By Janus Boye
Kate Tarling is a service leader and designer, author of The Service Organization and a visiting lecturer and speaker. She has spoken on service organisations and design at Harvard University, UCL, Google, Ravensbourne, and the Royal College of Art (RCA) and mentored at Techstars.
How do you lead and deliver successful services, sustainably?
All organisations are becoming service organisations. But most weren’t built to deliver services successfully end-to-end, and the human, operational and financial impacts are abundantly clear.
In the digital era the stakes are even higher, given how rapidly services change. Yet default working practices (governance, planning, funding, leadership, reporting, programme and team structures) inside large organisations haven't changed. Rather than modernise just one service at a time, it's the underlying organisational conditions that need to be transformed — anything less is futile.
Kate Tarling has written the must-read guide: The Service Organization, which came out in February 2023. It’s the missing manual for service organisations and in a recent member call, Kate introduced the book, took us through a few chapters and we also talked about the future of service organisations.
Below you’ll find my highlights from the call and at the end you can lean back and enjoy the recording.
A playbook for how to build the foundations for what the organisations behind successful services look like
My copy of The Service Organization - in the book launch call we also talked about the ‘sustainably’ part.
Kate actually started the call by saying what the book is not about: It’s not yet another book on agile, product management, digital transformation or service design. As she said:
This is not one of them. Or not exactly, anyway.
It’s not that Kate thinks you don’t know how to make and deliver products and services, it’s really a book about what tends to get in the way, when you are delivering services, in particular everything about how the organisation works.
The book comes with very practical examples and practical steps, tips and advice. As Hillary Hartley, Digital Government Leader Toronto writes in the foreword:
“Kate’s written the manual for any leader or team to reinvent their organisation by putting successful services - i.e. successful users - at the heart of how it operates”
It’s also a book about having personal influence, growing power within the organisation by knowing what you can do. It's advising on what to do as you face the various challenges that will come up and how to win support. By doing so it gives readers an amplified influence and empowers them to make a tangible difference.
Each chapter takes a problem that comes up and gives practical examples and advice on how to address it. It doesn’t require you to be in the senior management team.
As Kate said in the call, roughly the first half of the book is a grounding in how to define the services of your organisation, how to think about it in terms of the different steps, from taking a fixed brief and transforming it to what’s really needed. That applies to anyone, whether working in government, agency side or really anywhere.
The second half of the book is then more of what Kate called the tough stuff, the help that could come in handy if you find yourself as a part of a giant transformation program. Let’s say you are faced with the most complicated plan you have ever seen in your life, a plan that stretches out over several years and with incredibly detailed milestones, with exact dates and deliverables, but without any references to how it might work and what the point even is in the first place. The book is here as your missing manual to help you out.
This activity about planning
Getting back to the foreword, there’s a reference to a conference where Kate together with Ayesha Moarif gave a presentation titled “The actual problems to be solved”.
In our call, Kate turned us to the activity about planning and reminded us that what’s really going on is not so much planning, though it may seem so. What’s really happening is a form of reassurance for leadership that other people know what they are doing.
Chapter 8 is one of my favorite chapters. Titled: “Create plans that change as you learn more about reality.” The point is not to create more detailed plans before you get started, the goal is really to focus on what we need to do and learn.
That is, it has less to do with what’s needed for your initiative or programme to succeed. Rather, planning activities tend to provide the leadership with confidence in that everything is running smoothly in their birds eye view.
This is where delivering services and becoming a service organisation turns to culture change and it’s a new way to look at the actual problem you are trying to solve. The book advises moving leadership closer to what’s happening or closer to the people using the services, but keep in mind that’s not always what leadership wants.
Kate’s recommendation is clear: Make a simpler plan over 3, 6 or 9 months. Put what you want to learn on it, which is a small way of changing the conversation beyond just deadlines and milestones. A simpler plan also has the benefit of creating a way in for others who are new to the project. It’s one step towards starting to let go of the perhaps unnecessary and overly detailed planning, and a good simple plan can often capture what you need now.
Changing the language to be more user centred
On the member call, we were joined by Jeanette Clement, head of service design and user research at BT. She’s mentioned in chapter 2 - Define what’s in a service from the outside in - where the book provides an example of how BT uses common patterns as building blocks of services.
In the call, Jeanette stressed the point on how a common language is important, also so that end-users better understand them, but she also said, that’s not easy. Different departments often have their own well-defined terms, which they’ve been using for a long time and makes perfectly sense to them, but might make less sense for newcomers or customers.
To quote Kate:
“Thinking about language can be a good way to enable us to work better together and in the longer run deliver better services. Rather than try to make someone else within your organisation use different words, it often starts with defining services and what they're made of, genuinely collectively. Still, letting go is rarely easy. If there are well known specialist terms and phrases already in use by your current customers or end users, you might need to start with a compromise and slowly move towards simpler language on behalf of your future and potential customers and end users.”
We wrapped up the book launch call with a look to the future of services.
What’s the future of service organisations?
Kate started by saying that technology will always be changing and that will impact how we deliver services.
As we speak, people are looking at AI and ChatGPT in particular to try to support service users and provide information and help at a greater scale.
According to Kate:
“However we choose to deliver services, the fundamentals of what people need don’t change: Technology can help people be (more) successful at whatever it is they need to do. People need to feel confident that they've done the right thing, and that the right thing is now happening. To what extent technology does that is a matter of how we set it up: whether we can use it to learn about performance, to deliver better outcomes, and whether we can change it to respond to what we learn.”
Learn more about The Service Organization
The book naturally comes with its own website: The Service Organization. Here you can buy the book, find the chapters and also read a bit more about what others are saying.
A word on sustainably in the subtitle. It's a word that carries different meanings. In the book it’s about how you ensure it’s not just a one off effort. The book is about changing the way you deliver services, how to build the capabilities and making the best way to deliver services the default way. This includes establishing leadership, structuring a team, changing the approach to planning, pushing back on reporting expectations and much more, so that the whole thing is sustainable, because that’s just how things work.
Back in 2021, I finally wrote a brief post about one of the consulting books that has helped shape my thinking. While written specifically for professional services firms Strategy and the Fat Smoker; Doing What’s Obvious But Not Easy by David Maister is a must-read for strategic thinkers and similarly to Kate, he is also a strong believer in relationships. To quote:
What do I have to do to earn and deserve the key relationships that are going to get me where I want to go?
Read more in this post: Knowledge sharing in practice.
Finally, you can lean back and enjoy the recording from the call.