Imagine this. A 16-year-old kid is walking down the street, barefoot. Behind him, an older guy is running and shouting. “Son, wait!”. The teenager stops, and the older guy catches up with a pair of shoes in his hands. He kneels and puts the shoes on the kid.

Seeing this, you might think the teenager has some back pain or disability. Or you might just find it strange as hell because having a dad help a 16 year old put his shoes is really weird.

Sometimes, as service creators and staff members, we're just like that dad. We're over-helping, limiting people from learning or realizing their own strength.

And yeah, it feels good to be helpful. But are we really helpful (1)?

We sometimes over-support our staff, clients or patients. We make them think they can't handle things themselves. They start believing they have to wait for someone else to fix problems or to allow them to do so.

Action question

Where in your service or work relationships might you be the over-helping hand? How can you check if that's really the case?

Footnote

(1) Just to be clear, I'm not saying we should cancel all customer service jobs so users can do all the work themselves with crappy all self-services experiences. I’d like us to reflect on when our help to users, patients, staff members is too much, like being a helicopter parent.

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 reviewed and improved the text by hand.