My wife is a pastor in an organization where they like to move pastors around. Just like ambassadors. She gets assigned to a location, and we all move there. It’s pretty nice, we get to see many places. When you live like that you quickly learn to set some limits on your physical stuff. I’ve decided to have just one big box for souvenirs. Once it’s full, I have to take something out of it. Because otherwise, I’ll have to move that thing, around and around.

Strangely, we live a world where there are no limits: unlimited music, unlimited files in your cloud, unlimited growth and scaling of businesses.

I feel that sometimes, just like with my souvenir box, it makes sense to set a limit. It could be: “We won’t serve more than X customers”. Or “We won’t have more than X giga of hard disk space”. Or “we won’t run more than X projects within the company”.

Those limits, are nice, because they force us to think about what we’re saving, who we’re serving, how much is humanely mangeable, etc.

Action question

For which aspect of your service or the way you work would it helpful to set limits?

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.