Chapter 1

Introduction

Survive! Just think to survive!

––My father’s words

When I was a teenager, I happened to tell my father that unless I could contribute to some great endeavor, I didn’t see my life as worth living. Tadao, my father, got very angry at me and told me that coming back home and seeing his mother again had been his primary focus during the war. He told me “if you start to think it is okay to die, you surely will die.”

Now that I am in my 60s, I understand very well what Tadao felt, and also why he got so angry with my words. However, as a young man, I thought my father would agree that a life only matters when it serves a greater purpose. Tadao had been a sergeant in the Imperial Army of Japan, where the training books taught every soldier that serving the Emperor was the most important purpose in life, more important than your own life.

Devotion is the key to success in all things. If you go deep into the meaning of the word, devotion, you will realize that you need to devote your life to serve a purpose. The late Mr. Daikichi Kamada, wrote about my father Tadao in his book (1995). During the war, when Daikichi could barely walk, Tadao scolded him “Do not give up, keep walking and you will live to see your wife and daughter again!”

In business, too, the situation is the same. We need devotion in order to succeed, even when it would be easier to just give up and stop trying.

This book is devoted to service design—an approach to apply design thinking to develop efficient service within the field of Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME) (Hefley and Murphy 2008).

However, if you have something you really need to do, something more important, please throw this book out, and just devote your time to doing it. It is better to do the thing rather than delay. It is you who can change the world around you, not anyone else.

If I am such a strong believer in doing over reading, then you may very well ask why I am writing this book and for whom.

When we are not quite convinced that we know what to do, then reading can be very helpful. What is that great endeavor that you can devote your life to accomplish? I hope as you come to understand design thinking, you will see it as a way to find your great endeavor.

The Goal for Your Service

In October 2013, my colleagues and I ran a workshop for school kids between the ages of 9 and 12 to help them draw up a guiding map of life-time goals. You may recall what kind of dreams you had as a child, and you may or may not have achieved your childhood dream. If you have abandoned your old dreams, you may feel you have replaced them with better dreams or simply settled for more realistic goals and routines.

Goal setting is the most important thing in your business life, and this book can help you learn to set better goals. However, goal setting is a delicate and really difficult activity. When you look back at your childhood dreams, and compare them against what dreams you have now, most of you will find how much your goal has changed from your childhood days.

We know some people have achieved their childhood dreams, and some of you, readers of this book, may still be pursuing your childhood dreams. Have you ever thought about why people change their goals, and also whether it was good or bad for them to change their life-long goals?

Goal change—or pivoting—is an interesting subject in business schools. Lots of people and companies achieved their success by intelligently changing their original goals. However, there are also lots of stories about the people who achieved their life-long goals through their effort and persistence.

To study service design and delivery, I would sincerely advise you to check your goal in life, because your service depends on your heart—how much you think of the service, how much you think of the people who will appreciate your service, and how much you think of the people who helped you to deliver your service.

Service design and delivery depends a lot on technologies, techniques, and materials that you will learn in this book and others; it also depends on the people who design, implement, and deliver your service, but most importantly, service design and delivery depends on you.

Service is one of the activities with a very long history. However, service as an industry is a rather new concept––it was first considered as the third sector of industries by Colin Clark in his book Conditions of ­Economic Progress published in 1940––and is growing rapidly almost everywhere. The Service Industry itself was not born in 1940 just like America was not born in 1492 when Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas.

The question is why service was not perceived as an industry until 1940 or until Clark proposed it. One of the reasons would be that the activity of service is perceived as an individual action, rather than as an industrial or collective activity. And you must understand that these ­personal traits still attach to the service design and delivery in our own context. That is the reason why I emphasize that it is your personal goals that influence your services.

If your goals are not related to your services or your services do not contribute to the achievement of your goals, you should change them, or better yet, redesign them so that you have a more natural and smooth situation for the elevation of your services. Design thinking will be one of the approaches to achieve that harmonization.

Our Society in the Near Future

When you rethink your life’s goals, you may need to consider the society of the future. This leads to two important questions:

• How would the society of the near future affect service?
• How will you design, develop, and implement services to accommodate that future society?

You may choose your goal simply because you are devoted to it. That is, you may not care what your social environment for the service will be. The only thing you care about is to achieve your goal. Your service, however, may not be designed taking into consideration our social environments. Your service needs customers, and you and your customers will have a social relationship.

There is a joke about relationships between people:

There was a philanthropist who gave a poor man $1,000 every Christmas. On one Christmas day, the man went to the philanthropist, who handed him $500 saying “I do not have enough money this year because the wedding of both my daughters occurred. You must put up with this at this time.” Then the man got angry changing the complexion, and yelled, “Use your money for your daughters’ wedding. Do not use my $500.”

As you can readily see from the joke, the relationship between people changes as time goes by. If one were to consider the charity in the joke as a service, it would yield different results for the $1,000-year and the $500-year. This is one of the most difficult parts of the service design and delivery. If you assume the ever-changing status of the service recipient, it will be so easy for you to give up your design for the best service because you know that it is impossible to have a best design that is suited to the ever-changing environment of your customers.

What you can have is the best adaptable design or the best responsive design that works well for the first recipients of the service and delivers the best service to later recipients as well. This approach looks similar to the best-effort one, where you try your best to deliver the best possible service you can, but you cannot tell whether that service will be accepted as the best or not.

Yet another tricky part of service design and delivery is that the ­evaluation of the service by the service recipient will also vary over time. Sometimes, they appreciate your service very highly at first, but gradually forget the initial excitement and later rate your service as intermediate and not so high. In other circumstances, the recipients will not initially appreciate your service as very different from what they were expecting, but later begin to understand what you tried to deliver and praise your service.

Alan Kay once said “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”1 We can modify his words as “The best way to deliver the best service is to design the future for the service-recipients so that they can appreciate our service in the best way.”

Your Business Prospects

Since we have been talking about discipline in services you may wonder how these disciplines relate or affect your business. You have been working to achieve your goals all your life. You have studied what your social environment is likely to be in the near future. Now is the time to think about how your personal goals and the future’s social environment are connected to your business.

Now, let me ask you how you perceive or understand your business. After reviewing your personal goals and your future societal environment, I am sure you will look at your business from a perspective different from the one you had.

Of course, it may depend on your role in your business. You may:

• Be designing your new business;
• Have started your new business;
• Be in charge of the business department of your company;
• Be one of the senior managers of the business unit of your company; or
• Be a newcomer who just joined the business department in your company.

Things will vary depending on the situation and your role, and your service needs to change according to your role in the business. From the customers’ perspective, services and products are packaged into one entity so that they will not distinguish the service from the products they receive.

According to the trends in the industry sector, the service sector is growing in almost every country. So some people forecast that the product sectors will also include more and more services around their physical products.

What we see in business planning and business forecasting is a mixture of wishful thinking and an extension of the past. This process can produce beautiful numbers for internal executives, but will not always realistically reflect the future activities of customers.

In a way, a rule of thumb will be enough to give you preliminary guidance for your business prospects. What you need is to run the check-and-see cycle so that the real response to your activity can be measured, and you can modify your services so that more output is produced.

Focus on Your Services

Now, let us return to your services. Can you describe your service? Who are the stakeholders of your services? On whom does your service depend? Are there people who will be affected by your service but do not realize it?

We can make a long list of questions like the above on your services. Yet, you may find some questions you have forgotten to ask because your service has many features and many links to people and related activities.

Also, there are an infinite number of pitfalls waiting for you. There are deviations and seductions that counter your devotion to your services.
I myself once was so addicted to computer games that I could not think of anything other than playing them. It was a kind of addiction that was a dangerous seduction. However, there will be lots of subtle deviations from your devotion, and they will steal time and energy from you.

It is interesting that in the theory of innovation or generation of great new ideas, you really need focus and devotion to solve the problem; however, the idea itself will come to you when you relax your intense concentration to find the solution. Interestingly, but in general, you cannot mix the devotion and the deviation to form a kind of portfolio or plan a schedule that allocates time to focus on the service and time to do other things. No, this kind of mixture would produce a mess.

So, in a way, you need to establish your style of focusing on your service, like monks and nuns in the monastery. Yes, you need some discipline in your life, and there are taboos on things you should not engage in. This kind of daily routine in your lifestyle really contributes to high productivity as well as safeguards your mental health, even though, again, you still need to do or look at your work from different perspectives. This is the tricky part.

In focusing on your service, it is important to visualize your customers, both present and future customers. It is also important to think about the people who do not become your customers. We are so easily confined to thinking only of our customers we have today. The most difficult part of the phrase, “Listen to your customer,” is to identify the right customer for you. The current customers will surely inform you of lots of problems and create lots of opportunities, but they cannot tell about the future customers of your future services.

One of the approaches to focusing on your service is to purify your service, that is, try to extract the very essence of your service. In other words, try to delete any aspect that is not the very essence of your service. This process is also called abstraction or simplification. The emphasis of abstraction is to model your service at a higher level so that the details are hidden from your viewpoint. Ultimately, your service should be described by one word or one phrase. Simplification, on the other hand, is focusing on the elimination of any detours or ingredients that are not the essential components of your process. If you delete any activity but the effect remains essentially the same as before, then you have simplified your service.

These approaches to your service have an effect similar to purifying your lifestyle so that you will do the very essential activities with maximum effect. In your service, it is to make your service simpler, and more available, and possibly make your customer happier.

Just like chemical compounds and their effect on the human body, your service may contain lots of elements, and you cannot tell which elements are the essential elements of your service that are praised by your customers. Again, this is tough, because these complexities are dependent on your relationship with your customers. A person is a multifaceted entity: Your customer may appreciate many aspects in your service, and that sort of multiplicity might be the appealing point of your service. Yet, it is worth a try to purify or to pinpoint the essence of your service; this will give you some insights about your service and your customer.

Sometimes it is hard to identify your customer. For example, if we pick up the phrase “service for the country,” the recipient of your service is not so easy to identify. If the situation is the army service, what actually happens is that you will become a soldier or a cog in the wheel of the army, so that the direct service recipient is your boss.

In this chapter, we have discussed your service from various points of view—your ultimate goal, the value to our society, business prospects, and the principle of how you bring service into life.

As you have understood what you want to do, (which, by the way, is actually a tough thing speaking from my experience), we move to design your service. The approach for designing the service is called design ­thinking. I will explain it in the next chapter.