Sylvain Cottong has spent his career at the intersections of business, society, technology, science & culture, with the value of design for process, service & product development and more generally with leadership & innovation. This was an enlightening podcast that I go back and review often.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Service Design Is More About A Mindset
Joe: It seems to me there are so many tools in design thinking and service design. We talk about storytelling, journey maps, theaters, safaris. Is there a simplified approach?
Sylvain: It’s more about a mindset; I would say. Then different tools you can use. The mindset is getting this different type of use together instead of having the one view that maybe was the ruling view for the industrial age, for the last 300 years, in terms of unlimited resources, and everything is predictable.
Now, of course, these are new and emerging disciplines, so the tools are developed, somehow, as from scratch by the community by itself. It’s also interesting to notice that a lot of this stuff, doesn’t necessarily first emerge in universities, but within the practicing community, and they do that theoretical stuff in parallel to develop through them the molds.
And then it enters the universities to start teaching the models, which are very interesting evolution and another consequence of this changing landscape of knowledge communities that are connected and not necessarily need to be academic knowledge communities anymore, etc.
At the end, it is a challenge to understand all the truths that are out there to analyze them. You have to make your own choice what makes sense for you and how to attempt to put together a particular project without just taking textbooks that are out there and using every single tool and method for every single project.
That just certainly doesn’t work. Everyone must have his own little R&D on top of it and put together all the different methodologies in a way he thinks fits well for dealing with that type of project. That’s basically what I’m doing with all the stuff I’m doing now.
Related Podcast and Transcription: Service Design Is More About A Mindset
Lean Service Design Trilogy: Bring this Workshop on-site!