I’m just going to say it out loud, and that will make it real for me.

I am moving on from Snook. There, I said it out loud!

This, as many of you will recognise, is not a decision I have taken overnight, nor has it been easy for me to make. It’s been my own decision to move on. The time feels right for me to hand over leadership to our fantastic senior team.

When we started, hardly anyone had heard of ‘service design’. We worked hard on demonstrating the power of design, applying it to wicked problems and helping institutions move into the 21st century. We told stories of our projects, time and time again, and we eventually saw traction — small glimpses of meaningful change.

We’ve worked tirelessly to share the impact of our work with anyone who’d listen and needed help with a challenge. We’ve helped create the space…

This project will never be finished.

Striving to create a future where people and the planet can thrive is a mission I will always be dedicated to. And Snook will continue to go on and do more brilliant work. The story is far from over.

To end this particular chapter, I wanted to take some time to look back, and highlight some of the fantastic teamwork that’s happened along the way.

These memories are deeply cherished by me. …

Today, Snook launch the next iteration of the design patterns for mental health library.

I’m stoked.

It’s a free, open-source platform for anyone who’s involved in delivering mental health products and services. A place to share best practice and first-hand experience.

Patterns are simply things that have been used before and proven to work. It’s important to share them so mistakes aren’t repeated, hard-won learnings are shared and ultimately products and services that truly help people become the norm.

What you will see is not a finished product. …

First, we need to start with what services are.

Services help us do a thing, provide us, a person, with some kind of value, helping us reach an outcome that we need or want to do.

So for example;

I want a hot drink, I might go to a cafe who will make one for me. I’m on the go, so I don’t have an espresso machine or coffee beans, so I use a service to provide a hot drink. That’s a really simplified example.

I want to get somewhere, I might use a transport service like a taxi. …

Full Stack Service Design is a model I’ve used for years to help me navigate and understand how to diagnose services that fail, support organisations to meet user needs and outcomes and design new offerings that can be realistically delivered.

It is a model that helps people break services down into the parts that make them and understand how all of these parts impact the user experience.

I’m sharing the model online in the hope it will be of use to people running services, organisational leadership making decisions that affect user experiences and designers who need to learn how to…

Culture envelopes all the components of a service because it shapes how we make decisions and act. From the autonomy staff have to how authority works, our culture shapes how we design.

‘Culture’ encompasses how we think, speak, act, our beliefs, our moral compass, how we talk, what we wear, how we interact, which all affect how we make decisions. The intent we put out into the world is shaped by this and the existing cultural conditions around us.

Our ‘culture’ as an organisation is expressed through our attitudes and beliefs, how we make decisions, how we express our thoughts, and what we show up to expressly care for.

The culture of an organisation can be both organic and intentionally fostered. An organic culture is often created by like minded people gravitating towards one another based on perceived shared values and interest. These might be shaped by similar backgrounds, shared experiences and commitment to the shared mission.

Organisations can make efforts to intentionally design or foster a culture. These efforts include writing down principles, manifestos documents, company merchandise, leadership…

The intent of an organisation is the thing that it wants to achieve. This could be to ‘reduce road deaths’, ‘be the best beverage company in the South West’ or ‘make it easy for people to get the groceries they need conveniently for less money’.

Whatever this thing is, it is often more detailed than just simply ‘making money’ (if a commercial service) or ‘looking after or supporting people’ (if a public service).

An organisation’s intent is the thing that defines what services it provides and why it operates. This intent is often documented in a ‘mission’ or ‘purpose’, and, if that intent is fully supported within that organisation, will be encoded in every layer that this organisation uses to think — from its policies and business models right down to it’s values and ethics.

When we’re changing a service it’s important that we consider each of these ‘thinking layers’ and the effect they will have on how that organisation behaves and what it does.

Services are shaped by the organisations that create them.

Just like how a product is shaped by the machine that produces it, the way we construct our organisations or collaborative arrangements to design, deliver and maintain services affects the user experience. Our mental models of how organisations or organising should work often create constructs that our services inherit, making users do the hard work to navigate the bureaucracy of organisational designs.