For my wedding I had to wear a suit. I’m not someone who has a sense of fashion and I don’t know shit about suits. So I asked a good friend who had a real sense of fashion to help me find a suit for my wedding. She brought me to the right store. Asked me the right questions. And in less than an hour it was done. I then even had a suit for work moments that needed a bit of a more serious outfit.

When your service or organization is pretty small or has one key service or product getting an external partner to help you sort out how you can make your service more sustainable is a smart move (1).

For that expert it’s easy to understand your context and she can easily ask the right questions and make recommendations to save you hours of research on your own. Just like for my wedding suit.

We sometimes forget that we don’t have to become the experts to make a change happen. We can hire the experts.

Action question

What type of external help could you get to help you to make your service and organization more sustainable?

Footnote

(1) The larger and more complex your organization is the more one partner might not be the solution as you might have too many different contexts to work with and the onboarding might take way too long.

(2) The external help can be focused on assessing the situation, it can be focused on making recommendations for changes, it can be focused on coaching you in the transition towards more sustainable services, etc.

The inspiration behind this principle

This principle is based on a conversation I had with Michel Sterckx, a project manager working on a big sustainability project for the Salvation Army in Switzerland. The conversation was in French:

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.

• How I wrote this: This first draft was written by hand on my phone.