CHANGE BY DESIGN
 transforming organizational mindsets through service design thinking

Change by Design: Transforming organisational mindsets through Service Design thinking “Everything I have learnt during the last 20 years has been thrown up in the air, and landed up-side down – in a good way”. This quote is from a manager who participated in Service Design Academy, a transformation programme in Telenor; one of the world’s largest mobile operators. The quote highlights two aspects addressed in the paper: 1) an organisational imperative to focus upon delivering customer-centric service and 2) how this change can be enabled through service design thinking. Despite the massive strategic focus on customer-centricity that has been apparent during the past years, companies are struggling to fully align their organisational capabilities to a service- centric paradigm. The existing and dominating product-dominant business logic, and their respective structures, metrics and incentives, are solid obstacles in this respect. Transforming this is a multi- faceted journey that demands a rethink of many ingrained practices and processes within an organisation. It incorporates concepts such as developing customer empathy, working in cross- functional (and cross silo) teams, brand-based experience design, customer co-production of value, and service prototyping. This paper presents a practical case study that has implemented a change program that is theoretically founded in a thorough integration of a service dominant logic of marketing with perspectives and approaches from service design thinking. It shows that the challenges presented by a service dominant logic and customer-orientation can be met by a service design thinking approach, when embedded within the organisation. The case study is based upon a strategic initiative at Telenor Group, in which service design is defined as a core capability. The aim is to develop this capability as an organisational resource to provide increased customer value within an organisation that has more than 200 million mobile subscribers, in 13 markets across Europe and Asia. The goal is to change both the way of thinking and the way of doing within the entire organisation, consisting of around 33 000 employees. The presentation will show how we have applied service design thinking as a powerful approach to the step change of service-logic. This will be shown through physical artifacts from the service design profession (e.g. customer journey maps, service blueprints, personas, prototypes), design aptitudes (e.g. empathy, drawing, facilitation, integrative thinking, interdisciplinarity) and how they are combined with business artifacts (e.g. brand platform, segments, target experiences). We will present insights gained from 8- 10 Service Design Academies, 30-40 in-depth interviews of managers attending the Academies, observations, notes, and tangible artifacts developed by the participants. This is supported by quantitative and qualitative data from a broad cultural study within the organisation. We sum up by comparing and contrasting the two fields of service design thinking and service, at both the theoretical and practical level. This will highlight the implications that the comparison has for organisations wishing to deliver customer-centric service in the future and for researchers working in the two related fields.