01 5 pieces
Customer experience and service ecosystems
Treating services as a system, not a journey, and treating the customer experience as the visible edge of that system. Cybernetics, complexity, the Viable System Model in practice.
The brief is usually the surface of the work.
CX transformations, service redesigns and AI adoption programmes often turn out to be structural before they are technical.
Applying psychology and systems thinking to service and organisation design, and building better experiences for customers and for the teams delivering them. My work digs into how organisations and teams are built and whether they actually work. Advisory, fractional, and contract engagements.
Body of work
All writing → Four themes my work keeps coming back to.
02 7 pieces
Capability and organisational design
Looking at what it takes to build a design, strategy, innovation or delivery capability inside an organisation that really delivers on its ambition, not just following the ways it has always been done before.
03 6 pieces
AI adoption and the future of design
Adopting AI is an organisational act before it is a technical one, and most organisations aren't ready for it and don't know what to do with it. Notes from the question underneath the hype.
04 1 piece
Human flourishing through design
What it would mean to take flourishing as the goal of design, not problem-solving. Borrowing from positive psychology and trying to apply it to the world around us.
If you are reading me for the first time
Start here.
What actually makes a group smart together
The dominant story of AI is individual augmentation. But collective intelligence, the emergent capability that arises from social interaction between people, requires something different and may be at risk of being designed away.
From passive maps to active models: Introducing the Universal Service Graph
Org charts show who manages whom and quietly discard everything else. The Universal Service Graph models a service and its organisation as a connected graph, so the impact of a change can be traced before it is made.
Service design needs to evolve. Here’s where I think it should go.
Service design has spent fifteen years refining rather than reinventing itself. Four places I think it needs to go next, from closer work with strategy and risk teams to looking past needs towards human flourishing.
For people thinking about working together
Three shapes of engagement.
- Contract project A defined piece of work with a defined output. Capability diagnostics, AI adoption programmes, service architecture.
- Advisory retainer A standing relationship. Two to three days a month, for design and product leadership wanting a thinking partner.
- Fractional role A named position inside the team, usually two to three days a week, three to twelve months.