The death of the meeting

Turning good ideas into reality invariably involved other people, and doing things with others involves meetings. But so often I go to meetings that don't get the best out of people. I'm pretty sure my meetings don't get the best out of people.

I was watching Mad Men the other night and it struck me how we've lost that art of meetings. In a world where we can email, phone and twitter colleagues right up to the moment we walk into the room, we have less need to prepare for that single one hour opportunity for purposeful dialogue. These days we're always in dialogue and so we lose the discipline of meetings being special, considered events worth preparing for.

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Testing something

Bear with me...

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More than a McJob?

It seems some people working at McDonalds take their service role more seriously than others. I think Ray Krok would have approved. Somewhat ashamedly I've always enjoyed eating in McDonalds. I like all sorts of foo, junk included. Such is life. Anyway - hearing Denis Weil talk in Amsterdam about the years of attention they've given to service was very heartening. This article builds on that.

Take that and times a thousand

Design Generalist know what she's talking about. Take the next quote and times by a thousand for working in the British public sector! "Service designers are often facing questions such as: where are the hidden silent designers in a service system? What kind of specialized knowledge do they have that can be beneficial to designers? What kind of tools and methods can design provide to unlock stakeholders’ creativity? How do designers work beyond boundaries for collaboration?"

Snow bound

At least being stuck at home in the snow allows me to catch up on weeks of Google Reader!

Elephant in the room

"Basically... I'm saying that there's one elephant, it's not really a new elephant, but it may be a newly-relevant elephant, and all of these different terms are descriptions for different parts of a single elephant."

About the best description of the ongoing Service Design Definition War, and a good digest of some extensive Service Design reading by Red Cone.

The glue

"Where the ‘traditional’ design disciplines are geared towards creating individual touch points, service design seems to focus on integrating these into a complete and meaningful consumer journey. Therefore it is tempting to say that service design is just another word for multidisciplinary design. Tempting but unsatisfying: Somehow it seems to me that the added value of service design lies more in what happens between the design disciplines than within them. It looks at the connections rather than what gets connected, at the white space between the words"

"We don’t look at pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase, but at getting acquainted with each other, becoming familiar with each other, spending time together, getting to know each other, challenging each other, celebrating together etc. These phases in the relationship are then translated into opportunities for interaction and accompanying touch points."

More good stuff from Erik Roscam Abbing here.

Digit getting it right

"Marketers should be concerned with the product or service ahead of the communications. They need to get their hands dirty." Taken from their highly recommended white paper.