The lovely people at Project Drawdown have a big idea. They say that every job can be a climate job. For many roles they have created a list of what employees can do to better serve the planet. That includes roles like Asset Management, Engineering, Finance, etc. (1)

Imagine if you would adapt this to your organization and the job titles and reality of your organization. Imagine if for every job description and contract within your organization you would have also a bit of climate job description and contract. With tasks to do and expectations.

Action question

How could you translate the idea of “every job is a climate job” within your team or organization?

Footnotes

(1) I learned about this idea of Climate Jobs in a blog post from the Service Design Agency livework called How to act on sustainability: bringing design and innovation together.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

Imagine this. A 16-year-old kid is walking down the street, barefoot. Behind him, an older guy is running and shouting. “Son, wait!”. The teenager stops, and the older guy catches up with a pair of shoes in his hands. He kneels and puts the shoes on the kid.

Seeing this, you might think the teenager has some back pain or disability. Or you might just find it strange as hell because having a dad help a 16 year old put his shoes is really weird.

Sometimes, as service creators and staff members, we're just like that dad. We're over-helping, limiting people from learning or realizing their own strength.

And yeah, it feels good to be helpful. But are we really helpful (1)?

We sometimes over-support our staff, clients or patients. We make them think they can't handle things themselves. They start believing they have to wait for someone else to fix problems or to allow them to do so.

Action question

Where in your service or work relationships might you be the over-helping hand? How can you check if that's really the case?

Footnote

(1) Just to be clear, I'm not saying we should cancel all customer service jobs so users can do all the work themselves with crappy all self-services experiences. I’d like us to reflect on when our help to users, patients, staff members is too much, like being a helicopter parent.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

• Written with AI help: This principle draft is based on an audio note I took while walking that was transcribed and cleaned using Audiopen. I then reviewed and improved the text by hand.

Sometimes as service creators, service owners or workers we believe that our work is really necessary. If we would stop it, people would get mad, and things would go to shit.

The interesting thing, is that it’s both true and false.

Yes on a short term, we can get pretty pissed when a service stops. But it’s interesting to see how in the end people either find alternatives, or just live without it.

I think this reminder helps us when we are about to let a part of a service die (1), because it’s just using too many resources. We should think about the long term impact of the decision of stopping something. And not just the immediate frustration it will create.

Action question

In the long term, how hard would it be for people to live without your service? Is your service a necessity or a lovely luxury (2)?

Footnote

(1) See principle Let Things Die for more details about why it can make sense to let services die.

(2) I’m not saying here that we should live in a world where we have only necessities, lovely pleasures and luxuries have their place. But I think it’s good to be honest about the type of service we’re offering. A little pleasure that takes huge resources is maybe a problem.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

When you work in a big organization, it's always funny to see how much energy is spent starting new things versus ending things. But services and communities have a life cycle. They live for a while, then they degrade. When you're part of a business or community, and you see something failing, there's often a wish to save it, to bring new life into it.

But here's the thing: some things are really meant to die. Take Christian communities, for example. A good friend of mine, who’s a church nerd, told me that research seems to show that most die after 70 years. It's part of their life cycle.

We waste so many resources—human time, money—trying to keep dying services alive. Sometimes it's better to just let them go. And maybe throw a party for that end (1).

Not everything should be saved.

Action question

Which parts of your service or organization do you feel are dying? Which of these dying parts would it make more sense to let actually die?

Footnotes

(1) This principle builds well on another one: celebrate the end of things.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

• Written with AI help: This principle draft is based on an audio note I took while walking that was transcribed and cleaned using Audiopen. I then reviewed and improved the text by hand.

Hope rocks (1). It makes us more motivated to act! One of the ways I try to build my hope muscle every day is to review all the good things that are happening in my life.

And because I’m a nerd, I have a kind of database with a journal of all the lovely tiny achievements and things that happened in my life. Each day, I open that database (2) and it shows lovely things from my life that happened yesterday, a week ago, a year ago, and so on.

It’s pretty nice because it shows me how fucking blessed I am. And it shows me also how things have changed! (3).

In my tiny newsletter, I end each edition with 3 positive news from elsewhere. That’s another way to remind to build my hope muscle, and hopefully to help others do so.

Action question

What would be a simple enough system to keep track of the nice things that happen in your life or your company that can help you build your own hope muscle? Where and with who could you share more positive things, to build the hope muscle of others?

Footnotes

(1) That’s something I already shared in another principle called “Rebuild Your Hope By Seeing All What Has Changed”

(2) For the nerds, it’s a set of Notion databases.

(3) For example, one of the big wins of my life when my child was very young was that we could play the same game for 15 seconds! That was a huge thing for me back then!

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

Just putting a bit of money to help other causes is smart. (1) One of the ways I’ve found pretty interesting is the idea of Micro Loans. Instead of just giving money to charity. You give a loan to someone who then pays you back. And then you give another loan. And so one.

There is a service that helps to do that, it’s called Kiva. There I’ve put 148.69$. And it created already 395$ of loans. That’s what they call the Kiva effect (2).

Because when people repay, I can make another loan. There I can support people who are transitioning to sustainable energy sources, working on second hand shops, and a lot of cool things.

Action question

How could you create within your service your own Kiva effect? What would be a reasonable amount that you could as a team, individual or company put on the side for micro loans?

Footnotes

(1) I’ve mentioned in other principles nice ways of doing this. In this book I’ve shared this idea: “Put 5% of your time to serve others”. In the previous book I shared another one: “Invest 1% to do good”

(2) .It’s pretty nice, especially when you’re not a rich dude, and you still want to use some of the money you have to do some good.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

A decade ago there was this idea, that if we could move people from products to services, that would make things a lot more sustainable. Today, a lot of things have become services. But the world isn’t really much more sustainable.

As service owners, creators or workers, we sometimes thing that we’re not really in the problem. We’re not producing mass market shit like fast fashion clothes that get put in a trash as soon as they are worn once. We’re dentists, accountants, office workers. What we create is intangible. So it can’t break the planet, right? Sad news. Services also have a negative impact on the environnement.

Karin Fink made me aware of a publication by the European Environment Agency called « From data to decisions: material footprints in European policy making ». In this report, you can find a graph that clearly shows that even services have a material footprint on the environment.

From what I understand, that report seems to show that Services have a worth material footprint than clothing and footwear, with 11,3% of shares of consumption domain in the EU material footprint compared to 1,3%.

Ness Wright in her course Designing Sustainable Services, shows the many place services can have a negative impact on the climate crisis. She lists (1):

1. Where our service is delivered: Building and estates

2. The physical movement of things in services: Transport

3. The processes that run our services: Data and digital processes

4. The physical material of our services: Physical good and devices

5. The supply chain of our service: Suppliers and procurement

6. The behavior within our services: User and staff behaviour

Footnote

(1) This list comes for a preview of Ness’s courses that she shared on Linkedin

Action question

Do you still think your service doesn’t hurt the planet? Who could you ask to show you where your service sucks for the planet?

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

In some countries, people use the word “Risk reduction” to explain what Service Design is all about. With the fact that the climate will go crazy working on risk reduction is definitely something we as service owners, workers or creators need to think about.

Adaptation Scotland is helping businesses do that in the country of Nessy. They have on their website a “SME Climate Resilience Checklist” (1) which helps companies think about how they’ll handle floods, storms, droughts, heatwaves and all the shit that will hit the fan (2).

For example it asks: as a service, what can you do to protect staff members and customers during extreme weather? Or how might your service be impacted by climate change and more extreme weather?

Action question

When could you block time in the next month to go through a checklist to better prepare yourself and your service for extreme weather events? Who would be the people to invite to such a session? What questions do you want to ask? Maybe some from the SME Climate Resilience Checklist?

Footnotes

(1) For example their document "Climate Resilience Prompts for Business Advisors” has good questions around Products and Services, People, Premises, Processes and Place that you can ask yourself.

(2) Thanks to Ness Wright, a Service Design nerd and climate expert you definitely should follow, for sharing about that work done by great Scottish companies.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

You can do good with your money, without using your money. I know that sounds strange. But when you have your money in a bank account, your bank basically lends it to others. And depending on your bank, that money can go to help people pump out more petrol out of the ground, or fund startups and companies that work on doing good.

So changing bank (1), or credit card (2), or even pension fund can make your money work for things that you care more about.

Action question

Where is your personal or company money sitting? How can you check if the companies handling your money are doing it in a way that fits your values? Who within your company could you nudge to make a change about pensions or bank accounts?

Footnotes

(1) There is a website called bank.green that helps you see if your bank is climate responsible, meaning it doesn’t finance fossil fuels, finances low-carbon technologies, etc. Thanks to Nick Lewis and his website One small step for Earth for helping me find this nice resource

(2) For example, in a few countries around the world, the WWF has partnered with credit card companies so that each time you make a payment a part of the commission instead of going to the bank goes to the WWF.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.

We can’t be perfect. But we all try. There are things we do, like taking an airplane to visit relatives far away, that we can’t really do in other ways. For things like that, we don’t have to just say: shit happens, but even then we still can do something.

For example we can offset the carbon use we can avoid for now (1). So for a plane travel that pollutes by putting some carbon shit in the air, we can give money to people who will plant trees, do research, that will in some way eat that carbon back over time.

For this, I use the service Wren. It’s a tool that lets you get a sense of your carbon footprint, gives you tips on how to reduce it, and a way to fund climate solutions (2) for the parts you don’t know yet how to fix yourself.

Action question

What are the things you can’t do well according to your values today? How can you find alternative ways to at least start doing something in the direction of your values?

Footnote

(1) This doesn’t mean because we can offset it, it’s a free buffet. It’s more like a last resort band aid. Nobody likes to have a fucking band aid on his face. But sometimes you don’t have a choice. That’s what carbon offset are there for.

(2) I’ve started using the service in April 2022, and from there to today (August 2025) I’ve offset 1.5 tonnes of CO2 per month which is a total of 62.8 tonnes which they say is like avoiding 65,3 flights from Los Angeles to Paris or 2 886 pine trees absorbing CO2 for a year.

Daniele's notes

• This is the first shitty draft of this principle

• This principle might one day make it in the fifth book in the "Service Design Principles" series that explores how to better serve humans and the planet.

• If you're curious about service design principles, you can get the four previous books in the series, with proofread principles and less grammatical creativity.