A Service Design Principle about hope

If something doesn't feel possible we don't bother trying. In most cases that's smart, but when it comes to making the world more sustainable, this creates a problem.

Many people feel that as a society we can't change. But when we take two minutes to look in the past we see that this is far from true:

Society has banned slavery (1), women have voting rights, in many places we have a clean water and we even removed some diseases from the face of planet earth.

So we definitely can make change happen! Not convinced yet, just look at a few of the graphs from Gapminder (2):

All these things show that we can change and that it's worth doing the work to change.

I believe that seeing that change can happen brings us hope!

And hope seems to make people more motivated to act as some academics like Maria Ojala suggest (3):

"Young people who have constructive hope about climate change are significantly more likely to engage in positive environmental behaviors, compared with young people who lack hope and those who have hope based on denial of climate change."

If after all this you still need a hope boost, I highly recommend that you read the book Factfulness.

Action question

What are positive changes that happened in your industry in the last 30 years that show that change is possible? What made those big changes possible? What can you learn from them?

The inspiration

This principle is inspired by a conversation with Samuel Huber. The specific part of our conversation which inspired this was about the fact that many companies weren't customer centric at all in the past, but most companies are today. If this change could happen for customer centricity, the same can happen for planet centricity. Here a few excerpts from this conversation:

Samuel: So we, sometimes companies had a digital strategy and the normal strategy.

Like today, when I think about it, this doesn't make sense. There's no strategy that's not digital. Some companies had digital units, which now we know, no, this has to be distributed everywhere. The same happened a bit to design, right? Where we had innovation teams. The trend really is also now to have dispersed teams.

Now we have sustainability departments. Very soon we'll see sustainability being integrated in how organizations work. And

Daniele: There is an optimistic touch in what you say, the fact that, looking at the past, and you where were we 20 years ago, when, with questions of human centered, you say, oh we. It wasn't just evident answer to say, yes, we, this is something we want. If you ask the question today, in any organization, I think 99 percent of the organizations will say, this is important for us, we're trying to do it, at least try, which is already good, and we're trying to put money for it obviously we could always do more, but we are on that path.

seeing that you, we can do that in a few dozen years now, it's also possible to do the same for something else, which could be sustainability,

Samuel: I think that's what humans are good at, actually. It is transformation, even though we pretend we're not good at that. But we have to be sometimes, I'm not usually the most patient person, so I also have to remind myself.

Footnotes

(1) "Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by the UN General Assembly, explicitly banned slavery. After World War II, chattel slavery was formally abolished by law in almost the entire world, with the exception of the Arabian Peninsula and some parts of Africa." — Wikipedia

(2) "Gapminder identifies systematic misconceptions about important global trends and proportions and uses reliable data to develop easy to understand teaching materials to rid people of their misconceptions. Gapminder is an independent Swedish foundation with no political, religious, or economic affiliations." — Gapminder

(3) Ojala, Maria. (2012). Hope and climate change: the importance of hope for environmental engagement among young people. Environmental Education Research, 18, 625-642. Found via HopefulMinds

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.