The Service Design Dad

Applying ITV’s service design approach to the kids morning routine

Taking my work home with me isn’t always a bad idea.

The morning routine in our household was something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies. It was so draining I often felt like I’d done a day’s work before even starting my working day. Ridiculous, utterly ridiculous, all they have to do is get from their bed to the car and in the process, do spellings, get dressed, washed and eat breakfast.

Why is that so difficult?

I have delivered numerous multi-million-pound projects, I have swum the channel, cycled to Paris, I overcome adversity and solve problems every day. It’s what I do! Why on earth can’t I solve this?

Every morning it starts with gentle encouragement that turns into nagging every step of the way from their beds to school.

Until one day I said to my wife “I have an idea!” (I lied, this wasn’t my idea, I had drawn inspiration from a Vlog that had been shared with me from our Service Design Partners BJSS and Spark. design-thinking dad, Well worth a watch!)

I explained to my wife that we didn’t have any other options other than adoption, only semi-joking. I then explained the principle of Service Design as succinctly as possible.

“At work, when we solve problems, we do it as a group, and we include the people that are directly impacted by the problem and therefore have a vested interest in creating the right solution.” We talked about this approach in a previous blog — We’ve been on a hell of a discovery.

Sceptical but she agreed to give it a go.

We could use straightforward tools such as post-its and stickers, making it a bit of a game, it could even be fun. In fact, we may even be able to agree on something that works for all of us!

That evening after dinner, I set the game board out.

• The players
• The kitchen cupboards
• The coloured post-its
• The circle stickers
• The pens

I set out our problem statement — A brief reminder of the morning routine and it’s pain points (in child-friendly language!). I then offered a different kind of morning as a possible future vision — a hypothesis for us to test.

We tried to spark their imagination and open the discussion up to the art of the possible:

• Maybe there are things they want to do in the morning that we haven’t been able to do?
• Maybe they’d heard something their friends do that we could draw inspiration from?
• Maybe their favourite superhero had a great way to start their day?

To be honest, the stickers and pens were enough to spark interest, alongside a firm reminder that Sharpies are only for the Post-its!

Problem Definition

The next 5 minutes were spent writing down on post-its the things none of us likes about the mornings. What are the problems?

We then stuck them to the kitchen cupboards, and each of us took a turn to explain their post-it. We grouped them up into common problems to be solved.

It was tricky to retain everyone’s attention. Note to self, don’t do this at the end of the day in future.

With the problems clearly grouped, I reframed them into questions for us to solve.

Ideation: How might we?

By reframing the problems as questions, we now had a different perspective on the problem. It suddenly becomes a positive and opportunistic thing to solve.

This immediately triggered a flood of ideas and we had a job to hold them back so that we could get the ideas down onto their post-its.

I was actually quite surprised by some of the findings and how readily the ideas came.

To maintain their energy, we promptly moved on to voting. Using dot stickers, we all voted for our favourite ideas to take forward.

Prototyping

The debate and discussion around what was possible was interesting, but equally the engagement with the process was fun to watch.

With an idea agreed on, we set about prototyping and writing out a morning routine that each of us wanted.

Or thought we wanted :).

That night both boys surprised me and set their alarms for 6:30 am ready to start their routine. They were taking this seriously.

This is a great example of prototyping, testing and iteration as my youngest, who is 8, was up at 6:30 am ready and downstairs for his workout with Dad. My oldest who’s 11, on the other hand, couldn’t get out of bed and we had the same old problem. Late for school again!

We let the week play out to see how the new routine would work, and on the weekend, we held a family retrospective. We did this verbally and went through the days of the week and the routine to explain what we liked and disliked about it.

This time we narrowed down on a specific problem each.

My oldest said, “it takes a long time for my eyes to wake up and I don’t have time”.

After another round of ideas, we ended up with a new solution to try out. A 30-minute warm-up period where I would put some music or an audiobook on for him to wake up to slowly.

My youngest son wanted to move the morning exercise to be at the end of the day. So we now do either football or a workout before dinner in the evenings. Giving him more sleep time in the mornings.

The past few weeks have now been blissful, happy and not once late for school!

Hopefully, this inspires you to look at your problems differently, involve your teams and your users. Don’t be afraid to get it wrong as it’s all part of the process of learning together.

What can we solve next?