Andy Polaine: Hi and welcome to power of 10, a podcast about
design operating at many levels zooming out from thoughtful
detail through to organisational transformation and onto changes
in society and the world. My name is Andy Polaine. I'm a
service design and innovation consultant, leadership coach,
educator and writer. My guest today is KA McKercher, a
designer and writer living on Aboriginal land in Australia.
They have over 10 years experience leading social
innovation and CO design approaches across Australia and
New Zealand, previously working as principal at the Australian
Centre of social innovation and the innovation unit. And they're
currently working within the New South Wales government. They
write in their book relying heavily on sticky notes
privileges, those who can think quickly, are highly literate and
literary, and are well versed in thinking and headlines. Anyone
who can't do that is generally excluded and left bewildered by
the pace of commercial design methods. KA, welcome to power of
10.
KA: Thank you for having me, Andy.
Andy Polaine: So I'm going to return back to that quote, which
I'm guessing is, is where the title of your book Beyond sticky
notes came from. But I'm interested in your own journey
first. So you know, what was your pathway from where you came
from to here.
KA: So I accidentally went to design school after really
wanting to go to art school, and not having that be framed as a
real job. Sort of ending up in design and architecture, and
then being also at the very same time very interested in social
science as well. So I studied design, and I studied
anthropology at the same time, which was fortuitous, because
those things, I guess, would go on to become quite entangled.
Yeah. But at that time, I sort of thought cheese, designs
interesting, it's fun, perhaps doesn't have a very robust
understanding of people, and sort of methods of understanding
people. And I thought anthropology is interesting, but
it feels a bit stagnant and a bit othering. And we don't
really make things. So about, sort of interesting to join
these two things together. And very soon after design school,
sort of working for a company called optimal usability that
doesn't exist anymore, but was a fabulous company. And it's time.
And one of the early projects that I began working on was
around the translation of legislation, which in New
Zealand was around how we would better care for kids who are at
the precipice of perhaps entering the child protection
system. And the project was really to say, can we work in a
place based way? Look, can we work in particular communities
and with communities to take this legislative change, and
turn it into service design, and sort of functional and practical
service design. And very naively, I just sort of hurled
myself into this with the things I thought I knew about, like,
doing journey maps, and personas and workshops, and, you know,
having sticky notes and butchers paper. And those things were
just rejected, of course, by communities, who were really
confused about who I was and why I was there, and what I was
doing and why I had so much arrogance. And, and so little
cultural competency, actually being quite New Zealander. And
that gave me a bit of a taste for design as applied into a
social or community setting. Probably a bit of a taste for
how little I reasonably knew about that and what my role
should be, or could be. And then I guess, set me on a bit of a
path of working in a more community led design process,
across lots of different settings, predominantly health
and domestic violence and child protection. And that sort of
just a mask lots of different experiences, about designing
with people, particularly in community, not often in
boardrooms are not often in offices. And then a little bit
down that track, I sort of thought, Well, this has been
interesting and fantastic. And all this needs to go somewhere.
So hence writing book, but then I was also curious about what
it's like to be on the inside, and to work at a different level
and layer of the system and decided to then start working
government and seeing what was possible, what kinds of
conditions I could create from inside of government to perhaps
have people you know, like myself, or much better, more
competent versions of myself, come and sort of lead more
community accountable work.
Andy Polaine: So I mean, it's, I think quite a lot of obviously
service designers end up are attracted to government
actually, because in that sort of systems level of view that
you often take of the of the work we're doing, have a you
know where things going wrong. And one of the places where you
can actually make some significant change across that
entire system is obviously, is in government. At the same time
you get there, and you work with those departments. And there's
often an awful lot of good intention, but there's admired
in in process that slows them down. And that's part of the
kind of systems problem, what's been your experience, and really
working there. So probably, you might want to be careful about
what you say, but you know, given what you just said about,
you know, coming in, let's be kind of honest, I've worked in,
you know, in a consultancy, with all that kind of glossiness of
that and been one of those people who's kind of coming to
one of those departments to do some work. And I'm very aware
of, you know, of how that that kind of arrogance, I guess you
would just talked about four, and what's been your experience,
you know, of trying to bring these kinds of methods and
process and thinking into those departments, perhaps in a
different way to how external consultants would do. So
KA: I think the thing we get the opportunity to do when we're in
a place, and for for extended period of time, is and not
dissimilar to co design in this respect, work in a very
relationship first approach, right? Where we don't come in
with assumptions about what people are and aren't doing the
capabilities they do in don't have an I think some language
and I think it was Jeremy myosin, who, who presented this
language of perhaps the goal is designed and fused, not designed
LED. So this language of design led, you know, nice, yeah. And
it's it's active, it's strong, it's a bit bossy. And my
experience has certainly been the design of fused is more
helpful, not only to truly bring design methods and skill sets
into an organisation, but also just to value other skills and
capabilities that people have insights they have about their
work, and perhaps, you know, I guess, allow them to work with
their own curiosity about what is it they want to learn and
discover, as opposed to us, telling them that or suggesting
that that's somehow wrong or bad for not knowing or not having
had the opportunity to know and, actually, I think there's many
things for designers to reflect on in terms of the pace in which
we expect change to happen, which is often admirable, but
unreasonable. And also, perhaps that one of the reasons why
people don't engage in design processes is sometimes because
of the sheer operational demand. And if someone has this enormous
operational demand placed on them, it's not exactly that easy
to step out of that and engage in, you know, what we might
think of as a gold standard design process. So in some ways,
the way that I've moreso thought about it is what can I curate,
for folks across the organisation almost like a
tasting platter of different conversations, capabilities,
micro learn microlearning type activities, that just sort of
builds up in a way that's reasonable to the demands that
people have on themselves when they're in operational roles and
positions, but also keeps kind of stoking the fire of building
out maybe different mindset, sort of different skill sets,
and coming to see how they're relevant for a very specific
context. Because I guess much of design is framed, perhaps
unhelpfully as very generic. And as being these tools, that just
sort of Bob about in the world, and it can be really difficult
to make the conceptual leap between what would that tool
mean for me? How would I bring it into my context? And how
might it need adapting? And I guess it's someone working on
the inside, there's a translational role, perhaps in
sort of seeing the massive plethora of tools, and
meaningfully bringing those in and telling stories about them
and adapting them and even doing work and then using that as a
way of saying, See, we use that thing. And it was quite good.
And people said it was quite good. Do you want to use it too?
I'll give you a hand.
Andy Polaine: Right? And then you get the snowball effect. Of
more, you know, I say the snowball effect, I have this
expression called this of umbrella in the rain, which is,
you know, at the beginning, everyone thought, why have you
got an umbrella? I'm speaking to an Englishman here, my vegan
umbrella, you know, and then if so, of course, you know, then
when it starts raining, everyone wants to be under your umbrella
and that that sort of success attract success, and it's it's a
slow process. I think. I think though your point about design
is being frustrated. The lack of pace, particularly in a, you
know, with the noise, if you like from from Silicon Valley of
faster is always better, right? And the kind of speed and the
your point about designers being frustrated at that kind of lack
of places is really kind of well placed and well observed. I
think that that's a we forget to take people on the journey with
us and kind of not just forget, I suspect we're probably deeply
impatient about it,
KA: I think so that it can be shaming, right? Like, it's yeah,
that shame is not a good change strategy and to suggest to
people that they should somehow be ashamed of the things they
don't know, or haven't had the opportunity to learn. I think
the other thing is that it's actually very easy to create a
product, it's very difficult to then see all the layers of which
need to be aligned to make that an actual part of the
organisation. That's an implementation, not just an
installation of some
Andy Polaine: Yeah, yeah. To defend the service designer.
Second to that the reason why the book that I co wrote with
Ben elevens is called from insight to implementation was
for that very reason why this idea that otherwise you are
stuck in in sticky notes land, and and you've sort of come up
with some concepts, but not really, the implementation is
the is the tough bit, which might come to actually but then
just talking about shame, I've just noticed you'd had the there
was a piece of you said about having courageous conversations,
and are you enabling people to take off their armour? Which I
don't know if that was, you know, was that a direct
reference to Brene Brown? Or was it just happens to be the same
language because of this? You know, when we were talking about
shame, it's a difficult area, right?
KA: Yeah. And I wonder if there's anyone who's gotten away
with not being deeply influenced by Brene Brown, because the way
she speaks about this is so accessible and warm and
friendly. And, you know, certainly it does come you know,
and be inspired by Brene. Brown, but it also comes from a flavour
of community organising and activism. That is less the
pointy Jelle. Yeah, style. And a little bit more the, you know,
the whole, you know, let's not build a fence, but maybe have a
much longer table. And, you know, even Krista Tippett, I
think the host of on being is another person that models this
kind of hospitality and invitation, which, you know,
really some of the ingredients that I guess I speak about a lot
in the book, but also speak about a lot in design practice
that perhaps we've maybe forgotten some of the
hospitality based aspects of convenient people and hosting
conversations.
Andy Polaine: Yeah. And as a kind of sideline to that. I
mean, you've been, well, you're in New South Wales, right?
You're in Sydney. Sydney hasn't had the lockdown quiet that
Melbourne has had. But you know, I guess you've talking about
sort of hosting and hospitality. There's a lot that I guess we're
naturally attuned to, from, you know, hosting, being a host of
people in the space, put it that way, there's also a lot that as
you point out, that we're completely kind of ignorant of
or unaware of, or you're unconscious of or just not
getting right, in those physical spaces. I'd be interested to
know what your experience has been actually of doing this
trying to apply some of these things in the remote space?
KA: It's a good question. And I think for me, many of the same
principles and practices apply. So you know, I think it's
prayer, Parker and others who have often said, you know,
something like 80% of the work of being in the room, happens
outside of the room, and before you even get to the room in the
first place. So I guess in the virtual environment, I'm still
trying to do things like build relationships with people, one
to one and have conversations with them, ahead of there being
any sort of group based thing that's going to occur. I think
there's really small things like asking people, you know, is
there anything that you'd like to tell me or share with me by
which will make this issue more accessible for you, or more
engaging for you? And that might be a small thing, like, you
know, make it okay, that I can turn my camera off, or make sure
you have enabled captions or, you know, there's a whole bunch
of stuff. Yeah. I think small, like novelties, can play a role
as well around maybe there's, you know, almost like Easter
eggs built into invitations built into virtual convenings.
And afterwards, I think there's a lot that we can do around
buddying people up. So there's a greater sense of safety, even in
a virtual room, you know, there's a huge wealth of things.
Andy Polaine: Yeah, I mean, it's definitely nice. support, you
know, in breakout rooms are though. So there's probably two
sides, there's definitely spoiling breakout rooms that you
can, you know, in those virtual spaces where, you know, you can
say to everyone, hey, come up with a thing and share it with
the entire group of, you know, 30 people on this video chat is
obviously quiet, you know, a demand on on real quiet love
people actually, you know, to work in a small breakout group
together, and then kind of come back and report as your group or
something like that, that that kind of helps, definitely helps
create this sort of sense of safety in the group and take it
less, the focus less on the person. One of the downsides of
breakout groups is the way you can kind of jump around them,
you can't kind of see them all at once. And I think one of the
things you see in a visual space is, oh, there's a table over
there where one person is kind of not included. And the other
three people are kind of, you know, at the wall, you know,
doing whatever they're doing. And this other person seems to
be a bit checked out of you encounter, you know, I mean,
presumably, you've encountered that in physical space. I saw
you nodding before, have you kind of come up with any ways to
deal with that in the virtual? Yeah, so
KA: the best tool that I've found is, I build all of the
breakout rooms in advance, and deliberately curate who's going
to be in that specific breakout room. And particularly when I'm
teaching design or design related skills, I'll always have
someone in the room that I've sort of briefed ahead of time
around, these are the things I'd like you to look for what I'd
like you to exercise as kind of a peer to peer facilitator in
your own group. And even as a really simple thing, making it
really safe for people to leave the breakout room and come back
to the shared space. So we have a session where we had I think
about 170 people. And I said to everyone, breakout rooms,
distaff, all of us have some of us that create a huge amount of
anxiety, and we just hate them. So I let everyone know, and
actually show them a screenshot and say, This is how you can
leave, and you don't have to feel bad leaving the main space,
we'll just have some quiet music, you can turn off your
camera. And here's an independent thing you might like
to do, or think about. So. I think there's a power dynamic
here, though, that as the host, we set what's what's
permissible, right. And even if we don't say people come up with
their own sense of what the unspoken norms are, so one of
the most powerful things for a lot, I found was just to say to
people, just come as you are, you don't need to apologise for
your kids, jumping on your back, cat sitting on your computer,
you know, the blinds that you don't really like behind you,
and you have this perception and our professional. It's okay.
Like and if you're feeling a bit frazzled, and if you just start
crying in the middle of the session, it's going to be okay.
And I think for people even just to hear that explicit
permission, I noticed a massive shift.
Andy Polaine: Yeah, that's true. That's a very good idea. So I
guessing those kinds of ideas also, were the sort of itch that
you sort of wrote the book to scratch or tell me, people write
books, usually, because the one that they want doesn't exist.
And there's a sort of there's an itch, they want to scratch
themselves, sometimes also born around out of frustration. So
your books go beyond sticky notes, codesign, for real, and
then mindsets, methods and movements and the real it's kind
of its underlying, which I'm guessing you've been talking
about a bit already. You What was the genesis of this?
KA: So a few things. So I don't know if you've noticed this in
Europe, but certainly in Australia, and also an Altero.
In New Zealand. There's been this, I don't think explosion is
too wild word to use of the language of codesign. So we're
seeing it everywhere. From organisational strategies. We're
all commission recommendations. And there's a great deal of
projects that go out to market to say, We want an agency to
come work with us and to co design. My observation was most
of those things weren't what I had understood that to me. And
when I say what I had understood, I mean sort of
connecting to the lineage of, you know, participatory design
practice or emancipatory design practice, or community led
design practice that particularly I think back home
and Altidore is a much bigger, more burgeoning field of, of
people who think it's a seeing design, not as a toolkit, but a
catalyst for more even power dynamics, or more opportunities
for people to play a role in the decisions that shape their
lives. So I was feeling this dissonance, I guess, between the
language that people were using, and then what was actually
happening, which was really just kind of fancy workshops, and
actually not even very Just not even very good workshops. And as
you say, I was looking across the market. And what I could see
was super convoluted academic texts that are just not
accessible. I could see little bits and bobs that people had
put together, maybe a blog here or a blog there. But the other
extreme was these toolkits that were all tools, and no
connection to what would you need to unlearn? And what would
you need to be even to be successful? And what's actually
the social movements side of it as well, that, you know, really,
this isn't just about jazzy new methods, but the the opportunity
for greater civic participation, you know, greater connection and
neighbourhoods in between organisations and the people
gussied up to serve or to partner with. So I felt there
was a gap. And that seemed to be the case, particularly once the
book was out. And people were sort of saying, you know, I've
been looking for this. Yeah, so I guess, I wanted to write
something that had these three aspects. So wanted to say
something about the social movements side of things. And
what, what some of the, I guess, particular literacies around
power and privilege that might be helpful, or are helpful for
designers to have a much greater sense of, or anyone that can be
in CO design, it's not just designers. The second part, I
wanted to talk much more so about maybe some of the mindsets
that we don't often see talked about in design hospitality, in
particular being one of those things, but also the grittier
parts of things like asking people to be in ambiguity. But
whether that's actually a reasonable or possible request,
and if it is, when and how and how does that get supported. And
then pretty light on the methods and really focusing on the model
of care for codesign, which is sort of one of the core
frameworks, which is really about bringing about some more
trauma aware practices into doing design and convening
groups people, and just generally not trying to
replicate the great deal of excellent design, books, and
design methods that are already out there. But tell us how to do
things like generative design research,
Andy Polaine: there's a large part of this is really about
designing the process, right, or kind of applying a level of
thoughtfulness and detail. And there's an incredible amount of
it, I think it's very rich on that. To kind of not the I say
the process, not so much the process itself, not even the
kind of actual work that you're doing. But the preconditions in
which all of this is taking place. And applying the same
amount of effort to that you talked about in conditions for
CO design is really kind of like the first kind of chunk of it.
And you'd have one, you have these kind of four aspects of
support and sponsorship time and money, culture and climate, and
commitments. And particularly those first three, well
actually, notice that the support and sponsorship time and
money and commitments are all I would argue proxies for how
important people think this stuff is. Because if they're not
there, and when a common thing, and you mentioned it before is
anything a codesign is expensive, or and we talked
about the speed thing as well, I can imagine you've had the sort
of pushback on this is going to slow us down or whatever. You
know, it's there's no budget until it's something that
someone decides is important. And then suddenly there's
budget, right. So you know, a lot of this feels like what
you're doing is trying to kind of surface this as no need just
is, you know, this is important, because this is the right way to
treat people. But this is important, because otherwise you
don't get the outcomes you're after. You know, I think
designers tend to talk about design too much actually to to
stakeholders, and people who are kind of, you know, might be
pushing back on them or people they're trying to convince, you
know, when you've been doing this work, both when you've been
doing this work, and maybe when you've been sort of talking or
teaching or whatever about this, what have been some of the kind
of main push backs that you've had on on this way of working.
So I
KA: think that I don't have time or we don't have time is a big
one. And I think there's some reframing around that around,
you know, going slow now to go fast later or or thinking about
future liabilities that may arise from not having
sufficiently invested. You know, in the early days. I think
another sort of objection or a thing that people get hung up on
is they have Miss heard something along the way about
everyone has to be involved, or everyone should be involved. And
I think this is a great fallacy that when that's possible, and
to that, therefore, everyone has to be involved in same ways. And
I guess what I particularly advocate for is that we Think
about people who know people who care, people who perhaps haven't
got to have a seat in the conversation, but have important
insights to share. And we're really prioritising those people
as the core co design team, if you will. And then there, as we
both know, a great, great, huge list of many different ways in
which people can be involved, that may be more about breadth,
and depth. Or there might mix those things.
Andy Polaine: Right. And so I think, you know, one of the
things that happens when people say we need to be inclusive in
this is like, everyone has to have this a right and everyone
has to be involved, because then it becomes a kind of political
thing of all, we can't speak to those people, unless we keep
bringing these people is that the kind of thing you're, you're
saying ends up happening. And those people aren't necessarily
the right people, or they may even be unsafe people to be in
or make the space unsafe,
KA: or there are people who, whilst have views that arguably
are being you know, that they deserve to share our views that
are already well understood, and well represented. And I think
the part that designers are very guilty of, and we all are
because of our impulse to want to create something new, and
maybe create some kind of shrine to ourselves, as well as that we
often sort of parachute into contexts without sufficiently
understanding what's already known. And I think that does
mean that we often then go back over old ground, as opposed to
sort of saying, Where are the cracks? Where does the road end?
You know, where are people falling in the river? That just
got to be a very complicated metaphor. But, you know, I think
there's a different way of thinking about this. And it does
require being brave enough to say, Well, should everyone be
involved, and that's perhaps actually not inclusion, nests,
perhaps just a very unsophisticated understanding or
sophisticated way of thinking about it.
Andy Polaine: I mean, you've talked a lot about power power
structures, creating safe spaces and building wrote down a quote,
he said, building trust and relationships before offering
tools or methods, which I feel that we probably do the other
way around most of the time as designers. And you know, and
I've seen it, as you've seen it done an interesting because you,
given your background, there's a guy called Chris Hayward, who's
been on who I used to work with, who's been on the show comes
from anthropology background, and I've seen him really
brilliantly in a workshop where it was a large group of people
that lots of different kinds of parts of the lots of third party
service providers for this particular thing. And one of
those third party service providers was considered to be
the problem, basically, and the woman who was, you know,
representing that service, there was kind of a pile on starting
to happen in the space, and she then understandably started to
become quite defensive, which then started to kind of lock
down where things were going to go in terms of kind of opening
up the problem space and all of that stuff. And I saw Chris
just, well actually be incredibly empathetic and human,
but it had just had a real ability to kind of diffuse that.
And not only to kind of, you know, help that woman feel more
included, unwanted, and to sort of, which helped her kind of
dial down her and her defences, take off her armour, actually,
but also, at the same time, stop the others in the room from from
the kind of pile on and over the course of two days. I really, it
was just, it was brilliant to see, I don't know, you know, if
I asked him about it, he probably would remember it. I
don't know that he was such a sort of, it just seemed to be
something he was very kind of attuned to, I think, from his
anthropology background, actually, of understanding of
being a stranger in a strange land. And I don't, I'm not
actually part of this community. And you know, I'm, I'm, you
know, I'm colonising this community as a, you talked
actually about a design being, particularly when working with
indigenous people design being a colonising practice. And there's
that nice piece from Katerina Davis, in there about, you know,
we need more more designers, more Maori designers and good
allies, and no more white saviours. And so many people
assume we need something that we already have. And that kind of
skill to shape that safe space in the middle of seeing it was a
recurring recurring fact a dynamic where a space that might
have been assumed to be safe starts to become not safe was a
real skill. I thought then it was really nice to sort of see
in practice, you talk about kind of You Can we have can have a
lot of sort of good intentions and set up stuff as best we
think we can. But the same problem arises there which is
this is our kind of guess of what we think should be the safe
space, how do you deal with a kind of correcting, you know,
what we think is a safe space might not be how do we do that
better? And then in the middle of it when you realise something
is not going as it should? How do you correct for that?
KA: Look, I think the first thing to acknowledge is safe.
And I want to say safe enough, because I don't think that it's
possible for all spaces, right? Like, we're human beings and
we're colliding into each other. And we're, you know, saying and
doing things. So I think safe enough for me as the, the
framing and within that, according to who. And I guess in
my work, I take a particularly special focus on folks who will
not be the highest on the matrix of domination who will not have
the most authority in the room, or for who an identity or
experience is likely to produce an other kind of effect. And I
often have quite a few conversations with people ahead
of time about what safe enough might be like. And, you know,
often people because they've thought about this, often really
a lot, particularly survivors of different kinds of have done a
lot of work and had to do a lot of work around how do I feel
safe, or safe enough. So often, people have really practical
suggestions, like, I don't want to hear what everyone's jobs
are, at the start of the session, I want to hear who
people are in their community. And I just don't want to be
shamed, that I, for example, non unemployment right now. And that
person's got three PhDs. So people will often make
suggestions about what that could be like. And I guess, as a
somewhat, you know, a person who's facilitated a fair amount
in the space, I've also got a bit in my own memory bank of
things that I might draw from, I think it's a really different
matter as to when the space becomes unsafe. And I think the
people that I know, that are really good at doing this
experience, or have experience some exclusion in their own
lives, that allows them to the sounds a little bit kind of
woowoo, but feel a sense that something's broken, and the
relational space, and someone's done something that's awkward,
that's harmed someone. And, you know, I think this is where the
whole courageous conversation things come from. I don't know
that people who are hosting workshops always see it as their
role to take a corrective action of some kind and to practice
calling in. So let me give an example. I was in a workshop
some time ago, and the workshop was about LGBT health. And there
were these very lovely consultants who were running the
workshop and became clear to me that they weren't, in fact,
running the workshop, there just set up the room. So there wasn't
sort of anyone running anything. And I'd made a particular
comment and my experience as a non binary person in a very
aggressive, older cisgendered person sort of said to me, all,
that's fine. But we all just need to grow up here and stop
being so worried about language. And that would have been the
perfect opportunity for the person hosting the conversation
to say, we have already committed in this space to
prioritise the safety of LGBT people, and to listen deeply and
not to minimise. But instead, these people just kind of sat
back and they were very awkward. And nothing happened. And, of
course, that just reinforced this power dynamic of Yeah, it
was somehow Okay, for that to happen. So I think as a
facilitator, we have to have the capacity in that moment to call
out and call in at the same time and offer invitations that
people might think about their behaviour might change it, and
if they don't change it, that they may need to leave the
session.
Andy Polaine: So so there's a thing there, which is it because
we were talking about shame, obviously any in that situation,
you would kind of probably shame that other person, but that you
just who said it, by calling it out, or you know, there's a
danger of that happening.
KA: And calling it in, though, I think is the thing to do. The
other impulse is to shame and to be Yeah, Karen, stop it. But the
thing that's really helpful is to you know, even a question
like, it can be fairly kind, but strong at the same time around,
you know, might that comment, actually be a reinforcement of
all the things we've already been speaking about today. So,
you know, things that invitations as opposed to
interrogations, or, you know, calling out can can be something
that needs to happen some of the time, particularly if we see our
practices working in solidarity with people in the room who have
less power, not colluding with or helping people who have more
to feel safe and comfortable.
Andy Polaine: No, I think So you know, it's more of an evening
out of things as well, you know, an evening or an evening out and
evening, at CES, the same words, and evening out of their power
about rebalancing of the power dynamics there and as the person
facilitating whether you actually call it convening, that
CO design space, you know, you have a lot of extra power,
because you literally, you're the one standing at the front
with the mic or whatever. And that gives you kind of a bigger,
bigger clout, and so you can kind of rebalance. And now,
we're coming pretty close up to time, you also, you've, you've
got the book, you also have produced these mindsets, guides.
There's quite a few other things on your website. You did say
earlier, you're working on another, another book, what's it
called?
KA: Yes. The new book is tentatively called Beyond
service design, which evidently there's a beyond theme going on.
And this particular book is a question that I'm holding in my
head about how is it as service designers, that we may be
colluding with the manufacturing of need and new needs. And this
is particularly inspired by John McKnight 's work on the killer
society, in which he makes this observation that perhaps, you
know, one of the issues we've run into is not because we don't
have enough services, but because maybe we have too many.
And maybe there's some areas that have been professionalised
to such an extent that we've lost some of our capacities to
care for and about each other. And in no way, am I suggesting
that we don't need some services, for sure. We need
acute services, for example, we need people to do surgery on us,
we definitely don't want to do that on each other. But there
are a whole bunch of other services in which we've
invented. And perhaps, you know, as service designers, we're kind
of playing in the territory of inventing services of maybe
creating services that people can't stop using, or that
actually don't build their capability or efficacy in any
way. And maybe that's not always the outcome that we're looking
for. But whether it should be particularly in some categories
of service, in which we might say community capacity is an
outcome we want. But the way in which we go about creating
boundaries, and structures and services may not reflect that.
So it's not particularly well formed. But I've been
increasingly talking to folks, such as at the Australian Centre
for Social Innovation, about what that doing around caring
for carers around building up community resilience after
bushfires around community mental health and new models for
keeping people out of the child protection system. And the thing
that all those projects have in common is they're not services,
and they don't get framed in the context of service, they get
framed in the context of capability. And I'm just curious
about some of those things and working through some of the
different stories, the different approaches. But importantly,
what I'm also asking is, what is that ask of the service
designer? And are there some things perhaps that we need to
give up or some ways that we might reframe our own thinking,
so that everything isn't to service, a better service and
new service a different service, but we see that there's
different directions, different roles, and I get a different
outcomes?
Andy Polaine: I'm really fascinated to see what you come
up with. I think the thing when you just talked about the caring
for carers thing, I think there is a because we healthcare is a
classic thing we talked about and service design as one of the
kinds of big services that will be around, you know, has been
around since before we were born. And we'll be around after
we die. And there, those are the two points we know we access to
the health care services, as well, our birth and death. But
you know, one of the things going on in Germany, for
example, is, you know, with with COVID, is that the politicians
will talk about, you know, we need another 1000 in intensive
care unit beds, but the nurses have all burnt out. And so
they're leaving that profession, and actually one in mice of
family circle is has done exactly that. And because there
there was an interview with somebody, you know, from an
intensive care unit, and they just said, you know, beds don't
make people better. beds, don't make care for people. If you
don't have the staff. The numbers of beds don't make any
difference. And it's very frustrated with those kinds of
political statements. We just didn't really understand the
context or what it's like to be, you know, actually working in
those services. I think there's a lot of services that I mean,
look at that, and I feel like I'm always kind of loading on
the tech industry here. But you know, the tech industry is
obviously full of that. And we think of, you know, Amazon and
the rest of them where you've got or you know, the content,
auditors of people have to kind of view objection or content and
from Facebook and all those kind of people, there's a, there's
all these other services for whom the people in their
services aren't really cared for at all. Yeah, so I can, I can
definitely that and that resonate. So as you know, the
show is named after this rain, Charles Eames film called power
of 10, about the relative size of things in the universe. And
the last question is always what one small thing is either
overlooked or underappreciated, and could either be redesigned
or more well known that has an outsized effect on the world
KA: feels like a extraordinarily difficult question. To ask,
look, I'm going to say something that has, has personal elements
to it, and it has work assignments. And because we've
already talked about this a little in the conversation is, I
think the thing we can all do better, whether it's to our
family, our friends, our colleagues, workshop
participants, is just know how to write a really good
invitation, we just really fail on that we failed to make it
personal, we failed to make the personally feel like special to
some extent, and like we care about them are attentive to
their needs. I'll provide just a really quick example as I was
hosting birthday party the other day, and a friend of mine with
autism was coming along. And I'd said to her in advance, would it
be okay, if I burns and scented candles? Or would that be really
disruptive for you? And would that make it really unpleasant
to be in my home? And mediately? She sort of came back and said,
Oh, my gosh, I can't believe you even asked me that like, yeah,
ideally, prefer if you didn't, if you don't mind? And it's
like, well, no, I don't mind. Like it doesn't affect my
experience at all. But it was clearly going to have a really
big impact on yours. So invitations, personal
invitations, professional invitations, just make them a
little bit better. Not so generic. And, you know, I think
that would make a pretty significant difference about
who's in the room and how they feel about being in the room.
Andy Polaine: You talk about actually meant to us it's talked
about this before, but you talk about love quite a lot in the
book as an as an important part of this process. And my biggest
complaint about sort of professionalisation of genesis
of the word even being professional is that it seems to
kind of exclude all of that exclude, you know, love and
emotions and how people feel that's kind of irrelevant in the
kind of hard business world and stuff. And yet, without that,
you sort of don't get anything going anywhere. Because there's
just there's a lot of resistance that people will then push back
on. And do you think it's too extreme to say that when you
don't really take into account people's how people feel about
things? And how it kind of how they feel excluded or included?
It's actually, fundamentally people feel unloved?
KA: Absolutely, I mean, I don't think it would be an
understatement that it is all of our wish to feel in some way. So
you know, when we're together, and I think that's just as true
for a design workshop as it is and family and community. So
yeah, I think we've got to talk a lot more about love. I'm
particularly loving all of the contributions that people bring,
including the ones that aren't obvious to us, or we don't
naturally value or because it's not a professionalised skill,
and we might have classified it as craft or hobby, that we don't
value them, we don't see what that is and what they can bring
in. You know, that's probably drawing a little bit more on the
asset based community development type approaches in
which we just recognise that everyone has gifts to offer and
our role, or at least I see it as our role to create enough
hospitality and safety and a warm welcome in which people
feel like they can share whatever those gifts are. I know
that sounds kind of soft and fluffy, but it's, it's actually
hard and important.
Andy Polaine: That sounds like a very good place to end the
podcast. Thank you so much for being my guest on power of 10.
KA: Thank you for having me.
Andy Polaine: As I'm sure you're aware, you've been listening to
power of 10. My name is Andy Polaine. You can find me at a
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