This is a copy of the Service Design Newsletter I sent on December 1st 2022. You can join the Service Design newsletter here to get future updates directly in your inbox.

Hey there 👋

This week I want to share with you:

1. An invitation to my sneek-peak event for my next book (I'm excited!).

2. A story about the power of rules of thumb.

3. And a changelog of all the new service design content. 

Greetings from Switzerland,
Daniele 🧔🏻‍♂️
p.s. all the details are below 👇

💪 Good enough Service Design: The power of rules of thumb

— I hate sport!

It’s the start of the summer. I’ve lost a good amount of weight and the next step in my journey to become physically healthy is to do some sports. In the 33 years, I’m on earth, I’ve never been able to do sport.

Frankly, I kind of hate sports. I don’t get the idea of pain being something fun. I’m not competitive, so all the team sports feel strange to me.

But hey, I want to get healthy, so I find one sport that works in my criteria: I can do it alone and even do something else, like listening to an audiobook while doing it. So it doesn’t feel like a sport. Nice! Now I have to work on the pain side! I never had a big injury in my life, and I don’t want to get one. Also remember, I don’t get the idea of “no pain, no gain”.

— Do the complex work!

So run well, I should study it, right? I should study anatomy, physics and maybe even sport sciences! You need to know the theory before you can do anything safely and productively. Or I should do some research with experts and read a few books about the topic.

— Or not…

I didn’t do any of these complex things. Instead, I ask friends who are runners for their tips. And they gave me these simple pieces of advice:

• Run slowly but longer.

• Grow slowly: don’t go from a 5-minute run routine to one hour. Slowly build up your routine.

We are now 6 months later. For the last 6 months, I’ve run more than 150km per month without much pain and without getting an injury. And I don’t know shit about the science behind running or sport, and frankly, I don’t care.

— Facts, not Daniele’s stories please!

This reminds me of a study by Alejandro Drexler, Greg Fischer and Antoinette Schoar, who wanted to figure out the best way to help micro-entrepreneurs learn the basics of accounting. They had three groups of entrepreneurs.

The first group experienced classical teaching, like in a university, absorbing complex knowledge they had to master. The second group studied accounting with simple rules like ‘Keep personal and business money in different drawers’. The third didn’t receive any instruction.

Interestingly, the first group, exposed to complete instructions, and the third, which didn’t receive any, performed at the same level. But the group that was taught the simple rules of thumb increased their sales by 25%. Additionally, this group managed their accounting and cash much better.

In the book Simple Rules: How to Thrive in a Complex World, the authors explain:

“[A] study compared a state-of-the-art statistical model and a simple rule to determine which did a better job of predicting whether past customers would purchase again. According to the simple rule, a customer was inactive if they had not purchased in x months (the number of months varies by industry. The simple rule did as well as the statistical model in predicting repeat purchases of online music, and beat it in the apparel and airline industries.”

Okay, that’s enough academic knowledge that shows that a simple rule of thumb can be pretty powerful.

— Try simples rules

By following simple rules of thumb, you get the results of years of experience from other people packaged in simple advice. You can:

Following the rules of thumb doesn’t mean we lose all curiosity and never go deep into a subject. Rather, it frees us time to go deep into the topics we really deeply care about on an intellectual level. I don’t give a shit about anatomy, but the time I saved reading about anatomy is the one I spend nerding about service design.

So let me ask you:

Who could you ask around you to share some simple rule of thumb about something you need help with but don’t care about intellectually?

• Test it by yourself quickly

• Verify if it works for you

— A better toolbox

Having clarity about the power of simple rules gives you another toolset for improving your interactions with the people you serve. You can still use academic knowledge, reflection or intuition. Now you can add simple “rules of thumb” to this toolbox that you can test out quickly.

The art that is left to you is to know when each of these tools is the best for the situation you’re faced with.

The final benefit of simples rules is that they make us less overwhelmed:

“Meeting complexity with complexity can create more confusion than it resolves.” — Donald Sull, Kathleen M. Eisenhardt — Simple Rules.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Service Design Webinars

Next webinar: The Power of Principles

My next Service Design Webinar will be live on Saturday, December 3 2022 at 14:00 Swiss Time. During this one-hour session, you get a behind-the-scenes look at my next book, "Service Design Principles 201-300", followed by a Q&A time.

If you have a Service Design Question that you’d like that I answer, just hit reply.

💡 Service Design Principles

“A Service Design Principle is an idea, a tip, an advice or a principle  to improve the human experience.” These are the latest principles I've been working on.

New principles

1. Teach me something with the bills

2. Prove with a human touch this isn't automated

New principles from the community

1. It's okay to declare bankruptcy

2. Don't offer help if it's useless

🙋‍♂️ Service Design Questions

I'm slowly building a library of answers to the most common questions about Service Design. Here are the new ones:

New questions

1. What are skills you recommend for a service designer

2. How do I find a good topic for my Service Design thesis or school project?

3. Where can I find workshop templates and ideas?

4. Where can I find Service Design methods?

5. How to analyze interviews or research data?

💻 Notion templates

I’ve updated 12 notion templates with new links to the official Notion Help center and the official guide on how to duplicate a template. Thanks to Shailendra Vijayvergia, who spotted the dead links.

📝 The Backstage Blog

I love to explain how I'm building educational content. I'm trying to be as transparent as possible so that it might motivate others to create such content too. These are the latest blog posts I've written:

1. Why I re-committed to Podia for the next few years

🌏 Elsewhere

You can help my mate Marc Fonteijn with his global Service Design Salary Report survey 2023 by filling out the survey. If you are a service design practitioner take 5 - 10 minutes and really help the community.

p.s. In the last newsletter, I forgot to change the email subject 🤦‍♂️. Sorry for that.