Increasing Resilience through pairing Service Design and Behavioral Insights
Despite the hype and investment associated with the potential of shifting cognitive processing to LLMs I believe that the bridge between data and tangible value is our ability to humanize the narrative for change. This is increasingly important as systems fall under new stresses, and we work to design and architect solutions that increase resiliency.
AI has been viewed as the primary focus of investment to fuel digital transformation, but the outcomes are not so rosy. According to a recent MIT study The GenAI Divide STATE OF AI IN BUSINESS 2025 organizations are getting zero return. Their data shows big firms lead in pilot volume but lag in scale-up.
"Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return. Just 5% of integrated AI pilots are extracting millions in value, while the vast majority remain stuck with no measurable P&L impact."
Clearly there's no guarantee of successful outcomes and the approach that organizations are taking should be rethought. Those that focus on efficiency and optimization tend to manage delivery solutions that are narrow and reductionist. The bias towards traditional IT delivery methods is a reason to move toward balance with holistic practices that process system-level risks to reduce the likelihood of component-level failures. It requires a desire to make system-level change. Human-centered practices like Service Design paired with data informed insights can play a pivotal role in enhancing resiliency strategies by focusing on the roles that humans play in complex ecosystems, designing for adaptability, empathy and collaboration.
3 Areas where Service Design can help Organizations Increase Resiliency
Creating Adaptive Ecologies:
Adaptive systems are designed to evolve and respond to changes or disruptions. They embrace intelligent failure, where setbacks are treated as learning opportunities. This promotes innovation and growth, allowing systems to adapt and thrive in dynamic environments.
Eliminating Single Points of Failure:
This approach ensures that no single component's failure can disrupt the entire system. By introducing redundancy, fault tolerance, and distributed architectures, systems can continue functioning even when individual elements fail. This reduces vulnerability and enhances reliability.
Balancing Optimization by Prioritizing Flexibility:
Enterprise optimization often focuses on efficiency and streamlining processes, which can inadvertently create rigid systems that are less adaptable to change. In contrast, adaptive ecologies prioritize flexibility and resilience, enabling systems to withstand and recover from disruptions.
Service Design can play a crucial role in enhancing the success of resilience strategies by focusing on the holistic analysis and systems thinking while engaging stakeholders and community participants, fostering collaboration and innovation.
Service Jams: These are intensive, collaborative workshops where diverse participants—including designers, business leaders, and community members—come together to rapidly prototype solutions for complex challenges. Events like Global Service Jams and Sustainability Jams encourage creative problem-solving through interdisciplinary teamwork.
Stakeholder Mapping: This method identifies key individuals and groups involved in a service ecosystem. By understanding their needs, motivations, and relationships, organizations can design more inclusive and effective solutions.
Journey Mapping: A visual representation of a user's experience with a service, highlighting pain points and opportunities for improvement. This helps teams empathize with users and refine service touchpoints.
Co-Creation Workshops: These sessions bring together stakeholders to collaboratively design solutions. By involving users in the design process, organizations ensure that services are relevant and user-friendly.
Rapid Prototyping: Teams quickly develop and test service concepts, gathering feedback to refine ideas before full implementation. This iterative approach reduces risk and enhances adaptability.
Community Engagement Sessions: These events involve local participants in discussions about service improvements, ensuring that solutions align with real-world needs and cultural contexts.
Play-based Design Jams: A variation of Service Jams that incorporates elements of play and motivation to enhance creative problem-solving. Research has shown that these activities improve critical thinking, collaboration, and engagement.
By integrating these methods, service design fosters resilience, adaptability, and user-centered innovation.
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Iterative UX Prototyping and Co-creation as System-Level Problem Solvers
Iterative UX prototyping and co-creation serve as powerful methodologies for addressing complex systemic issues and second-order problems through their emphasis on cyclical learning, cross-functional collaboration, and human-centered approaches. Strategic prototyping enables teams to investigate interconnected elements of a system, identifying fundamental causes rather than merely addressing surface symptoms. This methodology aligns precisely with systems thinking principles by prioritizing comprehensive understanding of the problem ecosystem.
"You cannot understand a system until you change it." — Kurt Lewin
Field research and contextual inquiry that incorporate functional prototypes in authentic environments offer invaluable insights into user behavior patterns and system dynamics. These evidence-based insights enable teams to design solutions that demonstrate both sustainability and meaningful impact across the organization.
Four Critical Barriers to Organizational Change
Organizations frequently struggle to drive meaningful organizational transformation using traditional planning methods for several specific reasons:
Planning for adaptability:
Many organizations approach transformation with rigid, single-path methodologies that prove incompatible with the dynamic nature of disruptive change. Successful organizations instead implement flexible frameworks that accommodate rapid iteration based on emerging insights.
Innovation Prioritization:
Organizations often fail by not establishing dedicated innovation practices with appropriate resources and governance structures. Optimization-driven change models typically emphasize quarterly financial performance metrics over the sustained 18-36 month commitment required for transformative change initiatives.
Putting humans first:
Humans are the essential vehicles of change. Transformation efforts falter when processes are not informed by the specific needs, motivations, and concerns of frontline employees who must embody the change. Resistance from key stakeholders, insufficient engagement across departments, and inadequate communication channels can derail otherwise promising initiatives.
Cultural Change:
Organizational culture and legacy systems significantly influence transformation outcomes. Methodologies that fail to address cultural dynamics—including power structures, institutional memory, and unwritten rules—cannot effectively activate communities and typically stagnate before achieving meaningful impact.
HCD as a Transformation Catalyst
Human-Centered Design at its most impactful drives multidimensional change: behavioral, cultural, and experiential. Given the documented 70% failure rate of digital transformation initiatives, organizations should integrate HCD methodologies, including ethnographic research, systems thinking, design innovation workshops, structured co-creation sessions and Service Design as core components of their transformation roadmap.
Scaling research and design practices to function as catalysts for organizational change requires a multi-phased approach with specific milestones:
Building trust through demonstration projects with measurable impact
Establishing repeatable practices with clear documentation and training
Developing a strategic capability roadmap focused on value delivery
Creating feedback mechanisms that demonstrate ROI while accelerating business outcomes
By implementing these specific approaches, organizations can transform their design practices from project-based activities into strategic capabilities that drive sustainable competitive advantage.
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