Why and how I'm pushing for an open call for a new leadership of the Swiss Service Design Network community?

N.B.

This article is a sort of backstage reflection that shows some of the thinking and process that happened for the Open Call for a new leadership of the Swiss Service Design Network community. You can find information about the Open Call here.

Why sometimes you need to remove yourself

It's now roughly 3 years that I'm helping the Swiss Service Design Network keep an active presence.

My goal back then was to create enough stability and examples of what could be done so that it would attract a new generation of leaders who would say: we can bring this to the next level!

In these few years, I hope that I managed to bring that stability and some inspiration. Yet I didn't manage to create an organic way where a new generation of people came and said: let us bring this to the next level.

So after reflecting on this with a few friends, I have decided that it was time to more artificially create the hole that others would be filling.

It's always fascinating to me to see how nature, communities, organization react to holes or crisis. There is such a big need for stability and equilibrium that people, nature, etc. react strongly to fill the hole.

So I've noticed that if I wanted that a true team of leaders shows up, I need to create the hole that makes people want to fill it.

Why now?

I think the work I did with the Swiss Service Design Network arrived to a nice plateau. We have good monthly webinars, a nice Swiss Service Design Week, and a family reunion like on site conference. Plus there are even early signs of an ambassador program lead by Juliana Magalhães Cardoso that start to work with local hangout events in Lucerne and Lausanne.

I totally could continue to run with these things for the next 30 years. But I imagine that other people, who are not deeply introverts just like me, could bring this to a much bigger level.

Whenever I said to people that they could take over, I always felt there was a sort of politeness or respect as if people thought: you do this well, why should I do it, have fun with this. Obviously this is just my assumption.

To me this doesn't fit with the goal I had, to be a the person that brings back the heart beat, but not the person who moves it to the big stage.

So, why now? Because there is enough stability and because there needs to be a tiny electro choc to make things move to the next stage.

Oh so you're tired of it?

When I explain this, often the reaction is that people tell me: "Oh you are tired of it, you have too much.". That's definitely not the reason. I really enjoy doing this volunteer work. And I've setup a good routine that makes it very easy for me to run all of this.

But I feel it is selfish if I continue to work for this community in this way that feels very nice to me when I believe that there are other people who could make it have a bigger impact.

How will this happen?

There are decisions that have a big domino effect. This one is definitely one of those.

To make such a change of leadership happen in a good way I felt, after discussing with a few friends, that one of the important things to do was to first "clean the house". Cleaning the processes, the tools, etc. So that the people who come in can take over without having to search for information, but have most things available to just make real change happen.

Setup the association

So the first thing we did, was to reset a legal entity behind the Swiss Service Design Network, as for the last years I've pushed for it in a very low administrative way, where I basically paid for the costs of running the thing.

In the last few months we re-launched the "old" Service Design Switzerland association, which back in the days was the legal foundation behind the Swiss Service Design Network.

This is now done, and we have now a great team with the original founders of the Swiss Service Design Network in it, like Peter Horvath, Florian Egger, Klaus Marek and Emmanuel Fragnière.

And we also have people who came in in the last few years like Marta Angelillis, Biliana Vassileva and Juliana Magalhães Cardoso.

Open call

In the next few weeks an Open call will happen, where any Service Design nerd from Switzerland can apply to take over the leadership of the association that then also runs the Swiss Service Design Network.

To do this I prepared the following materials:

• A page that explains the whole process

• A form to apply

• A newsletter to let everyone from the community know about the open call

• A series of Linkedin Posts to remind people about the Open Call

• A Q&A webinar (outside of the usual programming) where people interested to apply and community members can come and ask their questions.

The committee of the Service Design Switzerland association is now checking all this material before we start this open call.

The selection process

Florian, Peter and Juliana, all have a lot of experience in running associations and community efforts and all have seen how leadership changes can fail or work. In the first committee meeting of 2026 together we designed a selection process that looks roughly like this:

• Open call: Any Service Design practitioner from Switzerland, or group of practitioners can apply. Lots of communication is done to be sure that the community knows about this opportunity.

• Application: we keep the application process small and human by asking people not to submit a shitload of documents, instead to deliver a 3-5 minutes video.

• Selection round 1: Based on the videos, the committee, asynchronously selects a few people to come to present live in a bit more details their vision.

• Selection round 2: The committee selects the best candidate or group of candidates based on their vision.

• Discovery period: The selected team or person gets in a period of 2-3 months where they can discover in more details how the community works, try things out, build a team, etc.

• Announcements or repeat: If the people feel that they can manage to make their vision happen now that they know everything, and if the committee agrees, the new leadership with the new vision is announced to the larger community.

The two key parts of this process: discovery and delayed announcements

There are two parts of this process that really benefited from the many experiences in community building that Florian, Peter, Juliana and myself bring.

The first is the discovery period. The difference between what both side explain and the reality is usually big. It can be that for a new leadership team, they discover that things are much more messy than what they thought, or that the committee is more sutborn than what they thought. Or the other way around. Sometimes these discoveries lead to a rebriefing, or reframing of what should be done. But sometimes that leads to a clarity that "this isn't for me".

The second is the delayed announcement. This gives the opportunity for possible new leadership people to come in, check if it makes sense, and if it doesn't leave it without any public pressure.

These two parts really then make it possible to do another loop in the process with other excited community members who curious to do a discovery round.

The cleaning process

Before all of this I started to clean the tools and processes that were made to be run by one guy to something that can be used by a team. This is one of these domino effects that such a change process has created. Here a few things that I did in this cleaning process:

• Created a mini Service Blueprint that explains what we do at the moment, with links to all the resources needed to run it

• Created a new email adresse that serves as the main email for the different accounts that we use to run the association

• Put all the passwords for the accounts in one shared 1password vault

• Etc.

As when you clean your house before new tenants come in, here I had to clean things a bit deeper than I would usually do when it was just me "living in the house".

Just a few thoughts

As always, I could write a book about all this, this is just one article, so it obviously doesn't go through everything.

But for now, if you are someone who practices Service Design in Switzerland and you wish to see more people practice Service Design in Switzerland, here's what you can do:

• Apply to the Open Call

• Or if you don't feel you are the right person, then share this Open Call to the people you think would be great at it

Backstage of this article

This article was illustrated by hand on a refurbished Remarkable II tablet. The text of this article was typed on the same tablet using a keyboard folio case.