with me today on this little trip I'll show you what we're doing We have got The Saturn out here the only code Well, there was two codes one was the IAT sensor and Take air temperature Which is that and I took it out and cleaned it that code cleared and stayed off the other one was the O2 sensor Number two bank number two sensor that'll take care of care of it for her, but they they gave her the wrong damn one They even called She called me and said here. It's going as a question for you. Is it before or after the catalytic converter? I said it's after it's number two That means it's after Okay, this is one we need I'll show you why we need it. That's all busted up But what it would do After you drove it somewhere, you know once it got up to operating temperature it would Be running alright. Well, there's a misfire on number two cylinder That's a that's a plug, but it wasn't bad Or we're gonna put new plugs in it too, but this is what that ends supposed to look like See that That's what it's supposed to look like This is what it looks like I'll bust it up. Also, this is what the end is supposed to look like And as you can see They gave us the wrong one so I'll have to go down when monkey gets home and get the right one I'm trying to get that done for tonight. See if that's issue But what it would do is it would be be driving along you shut it off and get it started up It would start up Run about five seconds install and the only codes I'm bringing up on that thing Was those two and one of them did it actually Cleared itself when I checked it again now. So Sometimes they normally won't cause it to shut down But I have seen them to where it actually caused the vehicle shut down But she came down here to ask me what I charge to You know fix it and we was talking about I ran the codes for and told her what the problems were and She said okay, and she was going to go Well, she was going to go home. I was going to call her once I found out what the what the prices were and Well, she started up install started up install so I took I unplugged it and I did clear codes and I took that out and It's Running now. So hopefully that'll be the issue. I'll let you know and updated that Also something else. I wanted to show you With those tents Stay tuned for a video of this Guy also gave me This needs mantles, but I've got mantles Hasn't been used that much so that's cool takes the white gas But little metal can of gas for them. So anyway guys Shea bear I meant the main on legend. I just wanted to do something real quick for you guys today and hopefully It won't rain until Sunday. So I can get that thing done for her this evening and Couple things I want to do tomorrow. So all right guys. So there it is We'll do another one when we cut that out. Like I said, I'm gonna use that for a template and And Then that way it'll be Much sturdier. I mean these things are just you know, you see how they're both together But so there it is. All right, I got to pick some tools up monkeys on their way home So I'll chat you guys later. Shea bear the main legend gone for now. Bye. Bye guys and take care