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Does the 21st century need a new leadership paradigm? Rama Geheerawo thinks that we do. Through his work with global large enterprises, he's found that bringing a design sensibility to the task of redefining better formats for leadership has yielded "Ah Ha" moments as well as real commercial impact.

About Rama:

Service Design YAP is developed and produced by the Service Design Network UK Chapter.
Its aim is to engage and connect the wider Service Design community.

• Episode Host: Stephen Wood
• Production Assistance: Jean Watanya

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In this episode we talk to Marzia Aricò about design leadership and Marzia shares great stories that illustrate the key to creating traction and long-term impact as a design leader.

We particularly liked talking about Marzia's experience of taking design into London Business School and the challenges that she faced repositioning design as a way to generate commercial value, rather than a form of corporate entertainment or light relief.

Marzi share practical tips for those of you looking to make the jump from design expert into formal leadership roles, and we talk about the attitudes, behaviours and competencies that you need to adopt, maintain and discard if you're going to transition successfully.

About Marzia

Marzia Aricò is a strategic designer, leadership coach, and consultant helping large organisations navigate transformation through design. With over 17 years of experience, she works with executives and design leaders to build the mindsets, structures, and capabilities needed to make design a true driver of strategic decision-making.

Her work blends systems thinking, organisational design, and leadership development — turning complexity into clarity and intent into action. Marzia is the founder of Design Mavericks, a global community of design leaders shaping the next chapter of the discipline, and the author of Design Leadership Chronicles (BIS Publishers).

She regularly collaborates with senior teams across sectors and speaks internationally about the evolving role of design in governing intelligent, adaptive organisations.

Service Design YAP is developed and produced by the Service Design Network UK Chapter.
Its aim is to engage and connect the wider Service Design community.

• Episode Host: Stephen Wood
• Production Assistance: Jean Watanya

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The Service Design Global Conference is just under a month away, but we couldn't resist grabbing time with design podcast legends, and conference keynote presenters Jesse James Garrett and Peter Merholz.

The founders of Adaptive Path and now co-hosts of Finding Our Way (its the design podcast that we want to be when we grow up), will be looking at how design leadership needs to evolve and how taking inspiration from leaders in "design adjacent" lines of business helps us to improve our own leadership skills. Genius steals.

We're also joined by SDN stalwarts David Russo and Greg Lakloufi, who have been tirelessly working on creating a stellar agenda for the conference. They give us the lowdown on the venue and program and share some insider tips for hip bars, BBQ shacks, and Honkey-tonk dance halls, which will feed your soul after the conference has blown your mind.

Greg also gives us hot off the press news about a way to get a 50% discount for in-person tickets. Click here to find about the scholarship funded by the kind folks at Teleolytics

Service Design YAP is developed and produced by the Service Design Network UK Chapter.
Its aim is to engage and connect the wider Service Design community.

• Episode Host: Stephen Wood
• Production Assistance: Jean Watanya

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In this bonus episode we speak to Yvonne Tran, product design director at the New York Times, AND Shipra Kayan, Miro's Chief Design Evangelist, AND Shelley Evenson, a founding SDN member and Berkeley Design Fellow.

So many stellar guests can only mean one thing: Service Design Global Conference is around the corner.

Each speaker gives us an exclusive peek into their conference keynote and shares their views on what skills and knowledge Service Designers need to gain to thrive in our rapidly transforming world.

You can still book your virtual ticket to the conference here and use the YAP discount code YAPSDGC to get 10% off.

Service Design YAP is developed and produced by the Service Design Network UK Chapter.
Its aim is to engage and connect the wider Service Design community.

• Episode Host: Stephen Wood
• Production Assistance: Jean Watanya

Send us a text

Mark Howell, has had a rich and varied career. He's the only person that I know that has a PhD in IVR.

In this episode Mark shares his approach to service design leadership. He talks about intentionally crating a culture underpinned by rituals, how modelling the positive behaviours and carving out time to do Individual Contributor, hands-on work means that he never loses touch with the changing shape of service design practice.

He also talks about the "secret work of service designers" - service designers are “spanners”. Mark talks about how we span the gaps to draw on our powers of empathy and orchestration to bring together multifunctional stakeholders to define and deliver services. This is a high stress task that can lead to burn out if not actively monitored and managed.

Sources listed in this episode:

Liminal Thinking - Dave Gray (interviewed here)

True Belonging according to Brené Brown

The other Service Design Podcast that Mark loves:

The Service Design Show

The Power of 10 with Andy Polaine.

Finding our Way with Jesse James Garret and Peter Merholtz

Service Design YAP is developed and produced by the Service Design Network UK Chapter.
Its aim is to engage and connect the wider Service Design community.

• Episode Host: Stephen Wood
• Production Assistance: Jean Watanya

Send us a text

Design research is tricky. When you work with a great design researcher you get to see the skill and subtlety involved in executing research that avoids biases and reveals fresh insights.

When your research participants are neurodiverse the task of the design researcher becomes even more complex, but this is where this episode's guest, Ashley Peacock has developed her expertise.

Ashley shares her career story and talks about the tactics that make design research more inclusive. Key take-aways are that there's no perfect approach and you need to be kind to yourself as there will be mis-steps to learn from. We hear about the power of Autemojis and fall in love with Weird Pride.

About Ashley

Ashley works primarily on AbilityNet’s inclusive user-research practices. Her expertise lies at the intersection of cognitive science, AI and technology.

Ashley previously led a company for four years, specialising in tailored assistive solutions for governments, businesses, and charities. This included creating 3D autism simulations, collaborating with the NHS on a mental health triaging tool during the COVID pandemic and engineering custom software to help people with neurodegenerative conditions to read again, working in partnership with UCL.

As a neurodivergent professional she continues to make an impact in this field through public speaking, writing and research.

Episode Links

Damian Milton's Double Empathy Gap Article.

Ability Net

Weird Pride

Learn about Dinah Murray

Service Design YAP is developed and produced by the Service Design Network UK Chapter.
Its aim is to engage and connect the wider Service Design community.

• Episode Host: Stephen Wood
• Production Assistance: Jean Watanya

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In this episode we speak with Lyle Sandler. I met Lyle when he was CDO at Aon, the mega-insurance firm, and it was clear from the off-set that he was a natural story teller. As you'll hear, he doesn't think that he's a natural storyteller. He's learned tactics and religiously rehearses his stories so that they land and create the right impact.

Lyle has bottled 100 of these tactics in his new book Universal Principles of Storytelling for Designers, which will help both Narrative Newbies and Tried and Tested Tale-Tellers to up their games.

Enjoy.

About Lyle

Stories ignite design, and design inspires stories, creating a dynamic cycle that propels human progress and sparks innovation. Lyle is a storyteller and designer.

The story/design connection became an "aha" moment during his undergraduate days at Hofstra University, where I shuffled between theatre, design, and anthropology, three disciplines that seemed to join forces effortlessly. His storytelling and design journey deepened at the American Film Institute's Center for Advanced Film Studies, art directing in Hollywood, crafting theatrical sets in New York, working in illustration, and designed high-end window displays.

At Merrill Lynch, he redesigned how analysts communicated with the patrons of Wall Street, and at Goldman Sachs, he pioneered UX and data visualization. He began to explore and create innovative techniques that enable humans to interact with large volumes of data efficiently, discerning hidden characteristics, patterns, and anomalies within dynamically changing information spaces (non-language, data-centric, progressive storytelling).

Later, he co-founded Brew, a design and innovation consultancy that assisted organizations to think differently, innovate, and design unique consumer experiences.

His career has spanned global design leadership roles at NCR and Aon where he has applied design approaches to create impact and value; staying true to his roots in storytelling and anthropology, ensuring that my designs and innovations always delivered meaningful value to the people they were created for.

Currently, as a consultant, he help organizations transform and grow through storytelling, design, and "storythinking" – powerful drivers for developing new forms of value in anticipation of future human needs.

Links:

David Foster Wallace: This is Water commencement speech.

Learn more about Hitchcock's Production Director, Robert Boyle here.

Service Design YAP is developed and produced by the Service Design Network UK Chapter.
Its aim is to engage and connect the wider Service Design community.

• Episode Host: Stephen Wood
• Production Assistance: Jean Watanya

Send us a text

In this episode we meet John Lynch, founder of Context Studio based in Dublin, Ireland.

John's career path has taken him from countries where design is part of everyone's mindset, to places where some businesses have yet to see the full value that design can bring. He shares the approaches that he's used to gain traction and make the case for adopting Service Design and stories of how design-led approaches have helped his teams to engage diverse stakeholder groups and generate better service outcomes.

We talk about the privilege of working with public sector folks, who's vocation is to make society better... and we talk of the impact of "better" vs. "new" and why Renovate often delivers more than Innovate when it comes to Service Design.

About John.

John Lynch is founder and director of Context Studio, a service design studio in Dublin, and a voluntary board director at the Institute of Designers in Ireland. With a background in software development, John is a committed advocate of design in the service of the public good.

References from John's episode.

Stratification of Design Thinking -Stefanie Di Russo
Danish Design Ladder
Dark Matter and Trojan Horses -Dan Hill
John Heskett

Ireland's Action Plan for Designing Better Public Services.

Service Design YAP is developed and produced by the Service Design Network UK Chapter.
Its aim is to engage and connect the wider Service Design community.

• Episode Host: Stephen Wood
• Production Assistance: Jean Watanya