The Balancing Act of Service
As a Service Designer, I’m at your service. Literally. ‘To serve’ or ‘to be of service’ is a fulfilling act for many in life. Service Designers can often become too obsessed with the design part and forget about the service part. But how do we define service? And how do we keep ourselves in balance when designing, providing and receiving service?
According to the Oxford dictionary, service is: The act of helping or doing work for someone, or a system meeting a public need such as transportation or utilities.
Service is a focus on human interaction. In extreme cases, some people risk their lives to serve in war zones whilst others hold a vision to build communities through humanitarian work. These values of giving are deeply rooted in the texts, traditions and practices of many faiths. As service moved into the business world, it became watered down, fulfilling different visions and objectives, depending on the goal(s) of the company. However, the sentiment to help another still remains at the heart of any interaction.
It can be rewarding to provide service to someone, and many take meaning and huge pride in it. I’ve seen this firsthand on many projects I’ve worked on: from the volunteers at the Olympic games to high school teachers providing mental health studies. There are two parties in this dance of exchange, and there needs to be a fine balance between the giver and receiver to maintain an equilibrium. It’s the Goldilocks principle of service — not too much, not too little, just the right amount of service with a smile.
As sociologist Christian Smith clarifies: There is a paradox to generosity — in giving, we receive and in grasping, we lose.
INNER AND OUTER ACTS OF SERVICE
In my life, I’ve been quite outward-focused while serving others in what I call: ‘Outer Innovation’: changing the world. In business, I serve my team, my clients, their executives and their clients. At home, I serve my partner, family, friends and community. My work consists of problem solving for other people, which creates an imbalance within myself. And since I was raised in a fairly ambitious, pretty outgoing family of entrepreneurs, I naturally assumed it was selfish to spend time on myself. Now, as I reflect on my inward journey, what I call: ‘Inner Innovation’: changing myself, I’ve come to understand how working on oneself is of equal importance. What I previously considered as ‘selfish’ is actually ‘self-love’, and I do a lot more of it today which is reflected in my last article, ‘Spirituality in Business: An Inner Innovation’. In fact, this shift in perspective has actually given me the space, energy and inspiration to write more authentic articles!
Any act of service is a purely relational dynamic. In order to authentically serve, we must be connected to our own needs as well. If we feel good in our mental, emotional, physical and soul states, this allows us to show up and serve others better. If any service provider (designer, cafe server, teacher, doctor, etc.) is constantly giving without first being connected to their own needs, there will be an imbalance in their service. They may not be aware of it at the moment, but the receiver can sense something is off. Our external world is a reflection of what our inside world is like — so if we’re feeling angry inside but plaster on a fake smile, the receiver can still sense something simmering beneath the surface and may not be appreciative of your service.
“If to change ourselves is to change our worlds, and the relation is reciprocal, then the project of history-making is never a distant one but always right here, on the borders of our sensing, thinking, feeling, moving bodies.” — J.K. Gibson-Graham
TIPPING THE BALANCE
From a young age, we’re taught to help others in order to be ‘seen’ a certain way by society, but why were we seldom taught to understand the relationship between our inner and outer worlds? In my professional life, I spent over a decade in the design practice, then got stagnant with the process. Then I became an entrepreneur and the business flows! But then I became stagnant with the consulting model. Though Service Design is still highly relevant to organisations, the day-to-day designing wasn’t feeling relevant to me anymore. Originally, I got into Service Design for its holistic nature and environmental impact by helping others to value experiences over objects. But I felt trapped inside one giant Post-It note, doing the same philosophy and methodology repeatedly and selling it in blocks of time. There was a persistent little voice telling me I had hit the ceiling with my current work and location. I’d been conditioned to think in a certain way, and I realized a shift in perspective and an openness to receive was needed. I was grappling with my ego; awakening to my layers of conditioning and archetypes. In fact, in an acupuncture session the other day, a distant feeling of being trapped and suffocated arose silently. It allowed me to experience an awareness of the ‘stuckness’ within my body. This is a good thing because when we’re open to the emotions stored in our body, there is a new spaciousness and insight.
Five years ago, in pursuit of being an open vessel, I faced my fears and went on my first solo month-long trip to Nicaragua. There, I had an energetic experience which opened my mind and body connection to what felt like another realm. It sparked my curiosity in what I could learn from Reiki and even produced a truth-ache (a term by Jeff Brown), which is an awareness of a path longing to be lived. A niggling feeling asking you to change. Like many people, society has conditioned us to be disembodied — to separate the mind from the body. This was a stepping stone for me because my inner practice is learning to be more aware of what my body, heart and gut are telling me. As mindfulness gains popularity in the mainstream, the next step is to be open to receive. Once we get out of our minds, where do we end up? In our heart, our guts, or the cosmos? Wandering in the woods or spending a night alone in the wild, when we’re free from having to serve others and our busy minds, we can focus inwards and be guided by our intuition.
Tuning into this balance is a fine art. Burnout is an increasingly reported condition. Empathy is one of the big principles in service design, the ability to properly feel where our users, clients and colleagues are coming from and share their voice in the design. However,
“Empathy is an interesting word, often mistaken for something quite different: unhealthy boundaries, not knowing where we end and the other begins. Our empathic capability can be misdirected as any other ability. Just because you can feel where someone is coming from doesn’t mean you have to put yourself at risk. When we allow empathy to keep us invested in that which brings us suffering, when we confuse it with a boundaryless way of being, it morphs into misplaced faith and self-sabotage. It turns a gift freely given to a gift freely abused. Better to not turn your compassionate nature against yourself. Empathize with humanity, but shield yourself from harm.” — Jeff Brown, Grounded Spirituality
Tuning into our breath, thoughts, feelings and behaviours is a fine skill to help us pause, continue or course correct. This way, when the balance is tipped, we know finding harmony is in the fine balance between our inner and outer being.
WHAT’S UNDERNEATH THE SERVICE?
In everyday life, we are constantly adjusting the way we give and receive from the organisations who serve us. We flow in and out of services all day long, the qualities of several acting on a subconscious level. Yet, we take many of these services for granted, deciding whether or not we had a ‘good’ experience. Perception of experience is dependent on an individual’s expectations.
Beneath the experience of a service, certain touchpoints should have been considered by the organisation behind it. If it had been crafted by a service designer, we apply the below principles to ensure the best experience possible. At Harmonesse, we design experiences that are:
- Understandable — clear and accessible
- Useful — provide you value
- Responsive — react promptly and positively
- Honest — open and truthful
- Consistent — acting in the same way over time and channel
- Empowering — give you confidence and control
- Ambitious — go above and beyond
- Long term — care about you
Services also need qualities that are specific to them. For example, our death notification project focused on exceptional emotional intelligence, a Telco home security project focused on reassurance, and a power company project focused on communicating succinctly around storms, helping people to be best prepared for disasters. As each service develops its own unique ´role´ or personality, those who are on the front line of any organisation also need to reflect these specific attributes and behaviours.
In the act of exchanging services, we encourage staff to be self-aware too. Having your staff understand their ‘why’ goes towards considering their own unique needs when they’re providing the service. By going through this type of exercise, it allows staff to provide service from a more authentic place. In a conscious organisation, we must stop considering how good business only fills our minds with data and information, and instead consider our body, our emotions, intuitions and spirit as areas of meaningful learning. Today, Harmonesse aspires to work with organisations who support the deeper yearnings of our souls. Our peers at The Moment and their teal self-management structure, and in the book Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux, show how an emerging new form of consciousness is bringing forth a more soulful, purposeful and productive organizational model.
And with this shift in world view or conception of reality, by focusing on our inner innovation as much as our outer innovation, we can be more balanced in the act of serving and receiving in each moment. Because that’s what we’re here to do. We are in service to ourselves and one another, and the earth on which we reside. If we do not maintain these equilibriums, how can we remain in harmony? Our purpose on earth is to be able to stand in the ebb and flow of life.
By remembering to serve yourself, you’re creating a balanced inner environment that will be reflected in your outer world.
So, how have you served yourself lately?
