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🤔 ▶️ How can you show that different backgrounds contribute to the service design work in valid ways?
🤔 ▶️ How can you show that different backgrounds contribute to the service design work in valid ways?
Daniele Catalanotto avatar
Written by Daniele Catalanotto
Updated over a year ago

Summary of the video

  • Use a list to reveal the hidden talents of team members with diverse backgrounds

  • Providing a special mission to each team member based on their background and experience

  • The double value of revealing diversity: for the organization to realize the richness of having a diverse group and for the team members to feel valued and have a sense of purpose

  • The Six Thinking Hats ideation technique: give six different roles to different team members to get better ideas and show how different backgrounds give different missions

Video transcript

This transcript was generated using Descript. So it might contain some creative mistakes.

Now, let's jump to the next question. Question from Joanna, who asks, how can you show that different backgrounds contribute to the service design work in valid ways? And for this I would say one thing that we do a lot in service design is we try to reveal what is hidden. And maybe that's exactly what we should do here.

I would suggest revealing the hidden talents with a list. If you have a project team And each person has a different kind of background and you want to show to your clients or to the organization why it matters to have all these different people in a team, show every person, take a little photo of everyone and say, okay, this is Mark, this is Bob, this is Judy.

And then below each person say, okay. Mark, he has a background in research and that's going to be useful for us in this project for that part. This is Judy. She comes from a medical background. She was a nurse before. And we're going to use her empathy skills in that part of the project. Now people can realize, okay, it's not just that there is a big team and that's good because it makes the workload easier.

No, these people were chosen for the different backgrounds that bring something very specific. to the project. So we need to reveal that. And there is a double value in revealing that. The first one is obviously for the organization or the client to realize, okay there is richness here because we have such a diverse group with diverse experiences, and that's going to make our project better.

That's on the client side. But on the team side, it gives like a purpose, a mission to each team member, where he knows, okay my past is very important. My past experiences, my past skills are valued here, and I have a special mission because I'm the only one who has that special Experience.

So it has a double value, which is very useful. And if we want to go in a deeper way in showing why this diversity of backgrounds is necessary you can speak about this technique called Thick Thinking Hats from De Bono, which is a thing which is quite well known in the innovation branch and with people who maybe have heard about brainstorming and this kind of stuff.

So basically, it's an ideation technique, Thick Thinking Hats, and it comes from this lovely guy, De Bono, and the technique goes like that. You have, you give six different, you give six different roles to different people. What will happen is one person will be the fact guy, the other one will be the optimist, another one will really look at the risks, and the other one will be very intuitive, one very creative, and so on and what we show here is, by using this analogy, what we can explain to our clients or to our team members.

Look, there is this ideation technique which It's quite old, but that is well recognized and that works well for getting better ideas. And one thing that we do there is we give a special mission to each person. And that's basically what we do by having different people who have a different background.

Because each background gives you a different mission. So that's a little analogy that you want.

A community question

This question was asked by a community member for the third Service Design webinar. You can rewatch the full webinar for free with all the show notes and slides.

✨ Made with assistance of AI.

The transcript of the video was made using Descript, and the summary was made by using Notion.ai and the automated transcript with the prompt: "Make a summary with bullet points"

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