Strategic Design in a post-pandemic world
As a service designer, my goal is to help facilitate stakeholders to create a vision for their organizations and how does that vision impact a specific service, offering or interaction. Since the pandemic started, I had to pivot, even though the ways we conduct our work have not change that much. We continue to facilitate conversations, ideation sessions, and strategic sessions.
From where I stand, what has changed is how we manage time and people to get what we need from them in order to produce things faster and more iteratively.
In a post-pandemic world, this type of work might turn into something of a hybrid approach between in-person and remote interactions.
This would demand from us, service designers, to rethink our project approaches and create solutions that can be adaptable to the needs of not only the people, but the planet, without compromising organizations’ core values and the environment (physical/digital/mental).
In order to address these new needs, here is a list of a few considerations:
- Take advantage of hybrid approaches on how to get the work done. Some tips in this article: Asynchronous and Synchronous communication challenges in a pandemic world.
- Rethink how to design for collaboration virtually and in-person to achieve alignment amongst stakeholders (e.g. inclusivity, diversity of thoughts, collaboration across the world, no more boundaries)
- Become experts in digital transformational projects to help organizations create self-service models for their organizations that can adapt quickly in case of natural events (e.g. digital resilience).
- Ensure that policies about remote employees are being designed to accommodate new market and life demands (e.g. reimagine onboarding experiences considering a possibility of nation-wide standardized labor policies, mental health, etc).
The work ahead of us
Because of the speed of change and the acceleration of digital transformation, the needs stated above will need to be constantly monitored and documented. The information that is being exchanged will be primarily driven by a digital platform and by doing this, communication takes a different form.
Service designers will be required to prioritize digital strategies and streamline delivery, that is why documenting insights on lessons learned as we “digitalize the practice” will be vital to inform outputs and deliverables.
Personal reflection: the reverse side effect for those who will return to a physical office space
Remember those first few weeks of the pandemic where people were scrambling on how to do the work from home? My prediction is that this will happen again in the first few weeks when people start to return to office spaces and interact with others. This time will be about social behaviors and level of comfortability. I would highly encourage to anticipate that this is happening and start to design on how to alleviate the anxiety of “returning to the new normal”.
Nevertheless, I’m excited for what is to come and share with you my after thoughts about this topic.
