and invitations to the sandbox. And at the risk of being cliché, you’ll need to find joy in the journey. This won’t be easy.
So I ask myself, what could help? And here’s my advice:
1. Find a collaborator or two. Don’t try this alone.
2. Don’t launch straight into one of the workshops. Use Chapter 11. Use it all year as the brief for applying the rest of the book. In our office, we often ask ourselves, “What conversation could we have in the next two weeks that would contribute to bringing our idea to life? Who needs to be involved, and do we need to make anything to support that conversation? Should it happen at a bar, in front of a working wall, or on a long walk together?”
These ideas can improve your ability to produce results that matter and last. But when you first pick up the book, there’s no way to predict the particular way it will take root in your work. You have to live through the process of change to find out. That may take a bit of courage and persistence, but what does it serve you to play small?
And, of course, you’re not alone. This book condenses the knowledge and experiences of a great number of people. With so many people setting out on this road, with a community of practice growing around these ideas, with so much enthusiastic exploration and imagination being captured in books like this, there is really no need for me to worry. I know you’ll be fine.
Marc Rettig
Principal, Fit Associates
Faculty, SVA Design for Social Innovation
INTRODUCTION
We—Patrick and Chris—have known one another for several years now. We’ve worked at three organizations together—an agency, a consultancy, and a large financial services corporation. We’ve shared the stage at conferences and Adaptive Path events. We’ve co-taught thousands of people how to design for more human experiences.
Along the way, we’ve had a continuous dialogue about what challenges we’ve seen organizations facing and how they have approached solving them: for example, Design Thinking for unlocking innovation; Agile for speeding up product development; and Lean for creating operational efficiencies at scale. Each of these methodologies—some would say religions—has its strengths, but they all fail to address three critical challenges that organizations face today:
• How to evolve from shipping disconnected products and touchpoints quickly to crafting end-to-end experiences that unfold gracefully over time and space
• How to break down operational silos and enable effective, efficient human-centered design collaboration
• How to bridge the gap between fuzzy-front-end strategy (“What should we do?”) to nuts-and-bolts execution (“What we did”)
This book takes aim at these challenges. Inspired and informed by our talented collaborators in service design and user experience, we will share language, concepts, and approaches that enable people across an organization to envision, plan, and design customer experiences together. We will help you guide others to understand the journeys of your customers and meet their needs better. We will expand your toolkit to generate better ideas and craft a compelling vision. Along the way, we hope to inspire you to become an orchestrator within your organization.
PATRICK AND CHRIS
Because there are two of us, sometimes we have different viewpoints. Look for our specific sidebars with our pictures. In those sidebars, we will highlight important information, give case studies that we’ve worked on, or simply give our personal viewpoint about a topic.
We use the terms orchestration, orchestrator, and orchestrating throughout this book. In one sense, we are referring to approaches that help shift organizations from designing and delivering disparate parts to designing these parts to be aligned and in harmony with one another. This approach requires crafting channels and touchpoints intentionally as a system to support customers and their end-to-end experiences over time and in multiple contexts (see Chapters 1-4). In another sense, orchestrating means facilitating collaboration to achieve those outcomes. More and more, we are finding ourselves—product, design, IT, marketing, operations, and so on—in a room together attempting to solve increasingly complex problems. An orchestrator helps foster empathy, collaboration, creativity, and alignment, which result in better experiences and outcomes (Chapters 5–11).
Whichever meaning you pick for the word, let’s face it: currently, orchestration runs counter to how most organizations operate. Although everyone has an agenda, we want to help you push your organization to be more thoughtful and collaborative in how it designs for experiences that result in real value. To support this objective, we have included workshop templates for facilitating the design process effectively. You can take these as is or adapt them to your unique needs.
We also provide examples of key outputs, both new and familiar—touchpoint inventories, ecosystem maps, experience maps, vision storyboards, and many more. Many of these artifacts are designed to be on walls—to be viewed by many, used as tools, and communicate lots of information. Our intent is not to load you up with more deliverables, but rather to give you tools that create impact.
While the latter portions of the book walk through approaches from research to prototyping, this is not a prescribed, rigid path. The methods we highlight are not required, nor are they the only ones to get the job done. Shipping products and delivering services is a continuum. Choose the methods that meet the needs of your team and organization. Play with your process. Invent your own tools.
As designers, we’re wired to tackle ambiguous problems. We strive to give shape and form to products and services in an increasingly complex world. Whether you are a designer or not, there is an opportunity to be the glue that unites cross-functional teams around a shared vision and coordinated action upon a foundation of empathy. Organizations struggling to create better customer experiences need more than mapmakers. They need orchestrators. They require leaders armed with the right language, frameworks, and soft skills to see the forest and make the trees. We want this person to be you.
PART I
A Common Foundation
Organizations work constantly to engage customers in their products and services. Dispersed among multiple departments and people, these efforts result in many tangible and intangible things, each intended to create a positive customer interaction. Marketers produce commercials, banner ads, microsites, emails, and direct mail. Digital teams make mobile apps, websites, digital signage, and kiosks. Customer service people deploy online help guides, AI (artificial intelligence) chat bots, and IVR (interactive voice response) systems. Front-line employees assist customers in real time. Retail operations construct aisles, checkout counters, help desks, signage, and entranceways.
That’s a lot of people, places, and things (and that’s just scratching the surface).
Each discipline or function in an organization directly or indirectly impacts the customer experience. Distributing ownership and decision-making across these groups, however, comes with a challenge. How
