New free facilitation course

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Swiss Innovation Academy

Hi lovely human 👋

Here is the overview of all the new Service Design content I've worked on in the last few days:

1 new course:

Free Facilitation Course: Simple tips for less terrible meetings

Learn how to turn meetings that feel like hell into productive moments.

1 invitation:

Service Design Webinar: Choreographic Thinking for Service Design with Katrin Kolo organized by the Swiss Service Design Network.

2 Service Design Principles:

Resilience: Make it work under extreme weather conditions
Unsustainable: Learn that services aren’t sustainable by default

As a bonus you'll also find at the end links to 3 positive news from elsewhere to start on a high note.

Greetings from Basel, Switzerland,

Daniele 🧔🏻‍♂️

p.s. As always, you'll find more details below 👇
for when you have the time to read this newsletter.

An illustration of two people putting sticky notes on a wall

Free Facilitation Course: Simple tips for less terrible meetings

Learn how to turn meetings that feel like hell into productive moments.

A few years ago I wrote a meeting facilitation course for the Salvation Army. Today I'm happy to release a beta version of it in English for free here.

Why should you follow this course? Because it's easy to create great meetings.

If you've always wanted to…

get your team synchronized without those frustrating blah, blah meetings,
take important decisions in a meeting quickly,
finish meetings on time and with participants that have a smile on their face,

…then this course is for you!

In this bite sized course, I've included my best tips and tricks about how to run and prepare productive meetings, including:

A meeting trick inspired by how kids are able to play games for hours with strangers.
A little math magic to finish meetings exactly on time and sometimes even earlier.
A proven system to take decisions in a meeting in a much faster way.

Get the course for free

Webinar this Wednesday:Choreographic Thinking for Service Design with Katrin Kolo

Discover the art and practice of Choreographic Thinking for Service Design with Organisational Choreographer and Creative Strategist Katrin Kolo.

About Katrin Kolo

Katrin is an Organisational Choreographer and Creative Strategist working in Switzerland.

Katrin Kolo is a senior professional with +20 years of C-Level experience in the field of consulting, organisational & strategic management as well as artistic direction and co-creation. Combining consulting & leadership practices and artistic expertise with her interest in coaching and co-creation.

Her unconventional background in organizational and strategic management, consulting as well as the performing arts allows her to take perspectives beyond the ordinary and find exceptional solutions for teams and customers. The interplay between economy, society and art fascinates her.

Save your free remote seat

Service Design Principles Series

I'm writing the fifth book in the series Service Design Principles, where I explore simple tips, tricks and provocations that can help us make services a little bit less shitty for the people who use them and the planet that hosts them.

An illustration of clouds striking lightnings with system gears hidden in them

Make it work under extreme weather conditions

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.

Share feedback

Another principle I shared this week:

An illustration of a sad person looking at a dying flower in a glass of water while a big cloud strikes lightning and pours rain on her

Learn that services aren’t sustainable by default

In short: Thinking that because we run a service we aren't impacting nature and climate is a big myth we need to understand.

Read the full principle

Positive news from elsewhere

I’m an optimist and as there is so much bad news out there at the moment, I want at my scale to rebalance things by sharing also some positive news for service owners and creators.

Israel and Hamas agree ceasefire and hostage deal: "A ceasefire deal to end the war in Gaza and return Israeli hostages to their families has been agreed by Hamas and the Israeli government, bringing cautious relief to millions in the Middle East and beyond." (Positive News)
Renewables overtake coal in ‘historic shift’: "For the first time, renewables have overtaken coal as the world’s leading source of electricity, representing a “historic shift” in the global energy transition." (Positive News)
Can we feed the world without breaking it? Yes, says report: "According to the [EAT-Lancet] commission, its ‘planetary health diet’ offers a template for a “science-backed dietary pattern” that promotes human health and protects the planet. Mass adoption of this, it estimates, could deliver returns of $5tn (£3.74tn) a year through better health, restored ecosystems, and climate resilience." (Positive News)

If you want more positive news make sure to checkout the website positive.news that offers more in depth articles.