To create better services that make customers happy, service designers have to discover what those customers want, need and dream about.

When you are trying to understand people, it can become an overwhelming experience 😵. You receive tons of feedback. And these pieces of feedback are often very different. It feels like you are drowning under a pile of different opinions.

The same problem happens again when you are coming up with solutions to the problems you have found or testing those solutions. There are so many different possible solutions 🤪. Which of these solutions should you choose to try out? Again, you get more feedback. What do you do with all of this information?

This just means that uncertainty, doubt, and information overload are perfectly normal sensations 🤔 that every service designer has to live with. But service designers have a few techniques that stop them from wanting to kill themselves on all their work days.

Before using any of these methods, service designers acknowledge that trying to innovate is scary 👍. This means that, again, they have to put their egos aside and accept that they are fragile humans.

This is pretty similar to what Alcoholics Anonymous, or AA, preaches. Yep, I know. It might weird to use addiction as an image. But it’s quite insightful. The AA group says that to overcome alcoholism, you first have to accept that you are an addict. I think the same goes with uncertainty. We have to acknowledge that as a normal human being, we don’t like it when nothing is sure. We don’t like to feel uncomfortable and remain without the answer most of the time. We don’t like to have much different and contradicting data in our small brains 😵.

What is true for addicts is also true for service designers in this case as well as for their clients. Instead of playing the proud and secure one, it will be a good attempt to accept that the innovation process is emotionally difficult ✅.

In fact, our schools and universities don’t teach us to deal with uncertainty. They teach us to follow a strict process. As a kid, you learn that 1 + 1 is always equal to 2. As we have seen before, most of our work as service designers is to work with how people perceive experiences and not with hard facts. So as an “adult” service designer, you have to learn to understand that, yes, the hard fact is that 1 + 1 makes 2 but that some people feel it’s more like 2.5 and others more like 3.5. Schools and universities will never prepare you for that.

As a service designer, I am happy to recognize that uncertainty, doubt, and information overload are normal. That’s why a big part of my job is about passing over my natural tendency to know where things should go 🧠 and help my clients to do the same.

When you accept that you feel weak during a process of change, you then can look for tools that can reassure you. Tools like the ones you’ll discover in just a minute.

This article is part of my free course "What is the Service Designer mindset?" which helps you to finally understand how service designers think and what makes them such a special group of innovators.