Hi everybody, I am Mitch Stein, might be a new face for some of you, but myself and Sherry will be part of a rotating panel hosting more and more of these shows joining Julia. So thank you so much for being with us and we're really excited about our guests today. Miriam Dix is going to tell us all about knowing when to say no, which we all know is incredibly difficult, particularly in the nonprofit sector and avoiding nonprofit scope creep. We're really excited. We only have 30 minutes and we have a lot to get through. So let's go ahead and dive in. Great topic. Absolutely. And like I said, Sherry and I are part of a group of rotating hosts here that you'll be seeing more and more of on the nonprofit show. So we're really excited to be hosting more of these sessions with you all. Hey, we just want to thank our presenting sponsors who have been with the show since some of them since the beginning and so I just want to thank Bloom ring American nonprofit Academy staffing boutique Inc. Fundraising Academy 180 management group who you're hearing from today, your part time controller JMT consulting nonprofit tech talk and the nonprofit show. Thank you so much Sherry. So I'd love to start off quickly with the person of the hour. Our guest today is Miriam, the founder and CEO of 180 management group Miriam. Do you mind just starting off giving a little introduction to the audience that might not be familiar with you or your work over at 180 management group. Sure. Hello everyone out there. My name is Miriam Dix and yes I founded 180 management group 10 years ago we've hit the 10 year mark this year. I'm excited about that. Yeah. And we are a management consulting firm we specialize in transformation. We work with nonprofits, faith based institutions, healthcare organizations, small businesses, those who are mission driven. And we provide consulting, coaching, custom events. So if we need to facilitate workshops and retreats and things like that we do that as well. And soon we'll be launching some new services so really excited about that. But our goal really is to make sure that any organization that we work with is supported in the way that they need to be supported when it comes to being operationally efficient so they can meet mission. And we really love the work that we do. And our clients. That's awesome. I feel like this is a good, good conversation today to have on mission creep. I feel like this comes up in so many conversations so I'm excited to hear what you have to say about that. Oh, yes. Yeah, it is a pretty good topic, I think. Let's dive right in without further ado. We're talking all about mission creep and how it manifests and impacts organizations and causes. Mary, can you help us start off by defining that and telling us a little bit about how it shows up in this work. So yes, I do want to start with a definition because I think that's so important for us to have the same be on the same page as we have this discussion. Let's start with a definition that might be a little unlikely. So if you were to Google scope creep, you would find this first definition that comes up is a militaristic definition. And it says that this actually let me go back to say this scope creep and mission creep are synonymous. So what you'll find if you look up mission creep is a gradual shift in objectives during the course of a military campaign campaign, often resulting in unplanned long term commitments. That's what Google says. And that's about that's about mission creep, right. And so what I love about this definition is that we often say in the nonprofit space we're in the trenches. We're fighting for all of the resources that we need. We are working ourselves really hard to get to, you know what we believe we need to do in order for us to meet mission. And so in an essence we are in this war right where some this warfare in the trenches doing this hard work. Yeah. And, and so when I look at that militaristic definition about the gradual shift in objectives. During during the course of a military campaign. So it's not that we had an objective shift in the strategic planning session. We had some objectives, objective shifts while we're on the field. Yes. And that's why it becomes so difficult to manage scope creep because we're already in the midst of doing the work. And now we're changing and shifting directions and priorities. So that's what it looks like to have mission creep or scope creep, and that we are already doing the work we've already planned the campaign we've already planned the work, and now we're shifting objectives in the middle of it. Now, why is that dangerous for many reasons. Well, the definition says, you know that we could, it could result in unplanned long term commitments. How many of you out there who have been working in this nonprofit space have, you know, found that there was a grant or some resources that seem to be a good fit for your organization. And it may not have had all of the objectives that you originally intended to work through, but these additional ones seem like they wouldn't be such a big deal. You get the grant, you get the resources and you realize now you're stuck with a long term objective that you never intended to have, and now you have to have the resources for it. So, so that's, that's what we, we find when we start to have that scope creep or that mission creep. And so how does that typically manifest it manifest or let me back up and say, what causes this right because at the end of the day I think there's some manifestations from the cause. But if we look at the root cause of some of the scope creep or mission creep that we find in our organizations, we will find that changes in leadership. The way one leader looks at your strategic plan, maybe totally different from the way another leader will look at a strategic plan. And so changes in leadership will bring about some scope creep or mission creep. What about changes in perspective of board members or changes in perspective of donors. I hear you on that. I also feel like my clients, it's like changes in perspective, but everybody has a new idea that the nonprofit should do. And I feel like oftentimes my clients are in half their time is in defense mode on like, well, the great idea, but that might take me out. So I feel that maybe maybe you see that too of like more ideas in that board meeting. Any stakeholder. Yeah, any stakeholder that has a vested interest in the work that you do could be are often to, you know, you know, often to some la la land about what it is that we believe the organization can do. And they don't have the insight, some in some cases, to actually make that decision to say we should be going this direction or another direction because they don't know the workload they don't know the pace. They don't know the struggles they don't know some of the challenges when it comes to staffing or resources when it maybe it's technological resources maybe it's not just money, but they're on the fringe, but they have a perspective. Yeah. And that that also lends itself to to scope creep or mission creep. And then the need to, and this is a big one to me, the need to diversify revenue streams. Again, you find that grant opportunity, you find that money, you find those resources that donor that says, well, we'll give this money if you do these things. And for the things you already do. But the other four you don't. Yes, yes. Let's go do it in a new state or a new country. I can point to one of those. It's interesting to me because I feel like it's one of the beautiful things about nonprofit work is everyone feels a sense of ownership in what you're doing and that's great right to a certain extent and certain instances that you have such a common bond with all stakeholders around organization, but then it can lend itself to people wanting you know I would argue the vast majority of those suggestions are well intentioned when they come in and people are have great ideas they want to share. What's the right balance to strike do you think when when you're fielding those questions that are pushing you further than you know as the as the like strategic vision holder for the organization and the direction you don't need to go. The balance is in the, when you think about what you would want to have happen in your organization, if taking on these additional initiatives, or these additional objectives is going to move your organization further away from what you believe it should be doing. And that's not just in the services provided but the culture that's established, because what we do know is that scope creek can cause burnout. It can cause misalignment. It can cause a lack of focus confusion within the organization and insecurity, because the resources are now just stretch so thin, trying to make something happen that is causing an insecurity job. People feel like me their jobs are in, you know, in, in the balance, because you know now we don't have enough money to do what we thought we were going to be doing. Now I don't know if the work that I am doing or was doing matters now that we've changed or shifted. And so it causes this this sense of insecurity. So if you're trying to figure out, you know, the best path forward, I think we should be strategic about how it is that we approach new objectives, new initiatives, and even if you're trying to diversify your funding. Yeah, I feel like the mission creep scope, it's like a nucleus or a spider web. It does touch every aspect of an organization. I mean, fundraising, HR programs, ops. Like, I think our, which maybe leads us into our next question about wraparound services, I think is what we're calling it. Could you just talk a little bit about like how, you know, how maybe this is impacting so many building on how this is impacting so many parts of the organization, but talk to me a little bit about wraparound services. So, you know, I have, from my perspective, working with nonprofit organizations and clients. I didn't know necessarily the term wraparound services at first, because I'm coming from a corporate background. I've had my hands in nonprofit work for a while before I started consulting a nonprofit space in the nonprofit space. But the idea of a wraparound service is that this service is something that supports a service that's already in place. A service that we already have expertise in a service that we had known that we know is effective that we know produces a result. And this wraparound services is just that it's wrapping around a core service and it makes sense. What we've noticed is that some wraparound services are are moving beyond the expertise and the experience of the organization into new realms of possibilities. And that's a little tricky. And I think that's where we're like, okay, well, do we want to grow and stretch? Or is it too far of a stretch because we don't we're getting into the space that we don't really understand and we don't know. And we may put ourselves in some kind of position from a compliance standpoint that we haven't really evaluated because we just don't know that space. And so a good wraparound service is one that doesn't change your core business model. And I know that that term we may not use that term much in the nonprofit space but we do we have a business model. If we provide these three or four services because we're trying to meet these needs, the specific need or two in the in the community. That's our business model. If we go outside of that to do things that we don't have experience in that doesn't support what we're already doing. It's probably not a good wraparound service. It's just a new separate service. I feel like all of these. All of these types of things like it really does take a strong leader or leadership team to be blocking that I mean something like Mitch said some of these are probably great ideas or you know well intended but I would think like it takes a strong leader. I guess I see this in my clients to to to no one to push no one to pull and then obviously I'm a believer in having an objective partner you know somebody like yourself in the room to say oh hold on hold on. So I feel like objectivity is key there when you know organizations want to serve as many people as possible and want to make the biggest impact but sometimes there is a line that gets crossed I suppose. Yeah you know you know and I'll get some strategies on what I think may help with avoiding scope creep and mission creep. Because I do think that the strategy should be objective. You're leading us right to our third question here strategies and KPIs thank you for that. Well and we know that down when we are you know going into the space into this work. It is passion driven work. We're going into the nonprofit space or industry or sector without passion. We're going into this because we believe strongly that there's something that the government isn't doing something that you know isn't being hasn't been legislated but people need and they and we want to fill the gap. We are we are trying to fill the gap for the needs of our communities. And so that's the passion that we take into it. Well what gets us in trouble is if we try to manage with passion that isn't balanced with just so this managerial perspective of what it looks like to have a really efficiently functioning organization. Like it has to be it has to be some balance there my passion and with what we actually can actually accomplish in our organizations. So one of the things that I think is very important is to make sure you have an up to date strategic plan that has been and I'm going to add this caveat that has been operationalized. I've gone into many organizations and asked about their strategic plan and doing an organizational assessment to identify maybe why they're having some of the challenges that they're having. And I will get a response of oh well yeah it's not really current. You know we really haven't pulled that out in a while it may not make sense for where we are right now. And so it's sort of sitting on a shelf. It was almost as if we check the box that we had the strategic plan done and then we put it on a shelf and we really didn't revisit it after that. Yeah. And we haven't looked at it since COVID. And then COVID happened. And then COVID happened. The other thing is like even now maybe our plans shouldn't be so such long term plans. Like five years you have a president's change maybe you'll have local officials change. We know the pace of business in the economy is different now. We don't know what natural disaster is going to throw us off track. We don't know what's coming down the pipe. And so like three years might be more of a better range of plan than five or six right. And so just thinking about that. But if the plan hasn't been operationalized what do we mean by operationalizing a plan. Meaning that that plan has some teeth to it and that certain people or departments or areas of your organization have a responsibility with goals to be met based on that strategic plan. Right. Because when you do that you try to it actually helps to support this alignment that we're all moving in the same direction toward a similar or toward the same goal the same strategy. Even if I have a different part to play I have a different role to play than someone else. We know that if we look at our work plans because our work plans are based on these goals that are based on our strategic plan. Then we know who's on first. Yeah. Right. When you have that kind of clarity then you can also have a decision making matrix for when things come up that we're not playing. Because at the end of the day we're not perfect. We are you know we don't have a crystal ball. We don't know what's coming down the pike. But if we had a strategic plan and a work plan it's easier to tweak something that's already there than to try to create and reinvent the wheel. So I think that decision making matrix is another strategy. So you have the strategic plan. Right. You operationalize and have work plans but then you have a decision making matrix. Because when the time comes for there to be a decision on we want to diversify revenue. We have different perspectives of our board members or donors. When those conversations come up whatever the idea is that's being floated around then we can go back to this matrix and say does it meet these following criteria. Is it a good idea for us to move on. I hope that makes sense. It does. And I'm feeling like what I saw a lot. It's like I sometimes I think should I still be bringing up COVID but I do see my clients still kind of reeling in some cases or you know thriving whichever way but it is interesting of thinking of there's there's mission creed but also how do people then say but actually there's a new opportunity. You know that maybe the pandemic brought on to where before you were local and now you're regional or your national. Did you sense that people were really like struggling with that is this mission creep or is this an opportunity in this moment to really you know stand up and lead in this area when frankly the country needed needs nonprofits the most. Well I think it again it goes back to are you standing up and leading in the area where you have expertise. Yeah. Right. Are you deciding to stand up and lead in the area that's just void like there's a void there. Yeah. And so having that understanding to say yes we're going to stand up we're going to lead now our voice magnifying a voice is different from changing your voice. Hmm. Oh that's right. Put that quote down for the show. I like I like that double click. So if you're if you're magnifying magnifying the voice that's already there. Yes that's the same voice you're just wanting a stronger stand you want a bigger spread or a bigger reach or whatever the case may be you're magnifying the voice. But if you change your voice. The impact of changing your voice means that people may not be able to hear you because they don't that that voice is unfamiliar coming from you. So good. And so. I'm sorry I was going to say that I feel like what you're getting at reminds me of what Sherry said earlier about objectivity. And the value of having someone like Miriam in the room to be an objective observer, because it's so easy to get caught up in the passion or excitement of new money and new opportunities etc. I feel like that framework and strategic plan gives you that objectivity. Let's refer back to this what we set together and it's almost like Miriam can be in the room after you've left by virtue of having having that good solid framework for people to refer back to. Right. Absolutely because objectivity is the name of the game because you know passion can can take us on high highs and low lows. Right. So if we stay objective knowing that the the mission is at the center, not just my individual passion. Yeah. But the mission is at the center of what we do, and that mission is driving our strategy and that strategy is driving our decision making. Then that helps us to remain objective, but not lose our passion. And so I think that you know having that decision making matrix is important. And when you create that decision making matrix, make sure that it aligns with your strategic plan. Right. So that way when you ask the questions on the matrix, you know that you're already in the vein of what you wanted to accomplish as an organization. Yeah. And then the other piece I would say is make sure that if you're going through and evaluating based on a decision making matrix that you're not doing in a silo. Right. Yeah. So the same two or three people. Yeah. Making those decisions. And they don't have enough information. They don't have the perspective that they may need in making those kinds of decisions. So it's important that if you have a decision making matrix that maybe you have a committee that's going you know that's helping to make that decision. And you know you're getting the perspective and the feedback of those most impacted. And so I think that's a great way of keeping it one objective and two, making sure the perspective is there and making that decision. So good. You know, Mary, you know who this I when you talk, I'm like, funders are attracted to this. Give me the strategic plan. Let me see your path, your work plan to those end results. Talk to me about that decision making tree. I feel like this just sets the metric. Yes. I feel like this just sets up organizations to have those investment level conversations in a different way than perhaps a lot of organizations can. Do you find that your clients are really when there's clarity when there is this North Star and really the structure to back it up that funders are like flocking to them. Well, I'll tell you what happens. What happens is internally it breeds confidence. Right. And it's a shade. Yeah, stress reducer. So then when leadership goes back to the board. The board can tell that something has changed and shifted. And they're better able to communicate the needs that they have to achieve the mission. Yeah. And when you can communicate the needs very clearly, then funding makes more sense. Right. So then the funders say, well, we understand exactly what you need because you're able to communicate that and it's not all pie in the sky. Yes. And that's what makes the difference. And this is the other piece. This is the last strategy I will give is that there should be some sort of regular evaluation of utilization of resources. Makes sense. How do we know when we're at capacity or over capacity. Yeah. And what does it look like for us to need to build capacity that capacity building we have capacity building workshops we talk about capacity building we do all this stuff but how do we assess it. And and do we have a plan of action to do that regularly. So if, again, we have a decision making matrix, do we have the capacity to pull this off. Yes. And that's the piece that funders will flock to because if you can say we need to build capacity like this in this area to do these things. You're more likely to have a funder say, oh, we can do that. Yeah. Oh, you just need that. Oh, you need this position field. We can do that because you have clearly linked all the dots. You have told the story, you know, and I know that fundraising is about storytelling. If you can have a clear compelling, precise story of what you need and how you need it and what it's going to do for your organization, the more likely you are to get that dollar. Yeah. In capacity building general operating revenue, but that not you're speaking my language on this one. So good. So good. Yeah, it's so important and I feel like something that we lose sight of is how draining decisions are. Gosh, if each if each decision you're in big and small, it really adds up and takes a toll and prevents you from doing work more effectively and efficiently. So if you have an easy thing to reference where like we don't need to have a full team meeting about this, like we've got the framework we have these decisions we already made up front to help reduce the stress of those ongoing micro decisions that also just makes things work much more streamlined. Oh, gosh, yes. And, and, you know, just kind of going back to that whole work plan thought process, right? When folks have work plans. They don't have to go and ask questions all the time. Less meetings. That means less meetings, less meetings. You know, it's, it's almost like when, well, when you don't have structure, a very clear structure and a clear way of working together, all decisions rise to the top, because they have to. Someone has to sign off on it. So it has to tell you, yes, that's what we want to do. Someone has to okay the plan. And what we want to do is make sure that people can work independently and can, you know, make certain decisions at their level of expertise so that everything isn't rising to the top stressing out the senior leader. And so I think those, those types of structures just really help everyone to be at their best, reducing the number of meetings, reducing number of emails. All right, right. The extra work or the rework and dual work. Yeah, because we know that this is, this is my lane, this is your lane, this is our lane. And it just makes things flow a little better. So good. Love learning about your work today, Miriam. Well, thank you. Yeah, and I had one before you wrap up Mary Mike said we've been talking a lot of great strategies do you have an example, especially if the idea of the wraparound concept is new to someone do you have an example that you could share more specifically about an organization you worked with or like what would be a real world instance of something qualifying as a wraparound service. Let's see if I can pull out one that's not like damaging or anything so overly. So, so, for example, you may provide, I was working with the organization that specialized in sort of access to reproductive health care. And so, part of that may be going out to educate on your reproductive health. They didn't necessarily have physicians, but they may have had folks who were clinicians and that they understood the medical terminology to have those kinds of discussions. But then if you go if you start to say that we're going to provide reproductive health medication or services outside of just education. That's a whole new ball of wax right and even though it may support the need for people to have reproductive understand their reproductive health options. If you're specialized in education but then you start providing services, then you really have to be thinking about what you need what's the compliance issue there what's the liability there. You know, how who do we need to hire. How do we need to grow. Yeah, all those sorts of things that requires a totally different conversation than what you probably had during your strategic planning process. Yeah. Right and triple the money, you know, triple the budget, you know, right, right. So that's one area. Let's say you were affordable housing. And part of your realm of responsibility is that or part of your strategic plan or your mission. Let me go back to say that your mission says you're going to work in one zip code. Because that zip code is one that is, you know, from a poverty standpoint, they need the most resources when it comes to affordable housing. But then you find that you might be land trapped and then there's other land that comes available, but it's not in your zip code. But there are people who could still benefit from affordable housing and another zip code. Yeah. Great example. So do you then say we're going to go and you know build homes affordable homes outside of our mission driven zip code. Because we're starting not to have as much land there. That's a different conversation. Yeah. And then do we build single family multi family apartments, because we were just doing single family homes before. Perfect examples. We're all thinking of like, oh, yeah, I've seen that one. But Maryam. Yeah, Maryam, thank you so much for joining us today. We have, we have had the end of the hour here. It's super, super interesting and valuable. And hopefully a good call to action for some of our listeners to start revisiting that strategic plan. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, well, I feel like I'm going to, I'm going to start with me right as we just wrap up and thank our sponsors again. Thank you, Maryam 180 management group. Bloomerang American nonprofit Academy staffing boutique Inc fundraising Academy, your part time controller, JMT consulting nonprofit tech talk and the nonprofit show. Thanks so much for being with us today. Mitch, you want to sign us off? Yeah, I would say thank you so much for joining us everybody. And from all of us here at the nonprofit shows, stay well so you can do well. We'll see you tomorrow.


We have, in the past, covered the astonishing mega-metropolis that has been unearthed using ground-penetrating radar beneath a nearly impenetrable rainforest that now engulfs the area. A super-civilization that not only supports our posit of there once being a number of lost civilizations that have flourished and often seemingly met an untimely demise here on our planet, but has been estimated to have been home to more than 10 million sites such as Tikal once believed to be independent separate clusters of past impressive and as yet unexplained block buildings through the use of ground-penetrating radar have been proven beyond doubt to have once been part of the same super-settlement that spanned nearly the entire rainforest that the site is now home to. Yet we have also covered the incredible ancient stone and earthworks that can be found dotting many areas of the Amazonian rainforest that, again, are indicative of a past super-civilization. Yet conveniently, since the discovery of Guatemala's super-city, funding for such penetrative studies elsewhere of said areas has dried up. The question is why? Why are we witnessing an active attempt to conceal these ruins from the world? We feel the evidence to suggest so is now beginning to mount. However, where mainstream academia won't step, many others are fortunately willing to pick up the slack, and this particular area of interest is of no exception. And as usual, the investigative researchers have turned up some astonishing characteristics of the Amazonian rainforests, features which are indicative of another super-settlement, possibly of a similar size to that of the ancient sites found within Guatemala. A group of scientists and researchers, after investigating the area, have put forward what has been pinned as the Amazonian Stonehenge. According to said researchers, they found evidence that a, quote, highly advanced ancient civilization once existed in Brazil. And although they have dated the ruins, as having been built 500 years before the European colonization of the Americas began, we feel that the evidence to suggest that they were in reality far before this date will soon be realized, and that these people who once inhabited the Brazilian Amazon were possibly creating an impressive arrangement of immense towering granite blocks. As such, scientists today speculate that these massive stones were like so many other sites we have covered in the past, attributed as that of an ancient astronomical observatory. The structure consists of 27 blocks of granite, each up to 4 meters tall, standing upright in a circle measuring over 30 meters in diameter. In other words, possibly more than a thousand years ago, an ancient civilization of native peoples were flourishing in the area. According to the New York Times, radiocarbon tests and site measurements during the winter solstice shed light on the ancient civilization's abilities that inhabited the Amazon. From this, new archaeologists have realized that the people who lived in the area developed a more advanced civilization than previously thought. Who built the Amazon Stonehenge? When did they build it? Is there a lost super-settlement hidden beneath the Amazonian rainforest as that of the Guatemala rainforest? We find the evidence to suggest such highly compelling. We have long conjectured that many ancient ruins found throughout the world are not what they seem, attributed to groups within known and permitted history. We feel, however, that the evidence to suggest that they were, in fact, relics of an as-yet unearthed advanced civilization is now overwhelming. Many sites we cover escape modern understanding or explanation. Gigantic multi-ton megaliths, often somehow mysteriously quarried and transported from quarry sites sometimes hundreds of miles away from where we find them today. Such realities are undeniable, and the lack of any explanation as to how our more primitive ancient ancestors accomplished such tasks. We feel remains elusive due to said sites' origins actually being a far more capable, far more progressive, now lost civilization, who were clearly once capable of such incredible feats. However, although many sites are often attributed to what we perceive were mere re-inhabitants and the archaeological footprint that they left behind excavated and permitted to be studied in depth, pinned as the creators of said sites. However, the relic we are focusing on in the following video, an ancient artifact left by those who possibly created the site itself. Mallorca, a favorite with holiday makers, yet alas, what many do not pursue while on the island is the inexplicable stone megaliths which litter its tropical shores. Academically attested as a 3200-year-old relic, we feel, however, that the sword, although clearly of a remarkable preservation, is in fact far older than this, and those who have investigated the site and said relic have concluded that the only possible origin of this incredible object was that of a now lost, yet once highly advanced ancient civilization. Now known as the Taliyat Sword, it is an astonishing ancient weapon, once somehow made far within antiquity, created to incredibly high standards, and we feel the reason the sword has survived so long is merely testament to the quality of the sword and indeed the past abilities of its creator. It is widely discovered by a team of experts digging at the archaeological site known as Taliyat de Seralda, say Abelis, found within Puig Puyant, a municipality on Mallorca. The site is comprised of several stone megaliths, which are claimed to date back anywhere from 1,000 to 6,000 BC. We, however, hypothesize that the sword is far older than even these unusually generous academically dated estimates. The sword was found near one of the stone megaliths, known locally as a Taliyat, hence the sword's name. Built by the mysterious Taliyatic culture, which we feel is the name given to lost civilization, that many funded individuals continue to try and dismiss, claiming that it was located within permitted timelines. Labeled by some as the Spanish Excalibur, it is undoubtedly an incredible artifact and one which sheds precious light upon the capabilities of a now lost civilization. Work is now underway at the site and is pegged to continue for the next few decades, initially explored by historian and archaeologist Guillem Bordeaux in the 1950s. It was in mid-September as the researchers were readying the museum at the site that the team found the sword. Who made the Taliyat sword? How old are the megalithic sites upon the island of Mallorca? Are we looking at an artifact left by a now lost civilization? We find the evidence to suggest such highly compelling. We have in the past covered numerous seemingly impossible ancient feats of ancient engineering found throughout modern-day Japan, polygonal stonework of gigantic proportions, ancient forts and temples, which we have previously distinguished, were constructed upon far older and now inexplicably mysterious masonry techniques, the most abundant of which we have come to know as polygonal. Yet alas, due to the explanation as to how this was achieved remains elusive, thus the site is dismissed and deliberately overlooked. As such, the absence of any logical explanation as to how said sites came into being, or even how this stonework was once achieved, means that not only are these sites suppressed from mainstream attention, but the seemingly impossible features still in existence are instead of being exposed and admitted as unexplainable accomplishments, thus allowing those with a critical capacity to pursue said origins we feel are instead avoided, compelling proofs of our posit of there having once been advanced, now yet lost civilizations, which once flourished and often seemingly suddenly vanished, have indeed been and gone on our planet. The suppression of this truth gives motive to academia, who attempt to cover up such realities. Yet, regardless of the defining purpose for this conspiracy, whether to avoid mass panic or not, we feel, it is not a valid enough excuse for this suppression, and in our opinion, we feel regardless of public reaction, we all deserve to be presented with the true reality of these ancient sites, and indeed, a true account of our history. Tucked away within rural Japan is a megalith known as Ichinohoden, at first glance this particular megalith looks as though it is floating in mid-air. The reason for this is due to the civilization's abrupt departure, as such, the stone has not been completely liberated from the bedrock it is still attached to. Clearly, at the final stage of excavation, the stone is literally hanging by a thread, and due to the location of the excavation, and the fact that the stone itself has protected its base from erosion, the megalith has remained attached to this small seam of rock for untold millennia. The defining reason for why we attribute the stone to a now-lost civilization is its sheer size, measuring an impressive 5.7 x 6.4 x 7.2 meters. The stone also weighs an estimated 500 tons, meaning that the techniques, or indeed the technology used to cut and transport the stone, remains an unexplainable feat of ancient engineering. Largely dismissed by academics the world over, these gigantic stones, however, are a legacy that due to their immense size, is likely to still be present here on our planet far after our own civilization has been and gone. Additionally, just like the many other sites which we have successfully identified within Japan, as the work of a now-lost civilization, a temple was later built at the site, and although attributed to a civilization within permitted timelines, the megalith has been believed to be holy and has been venerated since ancient times. According to mainstream study, which although not publicized, were literally forced upon academic institutions as they continued to attempt to appear transparent, although while actively avoiding the task of explaining not only who and when this stone was cut by, but how this ancient civilization was intended to transport said stones to their final locations. The official version is, predictably, a claim that the rock was intended to be a tomb. However, just as we would have expected, there is no scientific information as to who quarried the stone, or indeed what intentions they had for its eventual purpose. Who cut the Ishinohoden megalith? How did ancient civilizations move such gigantic stones, sometimes thousands of miles? We find the Ishinohoden megalith highly compelling.


In this episode, we'll be talking about how we've lost the true human nature of services and how we can get it back. We'll talk about what the organizational mechanisms are that allow service design to scale internally and we'll talk about why there isn't and never will be enough service design talent around. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hi, I'm Joel Bailey and this is the Service Design Show. Hi, I'm Mark and welcome to the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping service designers like you create organizations that put people at the heart of their business. My guest in this episode is one of the service design pioneers, evangelist, early day adopters. He started the service design drinks and things in London back in 2001, 2002. I've met this person back in 2008 at the service design conference in Amsterdam. If you look at his link in profile, you'll see that he's worked for the renowned service design companies and his latest service design company is EY7. His name is Joel Bailey. Joel has a pretty interesting perspective on why services are actually more important than design and why we need more people who truly and deeply understand what services are. So that's what we'll be talking about in the next 30 minutes. If you haven't subscribed already to this channel, be sure to do that because we bring new episodes that help to level up your service design skills at least once a week. So that's all for the introduction and now let's quickly jump into the chat with Joel. Welcome to the show Joel. Hey, how are you doing? Nice to see you. I'm doing awesome. Good to have you here. One of the pioneers of the service design field. We were going back, we were talking about the Epic service design conference that took place in Amsterdam, not in 2016, but in 2008. And that was also, like you mentioned, the first and only time that we actually met in person, right? That's right, that's right. I was reminiscing before we started. That is the first and last time we met, but it was a seminal moment for me. I had been involved in service design for a few years before that, but like in an isolated way, it had been a job title for me only for a couple of years and myself and a few handful of people in London had been congregating around a service design drinks we'd set up for myself and Nick Marsh and a couple of other people. But that event in Amsterdam that you'd organized, I managed to persuade someone to buy me a ticket for that and I went along and you had managed to congregate a few people. There was some IDO guys, Guy from McDonald's, it was really inspiring for me.  So I really salute you guys for making that happen. It was really great. It's good that a lot of people who were in that space in the Rotohood back then are sort of still active and it's a real community. It was back then and it still is today. So Joel, you've been, if I was checking your LinkedIn profile as I do before the talks and I was searching the first entry of service design in your sort of history and dates back to somewhere like 2001. So that's a long time. And I'm curious do you actually remember the first time you got in touch with service design? Yeah, actually it was a boss of mine who was pretty widely read at that point. And I was working in government at the time on an old website. I mean, this is the era pre-government digital services, a digital service called businesslink.gov.uk, one of the big old super sites. And my boss at the time, John John Johnston Hollow, he actually suggested to me the way you're going in your career, I think your next role is to be the service designer. And I was like, I don't know what that is. I looked, I typed it into Google and it came up with Wikipedia and it was like two lines. And I was like, I just read it and I was like, that's what I wanna do, right? And he was right. So I again, I salute him as well for showing me that path. And I did, I took that title and I said, this is what I'm gonna do. And I followed that path and I did what I could at BusinessLink with that title, even though it was very digital when it was going in a certain direction. But I've just followed that ever since and I've been lucky enough to have found people who have given me roles or I've forged a path and managed to find people who will give me budget. You know how it is, right?  And I'll be honest, there's a trade wind going through life at the moment, which is service design and it is human centred. And I've managed to follow that trade wind and it's taken me in the right direction. So opportunity knocks and you follow it, right? Yeah, you're riding the wave. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's it, right? And it's not failed me. And I think our industry is getting bigger and bigger as a result. And I'm very passionate about those two words, right? Services, and we'll talk about this more, I'm sure but I'm very passionate about service and I'm very passionate about services as human systems. I don't think as an industry, I think we're very obsessed with design and don't get me wrong, design is an important thing but I think services are very important and I think we have a lot of designers coming into service design who don't necessarily understand service design a lot but you have to understand services. You can't just come in as a designer and just be a service designer. You have to understand how services work. You're getting into the topics already. I see that you're passionate. I see that you're passionate. Let's do an interview just because I think you have a lot to share. Topic, topics, you gave me three topics and this one, we're going to start with this one. Reconnecting people to people. How can we? How can we? How can we reconnect people to people? What do you mean? How can we connect people to people? I have a view that this is an emerging view but it's come out of all the years I've been practicing which is that if you go back in history, people have always served people for thousands of years and I think we're born to serve each other. Within our family units, if you take it back to that primary unit, the moment we're born, we have to be served for a number of months in order to live and our parents serve us and then when they get to the end of life, we serve them. That's kind of traditional and the basic fact of life. And I think over the eons in our basic tribal units, service is a part of how we live and over the years, we have evolved that basic barter format of how we trade within tribes. They've become services, they've become very complicated and just over the last, let's say 100 years, they have become vastly more complicated and if you look at how services in the last just 30, 50 years have scaled in complexity, they have, particularly through technology and through, let's say interfaces and the use of the word interfaces, I think the provider and the customer of services have become disintermediated. And increasingly, if you go into these big service organizations, as you and I do and people listening and watching this show will do, the connection between people inside and outside of services has been lost. So when we go and talk to people at the front line of services, who get up every morning to serve people, like I've worked in public sector services where like adult social care people who get out of bed each day to go and help people who are struggling in their lives, that is their deep concern in life is to serve those people. They really struggle to be able to do that because the people who are running those services don't have daily contact with those people. They are disconnected with them because the only contact they have with those people is through a dashboard of data that tells them that. It's abstracted, yeah. It's very abstracted. And I think this is increasingly the case of the more technology, the more interfaces you put and this is the paradox of your modern service is that the more of those things that you put in, the more disintermediated your organization becomes from the human beings you're trying to serve. So paradoxically, I think we're being sold the idea that all this technology is better serving the customer and it is from a transactional point of view, but actually threatens your organization and makes them quite vulnerable because it removes your corporate instinct and your empathy for how you actually serve that customer. It takes away your relationship with that customer and so many organizations that go into, they don't have an instinct for who their customer is anymore. They don't really understand them. And I'm reading at the moment Sam Walton's autobiography, which is a great old one I bought off eBay and it feels like an old book, but all of his stuff is so relevant. So he used to make all his senior managers go into store once a week and hang around in store and then every week he would run a call centrally where they'd have to call in and tell them what he'd learned each week. That level of contact does not exist in most of our organizations. You know, I think I mentioned this on LinkedIn some time ago, like the role of technology should not be to have less contact with our customers, but to actually enable us to have more and deeper relationships with our customers, right? I think sort of, I don't know where it went wrong, but right, it feels like efficient, but it's only efficient if you, how are you going to use the time that technology gives you in a good way? I think where it might have gone wrong is slightly with the capitalist drive of headcount reduction, unfortunately, which I think there was a lot of push to get rid of headcount, which I think may have been a slightly miscalculation, because you need those people because people still want people. Like the logic of I'm going to get rid of my call center has never been true, right? Because what people now want is not those low value contact points.  I want to call you with my long phone calls. Really difficult challenges. I want to spend an hour on the phone with you to talk about my really complicated need. And I might cry down the phone with you about my really complicated long-term retirement money challenge that, because my husband's just died and I don't know what to do. That's a really valuable contact that I need to have with you, but that was never factored into the business case of the big change that you're going through. Everyone just thought I would just get rid of the call center and get rid of all those calls. So I think there is this view though at the top of organizations for these people who don't spend much time with customers that they've kind of become, going back to the original question, like how do we reconnect people with people? A lot of the work I'm trying to do in the service design, more agile service design sprint work we're doing is bring those leaders right back into contact with those customers. We bring them back into the research as much as possible. It's not about so that they can see the research insights. It's so they can spend time with customers so they can get that empathetic rush. You know, it's like, oh my God, we really need to serve these people better. It's like, like, do you get that back to the floor program in Hollywood? Yeah, it's a TV show. Yeah, yeah. It's the same story, right? You get the CEO going out to meet the customer. So, you know, I think we in the service design community would all applaud more interactions with actual customers, but the reality for a lot of service design is that it's already challenging to actually get the project team out of the door and meet people. What is your strategy for getting people outside of the project team to actually go on this journey with you? I mean, it does help to have clients who want to do it, right? And luckily, we do have clients who want to do that. I think I push clients to do it, right? And I sell them on the how. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I convince them, right? Because I tell them how good it is, right? There's no science to it. I think there's an art to it, right? Which is to convey what I believe to be the right thing for them and to show them the value of it. Because of what I'm telling you, right? What I pledge to them is that I can get a research team to go out and do this work for you. And they will come back to you with a report, but you will get 30% of the value by doing that.  You want 30% of your money's worth? It's like, that's the story I can tell them. And usually, they want 100% of the value, if not more. So that's the sort of discussion that we have with them when I'm putting together proposal. And then they can choose what value they want for their money. And I think what I also really applaud and hold dearly is that we as services designers should take a stand. Like, this is the way we need to do it. This is the way it should be done. If you don't want to listen, you'll probably don't need a service designer. Like, take a stance. Yeah. Right? Yeah, I think it's true. I think it's true because we, I don't know about you. I mean, there's a lot of demand for our time and we have to qualify at some point. And we can spend a lot of our time doing work that doesn't, as you say, ship. You know, it doesn't deliver value. It doesn't cut through. And I think at the end of the day, we all as service designers want to see our value in the market. And we've all over, you know, you've been in this game as long as I have, right? We've seen plenty of our work not arrive in the market. We've not seen it deliver. We've not seen it get through all the trade-offs and compromises that come downstream after our work is finished. And so we have to find clients that will actually commit to delivering it. And if they're not going to bother going to the research, that's not a great indicator to me that they're going to bother delivering it and get through all types of delivery. So it's really important to me to find clients who are up to the actual long haul of this. And if they're not going to find a day in their week to go along to customer research, that's not a great indicator. Red flags. Let's move on. Topic question number two, well, topic. And it's a topic of scaling, which has been on the show in the past. So I'm curious to hear your perspective on this one. I'm going to go with, oh, hold on. Here it comes. When will we scale? Oh, there it is. There it is. When? Now, what are we going to scale? That's the word I had right behind this scaling one. This was the topic of, instead of getting buy-in for service design, actually understanding how to implement and bet, scale service design. This one's a big shift, right? So yeah, if we go back to when we first met, right, it was all about getting buy-in, right? No one believed me, right? It was all, I would take anything to get into any room and do any piece of work. And I would literally, I take any brief and I do any compromised piece of work just to get a brief. But now we've come on a long way in the last, gosh, many, many years now. And I think we can afford to be a bit more choosy. And so I think that the markets moved on, we're very accepted. There's lots of business value in doing service design. And a lot of people understand that. A lot of clients who are willing to really follow through on the work. So the new question that we're getting asked is how do I build my own capability in-house, not just rely on you to do projects, but do full-scale capability build? And I'm lucky enough to have some clients who are going, who are very mature in this now, to the point where they don't really need us so much. And I work for EY Seren, part of EY, you know. So we have lots of clients of different levels of maturity, some so mature that they have their own capability that they're building at quite a rate of knots. And so scaling corporate capability, and I mean corporate in the public and private sector, is the new challenge, I would say. And that's the thing. When I say when will we scale, I think that is starting to happen. And I think it's probably the industry's main challenge to probably lead us on to our third question. But for me, it's where all the main questions now lie for us as an industry, because, sorry, yeah, jump in. Yeah, I'm going to jump in because when we were talking about this topic, what I found really interesting is how you framed scaling or how you framed the transition, like going from departments, organized in a way that is organized for production, to organizing around, you called it like around the service or the product, the service, the product, the customer, and then organizing around that. Can you share a little bit about that transition and how scaling fits into... Yeah, so the big discipline that we all need to get our heads around to make this bit work, there's a few actually, but one of them is certainly systems thinking because you come up against the system logic of the big organizations that we work in, which is the classical management theory of these organizations, which most of them is based on this factory model of how organizations run, which is 80 years of classical management theory, which is the consumer is a product to be managed through, and it's basically something you don't really want to deal with, which is why call centers don't really want to deal with a customer. As soon as you start realizing how an organization really thinks about the customer, not because it wants to, because that's how it's learned to deal with a customer, then as a designer, if you start to really recognize the internal logic of an organization because that's the way management theory is taught it to think about it, your life gets so much easier because you can really empathize with how the organization thinks, and then you can start to work with that behavior and slowly adapt it because these organizations don't think the way you want to, they're verticalized, right? And all the power and all the money runs vertically, and the CEO and everybody else at the top is desperately trying to change it, but until you start learning that the system is the product of how it's always been incentivized to work, you won't change it, right? So what we all need as designers need to start becoming much better at is systematic org redesign, and that's where we're now starting to get better at, so we have a business design team who are starting to really get more involved in our work, which is how do we start looking at governance models? How do we start all redesign? Do you start really getting to the depths of how do you re-intensify the organization? Right. Organizing horizontally, so you start having budgetary cycles that are much shorter so they can work according to agile principles so you can start getting away from committee decision-making, not my area of expertise, but we cannot succeed unless these things change because otherwise all our design sprints will fail, all our design ideas for horizontal journeys will fail. This is the new era that we're in. So what I find really interesting, and that is for me also basically uncharted territory, like what are the instruments that govern or the way, what are the design materials of an organization? Like governance, like incentives, you probably can name a few more, but and how do we use those to actually redesign how the organization functions? Yeah. Right? Well, the great news here as our service designers, we don't have to be experts in this thing. Exactly. So the great thing about working NEY is I'm surrounded by people who are experts in org redesign in governance and all those things which are quite traditional and very specific and quite technical, but they've all just been doing them in a way that is not changed for a long time. So now I'm turning up and saying, can we kind of turn them 20 degrees to the left and make them quite different? And they're saying, oh, we've not changed them in many years, but they're quite excited because they're like, oh yeah, let's just change those, right? Let's do that. They know which knobs they can actually turn. Yeah. Which levers. But it's great turning up to a guy who's never had to change them and saying, can we change them? He's like, yeah, I'd love to. So that's good, right? So I don't need to be an expert in those things. There are plenty of those. And every organization has those people, right? Well, is that the case? Because you're in the position with EY Sermon, smart people around you. What if you're like in a small team or maybe you're in an internal team? Like how do you actually start to start this position? Yeah. Yeah, that is true. I perhaps was talking for a point of privilege there. I mean, there is some good stuff written online about this. It's a bit scarce, but in turn, there are people starting to write about how you have to face into this headwind, a level up, which is how do you deal with governance? How do you deal with incentive models? The systems thinking aspect of this, it's quite new and no one's got the right answer. And I'll be honest, you know, even within the world we're working in, there are no single right answers. There are just themes, the things that I'm describing. Every organization is trial and error across the board, every client. And even the clients that are quite mature, it's more error than success, I would say. Everybody is sort of fumbling around and trying to find the right way to do this. I've also found it interesting that you stated, like startups, they don't have the heritage so they can implement models that have this behavior by default. Yeah, well, they're sort of native. Well, they're a blank canvas, right? So they don't have a legacy of governance and committees. So like the legacy committee thing is bigger than legacy IT, I think.  And then I had a bit of a moment, probably goes back about four years where I was on a commuter train surrounded by all the, I was working really hard and I was surrounded by all these guys. I live in the commuter belt here at Surrey where all these bankers live. I was looking around and I was working really hard in the late train and they were all sitting there like watching Netflix. And I was like, man, these are all the people that I'm probably up against. They're all in these lovely pensions waiting for retirement. I thought, it's these legacy people that will sit on all these committees that I think is the challenge. And actually it is like the legacy people who are kind of sat on all these committees whose job it is to review papers and to challenge change who are defending a status quo that I think is probably the bigger challenge in these organizations. You've got a lot of agility down at this lower tier close to the cold face of change. But then there's a huge rump of management who are quite defensive about change. And I think a lot of these organizations, and that's regulated from a regular, I work in financial services quite a lot and that's quite a regulated rump. And what I mean by the rump is it's a lot of fat in there. And I don't want to start saying that you have to cut that all out because the regulator has said you have to have people in there whose job it is to make sure the bank is doing the right thing. And that's the same in any regulated organization. So, but that puts a real drag on change for lots of safe reasons and banks are very risk averse as a telecommunications companies but your challenger banks don't have that, right? They're built in the form of, they're mostly engineers and a few designers. That's what they are. But so they don't have that drag on them but they also don't have lots of other things that these big banks do have. They don't have the huge amount of trust in their brand. They don't have a branch network that has a lot of relational value in them. So, you know. If you could to sort of round off this topic, if you could, what is, how should I formulate this question? Like what have you seen that works exceptionally well? Can you, have you found a pattern? Question. In terms of relation to scale. Yeah, and to actually starting the shift. Yeah. Well, certainly what I've seen work well is organizing around some form of journey-based model. And that's no, that's going to be no surprise to people watching. Well, it's good that you sort of confirm that that works. Yeah. You have to kind of organize horizontally, right? And you have to then give some form of autonomy to the team who's doing that. They have to be able to act within that team. You have to be able to put people in that team to work for a genuine period of time. And you have to empower them to work according to some sort of scrum dynamic so that they can kind of get stuff done. I think you, what else do you need to do? You need to have stakeholders, quite senior come to that group and be sent a way to unblock things, which is quite different. So they're not coming along to be told how great things are. They're being sent away with tasks. Right. That doesn't happen in these big organizations very often, but that's very empowering for the team to have a senior stakeholder sent away to go and fix things. I think you need leadership around design. You need leadership. What I mean by that is design needs to have some form of empowerment in the organization beyond where it currently sits. Most of the money sits within the business and there are two kingdoms within most organizations. Well, actually there's one kingdom. The business owns all the money. Design is always trying to get the money out of the business. Ideally, there should be some brokerage of power between design and business. At the moment as designers, we're constantly trying to fight for some of the money. I think I'd like to see our next couple of years where design is having a bit of budget. Yeah. I think it was Mauro Pochini in the CEO, Chief Design Officer of PepsiCo who was on the show and he said, do we actually want the responsibility of being responsible for profit and loss? Because that would change the game if we would say, okay, we'll make sure that the money flows in. We are the business. Well, I see business owners doing that. They're not doing that great a job, I'd say. Not always. Like, why do we think it would be any worse or any better necessary to have designers doing it? I just think we lack credibility necessarily.  Maybe. If I look at Dan Mikowski at Lloyds Banking Group, you should get on the show if you haven't already. He's a good guy. He doesn't necessarily lack the balls, I don't think. Maybe they lack. Maybe they don't want to give it to him, I don't know. But like, I don't know. I think that sort of shift needs to happen. My personal view is we'll come, we'll be 10 years down the road from here, maybe five, depending on the maturity of the organization and there should be less of a gap between business and design, right? Design is essentially problem solving. It's just a more divergent, bolder, braver way of doing it. Business has not shown that it's had a great track record in these big incumbent service organizations of solving problems in the last 10 years. It's proved itself to be pretty poor at it, I'd say. We're moving on into topic number three, the final one. And it relates to the previous one because this one is called talent growth. And if we want to scale, I guess we need talent. And I have so many questions about this one. Okay, so I think this one for me is how far are we? Where are we? Yes, there is. Talent growth, how far? So I'm in this gloomy room. Sorry, I didn't really set up the lighting for this. It was a trade-off between lighting and Wi-Fi signal. Oh, I'll always take Wi-Fi signal. Okay, yeah, me too. So yeah, how far are we on our road to talent growth, right? So I think this is one of my probably biggest concerns but also actually my biggest hopes. So there we go, a paradox for our third question. So it's my biggest concern if I talk about service design. It's my biggest hope when I talk about designing services, right? So I put this exactly in that language very, very purposefully. So if I talk about myself as a service designer, I find it's very niche language and I get very worried about the talent market. So I actually, in the last, probably a year and a half, and I wrote quite a long blog post about this for those who have bothered to read such things. We'll link to it down below, of course. But I'm very conscious. Okay, cool. I very consciously now talk about designing services and designing and building services because we've obviously got to build these things, not just design them. But designing services for me requires an army of people with an army of skills. And some of those people are service designers. And we have to talk about designing and building services if we are gonna have any chance of scaling the talent problem that we have because we do have a talent problem. Because I'll be honest with you, we've been hanging around this industry for a long, long time and the talent hasn't grown exponentially. We've got a lot more people turning up and there are lots of people who are very talented and some people who are quite talented, people who are learning as they go, but there aren't enough people to do all the work that's coming through the door. So for me, what we have got though is a lot of product designers. We've got a lot of visual designers. And just in our business alone, we've got business designers, product designers, visual designers. I've got research practice that I'm responsible for, design research practice. We've got storytellers. And equally, if I look at more broadly across CY, I've got like rec tech experts. I've got people who are experts in sectors like you wouldn't believe. All of them very talented, very smart people. All of them employed by service organizations day in, day out. Why would I not want them working on the design of a service? I do want them working on that. And equally, the client brings all of their experts along. And I've never yet worked on a project or an engagement with a client where they haven't brought along a bunch of super resourceful people. And in the immersion week where I essentially bring them into the project and we do an immersion week for us, by the way, it's a kind of educational deep dive. We throw them in the room. We say, this is what service design is. This is what systems thinking is. This is what behavioral economics is. And we kind of explode them a little bit. And then by the end of that week, they're like, I don't want to go and do anything else to run, right? I love it. And it's all about tapping into their resourcefulness. So for me, if we're gonna stay as an industry narrow on service design, we will fail. But if we go broad and tap into the resourcefulness of people turning their minds and skills to designing services, then we will succeed. So you mentioned a lot of different skills, a lot of different roles. How, where and how do we find those people and who are these people? They're everywhere. Yeah, exactly. So why is talent growth an issue? Well, I don't necessarily think it is. I think it's called, I think it's talent gathering, right? I think it's talent gathering and it's talent on boarding. I don't really like that word. Bringing the right talent to bear under the right conditions and motivating them to work in the right, yeah, under the right conditions in the right scenario. So I have this, the methodology, I don't really even like calling it, the mindset and methodology that we work with in EY Seren specifically that I adopt with the teams that I work with, is this kind of agile approach to service design that it involves those different mixed methodologies that I described earlier. It involves a very broad church of people who will put a mixed team set in the room with the client and depending on who they can bring in and who we can bring in, it might have a mixture of the client's team there and our team. It'll have people who come from a subject matter expert background that have people from EY who can come in as well. So we'll have quite a mixed playing field, mixed group of team members on the playing field and no one really knows who's from which part of the team. But the key thing is to work out what individual resources those individuals bring and what we will then seek to do is make the most out of the resources those people bring. So it does sound like it's almost quite wooly but this is what our clients need because I'll be honest with you, most of the skills that our clients employees bring to the table historically, like I've got people turning up who used to be project managers who are suddenly being told that they're now product managers, right? This is quite a common art thing, right? And the difference between a project manager yesterday and a product manager today, like you can't just switch someone from one to the other overnight. They're fundamentally different mindset. And yet that's the sort of challenge we've been given. So our role is to really coach people through this and to take them, I hate this on a journey sort of language, but we do have to take them on a bit of a journey and that is what we bring to the work we do with them. It's quite facilitative and we are helping them to go through that. But we cannot rely. I mean, obviously we have to bring some of our very skilled individual service designers, product designers, visual designers to that room, researchers to that room. So don't get me wrong. We are hiring those guys and we are continually hiring those guys into our company, but we cannot just rely on it. We are looking for resourceful individuals from our client teams and more broadly from across EY to participate in that work because we can't scale in any other way. So I hire into those squads, if you like, looking for people who have soft skills and future capability as much as I do, looking for the hard skills of service design. That's a long one. Well, I think you will actually enjoy the previous episode with Patrick Bach, who's... You can put a link and I need to listen to it. You need to and especially the third topic and people who are the fans of the show who've listened to the previous episodes will know what I'm talking about. Joel, we spend a lot of time in this episode and I do want to give you the opportunity to ask us a question. The listeners, the viewers, is there anything on your mind that we could sort of chew upon? I think I'd like to ask the listeners, viewers, where they think an organization like EY Seren should be focusing its energy on where to go next, right? Because we have our own ideas about what the future has in store and you can obviously hear I'm constantly thinking about this, constantly thinking about what the future holds. But I've been reading some really interesting books recently about where the future of the practice goes, like the Thinking in Services book you've had... Have you had magic on recently? Yeah, he's from my town, actually. Oh, cool, excellent. Not on the show yet. That looks just great, right? So, a question to the group is, as an organization who is part of a big organization who is looking to its own proposition about what it wants to do in the world, what would a service designer out there in the world be looking from an organization like us? That's a question I'm really curious to ask. We can ask our internal people, but I'd like to know from the outside what do people expect from an organization like us? What do they like to see from us? There's a question. I think a lot of people will be interested in the answers to this one, so let's see what happens. Joel, man, we could talk for another half an hour at least, at least, but we're not going to do that because we want to respect the time of our audience. If there's more to it, then be sure to comment and continue your conversation down there. Thanks for your time. Thanks for sharing what's on your mind. It was a pleasure. Yeah, great pleasure. Thanks for having me on. So, what is your take on Joel's question? What role should service design agencies play? Leave your comments down below. And I challenge you, if you know somebody who might enjoy this episode as well, grab the link and share it with them and help to grow the service design show community. Thanks so much for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.