Blog - Jacob Magnell

The Evil Escalation E-mail

I just almost committed one of the great evils of the 21st-century workplace. I almost sent an Evil Escalation e-mail.

Imagine you have a hard deadline two days away and you are in desperate need of someone in your proximity to help you. You have previously secured a loose commitment from your counterpart to help you with this sort of request. You send a reminder about the deadline – that will affect you much more severely than your counterpart – and receive no reaction. This can be exceedingly annoying when the favor is of a reasonable character, you report to the same organization, and the result will because of this, benefit both of you in the long run.

The two ways forward.

Either you pick up the phone and call your colleague to give them a heads up that you are in need of assistance. The probability of you getting help, or at least a decent explanation to why you are on your own, is at this point very high.

You can, as I almost did, send yet another reminder of what is needed, and, almost in passing add a carbon copy to your boss, your counterparts boss, and everyone in between. At this point, if your request is somewhat relevant. You will probably get the immediate result that you were looking for.

But at what cost? You have now alienated a colleague. You have also shown everyone involved in the cc field that you are not equipped to handle the situation. To me, this seems like a poor long-term strategy for success. And I am glad I stopped myself from doing this in time.

As to my own, annoying, work-avoiding colleague – whose help I needed. I happily, did choose the first option and picked up the phone. The person, who I never met before, was happy to help, despite almost drowning in post-vacation emails that made it difficult for him to prioritize. After turning in our work I was also able to get even more help from him in a separate matter. A few days later I had a digital coffee with my new, friendly colleague about the dangers of poor communication. We both agreed that it is a really good idea to make an effort to avoid jumping to conclusions that hurt our ability to communicate well.

I learned something today.

Given the choice, I think it is a good idea to avoid the Evil Escalation E-mail.

A bit of nuance.

There are of course legitimate reasons for including more people in e-mails. But only if it is relevant to the conversation and the work. Or all other ways of collaborating have failed.

I find that when it is used purely as an intimidation tactic. It is often a signal that there are things in the group culture at a company or department that needs addressing. Let us try and make everyone feel comfortable in sharing and collaborating effectively.

What do you think? Are there times when an escalation email is necessary? Am I just dead wrong? I would love to know your opinion on the matter.

If you would like to read something more, maybe you are interested in my thoughts on innovation and design.

Have a great day!

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash

Mobility as a service is hard

Using the car industry as a model for creating digital service systems connected to physical products.

Digitalization has enabled and is now increasingly forcing, traditionally product-focused industries to shift towards a service-system focus. Digitalization, however, has despite what the increasing number of ads for project management tools leads us to believe. Not made it particularly easy to make that shift. One of the hardest challenges is making informed prioritization in a new and unfamiliar context. Looking at the car industry can guide other industries in creating profitable digital service systems there.

Prioritization is at the heart of any management effort. What happens when prioritizations are consistently made on obsolete or flawed information? When the entire framework used to make prioritizations are outdated?

The success of electrification

The car industry, has successfully been transformed – granted, being pulled kicking and screaming by Tesla – towards electrification. The United States President Biden has set the goal of 50% of electric cars being sold in the US by 2030, Sweden has proposed a ban of fossil full cars all together within that same time-frame.

Political ambitions with regard to electrification are possible because the car industry has seen the need for and potential profits from, making the shift. This has successfully accelerated electrification to the point where a manufacturer of cars needs to have at least a flagship electric model in order to stay relevant.

The perils of servicification

One thing has also been on the agenda for a long time, which has not been as successful. Moving away from selling cars and towards selling mobility. Why have car manufacturers been successful in creating a whole new propulsion system, while simultaneously being so inept at changing how we use our cars?

While electrifying our vehicles requires new technical design and manufacturing capabilities. The same type of product – a car – is still created. Changing to selling mobility is shifting the whole idea of what a car manufacturer is and does. This in turn changes what information is important when making decisions.

When producing any physical product, the number of aspects that need to be taken into account is fairly limited. Let us simplify it to function, form, and marketing. These aspects, such as function – what the product does, and even how it does it – have been long since established. Sure, there might be tweaks to performance or comfort or looks, but largely physical products tend to be fairly static. This is the reality that most product companies, such as most car manufacturers have existed in for more than a century.

New actors

There is another effect of digitalization that is relevant to look at. Suddenly, companies without manufacturing capabilities are able to create new revenue streams, that manufacturers are largely cut off from. A good – and well-used – example is Uber that uses the cars manufactured by others. Creating digital service systems, completely outside the control of Volvo, Ford, and other manufacturers.

Logically then, car manufacturers have spent the bigger part of the last decade trying to close the gap between themselves as producers of physical products and the service economy that Uber and other actors have shown exist. Why have we not seen any large-scale and successful car-sharing, mobility, or transportation services spring out of our traditional automakers?

For one, most resources in these companies are invested in the creation and production of new car models. This makes sense since this is where they make their money. That brings a certain rigidity to the organizational setup. This n turn affects the organizations’ capabilities to focus on creating useful services.

Modern and agile development in a rigid system.

The car industry is – not without reason – used to working inside rigid processes. (When your feature can perform to x safety standard then you will get money to develop y). A car is again, a well-defined product that can be specified in a detailed way even before development starts. “We want a large SUV that caters to suburban females.” This then leads to having a product being launched in 2-3 years that has been specified in detail. Certainly down to what type of components should be included, and probably down to approximately what these components should cost.

Enter the agile design team, tasked with creating a revolutionizing service that will transform mobility. This is a complete clash of worlds. The first thing a designer will want to do is speak to the real users of the future service. This is something almost unheard of in a car company. “Real users, you say? I’m sure we have the number to a motor journalist here somewhere”.

Next, the design team will want to create an agile process where they can iterate ideas until they have a great solution. “Ah” says the car company. “We have plenty of agile teams working on our products!” While this is true, these agile teams all live inside of the rigid processes we visited earlier. This means that the teams are free to arrive at the specified conclusion however they like, but if they want money after that, they’d better make sure they don’t deviate from the specification. No matter what. To be fair, this is not out of any ill will. In order for cars to be sellable, cars need to live up to fuel and safety standards, among other things.

The real difficulty

This is frustrating to our designers. This is also the key to the car industry’s success – after Tesla – when it comes to electrification. So long as the original specification is clear enough it is (relatively) easy to fit batteries and electric motors into the traditional processes that are needed to develop a vehicle. These processes are extremely efficient at producing new cars and handle incorporating these types of technical innovations really really well. The problems start to appear when the produced cars are no longer the end product, but instead a vehicle – if you will – for the service of mobility.

In order to become credible service providers or digital service-platform providers, manufacturers need to commit to setting up an organization where services are able to dictate, through management buy-in, some of the technical requirements on the vehicles to facilitate these same services.

For one, creating digitservice systems around cars changes the demands on vehicles to include connected technology. Connected tech also needs to be robust and up to date for longer than the normal infotainment systems we see today. All this requires new types of information as input to the management of car companies. How digital should a car be to be digital enough? What is the return on investment for turning cars into mobile, over-the-air-updatable computers?

Wider implications

More and more cars are connected to the internet in more ways. More and more aspects of their use and operations will inevitably be taken over by digital services. The question is how the manufacturers of cars adapt to these changes. How much of the new revenue streams manufacturers will be able to tap into. To do that well, the auto industry leaders need to figure out how to incentivize the development of service systems. As opposed to the development of new car models. This will not be easy but will win them the race.

It is time to start looking beyond the auto industry. What we have already learned there, can be applied in other industries that have – up until now – been spared from the hassle of having to create digital service systems. I am guessing that facilities management, manufacturing of consumer goods, medicine, and food production, will have to tangle with the same issues as the auto industry has had to deal with. My hope is that management in other industries will learn from their experience. Hopefully, they will find solutions on how to shift organizational focus towards a digital service system mindset.

This article is an attempt at writing down the essence of several years worth of discussions on the topic with a lot of really smart people both inside and outside the industry. You know who you are, thank you, let’s have a chat soon!

Book Review: Good Services – How to design services that work

In Good Services, how to design services that work, Lou Downe effectively shifts the common focus of Service Design away from coming up with new things and innovation, towards making services function well (or at all) for users with real needs.

At first glance, Lou Dorne gives us – a very welcome – checklist with hygiene requirements that need to be fulfilled in order for a service to be a “good” service. But as the principles are presented one after the other, with excellent examples from the real world to clarify, it becomes something more. A way of shifting the conversation towards how we can make services more efficient at, for a lack of better words, serving humans.

Promoting the user perspective

Dorne consistently takes the users’ side against poorly designed services that do not put people’s needs first. In the process of explaining what and why this lack of user-centricity hurts both users and service providers. Throughout most of the book, the language, and tone not only caters to designers but is well suited for anyone that would like to understand how services interact with users and what can be done to improve these interactions.

Good Services, less explicitly, gives insight into one of the most value-creating and hopefully profitable activities that can be undertaken today as an entrepreneur. Find a corner of the vast fabric of services that people use that is under-digitalized and create seamless services that help people through the process without feeling that they are stuck in a Kafka-esque nightmare. A good service. Creating a successful startup around failed service points might be more challenging than I feel it would be when reading Good Services, but that is also not what the author is trying to achieve. Instead, Good Services conveys the common-sense solutions to service issues that make you think, “well of course a service should be inclusive, logical, and easy to find” without being trivializing or on the nose. It will surely be a guide often referenced by designers and companies trying to keep their services good.

A practical guide

Good Services is written with a very clear structure that furthers the books’ ability to function as a guide to diagnosing a service “goodness”. Each chapter goes over one design aspect and presents this as a statement. Then a short, three-sentence explanation of the statement before going into detail, deep-diving into the concepts with examples and all. Each concept is then summarized in a few bullet points. All in all the author has made a well-functioning guide to doing just what is advertised on the cover. Designing services that work.

That being said, if organizations can learn to use the principles of designing good services effectively, this would lead to a quality revolution in the service system, in which we as users and citizens try to get things done. If this book can serve as a conversation starter for this, no one is happier than me.

One issue I find with the book is that the author sometimes organizes the advice given as if they are the same order of importance and magnitude, while they can in fact be very different depending on what principle we are reading. Consider principle 1: Be easy to find, a hands-on text about how to make a service identifiable and findable for people. Then compare that to principle 12: Encourage the right behaviors from users and service providers. Which almost becomes a philosophical text about designers and service organizations’ responsibilities for the world we live in. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as both topics surely are worthwhile to discuss. However, for me, it makes it a bit difficult at times to organize the learnings from the book, demanding a lot more from the reader to make the principles applicable in real-world situations.

Final thoughts

All in all, this is a great book. I am already using it as reference material in my work and it is adding value for me as a Service Designer. Potentially Good Services could help organizations identify what can be done to make their services better.

What do you think? Have you read the book or are you thinking about it? I would love to hear your thoughts, so write a comment and let us discuss.

If you would like to buy Good Services, and I recommend that you do, you might consider using the affiliate link below. I get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

Good Services: How to Design Services that Work

It is of course also available in many other bookstores off- and online.

If you have the time and would like to read more, check out my post, Design as a catalyst for innovation.

Design as a catalyst for innovation

A couple of years ago I was asked to facilitate an innovation workshop for a large tech company. The format and scope were clearly defined from the start, it was to be a half-day workshop. The stated brief for the workshop was to “create fantastic innovation for our product pipeline”.

Being a Service Designer by trade, I am sometimes asked to facilitate innovation this way. It is true that performing design thinking activities, such as talking to real users, and engaging stakeholders in workshops, increases the likelihood for innovation to occur significantly. However, design is not a magical process, able to turn any hastily thrown together ideas into great and innovative services.

It is not a productive starting point to go into any project with innovation as the end goal. It is much better (and at the core of design thinking) to go into any value creation efforts with the goal of doing just that, to create value for your customers and users. If the solution for creating value is innovation, innovation will be logical. If your users will be helped more by changing the wording in a customer service script or by changing the layout of your product web page, that is where you should focus your efforts. Let innovation come when and where it is needed.

Needless to say, the afternoon workshop, while fun and engaging, did not produce any immediate innovations that transformed their business. Or as one participant exclaimed after my workshop, “How do we go forward from here?”.

How do we go forward from here?
Unnamed workshop participant

The difference between creating and experiencing innovation

You might disagree and think of one of any number of examples of transformative innovation, “What about the iPod?”. One of the most iconic examples of innovation. The iPod is undisputedly an innovative product that has transformed the world of music, quite abruptly for us users. What Apple did was identify an unmet, in hindsight logical, need that consumers had. To carry around their digital music. They hired Tony Fadell as a consultant, and the rest is history – and pretty great execution.

What did not happen, was a three-day design sprint with the stated purpose of finding good innovative ideas to diversify Apple’s product portfolio. Instead, the perception of technology making a huge leap is what makes us think of the iPod as a sudden innovation. I am fairly sure that Mr. Fadell did not see it as a flash of inspiration. He spent a decade trying to create great handheld technology before he found the perfect match with people’s need for portable music.

CNBC: iPod inventor Tony Fadell, I Literally had a decade of failure.

Innovation from the perspective of the user then is when you meet their needs using technology that makes the experience unfamiliar enough to feel completely new.

Fulfilling different levels of user needs.

I would argue – again in line with design thinking – that a better approach than trying to force innovation, would be to focus on the users. What needs do they have connected to our products and services?

If users have trouble using our product, then we likely will have the most to gain by addressing usability issues. When users have needs that can be fulfilled by adding features to our existing product, then we have a solid case for expanding our product development team. If instead, we find that our users have an issue that we can solve using new technology or existing technology in a new way, this is when we have the kind of revolutionizing potential for innovation that could transform entire industries.

The important takeaway from this is not that we should spend all our resources trying to find new technological breakthroughs. Nor should we try to find new ways to use our kitchen utensils and call it innovation. Rather, we need to make sure that everyone in our organization understands our users and their needs. We should double down on our efforts to make new technology visible and understandable in our organizations. And not least, we need to look at our organizations and understand what it is that we do well, and what we can do even better. This is how we best serve our users.

How do we go forward from here?

I don’t want to sound like I don’t believe in rapid improvements and transformative innovation. Or that I don’t think workshops can be great forums for collaboration within an innovation process. On the contrary, I am an avid supporter of all these things – if performed with insight and purpose.

TDLR: I'm arguing that the most effective innovation strategy is to make sure that the three aspects, Understanding of tech, Understanding of Business Goals, and Understanding of User Needs are all represented effectively, and understood by a
everyone included in our innovation efforts.

In order to innovate, we need to be able to connect technology, business values, and the needs of people that are affected. This is where design has an important part to play. But, it takes time, effort, and a nuanced understanding of what innovation really is. That is how we go forward from here.