Andy Polaine: Hi and welcome to power of 10, a podcast about

design operating at many levels zooming out from thoughtful

detail through to organisational transformation and onto changes

in society and the world. My name is Andy Polaine. I'm a

service design and innovation consultant, leadership coach,

educator and writer. My guest today is KA McKercher, a

designer and writer living on Aboriginal land in Australia.

They have over 10 years experience leading social

innovation and CO design approaches across Australia and

New Zealand, previously working as principal at the Australian

Centre of social innovation and the innovation unit. And they're

currently working within the New South Wales government. They

write in their book relying heavily on sticky notes

privileges, those who can think quickly, are highly literate and

literary, and are well versed in thinking and headlines. Anyone

who can't do that is generally excluded and left bewildered by

the pace of commercial design methods. KA, welcome to power of

10.

KA: Thank you for having me, Andy.

Andy Polaine: So I'm going to return back to that quote, which

I'm guessing is, is where the title of your book Beyond sticky

notes came from. But I'm interested in your own journey

first. So you know, what was your pathway from where you came

from to here.

KA: So I accidentally went to design school after really

wanting to go to art school, and not having that be framed as a

real job. Sort of ending up in design and architecture, and

then being also at the very same time very interested in social

science as well. So I studied design, and I studied

anthropology at the same time, which was fortuitous, because

those things, I guess, would go on to become quite entangled.

Yeah. But at that time, I sort of thought cheese, designs

interesting, it's fun, perhaps doesn't have a very robust

understanding of people, and sort of methods of understanding

people. And I thought anthropology is interesting, but

it feels a bit stagnant and a bit othering. And we don't

really make things. So about, sort of interesting to join

these two things together. And very soon after design school,

sort of working for a company called optimal usability that

doesn't exist anymore, but was a fabulous company. And it's time.

And one of the early projects that I began working on was

around the translation of legislation, which in New

Zealand was around how we would better care for kids who are at

the precipice of perhaps entering the child protection

system. And the project was really to say, can we work in a

place based way? Look, can we work in particular communities

and with communities to take this legislative change, and

turn it into service design, and sort of functional and practical

service design. And very naively, I just sort of hurled

myself into this with the things I thought I knew about, like,

doing journey maps, and personas and workshops, and, you know,

having sticky notes and butchers paper. And those things were

just rejected, of course, by communities, who were really

confused about who I was and why I was there, and what I was

doing and why I had so much arrogance. And, and so little

cultural competency, actually being quite New Zealander. And

that gave me a bit of a taste for design as applied into a

social or community setting. Probably a bit of a taste for

how little I reasonably knew about that and what my role

should be, or could be. And then I guess, set me on a bit of a

path of working in a more community led design process,

across lots of different settings, predominantly health

and domestic violence and child protection. And that sort of

just a mask lots of different experiences, about designing

with people, particularly in community, not often in

boardrooms are not often in offices. And then a little bit

down that track, I sort of thought, Well, this has been

interesting and fantastic. And all this needs to go somewhere.

So hence writing book, but then I was also curious about what

it's like to be on the inside, and to work at a different level

and layer of the system and decided to then start working

government and seeing what was possible, what kinds of

conditions I could create from inside of government to perhaps

have people you know, like myself, or much better, more

competent versions of myself, come and sort of lead more

community accountable work.

Andy Polaine: So I mean, it's, I think quite a lot of obviously

service designers end up are attracted to government

actually, because in that sort of systems level of view that

you often take of the of the work we're doing, have a you

know where things going wrong. And one of the places where you

can actually make some significant change across that

entire system is obviously, is in government. At the same time

you get there, and you work with those departments. And there's

often an awful lot of good intention, but there's admired

in in process that slows them down. And that's part of the

kind of systems problem, what's been your experience, and really

working there. So probably, you might want to be careful about

what you say, but you know, given what you just said about,

you know, coming in, let's be kind of honest, I've worked in,

you know, in a consultancy, with all that kind of glossiness of

that and been one of those people who's kind of coming to

one of those departments to do some work. And I'm very aware

of, you know, of how that that kind of arrogance, I guess you

would just talked about four, and what's been your experience,

you know, of trying to bring these kinds of methods and

process and thinking into those departments, perhaps in a

different way to how external consultants would do. So

KA: I think the thing we get the opportunity to do when we're in

a place, and for for extended period of time, is and not

dissimilar to co design in this respect, work in a very

relationship first approach, right? Where we don't come in

with assumptions about what people are and aren't doing the

capabilities they do in don't have an I think some language

and I think it was Jeremy myosin, who, who presented this

language of perhaps the goal is designed and fused, not designed

LED. So this language of design led, you know, nice, yeah. And

it's it's active, it's strong, it's a bit bossy. And my

experience has certainly been the design of fused is more

helpful, not only to truly bring design methods and skill sets

into an organisation, but also just to value other skills and

capabilities that people have insights they have about their

work, and perhaps, you know, I guess, allow them to work with

their own curiosity about what is it they want to learn and

discover, as opposed to us, telling them that or suggesting

that that's somehow wrong or bad for not knowing or not having

had the opportunity to know and, actually, I think there's many

things for designers to reflect on in terms of the pace in which

we expect change to happen, which is often admirable, but

unreasonable. And also, perhaps that one of the reasons why

people don't engage in design processes is sometimes because

of the sheer operational demand. And if someone has this enormous

operational demand placed on them, it's not exactly that easy

to step out of that and engage in, you know, what we might

think of as a gold standard design process. So in some ways,

the way that I've moreso thought about it is what can I curate,

for folks across the organisation almost like a

tasting platter of different conversations, capabilities,

micro learn microlearning type activities, that just sort of

builds up in a way that's reasonable to the demands that

people have on themselves when they're in operational roles and

positions, but also keeps kind of stoking the fire of building

out maybe different mindset, sort of different skill sets,

and coming to see how they're relevant for a very specific

context. Because I guess much of design is framed, perhaps

unhelpfully as very generic. And as being these tools, that just

sort of Bob about in the world, and it can be really difficult

to make the conceptual leap between what would that tool

mean for me? How would I bring it into my context? And how

might it need adapting? And I guess it's someone working on

the inside, there's a translational role, perhaps in

sort of seeing the massive plethora of tools, and

meaningfully bringing those in and telling stories about them

and adapting them and even doing work and then using that as a

way of saying, See, we use that thing. And it was quite good.

And people said it was quite good. Do you want to use it too?

I'll give you a hand.

Andy Polaine: Right? And then you get the snowball effect. Of

more, you know, I say the snowball effect, I have this

expression called this of umbrella in the rain, which is,

you know, at the beginning, everyone thought, why have you

got an umbrella? I'm speaking to an Englishman here, my vegan

umbrella, you know, and then if so, of course, you know, then

when it starts raining, everyone wants to be under your umbrella

and that that sort of success attract success, and it's it's a

slow process. I think. I think though your point about design

is being frustrated. The lack of pace, particularly in a, you

know, with the noise, if you like from from Silicon Valley of

faster is always better, right? And the kind of speed and the

your point about designers being frustrated at that kind of lack

of places is really kind of well placed and well observed. I

think that that's a we forget to take people on the journey with

us and kind of not just forget, I suspect we're probably deeply

impatient about it,

KA: I think so that it can be shaming, right? Like, it's yeah,

that shame is not a good change strategy and to suggest to

people that they should somehow be ashamed of the things they

don't know, or haven't had the opportunity to learn. I think

the other thing is that it's actually very easy to create a

product, it's very difficult to then see all the layers of which

need to be aligned to make that an actual part of the

organisation. That's an implementation, not just an

installation of some

Andy Polaine: Yeah, yeah. To defend the service designer.

Second to that the reason why the book that I co wrote with

Ben elevens is called from insight to implementation was

for that very reason why this idea that otherwise you are

stuck in in sticky notes land, and and you've sort of come up

with some concepts, but not really, the implementation is

the is the tough bit, which might come to actually but then

just talking about shame, I've just noticed you'd had the there

was a piece of you said about having courageous conversations,

and are you enabling people to take off their armour? Which I

don't know if that was, you know, was that a direct

reference to Brene Brown? Or was it just happens to be the same

language because of this? You know, when we were talking about

shame, it's a difficult area, right?

KA: Yeah. And I wonder if there's anyone who's gotten away

with not being deeply influenced by Brene Brown, because the way

she speaks about this is so accessible and warm and

friendly. And, you know, certainly it does come you know,

and be inspired by Brene. Brown, but it also comes from a flavour

of community organising and activism. That is less the

pointy Jelle. Yeah, style. And a little bit more the, you know,

the whole, you know, let's not build a fence, but maybe have a

much longer table. And, you know, even Krista Tippett, I

think the host of on being is another person that models this

kind of hospitality and invitation, which, you know,

really some of the ingredients that I guess I speak about a lot

in the book, but also speak about a lot in design practice

that perhaps we've maybe forgotten some of the

hospitality based aspects of convenient people and hosting

conversations.

Andy Polaine: Yeah. And as a kind of sideline to that. I

mean, you've been, well, you're in New South Wales, right?

You're in Sydney. Sydney hasn't had the lockdown quiet that

Melbourne has had. But you know, I guess you've talking about

sort of hosting and hospitality. There's a lot that I guess we're

naturally attuned to, from, you know, hosting, being a host of

people in the space, put it that way, there's also a lot that as

you point out, that we're completely kind of ignorant of

or unaware of, or you're unconscious of or just not

getting right, in those physical spaces. I'd be interested to

know what your experience has been actually of doing this

trying to apply some of these things in the remote space?

KA: It's a good question. And I think for me, many of the same

principles and practices apply. So you know, I think it's

prayer, Parker and others who have often said, you know,

something like 80% of the work of being in the room, happens

outside of the room, and before you even get to the room in the

first place. So I guess in the virtual environment, I'm still

trying to do things like build relationships with people, one

to one and have conversations with them, ahead of there being

any sort of group based thing that's going to occur. I think

there's really small things like asking people, you know, is

there anything that you'd like to tell me or share with me by

which will make this issue more accessible for you, or more

engaging for you? And that might be a small thing, like, you

know, make it okay, that I can turn my camera off, or make sure

you have enabled captions or, you know, there's a whole bunch

of stuff. Yeah. I think small, like novelties, can play a role

as well around maybe there's, you know, almost like Easter

eggs built into invitations built into virtual convenings.

And afterwards, I think there's a lot that we can do around

buddying people up. So there's a greater sense of safety, even in

a virtual room, you know, there's a huge wealth of things.

Andy Polaine: Yeah, I mean, it's definitely nice. support, you

know, in breakout rooms are though. So there's probably two

sides, there's definitely spoiling breakout rooms that you

can, you know, in those virtual spaces where, you know, you can

say to everyone, hey, come up with a thing and share it with

the entire group of, you know, 30 people on this video chat is

obviously quiet, you know, a demand on on real quiet love

people actually, you know, to work in a small breakout group

together, and then kind of come back and report as your group or

something like that, that that kind of helps, definitely helps

create this sort of sense of safety in the group and take it

less, the focus less on the person. One of the downsides of

breakout groups is the way you can kind of jump around them,

you can't kind of see them all at once. And I think one of the

things you see in a visual space is, oh, there's a table over

there where one person is kind of not included. And the other

three people are kind of, you know, at the wall, you know,

doing whatever they're doing. And this other person seems to

be a bit checked out of you encounter, you know, I mean,

presumably, you've encountered that in physical space. I saw

you nodding before, have you kind of come up with any ways to

deal with that in the virtual? Yeah, so

KA: the best tool that I've found is, I build all of the

breakout rooms in advance, and deliberately curate who's going

to be in that specific breakout room. And particularly when I'm

teaching design or design related skills, I'll always have

someone in the room that I've sort of briefed ahead of time

around, these are the things I'd like you to look for what I'd

like you to exercise as kind of a peer to peer facilitator in

your own group. And even as a really simple thing, making it

really safe for people to leave the breakout room and come back

to the shared space. So we have a session where we had I think

about 170 people. And I said to everyone, breakout rooms,

distaff, all of us have some of us that create a huge amount of

anxiety, and we just hate them. So I let everyone know, and

actually show them a screenshot and say, This is how you can

leave, and you don't have to feel bad leaving the main space,

we'll just have some quiet music, you can turn off your

camera. And here's an independent thing you might like

to do, or think about. So. I think there's a power dynamic

here, though, that as the host, we set what's what's

permissible, right. And even if we don't say people come up with

their own sense of what the unspoken norms are, so one of

the most powerful things for a lot, I found was just to say to

people, just come as you are, you don't need to apologise for

your kids, jumping on your back, cat sitting on your computer,

you know, the blinds that you don't really like behind you,

and you have this perception and our professional. It's okay.

Like and if you're feeling a bit frazzled, and if you just start

crying in the middle of the session, it's going to be okay.

And I think for people even just to hear that explicit

permission, I noticed a massive shift.

Andy Polaine: Yeah, that's true. That's a very good idea. So I

guessing those kinds of ideas also, were the sort of itch that

you sort of wrote the book to scratch or tell me, people write

books, usually, because the one that they want doesn't exist.

And there's a sort of there's an itch, they want to scratch

themselves, sometimes also born around out of frustration. So

your books go beyond sticky notes, codesign, for real, and

then mindsets, methods and movements and the real it's kind

of its underlying, which I'm guessing you've been talking

about a bit already. You What was the genesis of this?

KA: So a few things. So I don't know if you've noticed this in

Europe, but certainly in Australia, and also an Altero.

In New Zealand. There's been this, I don't think explosion is

too wild word to use of the language of codesign. So we're

seeing it everywhere. From organisational strategies. We're

all commission recommendations. And there's a great deal of

projects that go out to market to say, We want an agency to

come work with us and to co design. My observation was most

of those things weren't what I had understood that to me. And

when I say what I had understood, I mean sort of

connecting to the lineage of, you know, participatory design

practice or emancipatory design practice, or community led

design practice that particularly I think back home

and Altidore is a much bigger, more burgeoning field of, of

people who think it's a seeing design, not as a toolkit, but a

catalyst for more even power dynamics, or more opportunities

for people to play a role in the decisions that shape their

lives. So I was feeling this dissonance, I guess, between the

language that people were using, and then what was actually

happening, which was really just kind of fancy workshops, and

actually not even very Just not even very good workshops. And as

you say, I was looking across the market. And what I could see

was super convoluted academic texts that are just not

accessible. I could see little bits and bobs that people had

put together, maybe a blog here or a blog there. But the other

extreme was these toolkits that were all tools, and no

connection to what would you need to unlearn? And what would

you need to be even to be successful? And what's actually

the social movements side of it as well, that, you know, really,

this isn't just about jazzy new methods, but the the opportunity

for greater civic participation, you know, greater connection and

neighbourhoods in between organisations and the people

gussied up to serve or to partner with. So I felt there

was a gap. And that seemed to be the case, particularly once the

book was out. And people were sort of saying, you know, I've

been looking for this. Yeah, so I guess, I wanted to write

something that had these three aspects. So wanted to say

something about the social movements side of things. And

what, what some of the, I guess, particular literacies around

power and privilege that might be helpful, or are helpful for

designers to have a much greater sense of, or anyone that can be

in CO design, it's not just designers. The second part, I

wanted to talk much more so about maybe some of the mindsets

that we don't often see talked about in design hospitality, in

particular being one of those things, but also the grittier

parts of things like asking people to be in ambiguity. But

whether that's actually a reasonable or possible request,

and if it is, when and how and how does that get supported. And

then pretty light on the methods and really focusing on the model

of care for codesign, which is sort of one of the core

frameworks, which is really about bringing about some more

trauma aware practices into doing design and convening

groups people, and just generally not trying to

replicate the great deal of excellent design, books, and

design methods that are already out there. But tell us how to do

things like generative design research,

Andy Polaine: there's a large part of this is really about

designing the process, right, or kind of applying a level of

thoughtfulness and detail. And there's an incredible amount of

it, I think it's very rich on that. To kind of not the I say

the process, not so much the process itself, not even the

kind of actual work that you're doing. But the preconditions in

which all of this is taking place. And applying the same

amount of effort to that you talked about in conditions for

CO design is really kind of like the first kind of chunk of it.

And you'd have one, you have these kind of four aspects of

support and sponsorship time and money, culture and climate, and

commitments. And particularly those first three, well

actually, notice that the support and sponsorship time and

money and commitments are all I would argue proxies for how

important people think this stuff is. Because if they're not

there, and when a common thing, and you mentioned it before is

anything a codesign is expensive, or and we talked

about the speed thing as well, I can imagine you've had the sort

of pushback on this is going to slow us down or whatever. You

know, it's there's no budget until it's something that

someone decides is important. And then suddenly there's

budget, right. So you know, a lot of this feels like what

you're doing is trying to kind of surface this as no need just

is, you know, this is important, because this is the right way to

treat people. But this is important, because otherwise you

don't get the outcomes you're after. You know, I think

designers tend to talk about design too much actually to to

stakeholders, and people who are kind of, you know, might be

pushing back on them or people they're trying to convince, you

know, when you've been doing this work, both when you've been

doing this work, and maybe when you've been sort of talking or

teaching or whatever about this, what have been some of the kind

of main push backs that you've had on on this way of working.

So I

KA: think that I don't have time or we don't have time is a big

one. And I think there's some reframing around that around,

you know, going slow now to go fast later or or thinking about

future liabilities that may arise from not having

sufficiently invested. You know, in the early days. I think

another sort of objection or a thing that people get hung up on

is they have Miss heard something along the way about

everyone has to be involved, or everyone should be involved. And

I think this is a great fallacy that when that's possible, and

to that, therefore, everyone has to be involved in same ways. And

I guess what I particularly advocate for is that we Think

about people who know people who care, people who perhaps haven't

got to have a seat in the conversation, but have important

insights to share. And we're really prioritising those people

as the core co design team, if you will. And then there, as we

both know, a great, great, huge list of many different ways in

which people can be involved, that may be more about breadth,

and depth. Or there might mix those things.

Andy Polaine: Right. And so I think, you know, one of the

things that happens when people say we need to be inclusive in

this is like, everyone has to have this a right and everyone

has to be involved, because then it becomes a kind of political

thing of all, we can't speak to those people, unless we keep

bringing these people is that the kind of thing you're, you're

saying ends up happening. And those people aren't necessarily

the right people, or they may even be unsafe people to be in

or make the space unsafe,

KA: or there are people who, whilst have views that arguably

are being you know, that they deserve to share our views that

are already well understood, and well represented. And I think

the part that designers are very guilty of, and we all are

because of our impulse to want to create something new, and

maybe create some kind of shrine to ourselves, as well as that we

often sort of parachute into contexts without sufficiently

understanding what's already known. And I think that does

mean that we often then go back over old ground, as opposed to

sort of saying, Where are the cracks? Where does the road end?

You know, where are people falling in the river? That just

got to be a very complicated metaphor. But, you know, I think

there's a different way of thinking about this. And it does

require being brave enough to say, Well, should everyone be

involved, and that's perhaps actually not inclusion, nests,

perhaps just a very unsophisticated understanding or

sophisticated way of thinking about it.

Andy Polaine: I mean, you've talked a lot about power power

structures, creating safe spaces and building wrote down a quote,

he said, building trust and relationships before offering

tools or methods, which I feel that we probably do the other

way around most of the time as designers. And you know, and

I've seen it, as you've seen it done an interesting because you,

given your background, there's a guy called Chris Hayward, who's

been on who I used to work with, who's been on the show comes

from anthropology background, and I've seen him really

brilliantly in a workshop where it was a large group of people

that lots of different kinds of parts of the lots of third party

service providers for this particular thing. And one of

those third party service providers was considered to be

the problem, basically, and the woman who was, you know,

representing that service, there was kind of a pile on starting

to happen in the space, and she then understandably started to

become quite defensive, which then started to kind of lock

down where things were going to go in terms of kind of opening

up the problem space and all of that stuff. And I saw Chris

just, well actually be incredibly empathetic and human,

but it had just had a real ability to kind of diffuse that.

And not only to kind of, you know, help that woman feel more

included, unwanted, and to sort of, which helped her kind of

dial down her and her defences, take off her armour, actually,

but also, at the same time, stop the others in the room from from

the kind of pile on and over the course of two days. I really, it

was just, it was brilliant to see, I don't know, you know, if

I asked him about it, he probably would remember it. I

don't know that he was such a sort of, it just seemed to be

something he was very kind of attuned to, I think, from his

anthropology background, actually, of understanding of

being a stranger in a strange land. And I don't, I'm not

actually part of this community. And you know, I'm, I'm, you

know, I'm colonising this community as a, you talked

actually about a design being, particularly when working with

indigenous people design being a colonising practice. And there's

that nice piece from Katerina Davis, in there about, you know,

we need more more designers, more Maori designers and good

allies, and no more white saviours. And so many people

assume we need something that we already have. And that kind of

skill to shape that safe space in the middle of seeing it was a

recurring recurring fact a dynamic where a space that might

have been assumed to be safe starts to become not safe was a

real skill. I thought then it was really nice to sort of see

in practice, you talk about kind of You Can we have can have a

lot of sort of good intentions and set up stuff as best we

think we can. But the same problem arises there which is

this is our kind of guess of what we think should be the safe

space, how do you deal with a kind of correcting, you know,

what we think is a safe space might not be how do we do that

better? And then in the middle of it when you realise something

is not going as it should? How do you correct for that?

KA: Look, I think the first thing to acknowledge is safe.

And I want to say safe enough, because I don't think that it's

possible for all spaces, right? Like, we're human beings and

we're colliding into each other. And we're, you know, saying and

doing things. So I think safe enough for me as the, the

framing and within that, according to who. And I guess in

my work, I take a particularly special focus on folks who will

not be the highest on the matrix of domination who will not have

the most authority in the room, or for who an identity or

experience is likely to produce an other kind of effect. And I

often have quite a few conversations with people ahead

of time about what safe enough might be like. And, you know,

often people because they've thought about this, often really

a lot, particularly survivors of different kinds of have done a

lot of work and had to do a lot of work around how do I feel

safe, or safe enough. So often, people have really practical

suggestions, like, I don't want to hear what everyone's jobs

are, at the start of the session, I want to hear who

people are in their community. And I just don't want to be

shamed, that I, for example, non unemployment right now. And that

person's got three PhDs. So people will often make

suggestions about what that could be like. And I guess, as a

somewhat, you know, a person who's facilitated a fair amount

in the space, I've also got a bit in my own memory bank of

things that I might draw from, I think it's a really different

matter as to when the space becomes unsafe. And I think the

people that I know, that are really good at doing this

experience, or have experience some exclusion in their own

lives, that allows them to the sounds a little bit kind of

woowoo, but feel a sense that something's broken, and the

relational space, and someone's done something that's awkward,

that's harmed someone. And, you know, I think this is where the

whole courageous conversation things come from. I don't know

that people who are hosting workshops always see it as their

role to take a corrective action of some kind and to practice

calling in. So let me give an example. I was in a workshop

some time ago, and the workshop was about LGBT health. And there

were these very lovely consultants who were running the

workshop and became clear to me that they weren't, in fact,

running the workshop, there just set up the room. So there wasn't

sort of anyone running anything. And I'd made a particular

comment and my experience as a non binary person in a very

aggressive, older cisgendered person sort of said to me, all,

that's fine. But we all just need to grow up here and stop

being so worried about language. And that would have been the

perfect opportunity for the person hosting the conversation

to say, we have already committed in this space to

prioritise the safety of LGBT people, and to listen deeply and

not to minimise. But instead, these people just kind of sat

back and they were very awkward. And nothing happened. And, of

course, that just reinforced this power dynamic of Yeah, it

was somehow Okay, for that to happen. So I think as a

facilitator, we have to have the capacity in that moment to call

out and call in at the same time and offer invitations that

people might think about their behaviour might change it, and

if they don't change it, that they may need to leave the

session.

Andy Polaine: So so there's a thing there, which is it because

we were talking about shame, obviously any in that situation,

you would kind of probably shame that other person, but that you

just who said it, by calling it out, or you know, there's a

danger of that happening.

KA: And calling it in, though, I think is the thing to do. The

other impulse is to shame and to be Yeah, Karen, stop it. But the

thing that's really helpful is to you know, even a question

like, it can be fairly kind, but strong at the same time around,

you know, might that comment, actually be a reinforcement of

all the things we've already been speaking about today. So,

you know, things that invitations as opposed to

interrogations, or, you know, calling out can can be something

that needs to happen some of the time, particularly if we see our

practices working in solidarity with people in the room who have

less power, not colluding with or helping people who have more

to feel safe and comfortable.

Andy Polaine: No, I think So you know, it's more of an evening

out of things as well, you know, an evening or an evening out and

evening, at CES, the same words, and evening out of their power

about rebalancing of the power dynamics there and as the person

facilitating whether you actually call it convening, that

CO design space, you know, you have a lot of extra power,

because you literally, you're the one standing at the front

with the mic or whatever. And that gives you kind of a bigger,

bigger clout, and so you can kind of rebalance. And now,

we're coming pretty close up to time, you also, you've, you've

got the book, you also have produced these mindsets, guides.

There's quite a few other things on your website. You did say

earlier, you're working on another, another book, what's it

called?

KA: Yes. The new book is tentatively called Beyond

service design, which evidently there's a beyond theme going on.

And this particular book is a question that I'm holding in my

head about how is it as service designers, that we may be

colluding with the manufacturing of need and new needs. And this

is particularly inspired by John McKnight 's work on the killer

society, in which he makes this observation that perhaps, you

know, one of the issues we've run into is not because we don't

have enough services, but because maybe we have too many.

And maybe there's some areas that have been professionalised

to such an extent that we've lost some of our capacities to

care for and about each other. And in no way, am I suggesting

that we don't need some services, for sure. We need

acute services, for example, we need people to do surgery on us,

we definitely don't want to do that on each other. But there

are a whole bunch of other services in which we've

invented. And perhaps, you know, as service designers, we're kind

of playing in the territory of inventing services of maybe

creating services that people can't stop using, or that

actually don't build their capability or efficacy in any

way. And maybe that's not always the outcome that we're looking

for. But whether it should be particularly in some categories

of service, in which we might say community capacity is an

outcome we want. But the way in which we go about creating

boundaries, and structures and services may not reflect that.

So it's not particularly well formed. But I've been

increasingly talking to folks, such as at the Australian Centre

for Social Innovation, about what that doing around caring

for carers around building up community resilience after

bushfires around community mental health and new models for

keeping people out of the child protection system. And the thing

that all those projects have in common is they're not services,

and they don't get framed in the context of service, they get

framed in the context of capability. And I'm just curious

about some of those things and working through some of the

different stories, the different approaches. But importantly,

what I'm also asking is, what is that ask of the service

designer? And are there some things perhaps that we need to

give up or some ways that we might reframe our own thinking,

so that everything isn't to service, a better service and

new service a different service, but we see that there's

different directions, different roles, and I get a different

outcomes?

Andy Polaine: I'm really fascinated to see what you come

up with. I think the thing when you just talked about the caring

for carers thing, I think there is a because we healthcare is a

classic thing we talked about and service design as one of the

kinds of big services that will be around, you know, has been

around since before we were born. And we'll be around after

we die. And there, those are the two points we know we access to

the health care services, as well, our birth and death. But

you know, one of the things going on in Germany, for

example, is, you know, with with COVID, is that the politicians

will talk about, you know, we need another 1000 in intensive

care unit beds, but the nurses have all burnt out. And so

they're leaving that profession, and actually one in mice of

family circle is has done exactly that. And because there

there was an interview with somebody, you know, from an

intensive care unit, and they just said, you know, beds don't

make people better. beds, don't make care for people. If you

don't have the staff. The numbers of beds don't make any

difference. And it's very frustrated with those kinds of

political statements. We just didn't really understand the

context or what it's like to be, you know, actually working in

those services. I think there's a lot of services that I mean,

look at that, and I feel like I'm always kind of loading on

the tech industry here. But you know, the tech industry is

obviously full of that. And we think of, you know, Amazon and

the rest of them where you've got or you know, the content,

auditors of people have to kind of view objection or content and

from Facebook and all those kind of people, there's a, there's

all these other services for whom the people in their

services aren't really cared for at all. Yeah, so I can, I can

definitely that and that resonate. So as you know, the

show is named after this rain, Charles Eames film called power

of 10, about the relative size of things in the universe. And

the last question is always what one small thing is either

overlooked or underappreciated, and could either be redesigned

or more well known that has an outsized effect on the world

KA: feels like a extraordinarily difficult question. To ask,

look, I'm going to say something that has, has personal elements

to it, and it has work assignments. And because we've

already talked about this a little in the conversation is, I

think the thing we can all do better, whether it's to our

family, our friends, our colleagues, workshop

participants, is just know how to write a really good

invitation, we just really fail on that we failed to make it

personal, we failed to make the personally feel like special to

some extent, and like we care about them are attentive to

their needs. I'll provide just a really quick example as I was

hosting birthday party the other day, and a friend of mine with

autism was coming along. And I'd said to her in advance, would it

be okay, if I burns and scented candles? Or would that be really

disruptive for you? And would that make it really unpleasant

to be in my home? And mediately? She sort of came back and said,

Oh, my gosh, I can't believe you even asked me that like, yeah,

ideally, prefer if you didn't, if you don't mind? And it's

like, well, no, I don't mind. Like it doesn't affect my

experience at all. But it was clearly going to have a really

big impact on yours. So invitations, personal

invitations, professional invitations, just make them a

little bit better. Not so generic. And, you know, I think

that would make a pretty significant difference about

who's in the room and how they feel about being in the room.

Andy Polaine: You talk about actually meant to us it's talked

about this before, but you talk about love quite a lot in the

book as an as an important part of this process. And my biggest

complaint about sort of professionalisation of genesis

of the word even being professional is that it seems to

kind of exclude all of that exclude, you know, love and

emotions and how people feel that's kind of irrelevant in the

kind of hard business world and stuff. And yet, without that,

you sort of don't get anything going anywhere. Because there's

just there's a lot of resistance that people will then push back

on. And do you think it's too extreme to say that when you

don't really take into account people's how people feel about

things? And how it kind of how they feel excluded or included?

It's actually, fundamentally people feel unloved?

KA: Absolutely, I mean, I don't think it would be an

understatement that it is all of our wish to feel in some way. So

you know, when we're together, and I think that's just as true

for a design workshop as it is and family and community. So

yeah, I think we've got to talk a lot more about love. I'm

particularly loving all of the contributions that people bring,

including the ones that aren't obvious to us, or we don't

naturally value or because it's not a professionalised skill,

and we might have classified it as craft or hobby, that we don't

value them, we don't see what that is and what they can bring

in. You know, that's probably drawing a little bit more on the

asset based community development type approaches in

which we just recognise that everyone has gifts to offer and

our role, or at least I see it as our role to create enough

hospitality and safety and a warm welcome in which people

feel like they can share whatever those gifts are. I know

that sounds kind of soft and fluffy, but it's, it's actually

hard and important.

Andy Polaine: That sounds like a very good place to end the

podcast. Thank you so much for being my guest on power of 10.

KA: Thank you for having me.

Andy Polaine: As I'm sure you're aware, you've been listening to

power of 10. My name is Andy Polaine. You can find me at a

perlane on Twitter, or perlane.com, where you can find

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