Being an Embedded Service Designer
Over the last 3 months I’ve been part of the team designing the Children and Young People’s Program at Mind, the mental health charity. As someone who had worked for two years in a Service Design agency, I’d carried out projects as a designer going into an organisation, which comes with it’s own advantages and challenges.
One of the advantages is that you’re part of a supportive design team who know exactly Service Design is, and what the project that you’re working on is trying to do. A disadvantage can be that a lot of the work is out of your hands, you can advice an organisation on how to improve their services, but once you’ve left, it’s up to them.
Mind are arguably the UK’s largest mental health charity, with 300+ employees at their national office in Stratford and 140 local Mind’s across England and Wales delivering mental health services. Mind pioneered the use of Service Design in the charity and community sector, they have their own Service Design approach and toolkit which was developed with Innovation Unit, and is now being used across the organisation by people developing new, and improving existing mental health services.
I was eager to find out what it would be like to work as a Service Designer inside an organisation, rather than working for a design agency. Here’s what I learned.
Slow decision-making
The first thing I noticed was how a large charity functions verses a small design agency. Decisions that seem small when you’re working in a small team are magnified in a large organisation. For instance; if HR makes a policy change in an organisation of 20 people and it goes wrong, only 20 people are affected. In an organisation of 300 people, the effect of that policy change is magnified. This explains why you may have multiple meetings to do something quite small. Those small decisions matter a lot.
More lead in time
Similarly, all projects need longer lead in time. Getting something done; a campaign, a new service, a new policy project will require multiple teams. All of those teams must be on board and have capacity to carry out the work. Therefore everything takes a little longer.
Listen to lived experience
Mind do a lot to ensure that the wisdom and expertise that comes with having a mental health problem is celebrated. They take co-design further — how can people with lived experience of mental health actually deliver mental health services? A great example of this is Mindkit, which gets young people who have experience mental health problems to deliver sessions to other young people in schools. Why is it so engaging for young people in schools? They hear a person their age talking about their personal experiences. It’s more real for them, and it empowers the young people who are speaking.
Silos can be an advantage
Why do large organisations divide their staff into smaller departments? To get things done. Imagine if you had to consult the whole organisation, 300 people, when you wanted to send a tweet? Silos mean that teams can operate quickly. There’s an element of trust involved — the fundraising team must trust the communications team that they will put the right message out. And of course the communications team will — that’s their area of expertise!
Read everything
Despite silos being a good thing, staying connected with what the rest of the organisation is doing is paramount to ensure you’re building on what others are doing. This is why intranets, staff briefings, reports are so important to pay attention to. The first thing I did when I started working on Children and Young People’s mental health at Mind was read every paper I could find on the subject. If Mind had carried out a pilot in a school 10 years ago, I needed to know, but it wasn’t necessarily something that would come up in a meeting, so reading allowed me to understand the landscape within the organisation.
Practicing what you preach
Mind are all about mental health, so of course the mental health of their employees is a focus. I loved having a dedicated line manager, who would check in with me about my wellbeing as well as my work. The Workplace Action Plan, which allowed me to detail what conditions I work best in. They even have regular little events to support mental health, like a ‘Mind Hatters Tea Party’. Gender-neutral toilets, flexible working hours and a line you could call for counselling.
A different approach
Working within such a large organisation meant there was a wealth of expertise and experience to learn from. The way that the Research & Evaluation team carried out research in a completely different way to the Service Design team, so it was great to learn by doing by carrying out research using their methods, rather than the Service Design methods that I was used to.
The key learning was how important it is to get out of your comfort zone as designer. These learnings differ from place to place. I’m eager to understand what it’s like to be a Service Designer in government, in local councils and beyond…
