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.