Show and Sell the Ripple Effect

Daniele Catalanotto

An illustration of a person walking up the stairs, step by step to arrive to the big goal

Sometimes, a single slide change your mindset. For me, one of those was from Isabell Fringer (1).

Isabell doesn't sell the immediate effect of what she's doing. She shows that once you start working with her, it will change, A, which then affects, B, which then moves C, and finally brings you to D.

She visually shows a double ripple effects. On the top she shows in four ripples effects how her work drives revenue, and on the bottom, again in four ripple effects how it cuts costs.

A screenshot of the webinar with Isabel's portrait and a slide showing an argumentation line with multiple steps.

A screenshot of the webinar with Isabel's portrait and a slide showing a real example of a sales pitch she did for a client

We often miss this because we focus on the immediate results. But if you look deeper, you see that this big bet pays off.

So when we are pitching a big cultural change within an organization, like making our services more sustainable we can use the same slide. Initial actions might not show big changes right away. But the ripple effect? That's where the magic happens.

Ness Wright (2), shares this with her example of insulating homes or offices. Sure, it's a cost upfront. But it's not only nice for the environment. In the end it improves the quality of life and saves a shit ton of money on heating.

Action question

For which big change in your service does it make sense to showcase the 4-5 levels of ripple effect to motivate your team to embrace it?

Footnotes

(1) She shared this in a webinar called "How To (Not) Sell Service Design" hosted by the Swiss Service Design Network.
(2) Ness Wright is a Service Design expert and sustainability nerd, at the time of writing she's working as Senior Climate Resilience Manager at Sniffer.

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 rewrote most of it and just kept the initial notes as inspiration.