Service Design Show

What if we’ve been led down the wrong path…When it comes to service design, we’re often told the main goal is to break down silos. And that makes sense, right?Our organizations are structured vertically, but the experiences we design flow horizontally. This clash creates friction, so the natural instinct is to declare war on silos.But what if that’s sending us in the wrong direction?Silos exist for a reason; they bring focus and efficiency to specific tasks. The real problem is often the broken connection between them. So, what if instead of trying to eliminate silos, we focused on repairing them?In this episode, I talk with Ellen Pittman, a researcher who shares a fascinating case study from a high-stakes organization struggling to meet a critical, time-sensitive performance target. On the surface, the pressure was on a single department to solve it.But as they dug deeper, they discovered the true bottleneck wasn't in that department at all, or even on the organizational chart. The real roadblocks were l