Changes to an existing service or the creation of a new service can be an outcome of service design, but service designers usually face challenges while attempting to ideate for improvement, and one of the main challenges is resistance. Resistance is usually identified as the urge to leave things as they are. This urge can hinder creativity, imped people, and consequently the organizations.
As a service designer, you will be startled by the resistance to embrace any new ideas when leading a service design workshop especially as you start the ideation phase, and as a service designer, you need to be aware of why your participants resist. According to Laura Yarrow in How to be a trusted agitator – Design in government , “People don’t like change, and there is usually a very valid emotional reason for that at the core of why they don’t want to accept changes to the status quo”
Fear of the unknown is one of the key reasons why individuals resist change. Some people in organizations prefer to keep things as they are because it is secure, has previously delivered positive results, or is simple to anticipate. Most of the time, individuals employ resistance to mask their fears. Some of your design workshop participants may fear losing their job, worry that when adopting a certain initiative, their roles will be eliminated or diminished, and fear that if you implement a certain initiative, they might not achieve as much in the future.
So how do you overcome this challenge?
1. Introduce the concept of service design to your team members and try to explain how and why it functions. Your team members must comprehend the rationale behind the improvement program, the leaders’ reasoning, and the organizational goals.
2. Establish a secure space to test the concepts! The right physical environment must be created for the design initiatives to be conceived, developed. Service designers must create safe spaces that let those involved in the creative process know that their contributions are valued. Because there can be no good ideas without first producing bad ideas. In fact, a design lab of this nature is being established by Government of Abu Dhabi’s Program for Effortless Customer Experience supported by Gov. Design Academy .
3. Demonstrate empathy to comprehend that negative reactions are actually emotional responses. Customer-Centred Design practices are built on foundations that acknowledge that fear and confusion exist and should be considered, as a result, these methodologies include components that help in managing resistance, such as iteration, prototyping, testing, and incremental implementation.
4. Get them involved in the design process as it’s important to gather feedback from multi-disciplinary teams, and several levels of the organization. People are more willing to accept (or at least endure) the change if they are actively involved in the process.
Change is never easy. Any management plan must take the human element of change into account. Organizations must never lose sight of the fact that individuals will implement and experience the change themselves, and as a service designer you must always remember that.
Fear of the Unknown
