At Work•Play•Experience Adam St. John (aka Adam Lawrence) turns good services into memorable service experiences that start people talking. I ask Adam in a past Podcast, “Theater seems to be the convenient analogy. Is there a deeper relationship between that, between Service Design and theater?
Related Podcast and Transcription: Show Business in Service Design
Adam St. John: Very much. I always say it’s not a metaphor; it’s the same thing. I really do fervently believe that. That’s my first point, again, really with the comedy. Let’s widen up comedy and talk about all kinds of show business whether it’s theater or film or music or dance or any of these things. What are they all about? They’re all about setting up a process, if you like, or a set of stimuli or a story, whatever you want to call it, setting up a sequence of events which influences somebody’s emotion and makes them feel the way you hope they will feel. It always interacts with their own experience, of course, but you’re trying to guide them along a certain emotional path. I think Service Design is the same thing. The experience end of it is very clear parallel. What do I see, what do I feel, how is it presented to me? That’s very clear.
You’ve got to understand, also, theater is not just performance. Theater is a development tool. Theater is a tool which you can use to model any kind of human interaction very, very quickly, very, very cheaply, and actually quite effectively. It’s not just the performance side of theater which interests us; in fact in our work we hardly ever use performance techniques.
What we use are rehearsal techniques which is how a theater goes out there and uses the resources it has on a limited time frame asks itself a question. OK, we have a process here. It’s a play in this case, but it could be a Service Design, of course. It says how might this be, how might this turn out in the end, and looks at all the options of doing that in a very fast, very iterative, very full bodied ?? they use their whole body; you don’t sit down and think and rehearse, you get up and do.
That brings in much bigger emotional level, as well. I think that really is a very big overlap there. We took these tools out of the theater, like the rehearsal and other things we can talk about, and said let’s apply these to business processes. How can we rehearse a business process?
I just want to point out there rehearsal is not practicing something but it’s always the same. Rehearsal, again, is developmental, how might it be. Then you start getting these really, really great insights into the emotionality of things and also the options that you have open to you.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Show Business in Service Design
Lean Service Design Trilogy: Bring this Workshop on-site!