Position Service Design within Social Organisations: The Poliferie case

POSITIONING SERVICE DESIGN WITHIN SOCIAL ORGANISATIONS THE POLIFERIE CASE

The role of Service Design in the Social Economy, through an action-research approach on a case study.

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Riccardo Agosto Master Degree Thesis in PSSD

POSITIONING SERVICE DESIGN WITHIN SOCIAL ORGANISATIONS THE POLIFERIE CASE

The role of Service Design in the Social Economy, through an action-research approach on a case study.

Master Degree in Product Service System Design Research Thesis

Author:

Riccardo Agosto

Matricola:

897286

Tutor:

Beatrice Villari

Academic Year:

2019/2020

Copyright, 2020 by Riccardo Agosto All rights reserved First Published: July 2020

Acknowledgements Abstract Introduction 1. Methodology and Approach 12 ▶ 1.1 | Research Question

↳ Culture

↳ External Communication

↳ New product/service process

↳ Design and Change

↳ Other tools and software

↳ Personas

▶ 2.3 | Service Design ↳ SD Definition

↳ High-Schools Curriculum

↳ SD and organisational failure

↳ Business Challenge

↳ SD and organisational change

↳ Orientation App

▶ 2.4 | Synthesis

↳ Organizational Level

↳ Social Organisation Quadfecta

↳ Service Level

↳ Service Spectrum

↳ Small-Medium Social Organisation

↳ Research Matrix

▶ 1.2 | Overall process ▶ 1.3 | Action research

▶ TAKEAWAYS

3. Poliferie: Who? 54

↳ Introduction to the approach ↳ Cycle 0 ↳ Cycles 1-2-3 ↳ Cycle 4 ↳ Limitations

▶ 1.4 | Environment, focus and point of observation ↳ Environment ↳ Focus ↳ Observation Perspective ↳ Role in the organisation

▶ TAKEAWAYS

2. Background Research: Why? 26 ▶ 2.1 | Social Economy and Organisations ▶ 2.2 | Organisational Theory and Design ↳ Structure ↳ Competencies ↳ Processes

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▶ 3.5 | Services

▶ 3. 1 | Overview of the Organization ↳ Origin ↳ Type of Organisation ↳ Offer Purpose ↳ Service Scale ↳ Organisation Scale ↳ Key metrics

▶ 3.2 | Organisational Culture ↳ Mission ↳ Strategic Values

↳ Requirements table ↳ Tool Structure

4. Field Research: What? 70 ▶ 4.1 | Cycle 1: Observation 72 ↳ 1. Framework ↳ 2. Dataset ↳ 3. Analysis ↳ 4. Insights

▶ 4.2 | Cycle 2: In-depth Interviews 86 ↳ 1. Framework

↳ 3. Analysis ↳ 4. Insights

▶ 4.3 | Cycle 3: Co-Design Session 114 ↳ 1. Framework

↳ 4. Insights

↳ Teams and Roles

↳ Contents Creation

↳ Timeframe and sessions ↳ User Journey Maps: with Design Facilitator ↳ Benefits

▶ 5.3 | Prototype ↳ Test ↳ Feedbacks ↳ Deliverables

▶ 5.4 | Next steps ▶ TAKEAWAYS

↳ 2. Dataset

↳ 3. Analysis

↳ Internal Communication

↳ Goals

▶ TAKEAWAYS

▶ 3.3 | Organisational Structure

▶ 3.4 | IT/Tools

▶ 5.2 | Concept ↳ Service Designer’s role in time

↳ 2. Dataset

↳ Slack Channels

↳ What if?

▶ 3.6 | Impact

↳ Operational Principles

↳ Organisational Chart

↳ User Journey Map: status quo

5. Project: How? 130 ▶ 5.1 | Scenario ↳ Cycle Question

6. Conclusion 180 ▶ General ▶ For Poliferie ▶ For Social Organization ▶ For Service Design ▶ For Social Economy

References and Appendix 186 ▶ References ▶ Appendix A: Cycle 2 Clusters ▶ Appendix B: Validation Process

↳ My personal experience with the task-force INCIPIT

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Beatrice Villari, my thesis tutor, thank you to welcome me aboard of this project by supporting me with your practical but insightful approach and reach this goal, no matter my full-time job and a global on-going pandemic.

To Anna Meroni and the whole PSSD team, I am grateful of the world’s perspective that this Master gave me and I am confident that Service Design deserves a leading spot in shaping the future of global communities.

Thanks to Raffaele Boiano, UX Design professor, to be a role model of responsibility, ethics and professionalism. A Northern star during the on-boarding semester.

Cansu Hizli, whatever I am writing for you will be never enough. My greatest support, my motivator, my innocent and a cultural hero in my life. I have never met someone like you in my life. You taught me that love will bring everything soft and slowly when I found myself lost and superficial. You gave me the courage to realize my quite dedication and I learned again how to build dreams and believe in them. You are an amazing designer, domates, and love in personal organisation.

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To the whole Poliferie team, I am sincerely happy to be part of this noble project. Grazie for your time and participation. Every effort done will worth. We will change Italians approach to education one high-school, one classroom and one student at the time, proxy for the office-by-proxy for the office. And thanks again to Edoardo Argentieri for his talents in illustrating Poliferie’s vision (see cover).

Thanks to my family, always supporting in everyday of my private and personal life. I have no other words to say. Without you none of the past three years could happen. Facing changes and welcoming unknown international people with a smile in our countryside life, is the metaphor of what I would like to believe in.

Then, I would like to say thank you to a long series of friends I could never met otherwise: Samuele and Alberto, to be my flatmate and started this journey together; Chiara L., to have fought with me in the hardest moments. Hiro and Angela, to me my first teammates in my Milanese chapter; Akanksha, Benz, Carolina, Eva, Daniela, Paola G., Rongrong, Melisa, Yagmur, Felipe, Cosmo and Oz to come to Italy and enrich this country.

Alessandro, Chiara P., Emma, Ginevra, Giulia, Marco, Martina M., Paola Z. to open me new perspectives about Italy, life and sghisca. Lorenzo, to be my Sommariva’s wingman in Milan. Alessandro, Alberto, Ivan, Marco A., Marco R., Matteo, Gian, Fabio to make my hometown vibrant whenever I was going back. Alice, to be on a similar path and share it with me somehow. The Fulbright BEST mates, to make my experience abroad unique.

Lastly, a sincere thank to Mattia, to be a greatest companion through every stage of growth.

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First at all, I would acknowledge how this thesis and the whole Master degree have been an actual collaborative work of over 50 people. With them, I do not mean solely the Poliefie’s members that participate to the project, but a wide set of people, and I would remark the work ‘people’, that actively walked this journey side-by-side with me.

ABSTRACT [ENG]

ABSTRACT [ITA]

Private organisations provide fundamental services and products to the society for profitable returns. On the other hand, the public sector provides governance, administration and aid services to the citizens. The Social Economy, or Third Sector fills the gap between the two by fulfilling the demand of services that might have low revenues or are difficult to tackle, due to political or cultural reasons, even though essential to improve the life-quality of multiple stakeholders. Social organisations operate in a broad variety of industries and consider most valuable the social impact, rather than the profitability. Moreover, they pursue their mission with different forms of the organisation compared to regular businesses. For these conditions, social organisations, especially the ones based on volunteering, face a challenging environment, lacking structure, culture, competencies, resources and funds to build scalable services and durable organisations.

Le organizzazioni private forniscono servizi e prodotti fondamentali alla società in cambio di profitto. D’altra parte, il settore pubblico fornisce servizi di governo, amministrazione e aiuto ai cittadini. L’economia sociale, o terzo settore, colma il divario tra i due soddisfacendo la domanda di servizi che potrebbero essere poco profittevoli o che sono complessi da affrontare, per motivazioni politiche o culturali, anche se essenziali per migliorare la qualità della vita di plurimi portatori di interesse. Le organizzazioni sociali operano in molteplici e svariati settori e considerano più prezioso l’impatto sociale che generano, rispetto alla redditività. Inoltre, perseguono la loro missione con tipologie di organizzazione diverse rispetto alle aziende for-profit. Per questa natura, le organizzazioni sociali, in particolare quelle basate sul volontariato, affrontano un ambiente più difficoltoso, spesso privo di struttura, cultura, competenze, risorse e fondi fondamentali per costruire servizi scalabili e organizzazioni durature nel tempo.

In particular, an action-research has been carried out in three cycles of field research, plus a projectual one. After a first iteration based on user observation [#1], a round of in-depth interviews [#2] is conducted with 15 key members (on 75, 20%) evidencing how in a seed stage the service delivery and organisation definition collide in wicked internal problems that jeopardy Poliferie sustainability in the long-term. Furthermore, in a co-design session [#3], solutions are collaboratively concepted. However, a clear need surges from the cycle, namely the urgency to define a new service development and project management framework. The last cycle explores and designs a tool to support the association in acquiring design management competencies and guide the process of implementing new solutions by novice-to-design individuals.

In conclusion, Service Design could represent a strategic contribution for social organisations to foster the integration between service development and organisational structure and culture. Notably, tacit knowledge transmission, internal collaboration and community, user research and impact evaluation could be enhanced by Service Design.

Consequently, it could lead to improved capabilities of decision-making and long-term vision, which are crucial in the uncertain but socially valuable environment that social organisations live in.

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Diversamente, la disciplina del design dei servizi affronta sin dalla sua nascita le problematiche di sistemi complessi, adottando una prospettiva collaborativa e olistica.

Di conseguenza, la tesi si focalizza su Poliferie, una giovane non-profit italiana di piccolemedie dimensioni che organizza corsi per facilitare la formazione e la carriera di studenti svantaggiati delle scuole superiori. L’obiettivo principale della ricerca è quello di esplorare quale potrebbe essere il ruolo del design dei servizi nell’ambiente sociale e quali vantaggi potrebbero portare il integrazione della dimensione dei servizi con quella organizzativa.

In particolare, è stata condotta una ricerca-azione con tre cicli di ricerca sul campo, più uno progettuale. Dopo una prima iterazione basata sull’osservazione degli utenti [n.1], viene condotta una serie di interviste approfondite [n.2] con 15 membri chiave (su 75, 20%) che evidenziano come in una fase iniziale l’esecuzione del servizio e la definizione dell’organizzazione si scontrino in complessi problemi interni che mettono a rischio la sostenibilità di Poliferie nel lungo termine. Successivamente, in una sessione di co-design [n.3], le soluzioni sono ideate in modo partecipato. Tuttavia, una chiara necessità emerge dalle iterazioni precedenti, vale a dire l’urgenza di definire un quadro di sviluppo di nuovi servizi e di gestione dei progetti. Nell’ultimo ciclo si esplora e si progetta uno strumento per supportare l’associazione nell’acquisizione delle competenze di gestione del design e guidare il processo di implementazione di nuove soluzioni da parte di individui inesperti.

In conclusione, il design dei servizi potrebbe rappresentare un contributo strategico per le organizzazioni sociali capace di favorire l’integrazione tra sviluppo di nuovi servizi, struttura e cultura organizzativa. In particolare, il design dei servizi potrebbe migliorare la trasmissione tacita di conoscenza, la collaborazione e la comunità interna, la ricerca dei bisogni degli utenti e la valutazione dell’impatto. Di conseguenza, potrebbe portare a migliori capacità decisionali ed a una visione di lungo termine, i quali sono cruciali nell’ambiente incerto ma prezioso dal punto di vista sociale in cui vivono le organizzazioni sociali.

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Differently, Service Design tackles complex systems issues since its inception, adopting a collaborative and holistic perspective. Then, the thesis is led into Poliferie, an early stage small-medium Italian nonprofit, which organises a curriculum to facilitate carrier shaping of disadvantaged high-school students. The main aim of the research is to explore which could be the role of the service design in the social environment and which advantage could bring the connection of the service scale to the organisational dimension.

INTRODUCTION Emergency conditions, like the one due to COVID-19 pandemic, clearly showed how social fabric and resilience capabilities of communities are mandatory for a society to survive in crisis time. Nonprofit organizations, associations, cooperatives and social enterprises have a key role in making society and the economy thrive, by placing social purpose before profit, both in emergency and normal time. Together, these organisations form the Social Economy (SE), a sector that connects the public to the private, by filling the gap of services between the two parts of the system. (Chaves & Monzón, 2017); However, these organisations face a series of challenges that private ones do not due to their nature (Leung, Mo et al., 2019): lack of resources (not profitable activities), lack of time (based on volunteering), difficulty to retain talents (lost of motivation), lack of long-term vision or managerial skills (good missions, not followed by a proper organization). Moreover, services and products delivered rarely follow a design process.

As a last consideration, the pursuit of a social impactful mission raises complexity even more.

On the other hand, Service Design (SD), with a holistic, systemic and innovative approach, has the capabilities to tackle these challenges. Consequently, it can have a role in improving internal organisation, building sustainable business models and generating competitive advantage. At the same time, SE’s organizations and SD share a human-centred approach focused on people’s needs (Stickdorn, Lawrence et al., 2018) and user research. Hence, Service design can be a pivot in problem-solving relevant and mandatory sustainable urges of the next years by contributing to the success of SE’s organization.

By supporting on the ground an Italian nonprofit organization, Poliferie, an exploration of the role of Service Design in the environment is led by following a research and action approach with an internal perspective as an active member. Specifically, it investigated the capability of SD to connect the organisation layer (strategy, structure, culture) to the product/service one (offering, journey, blueprint, portfolio).

After conducting in-depth field research, a framework to facilitate project management is designed for the association to support design management knowledge absorption and improve new product/service development journeys.

Finally, as an outcome from the research in Poliferie’s controlled environment models and guidelines are extrapolated to be usable and further to be tested in other contexts.

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To future and memory. To Carlo and Fistik.

Methodology and Approach

1. Research Question 2. Overall Process 3. Action Research 4. Environment, Focus and Point of View 5. Takeaway

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EXPERIMENTAL METHODOLOGY TESTING AND APPROACH RESULTS

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1.1 | RESEARCH QUESTION What could be the role of Service Design in connecting organisation and service levels in a small-medium social organisation?

ORGANISATIONAL LEVEL An organisation is an intangible tool that individuals use to organize their efforts to accomplish their objectives — namely, satisfying a need or reach what they value. The use of an organisation allows to generate coordination amongst multiple stakeholders and managing different resources following a specific target goal (Jones, 2013). This is the essence of why organisations exist, to create more value by the collaboration of more people.

There are multiple reasons why people gather in organizations to take advantage of scale, but the dynamics between employees, the container itself (regardless the size) and the environment are what make them a system subject of study by the organizational theory. Indeed, organisations not only operate but require to be designed, changed and updated in time.

The structure of an organisation is a defined hierarchy of mission and authority ties that governs how individuals operate together and utilize resources to accomplish the goals of the organisation. In this process of coping with competition, this system can be changed to better fit the requirements and improve its effectiveness. Moreover, parts of the structure can undergo in this process due to the expansion of the company or the launch of new activity. The design of an organisation should take into consideration another respect — the organizational culture, namely the ensemble of values, motivations, ethics that controls people interactions internally, shaping their behaviours. Hence, the design process has to assess both conditions, the hard structure and the soft culture, balancing the internal friction and the pressure with the external environment.

SERVICE LEVEL A service is a process (Gronroos, 2000). Processes are the execution in time of a series of planned actions by designated actors to obtain a determined result (Kimbell, 2009).

Services are naturally intangible, like organisation, and they are tangible only through their touchpoints (physical - a kiosk or an employee, or digital - an interface or a software). Operating on a timeline, services manifest only in specific moments, before moving to another status. For example, the talk of a speaker has a beginning and an end that mark the visibility of one actor of the service. Lastly, the services are planned actions executed by actors. This means that each step has been designed beforehand to reach a specific performance by using defined tools. For instance, to deliver an educational talks service, a set of rules, a script and a Google Slides presentation are designed in advance for the introduction of a new topic at the beginning of the event.

Zooming out, managerial, strategic and design roles are required to coordinate the execution, drive change and decision in case of need, as well as collect data for new opportunities, assessment and development.

SMALL-MEDIUM SOCIAL ORGANISATION

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Social organisations are organisations that operate in the so-called third sector or social economy. They differ from traditional companies due to their primary purpose shift from the profit to the social goal. This goal, widely established, is to reaffirm the principles of social justice in the economy that challenge social exclusion through the implementation of inclusive systems; to promote the principles of solidarity and reciprocity between individuals and organizations that may otherwise compete, or to counter unequal urban growth and to promote socio-economic regeneration in specially disadvantaged areas (Thompson, 2020).

Social organisation is a broad definition of various types of organisation that operate in different forms but adopting the social purpose silver-lane. In the case of social organisations pursuing profitable margins beyond their social goal, they acquire the definition of social enterprises. The social economy compass (Manfred et al., 2007) is a simple representation to understand the position of social enterprises (and organisation) on the market. The horizontal axis represents the ownership of the organisation, that can be publicly administered or privately owned. Instead, the vertical axis focuses on the primary purpose of the entity, if it is social or commercial (for profit). Social Enterprises are located in the top-right area. It is noticeable how private industries are moving upward.

Climate change, as well as social rights movements, are pushing companies to take care thoroughly of their product life-cycles, internal ethics and stakeholders relationships.w

1.2 | OVERALL PROCESS The thesis process took six months, spanning from February to July 2020 and is divided into three main phases.

The first phase consists of the framing of the methodology and the background research, mainly conducted via desk research. In this phase, the macro-context of social economy, social organisations and service design with their possible relations have been explored. [ → for further information see chapter 2 ] Instead, the second phase includes the analysis of the organization subject of the study, Poliferie and three cycles of field research to investigate problems, opportunities and scenarios for service design practices. [ → for further information see chapter 4 ] In the last phase, data and insights from the three learning cycles are crossed to define the role of service design in the association and generate a concept to tackle issues detected. [ → for further information see chapter 5 ]

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Small-medium is referred to as the number of volunteers and employees that the organisation involves. Usually, small organisations are under 15 and medium under 100, doing a comparison with usual businesses.

1.3 | ACTION RESEARCH INTRODUCTION TO THE APPROACH For the field research phase, an action research approach is followed to frame the research and plan a tangible outcome of the iterative process.

The origin of the methodology is dated back to 1944 when it appeared for the first time in a Kurt Lewin’s (MIT professor) paper. It consists in an iterative systematic approach, based on analysis, learning and action cycles, of nurturing transformative change in a specific environment (an organisation, or a community). Each spiral of activities consists of three phases plus one — plan, act, observe and reflect (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1999). ‘Plan’ is the moment of problem framing, set-up of the research framework and data gathering; ‘act’ is the moment of interaction and change of the system; ‘observe’ is the moment of new data collection based on the action; ‘reflect’ is the moment of assessment of the effectiveness and revision of the strategy foreseeing a new cycle. By combining multiple cycles with specific queries to a broader question, each iteration could be seen as a phase of a project. For example, plan, implement and evaluate a system change.

Action research is often opposed to the experimental and qualitative (via a survey) research, which focuses on investigating specific questions with numerically-based hypothesis-testing procedures. While these techniques have been widely effective in detecting and regulating events in the physical world, they face undeniable challenges in facing the social world (Stringer, 2014). Indeed, action research is contextual, meaning that the results of the inquiry are appropriate for a defined and limited system and its dynamics, set beforehand.

Moreover, action research is highly collaborative and horizontal, opening the process to all the stakeholders interested, because each perspective is considered valuable to tackle a complex array of issues in any social setting.

The development of the thesis follows three evident cycles of field research, anticipated by one of desk research (social economy and social organisations) and environment analysis (the organisation Poliferie), and followed by a design cycle to investigate a solution to implement.

CYCLE 0 → CHAPTER 2-3

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It represents the phase of exploration of the broad topics of social economy, organisations and service design to set the ground for the relevance of the thesis and the understanding of the results. It includes a literature review and it is followed by a desk analysis of Poliferie, the nonprofit organisation considered like the environment of the research.

CYCLES 1-2-3 → CHAPTER 4 These are the cycles of intense interaction with the members of the association. The first is based on personal observation, shadowing and unstructured interviews to gather initial data about the social dynamics; the second on structured interviews to coordinators and designers to explore a top-down perspective; the third consists in a collective co-design session to capture the bottom-up point of view.

Each field research cycle is explained through four sections: ▶ Framework collects the cycle questions and the probes used; ▶ Dataset is shortly de-briefed after collection; ▶ Analysis of the data based on the framework set; ▶ Outcomes include key findings, insights and notes for the next cycle.

CYCLE 4 → CHAPTER 5 The last cycle could be considered the project phase of the thesis. In this section, the outcomes from the past three cycles are cross-analysed to design a project management tool, the design facilitator, to facilitate new service development inside the organisation, guiding novice members in the process.

LIMITATIONS

1.4 | ENVIRONMENT, FOCUS AND POINT OF VIEW ENVIRONMENT The environment of the research is limited to a nonprofit social organisation, Poliferie.

Its mission is to support high-school students in taking better decisions for their future (especially regarding superior education orientation). It fights against social immobility, information asymmetry and outdated education, side-by-side with the traditional education path. The organisation operates in Italy and it is constituted by over 70 volunteers with an average age 25 years old, spread all over Europe.

FOCUS Every organisation operates and is alive in a specific environment, which is a system collecting all the stakeholders (specific environment) and which is influenced by sociopolitical, economic, demographic and technological forces (general environment).

Consequently, the environment is the first cause of uncertainty that has to be challenged internally to avoid failure or lose effectiveness. Uncertainty can be caused by mainly three factors: the complexity itself of the environment, namely an increase in the number of stakeholders and relation that the organisation has to maintain; its dynamism, namely the speed of change of the environmental conditions; its richness, namely availability and provision of resources (Jones, 2013).

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Since the action research is a contextual practice, the results outlined in this thesis have to be considered valid exclusively for the environment of analysis, namely the organisation Poliferie. Anyway, in the development of the research, diagrams have been designed to attempt an abstraction from the context and to further be tested in similar ones.

An organisation survival is strictly connected with the degree of fit it has with the surrounding environment. The best fit, the higher chances of success. A major fit can be reached due to a change in the external environment, from which the organisation is luckily affected, or in the organisation, thanks to a transformation of the internal environment.

evaluated when it is triggering reaction internally. Hence, generating challenges. External challenges are harder to foresee. It is an example of how the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically changed the way education is held and teams cooperate unexpectedly.

Internal challenges are more detectable and solutions or processes could be structured to solve them. Therefore, the internal environment works as a boundary allowing to focus research on a controlled system. However, internal changes can lead to solutions for external challenges, generating a positive impact on the outside. In conclusion, to foster a better fit between the external environment and the organisation, it is decided to focus on the internal environment to be able to foster organisational change and positively impact the system.

OBSERVATION PERSPECTIVE The point of view adopted during the research and the analysis of the organisation is internal and cross-team. Internal because personally I am an active member of the organisation and actively participating in it since autumn 2018. Cross-team because as a designer, my role is horizontal in the structure of the association. Engaging mainly with communication and digital product development teams, but providing strategic consultancy on design to other teams.

This perspective allows the observation to be conducted horizontally throughout the association and understand multiple bottlenecks or problems emerging in different areas. Moreover, it supports the creation of meaningful connections between teams and foster integration.

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The focus of the analysis of this thesis is the internal environment of the organization.

Namely, the structure and culture of the organization, its volunteers and services. The external environment will be kept in consideration, but limitedly. It will be especially

MY ROLE IN THE ORGANIZATION As an active member of the association, I have the role of a design coordinator. The role takes care of the brand, communication, and UI coherency throughout the whole organization. Specifically, the position had a threefold role in the organisation.

Horizontal Role The role is mainly horizontal. Indeed, there is not a design team or department that operates centrally on request of other teams. Instead, as the first designer in the organisation, the design coordinator is involved in multiple subteams and operations under the communication branch. For example, teams include social media, website, presentation. Moreover, often an exchange is held with various local teams or the impact evaluation team to review materials and give consultancy about visual design.

Vertical Role Besides the horizontal dimension, high involvement is generated in the Research and Development team to design the application of the platform along with a digital product designer, specifically taking care of the project. The design process includes UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface) of the orientation app which Poliferie is developing.

In addition, the overall R&D team includes front-end and back-end developers, to be able to follow the design iterations and the development processes at the same time.

This makes the design coordinator role vertical on a specific outcome.

Emergency Role Recently, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a new project and cross-functional team of the association started: The task-force for orientation.

TAKEAWAYS Action-research is an on-the-field iterative research method developed in the social sciences field to investigate complex systems, usually distinguished for their wicked problems.

Taking advantage of my internal position into a local social organisation, an inquiry, based on five learning cycles, is led to explore what could be the role of service design into a small-medium social organisation. The final aim of the thesis is to extrapolate insights that could support similar organisations in navigating moments of uncertainty and find stability in the long-term to provide valuable social impact to the communities of reference.

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The scope is to be able to get in touch and provide key orientation information to the high-school students that are now facing remote education. The team is composed of members that did not work together before with a similar goal, namely designing media contents for social media and planning the strategy to reach the target and keep a relevant engagement. Specifically in this context, the design coordinator role acted with project management functions. It was necessary to connect concepts during the ideation phase and streamline the processes to deliver foreseen outcomes.

Background Research

1. Social Economy and Social Organisations 2. Organisational Theory and Design 3. Service Design 4. Synthesis

CHAPTER 2 → CYCLE 0

EXPERIMENTAL BACKGROUND TESTING RESEARCH RESULTS

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2.1 | SOCIAL ECONOMY AND SOCIAL ORGANISATIONS Social economy (SE) is a broad umbrella term not easy to define that is generating multiple interpretations especially among different geographies and social sciences.

In the attempt of giving a simple description for the social economy is intended the generation of goods and services through entrepreneurial risk-taking - as it happens in the private market, but with associative or voluntary organisation models to create public benefit rather than revenues solely - as the public sector behaves (Thompson, 2020).

From this raw definition, four points emerge clearly. First of all, the social economy is producing value with its offering for specific stakeholders; second, this value is generated by “uncommon” forms of organisation for the usual profit-market; and third, these organisations have a clear social goal driving the operations; last, a connection is established between the public and the private spheres.

Starting to deepen the analysis from the last point, it is necessary to locate the SE compared to the other sectors. The most representative diagram to describe this positioning is the Pestoff Triangle, after the scholar of the same name. In the diagram, the SE is overlapping what is called the third sector, an independent set in contrast to the two conventional sectors, namely the public and the private. The former collects the

nonprofit and formal activities managed by the public state. The ladder includes instead all the private and formalized organisations active to generate profit. Along with these two, the third corner of the triangle is held by the community or civil society, which is not recognized as a sector per se due to a lack of formalisation in the economic activity. This area represents the set of jobs and work done usually not for profit and informally to the benefit of a family (internally) or a community (externally and participatory approach).

The identification of the SE falls in the crossroad of the formal, private and nonprofit axes, in the middle of the triangle. But, the borders of the third sector extend over the other three areas, reporting the difficulty to set clear boundaries. This unique hybrid position gives to the SE the role of bridging with the other sectors by providing key services or filling empty roles where they lack (Thompson, 2020).

The European Union through the European Economic and Social Committee attempted to define the SE to establish a silver lane across the union’s countries, which is reinforcing the Pestoff triangle position.

“The set of private, formally-organised enterprises, with an autonomy of decision and freedom of membership, created to meet their members’ needs through the market by producing goods and providing services, insurance and finance, where decision-making and any distribution of profits or surpluses among the members are not directly linked to the capital or fees contributed by each member, each of whom has one vote, or at all events are decided through democratic, participatory processes. The SE also includes private, formally-organised entities with an autonomy of decision and freedom of membership that produce non-market services for households and whose surpluses, if any, cannot be appropriated by the economic agents that create, control or finance them” (Chaves & Monzón, 2017, p.11) Tackling the first point, namely the offering, this definition reports that SE offers a wide spectrum of products and services for both market (for profit) and non-market (nonprofit), but always considers the benefits for members or target of the action.

Indeed, SE organisations result in being ‘of people’, not ‘of capital’. Framing capital in tool-wise perspective along with other non-monetary resources, they pursue the aim to meet the needs of persons, households and families (Chaves & Monzón, 2017).

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BACKGROUND RESEARCH

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To reach this objective, members can decide to organise themselves in various models. The most common and shareable are cooperatives, social enterprises, associations, mutual societies, and non-profit institutions, like foundations. Each of them can have slight differences in the way members participate and bond in the life of the organisation. For example, social enterprises tilt more on the market offer and a classic for-profit company structure with private investors too. Instead, associations lean more to a non-market offer and less structured forms, usually based on volunteering and grants. Anyway, an identity trait of SE organisation remains, as stated in the definition

before, the democratic and participatory nature of the interactions, that is one of the criteria to be included in the cluster.

The introduction of a clear social purpose raises the complexity in the game because it requires organisations to establish processes and evaluate the goal fulfilment.

Compared to a standard for-profit organisation, a SE organisation must set a purpose, which can nurture internal members’ needs (for example an agricultural cooperative that bargains the best condition for its farmers) or accomplish the provision of social service (for instance, an NGO answering to the migration crisis in the Mediterranean sea).

Moreover, the declared purpose can also cause public misconceptions and reputational issues, especially regarding more for-profit models, like Social Enterprises, which have a dual purpose (Davies & Doherty, 2018). From the literature, it is evident that organisations with this vocation must adapt and translate best practices from the business world, especially in terms of management and advisory to be competitive, sustainable, profitable and maximise their social impact (Leung et al., 2019). On the other hand, social and business tensions can cooperate in the generation of innovative business models, enhancing value creation, delivery, and capture (Tykkylainen & Ritala, 2020).

Anyway, only a portion of the organisations part of the third sector faces this dual challenge, social and economical, explicitly as Social Enterprises. However, the rest are bonded to grants or donations to economically survive in time, which requires improvements in management and structure to guarantee, as well as scale in both quantitative and qualitative direction, their social impact (Islam, 2020).

the working population in 2012 only in the EU-28 and it was barely untouched by the 2009 economic crisis (Jahier, 2017). Lastly, SE starts to be assessed for its potential to solve “wicked problems” (Doherty, Haugh, and Lyon, 2014) by offloading the government and transferring these responsibilities to civil private hands (Thompson, 2020). In the Italian arena solely, over a million of these realities can be counted, suggesting the immense social value that the Country could benefit from the third sector.

In conclusion, SE is a propulsor of social value, trying to satisfy user needs remained untouched by both the private and the public sector. Its organisations, by being such interconnected and complex systems, require attention from a design perspective to tackle, solve their challenges and reach their scopes.

2.2 | ORGANISATIONAL THEORY AND DESIGN As mentioned in the first chapter, an organisation is an intangible tool that individuals use to organize their efforts to accomplish their objectives — namely, satisfying a need or reach what they value (Jones, 2013). In the previous section, some key respects and challenges of the specific kind of organisations taken into consideration in this volume were reported. Before entering in the service design field, it is worthwhile to describe how an organisation is structured and how its culture takes shape, considering the democracy of processes of SE organisations.

To sum up the main challenges of organisations operating in the Social Economy: ▶ Social impact KPIs must be achieved along with economical ones and vice versa, causing tension during the journey to thrive. ▶ Organisations, especially in the non-market area, rely heavily on volunteering and miss to translate business practices to improve management. ▶ Lastly, the definition of the offering to tackle key social needs leads to business model change and innovation to find a sustainable model.

SE and social organisation remain a complex phenomenon to describe in a few pages.

Peculiar internal structure and culture, goal definition and generation of value require attentive and systemic organisational design to manage the complexity.

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The value of the social economy is growing worldwide. Since 1997 social economy has been recognized for its local growth and employment source by the European Union during the Luxembourg jobs summit (Chaves & Monzón, 2017). Now, it employs 6.3% of

Borrowing the concept that Flichy (1996) designed to describe individual, social and cultural model changes and used in innovation management (Bellini, Dell’Era and Verganti, 2012), an organisation and its speed of change could be read based on a threelayer concentric model in motion. The levels could be organized based on their capability to change over time. The core level is the structure, then the intermediate one is the competences, and lastly a processual one on the external. Indeed, imagining that each diagram is rotating to exemplify a change, a point on the external circle has to move significantly compared to one in the internal ones. In other words, great changes in processes might affect in a limited way competencies and structures. But even minor changes in the structure have a waterfall effect on the other two layers. On the other hand, processes and competencies could move, hence change, quickly within the same structure. Each layer and its relationship with the others are explained in the following paragraphs.

STRUCTURE The organisational structure defines how tasks and responsibilities will be assigned, managed and coordinated by employees and whether they can be grouped into teams or business lines. A structure can be centralized or decentralized. Where in the former the decision making power is handled by a restricted top management board, and in the latter is distributed to units that acquire more independence.

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COMPETENCIES The second layer of competencies, zoom the analysis on the individual or group level, entering each sub-unit. Competencies are the set of abilities an individual needs to perform properly in an environment (a team or a company, for instance).

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The most common tool to represent a structure is an organisational chart, which visually draws the connection between teams, divisions, or functions. The vertical axis usually shows a hierarchical relationship and distribution of authority with the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) on top. Instead, on the horizontal axis groupings of organisational tasks can cooperate or interact. Most used structures are: functional (fig. 2.3), where individuals are grouped by function with homogeneous competencies; divisional (fig. x.x), where the company groups individuals in divisions based on the market, products, clients each of them with their functions; matrix (fig.2.4), combining the previous two and generating a grid of vertical functions and horizontal division generally co-lead by a project manager and a function manager; flat (or horizontal) (fig. 2.5), where executives and members participate in activities with few or none degrees of management. Each of these structure typologies has pros and cons, based on multiple factors. For example, functional groups can hardly cooperate, divisional groups generate internal competition and cross-selling costs, product and the functional team can conflict for expectations or resources usage, or a flat structure is unclear in roles and priorities. Obviously, different internal dynamics impact how the organisation will be able to cope with environmental changes. Indeed, structure changes based on industry, scale, geography, culture and mindset.

PROCESSES Lastly, a process is a series of interdependent and interlinked procedures that accept a certain input (materials, client knowledge, decisions) to turn it into output. This outcome would then act as inputs for the next stage before a specified goal is achieved (Jones, 2013). Hence, a process generates value transforming an input in a result through a cycle of activities, information exchange and decision making.

If functional-wise it is easier to control and improve efficiency, this is not the same when it comes to establishing integration between different groups. Processes, being executed by individuals (or tools designed by/for them) with specific competencies and frame into a structure, portray the pivot of an organisation by guaranteeing the success in the long period (Jones, 2013).

Every process has three main features. First of all, the structure and process are not dependent. Processes can be performed by different departments or business units.

Second, a process is run in a time span from the trigger till output is reached. Third, subprocesses and tasks can be designed for better viability.

Lastly, processes have an organisational-relevant characteristic, namely, they can be designed considering users and their needs, the set of activities required, the definition of indicators for efficiency and effectiveness and in the end a control system to analyse the data and assess its successfulness.

Competencies are divided into two groups: soft and hard.

Soft competencies are related to cognitive, interpersonal and behavioural skills, including communication and interaction between people. These are typical of the individual personality and can be hardly influenced in the short-term. That, in another perspective, represents a plus to be carefully identified and retained during the hiring process.

Instead, hard competencies are the set of expertise learned through the years in specific technical areas, via study or practice. Opposite to the soft competencies, hard ones can be learned over time and favours during the onboarding process, recurrent training or mutual exchange between colleagues.

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The combination of the two is the key to the success of an individual into a system and of the organisation itself. Indeed, soft skills will support coordination and motivation between peers, while hard skills will give the capability to a single to run a task and contribute to the overall achievement. To conclude, competencies are recognized as a major competitive advantage for being the representation of vision, mission and values and driving employees activities day-by-day, influencing overall organisation performance.

CULTURE Given an introduction of how an organisation is composed, it is now possible to define another key respect of an organisation: the culture.

The definition proposed by the EU committee of a social organisation clearly brings unearth the democratic and participatory decision-making process. This is one of the examples of a cultural characteristic of an organisation. Culture is a fuzzy term, still under investigation by social sciences, on which anthropologists have discussed since its conception (Boiano, 2017). Recent theories converge on the contested, temporal, and emergent nature of the culture (Clifford, 1986). Meaning that culture cannot have a clear definition and it is a fluid matter that changes over time and context, as well as rises and fall.

This passage is crucial because organisational culture is defined ‘as the set of shared values and norms that control organizational members’ interactions with each other and with suppliers, customers, and other people outside the organization’ (Jones, 2013, p.201). Hence, by combining the two definitions, it is clear how the term in the organisation perspective goes beyond the set of common rules in the working space.

Being a fluid asset, organisational culture can be influenced by four main factors and their interaction. The soft and hard characteristics of an individual within the organization.

The culture is influenced by the personal and professional competencies of the members that are attracted and participate in the organisation, marking the difference from another system (Schneider, 1987). If the values change, individually or at an organisational level, an employee may leave or not be selected. This leads to a likely homogeneous internal environment, hence, culture.

Organizational ethics. It is the set of moral values, beliefs and rules to regulate members and stakeholders interaction (e.g. user-first approach in the case of a product with unexpected production malfunction). The founders and the top management usually

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convey at most the ethics, since they detain the decision-making power. By transmitting different ethics, culture and micro-interactions are shaped consequently.

The property rights that are given to employees. They are the rights that an organization grants its members to obtain and use internal resources (e.g. stock options, pension, etc.). Different distributions to different stakeholders within the organisation generate different cultures by favouring a group or the other.

The structure of the organization. It designs the interaction between teams, divisions and functions, plus the relationship with the management layer and the board.

More hierarchical structures deeply sign how culture is mould. As well, divisional, matrix or horizontal models have different aftermaths.

Instead, Rousseau (1995) displays the organisational culture with a concentric model based on layers. From the most tangible, artefacts on the most external and influenceable circle, to the most intangible, fundamental assumptions eradicated in the core of an organisation. The former is the most tangible components, like products, objects, tools, that an organisation uses and through which is manifested. The latter is the set of unconscious and unquestioned beliefs often shared by individuals about the organisation.

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Values are principles that individuals use to assess which kind of behaviours, cases or outputs are accepted or must be avoided. Values can be ranked in two categories: Terminal, namely characteristics connected to the outcomes to pursue (e.g. pixel perfect); or Instrumental, namely values related to the behaviour (e.g. observe and listen to your colleagues) (Rokeach, 1973). It is easy to link this division to the competencies one.

Indeed, organisational values represent an abstraction of the desirable values embodied by the single members. Those represent the touchpoint demarking the line of visibility of the culture. Lastly, values can be supported by norms that are a specific, explicit standard of behaviour to foster in order to promote specific values (e.g. take a break to support a teammate, which can improve dedication and develop listening skills, as knowledge transfer).

organisation and the environment causes higher uncertainty and often a change is required due to deal with the new standard. Since the external environment is hardly influenceable, going in-bound is the most effective way to survive and thrive.

There are mainly four targets of change: first, human resources, the most important asset which collects the competencies of the organisation; second, functional resources, namely reorganizing procedures to respond to the environment (e.g. moving from a function-silos approach to a product approach, more integrated); third, technological capabilities, that are the ability to develop or modify products (or services); and lastly, organisational capabilities, which means intervene on culture and structure to foster new relations between people and functions.

The process should keep into consideration the balance of the whole structure, which is subject to three design challenges. The first of the three is how to connect and organize activities. The second is to decide who is going to take the decisions. The third is to determine which types of systems are the most suitable for the management of tasks and responsibilities of employees (Jones, 2013). The choices are taken in regards to the design of structures, competencies, processes and culture, as well as the balance of their relationship rule if the organization will be effective and thrive or not.

What has been displayed before are the Lego pieces that organisational design should consider when promoting a change to move from the present state to a future enhanced state, capable of delivering higher value. As reported before, a poor fit between the

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DESIGN AND CHANGE

In conclusion, an organization’s structure is designed to achieve a competitive advantage and promote stakeholder interests within an environment. Instead, an organization’s culture can be used to increase organizational effectiveness and longterm results (Smircich, 1983). Which role can a discipline like service design have in these complex organisational challenges and, moreover, within social organisations, distinguished by a higher degree of uncertainty and lack of resources?

2.3 | SERVICE DESIGN

▶ Human-centered: SD considers the experience of all the people affected by the service.

SD DEFINITION

▶ Collaborative: Stakeholders of various backgrounds and functions should be actively engaged in the SD process.

Service Design (SD) is a discipline that started to move few years before the 2000s, thanks to an insightful vision of a pool of universities located in Italy, Germany, UK and US, turning into the professional world right after the rise of the century (Sangiorgi & Prendiville, 2015). Nowadays, the discipline still struggles to find a unique definition but recovering the definition of service from chapter 1 - services are the execution in time of a series of planned actions by designated actors to obtain a determined result - a light definition of what the discipline does can be retrieved.

Service design is defined as “an emerging occupation in which practitioners aim to understand customers, organizations, and markets; develop new or improved services and customer experiences; translate them into feasible solutions, and then help organizations implement them” (Fayard, Stigliani & Bechky, 2016, p. 6).

Instead, from a simplified business perspective, service design can be identified as a discipline that aims to achieve quality in user experience by organising and planning people, processes, environments and communications (Lobanov, 2017).

However, both the service and service design definitions cut off or make implicit the tangible layer of artefacts, mentioned earlier as part of the organisational culture model of Rousseau. Furthermore, it is more accurate to talk about product-service systems (PSSs) which can be defined as ‘a mix of tangible products and intangible services designed and combined so that they are jointly capable of fulfilling final customer needs’ (Tukker & Tischner, 2006). PSSs approach is more complex but complete. It makes clear the consideration of the project as a system or as an environment. However, this consideration has been incorporated in the concept of service, by dedicating attention to the whole experience of each stakeholder involved in the service throughout the touchpoints, from the service overall to the distinct artefact enabling the activity (Kimbell, 2009). Thus, service design challenges and organisational design ones can have a consistent overlap, since both regards similar respects.

▶ Iterative: SD is an exploratory, adaptive, and experimental approach, iterating toward implementation. ▶ Sequential: The service should be visualized and orchestrated as a sequence of interrelated actions. ▶ Real: Needs should be researched in reality, ideas prototyped in reality, and intangible values evidenced as physical or digital reality. ▶ Holistic: Services should sustainably address the needs of all stakeholders through the entire service and across the business.

These principles that take life through the uses of methods and tools in the design process can result in a huge resource to tackle both internal and external issues that organisations can have. Even though lately, designers received critiques due to their emphasis on user perspective and exclusion from the focus of actual cost-effective economics and organisational structures and culture problems (Mulgan, 2014), in the broader design thinking literature, the design field remains one of the three key points of view to drive meaningful innovation (Brown & Katz, 2009). In the innovation trifecta, the design represents the user needs and desire perspective (desirability), the business the economical sustainability of investments and returns (viability) and technologies flawlessly functioning of a service/product/system (feasibility). All of them are different perspectives in tension that an actor can take in solving a problem, but only when an interdisciplinary balance is reached innovation results are optimal.

Anyway, SD results in a more articulated field, characterized by multidisciplinary and mutating its toolkit from various disciplines ranging from social sciences and research to IT and management to interaction design, as well as previous design approaches, namely participatory and user-centred design (Sanders & Stappers, 2008).

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If the service design definition results hard to simplify, in time the discipline converged around six principles to follow and use as guidelines, reported in ‘This is Service Design Doing’ manual (2018, p.25-29).

SD AND ORGANISATIONAL FAILURE Positioning design in this diagram, it enriches the Service Design capabilities of vision and comprehension of complex ecosystems. If it is then placed in the perspective of SE organisations, it leads to further strategic value.

Indeed, Gasca (2017) in an article for the World Economic Forum, compares startups and social organisations (in particular enterprises) main failure reasons. When a for-profit private business fails the burden falls onto the commercial ecosystem linked (founders, employees, investors and customers), but when it happens to a social organisation a whole range of stakeholder that were benefitting from the services is damaged. The study reported shows how almost 40% of these businesses close before one year of activity, and another 45% in the second. The three main causes of failure for social businesses are: lack of resources and infrastructure, from fundings to actual skills in the game; context, every environment is different and welcome social policies in a local manner; board of directors, which results in a cause of conflict and internal chaos, compared to the extra-value that acquires in the startup ecosystem.

If these data are compared to the top 3 reasons why startups fail provided by a CB Insights post-mortem analysis (2019), the overlap is almost perfect. Indeed, the main reason is ‘no market need’, a clear statement of fit between a product and the delivery area culture. If the two aspects do not go along, the product can not penetrate in the market, hence the context. Second, ‘ran out of cash’, displaying a clear challenge for resources in the business world too. Third, ‘not the right team’ showing the dependency in small teams to the skillset of founders and early employees.

Therefore, integrating (service) design in an organisation, it seems the wisest way to pursue. Design Thinking and SD has been explored in small-medium businesses (Salvo, 2019) and in the public sector (Alonso, Rizzo et al., 2016), as well as applied in startups, or newborn companies, incubation and acceleration paths (Pacchiarotti, 2020) or in order to enhance innovation, economical and environmental sustainability (Baruzzi, 2019). Hence, in two out of four sectors and in similar organisations for size and challenges. Consequently, this thesis would like to incipit a process of exploration of the role of SD in SE organisations.

SD AND ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE Since the early 2000s, the role design in organisations has been investigated. The Design Ladder (DDC, 2001) is a representation of the four steps that design can have in an organisation. Maybe the design is invisible and does not play a part in the creation of a bid, or it is solely used to provide shape to a pre-existing concept. These are the first two ladder moves. It follows a deliberate design cycle, where several actors and a range of skills and methods are included in the development strategy. The last step is when designers take part in the transformation of organisational visions in practice and generate innovative ways to do so (Camacho, 2016).

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The nature of service design and its principles evidently look as possible solutions to tackle these failing reasons. Moreover, as Martin reports in The Design of Business (2009) “design thinkers learn by doing, in fact, rapid prototyping speeds up the innovation process because designers learn about the quality of their ideas when they test them in the real world”.

If the impact of service design and design thinking has been difficult to measure and identify especially in higher maturity companies, where design becomes part of processes often not explicit (Björklund, Hannukainen and Manninen, 2018), Service Designer have been recognized has facilitators and enablers, rather than directors or magician, contributing to foster new behaviours and configurations (Junginger & Sangiorgi, 2009; Kimbell, 2009).

By establishing a parallel with the Rousseau organisational culture, Junginger and Sangiorgi (2009) proposed three levels of depth that Service Design can foresee to challenge and improve the status of an organisation. Service interaction design touched the two outer rings, influencing how the organisation relates to the service with object and behaviour. Changes are minors, easier to control and implement. Service design interventions operate when greater updates require mutations in norms and values. The most radical change is when service design challenges the fundamental assumptions to deliver a new service concept. The more prone to the core is the layer that service design wants to impact, the more resistance will face from the organisation. To manage this conflict, service design should move towards the role of collaborator and involve organisation stakeholders as co-designers.

In these last respects, in the recent year, few studies explored how SD evolves into an organizational capability enabling firms to transform their existing businesses and sustain competitiveness bridging SD from an outsourced sporadic event to an internal best capability (Martinkenaite et al, 2017).

If to manage change in increasingly fluid and convoluted service ecosystems, a major corporation like Samsung have embraced SD to open new markets, organisational structures and norms (Yoo & Kim, 2015), the majority of the players, especially in the SE, miss still the absorption of design capabilities to a strategic level. Competencies have been recognized as one of the key metrics for organisational effectiveness. Consequently, in a fast-paced world, dynamic capabilities, namely the capacity for update competencies to reach improved fit with a volatile business environment (Teece et al., 1997, p. 516), are fundamental to prosper.

SD for its nature and principles results in a precious tool to connect the service level to the organisational one, providing an insightful vision on both users and internal capabilities, leading to improved dynamic capabilities and faster learning cycles. Multiple barriers exist, especially from small-medium enterprises (SMEs), to access design culture, from limited human and economical resources, informal or non established new product/ service roadmaps, poor accessibility to design resources or design understanding (Acklin, 2017) evidencing the gap between management and design.

The Design Management Absorption Model (based on Zahra & George, 2002) represents in four phases the journey of integration of design competencies inside an organisation novice to the discipline. After a trigger (a failure or a moment of crisis), acquisition consists in defining clear design contribution to the firm. Then, assimilation involves other functions of the organisation (e.g. engineering or marketing) in the use of design knowledge. Thirdly, in the transformation phase, design knowledge is rooted to improve offering and processes (for example new service development). Finally, during the exploitation, the design is integrated deeply in the organisation by leading coherence in divisions and coordinating functions as well as being part of the internal education path. This journey happens in time and usually long-term, it can be an explicit position or a more tacit passage. In this respect, key indicators can support the analysis of the status quo and notably, the use of tools and approaches design-related is one of the clear touchpoints of change to notice.

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As Acklin (2017) concludes ‘an external outcome of absorbing new design knowledge can be a competitive advantage achieved through improved offerings and customer experiences. There can be an internal outcome as well, which might be even more important because it has the potential to change a firm into a dynamic and flexible entity.’

SOCIAL ORGANISATION QUADFECTA The social organisation quadfecta is a diagram based on a combination of organisational theory and design literature. As seen, culture, structure, competencies and processes are crucial areas for organisations that need to be designed in order to achieve competitive advantage and organisational effectiveness. Moreover, in the context of social organisations, an extra effort has to be done in building a democratic decision-making process and environment, as considering the challenges brought by an organisational form often based on volunteering and donations.

Applying the innovation trifecta (Brown & Katz, 2009) to the SE context, the three core competencies require to be adjusted. The business perspective has to guarantee the sustainability of the project, the design perspective that it is socially valuable and the technology the service can be delivered quickly. This shift is needed to make sure that an organisation, usually operating with a shortage of funds and resources, is capable of surviving and producing the expected social impact by making a decision with the correct mindset.

In the end, the design showed its capabilities in driving thoughtful decision-making into innovation by including the users’ perspective into the process. Narrowing down to Service Design, the discipline presents the correct toolkit to approach a complex system, integrate functions and deliver an improved user experience cost-effectively. On the other hand, SE organisations suffer from lack of competencies to tackle environmental and internal challenges in delivering their products/services. Therefore, an inquiry on the specific case study of Poliferie is carried out to explore the role of SD in a small-medium social organisation (SMSO).

2.4 | SYNTHESIS

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If the trifecta could be helpful to frame the organisation from a product/service perspective, instead organisational theory highlighted the urgency to focus on culture, structure, competencies and processes to build an effective system. With this in mind, by broadening the three areas of the trifecta and splitting the feasibility area in two, it is possible to obtain a more comprehensive diagram to read the internal system of a social organisation. The four areas become: the desirability (social value) is contained in the

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From the previous background research, integrating social economy, organisational theory and design, and service design, two diagrams are designed to analyse and interpret the context of Poliferie during the action-research process. The first is the social organisation quadfecta, and it will describe the organisational side. Instead, the second, the service spectrum, will be useful to look at the organisation from a service/product perspective.

culture area; the viability (economic sustainability) in the sustainability one; the feasibility (deliverability) is divided into resources (technologies and human) and processes. The diagram is elucidated in the following paragraphs.

The two layers are not silos, and especially in SMSOs knowledge exchanges are part of daily life. Anyway, the translation of these passages into actionable insights or actions is the key to generate integration in the system.

FOUR KEY AREAS Culture: Culture is the set of values, beliefs, and norms that control the interaction among individuals, and also other stakeholders. Furthermore, the culture that is established between the members of a social organisation is crucial for success. In a for-profit company, the main driver remains profit. This makes it easier to identify internal structures, drivers and KPIs, especially for striving SMEs. However, in a social organization, the focus shifts to different values that must be clearly identified and managed. In particular, in a volunteering environment, where the bond between the members and the mission (and vision, which are part of this cluster) is the only real glue to the keep together system.

An organisation usually presents two levels of analysis. Strategy drives the organisation in the long-term by building goals, culture, mindset, and envisioning the path to a sustainable business model. Instead, operation delivers services and products day-byday and it focuses on putting in practise the strategy in the short-medium term (Bellini et al.,, 2017).

Strategy can be seen as the leadership, guidance and management layer. In social organisations, it is the level that guarantees the right direction and shape of an organization. It makes sure that the path to reach social impact (the main goal of a social organization) is the smoothest possible. It guides the culture and decision-making of the volunteers and makes sure that the system is economically viable.

On the other hand, operations are the ground level, where strategy generates outcomes to reach the organisation objectives. Hence, it is the level that delivers services and products. In social organisations, it makes sure that the final user, the target of the association, receives what the strategy has drawn. It takes care of the primary resource of an association, its members and all the processes that interconnect them to reach the goal.

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Resources: In the design trifecta, technology is one of the three aspects of innovation, in a social organization, often the main technology remains human. Hence, the terminology could shift from technology to resources, a more inclusive term for both human and nonhuman assets. The members of an association are the first stakeholders and the most relevant resource to achieve the mission. In this sense, they must be considered as a key asset of the system by enhancing their competencies, capabilities, mindset, skills and following them in learning new knowledge.

Processes: In social organisations, processes tend to look less structured for the nature of the members (volunteers) and the focus on the social mission in the shortterm. The true story is that processes are fundamental for an organization to succeed in the long-term and scale. By making processes clear, short and engaging only with the right members, can lead to better results without loss of efforts, energies and resources (funds, physical assets or members). Moreover, it allows the organisation to have guidance during moments of uncertainty - for example, expanding in a new area or launching a new service.

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LEVELS OF ANALYSIS

Sustainability: Sustainability is a broad term to translate the need for a social organization of having a positive impact. Indeed, sustainability has a trifold scope: social, focusing on people rights and well-being (both members and users); environmental, protecting habitats and fostering circularity; economical, making sure that the organisation operates with a neutral or positive profit balance. For social organisations, sustainability should support impact generation. To guarantee the impact is necessary to have a sustainable business model, a thoughtful strategy of growth and the acquisition of dynamic capabilities to face environmental changes. Lastly, a proven evaluation system to assess the impact has to be built to measure progress and identify pivots.

The four areas overlap in four intersections. Two of them intersect on the same level (cross-areas), the others between levels (cross-levels).

Intersections cross-areas produce results in transparency and efficiency, making sure that levels operate in harmony and horizontal areas in symbiosis.

Transparency (Culture+Sustainability): With a clearly stated culture and values properly diffused, the organization is coherent in pursuing a goal (even economical) It generates transparency, integrity and coherence both internally and externally by being in line with the principles identified.

Efficiency (Resources+Processes): With established processes, human and technological resources could become actionable and improve efficiency in time, optimizing efforts and expenses. Properly structured processes enable members to take action and knowledge to spread flawlessly in the organisation.

Intersections cross-level produce results in ownership and effectiveness, allowing strategy to flow into operations and generating integration in the system.

Ownership (Culture+Resources): When the organisational culture filters and fits properly within its members, every individual becomes an ambassador by taking ownership of mission and vision both internally and externally.

Effectiveness (Processes+Sustainability): At the moment the sustainability strategy becomes viable through scalable processes, effectiveness could be reached on the path to guarantee impact.

The social organisation quadfecta results in a useful tool to analyse an organisation and understand connections and synergies between areas to evaluate internal integration.

Social organisations capable of achieving higher scores in connecting the four areas have more chances to thrive in the long-term, assuring social impact at scale.

SERVICE SPECTRUM The service spectrum is a simplified model showing key steps of definition on a service design journey. It is a lighter diagram used in this thesis to cluster findings and order them from a service design perspective, in terms of organizing people, processes and timeline of the project. Usually, service designers rely on a set of tools and canvases developed over time to map, analyse, represent, synthesize, collect information, and foster decision-making.

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The service spectrum is a tool to cluster findings based on a service perspective.

It was born from the union of concepts used in the main four service design tools. The user journey map (Service Design Tools. This is Service Design Doing, 2018) explores the frontstage interaction of the target user with the service based on time, touchpoints and emotions. The business model canvas (Osterwalder & Pigneur, 2010) investigate the value proposition of a service, its sustainability and the relations between the organisation, the user and key partners. Lastly, the service blueprint (Service Design Tools. Shostack, 1984) expands the user journey vision beyond the layer of visibility, including processes in the back-end as well as management operations that the organisation design internally.

The offering map synthesizes what the organisation is offering to solve the final user problems or needs (Service Design Tools).

The service spectrum represents seven key steps of the service definition. ▶ Sustainability: the service has to be deliverable from the organisation and guarantees a balance between costs and returns. ▶ Management: the service has to be managed in terms of orchestration of resources (individuals, assets, funds). ▶ Providers: the service could be provided with different mediums. They can be tools or platforms, or individuals that act to bring the service alive. ▶ Offering: an organisation might offer different services to different final users. The services can be summarized in an offer or value proposition to a target user. ▶ Communication: the service has to be communicated and marketed to the user to generate awareness, interest and engagement. ▶ Delivery: the service has to be delivered in a specific moment of time and space with specific processes. Aspects that change the delivery stage go in this cluster. ▶ Evaluation and Research: the service has to be evaluated in performance. The assessment usually is achieved through user research, which can lead to service improvements, new service opportunities and concepts. It closes the loop and pushes the organisation to understand the sustainability of the service or design a new service.

It is worthwhile to notice that the service offer portfolio can be directed internally to the members’ community (e.g. education, rewards, etc..) or externally to external stakeholders.

The first three steps are typically part of the backstage of service and organisation.

They are focused on framing the offer, how and why it takes place. Instead, The last three steps are oriented to the frontstage, taking place with or towards the final user.

As a threshold, the offering (fourth step), marks the line between front and backstage,

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INTERSECTIONS

TAKEAWAYS

The service spectrum is used in the thesis to cluster findings from user observation, interviews and co-design sessions. It is a simplified tool to frame user research from a service perspective and enable sense-making, connections and insights.

RESEARCH MATRIX In the various cycles, the social organisation quadfecta and the service spectrum are combined in the analysis of the field research outcomes. The former represents the organisational level. The latter the service level. The mix allows obtaining an integrated view of the organisation back-end and how it influences the services executions. More details about the usage of the two diagrams are provided in the framework section of each inquiry cycle.

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because it represents the synthesis of the strategic process and the starting point of the operational one.

Social Economy, Organisations and Service Design represent respectively an environment, a system and a tool that could find a positive impact from working in symbiosis. SE is acknowledged as a fundamental piece of the society puzzle, supporting a more inclusive equal world, by bridging the public, private and household sector, looking at profit as a by-product. Organisations, based on theory and design, are complex entities that allow cooperation of individuals to scale social value and impact, through culture, structure, competencies and processes. SD embodies a user, business, and system perspective, in a single discipline capable to drive positive change and innovation. In the following chapters, an inquiry is led to investigate the interaction of these three elements and which role service design could adopt in it.

1. Overview 2. Organisational Culture 3. Organisational Structure 4. IT and Tools 5. Services 6. Impact

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3.1 | OVERVIEW OF THE ORGANISATION

ORGANISATION SCALE

Poliferie is an Italian non-profit organization. Its mission is to support high-school students to make better decisions for their future regarding their superior education orientation. The organization fights against social immobility, information asymmetry and outdated knowledge systems, side-by-side with the traditional education path.

Poliferie counts 76 members and is growing. However, around 10% of them are almost inactive or prone to leave in the next round. Volunteers come from 17 on 20 regions in Italy. The age range is between 20 and 30 years old with an average of 26 years old. Most of the volunteers are workers at the first job experience (51%), students at university (34%) or a mix (13%). 57% of the members have a Master of Science degree, 26% a Bachelor degree and 17% a diploma (they can be undergraduates). 45% of the members recognized themselves as female. Leading the organisation to almost reach gender balance. 80% of the members had previous experience with other associations.

ORIGIN Poliferie was founded in November 2017 as a spin-off project of a group of 6 students from the “Scuola di Politiche” (Politics School), an intensive 1-year private master of politics and public policy.

TYPE OF ORGANIZATION The organization is registered under Italian law as a social promotion association (Associazione di Promozione Sociale - APS). The association is a non-profit, nonpartisan and exclusively built by volunteers without association fee.

OFFER PURPOSE Poliferie prepares students for the future of work. It organizes training workshops only in suburban technical schools and will offer a unique post-diploma orientation database in the Italian panorama, via mobile app.

SERVICE SCALE

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The association signed partnerships with 9 high schools in 9 cities in Italy on April 2020: Roma, 2017; Turin and Milan, 2018; Genoa, Pisa, Naples, Bari, Vibo Valentia, Palermo, 2019).

3.2 | ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE

STRATEGIC VALUES

From a young members-base, a vibrant and dynamic community is generated. Anyway, in spite of the age (of members and association), the organisational culture looks to a more structured world. By some of the members Poliferie is defined as a modern startup, and indeed, most of the principles wink to Silicon Valley’s innovation ecosystem but boxed in a social frame.

“From the beginning, the goal has been to continuously innovate, grow in all the suburbs of Italy and scale our impact to help as many high-school students as possible. For this reason, the working methods are constantly evolving. Those that are reported here summarize what has worked so far, but are destined to evolve because the more you go on, the more mistakes you make and the more you learn.”

MISSION

With this statement, the organisational culture guide of Poliferie starts. Since the beginning, the association has been founded on three guidelines:

We create opportunities and nurture communities

▶ Innovation to challenge the status quo and find new ways to tackle problems; ▶ Scaling to grow in size to reach as many users as possible, leading to more social impact. ▶ Try and error to test new paths and evolve quickly in a better form.

Marginal neighbourhoods in Italy’s urban areas have huge neglected potential. By working with youngsters in high-schools, we seek to transform these ‘periferie’ (outskirts) in ‘poliferie’ (from Latin poli: multiple, plural. e.g. Politecnico, a university teaching multiple technical disciplines): thriving communities rich in opportunities.

The document continues: “In terms of governance, we have always combined decentralization to solve problems quickly and standardization in implementing a few well-made projects. Our mission is to fight inequalities, we must maintain the same quality towards all the young people we reach!”

The organisation then sets some guidelines about power and decision-power distribution. ▶ Diffused governance to quickly make decisions and tackle problems; ▶ Focus on make projects scalable standards to be distributed easily; ▶ Keep the same quality and level in each location to bring the same value;

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From this introduction, the imprinting is clearly oriented to build a flexible organizational culture capable of coping with a changing environment and looking for simple solutions to diffuse on a national scale.

OPERATIONAL PRINCIPLES The organisation identifies three main principles to guide the interaction amongst the members and the approach to the day-by-day work. ▶ Ownership (Appartenenza) means feeling the mission personally and feel an active part in the association; it reflects the sense of responsibility the association has towards the children it follows and is expressed through meetings in schools, activities and participation in meetings. ▶ Efficiency (Efficienza) is necessary to reach the greatest number of children with the work of each member, it is put into practice through the use of Slack, the proxy (for the office) on Saturday and the G Suite tools. ▶ Transparency (Trasparenza) is essential to work well together; it is based on shared habits in the choice of roles, in making decisions and in relationships with volunteers.

Ownership puts in charge each member of being ambassadors for the organisation and respectful to the mission. Efficiency makes sure that everyone uses wisely the few hours they can dedicate to the project. Transparency allows the association to build an informal and friendly environment, where feedback is a constructive tool to move forward.

3.3 | ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE Proposing itself as an innovative social startup, Poliferie structured itself with a mainly functional approach. Indeed, functions are divided into silos departments, referring to areas coordinators (similar to VPs) and then to a board of directors or the director himself.

Anyhow, cross-communication and collaboration between silos are allowed thanks to a horizontal culture and IT internal communication tools like Slack.

ORGANISATIONAL CHART The organizational structure is on the paper designed in 3 main functional areas (Research & Development, Cities, Communication), divided into sub-areas. On top of them, there are 3 more areas (Administration, Human Resources and Board of Directors) reporting directly to the director.

The city function is taking care of delivering the service of Poliferie into the local partner school. Internally, the function is subdivided into: ▶ Strategy designs improvement and expansion year by year; ▶ Geographical areas, Northern and Southern Italy; ▶ Concentrate, schools focused on a compact version of the curriculum.

Communication is taking care of promoting and developing the identity of the organisation.

It is divided in: ▶ Communication design builds the brand and visual identity; ▶ Social Media manages social channels; ▶ Press establishes relations with journals and newspapers; ▶ Fund-raising looks for funding opportunities;

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▶ Events organised public relations events.

Research & Development is combining various experimental functions that are out of operations. Those are: ▶ Research builds and collects data to support the organisation; ▶ The app develops the Poliferie’s digital app project; ▶ Challenge designs a new possible offer for schools and other partners; ▶ Impact evaluation runs user research and produces an impact framework.

These three functions report to the board of directors, a mix of founders and early members, which reports to the director. Instead, human resources and administration

3.4 | IT/TOOLS INTERNAL COMMUNICATION: SLACK The organization adopted a full-Slack strategy limiting to a minimum all internal communication on other software. Local teams can organize with autonomous tools if they desire, even though it is strongly not advised. But the main part of common discussions is generated on the platform. Slack premium is free for nonprofit organisations, allowing a full record of discussion and material shared. In conclusion, Slack offers in-app video calls with screen sharing and a lot of useful extensions for third parties.

(legal, finance and IT) report directly to the director.

CONTENTS CREATION: GOOGLE SUITE

TEAMS AND ROLES

Google Suite, another package given free for nonprofit, offers a set of cloud tools fundamental for the association to work remotely and quickly. Due to the design similar to the Microsoft or Apple competitors, big G software allows a low learning curve and the in-cloud architecture maximum collaboration.

Teams, the smaller unit of sub-functions, can differ from the organizational chart that creates groups in terms of overall function. Usually, local teams are built for each city, while more remote-work functions (legal, social media, etc..) can be managed at distance. However, members can be part of multiple teams. For example, a person from a local team (Rome team), can be a part of another team (Fundraising team). This sort of matrix approach, that includes a vertical function plus a horizontal one, shows how the members move freely and could create connections in the micro-environment of the organization, helping to flatten the hierarchy. Multiple points of contact amongst members can generate positive social fabric and foster a sense of community.

The used tools are: ▶ Google Documents for documents and proposals; ▶ Google Spreadsheet for databases; ▶ Google Slides for presentations; ▶ Google Survey for surveys; ▶ Google Images to design social media posts.

Slack is the main tool for internal communication. Slack channels have a different role compared to functions, areas and teams. They usually are more agile for nature and new channels could be created to reach a specific goal, even temporary (answer a question, organize a meeting, solve a problem that needs cross-skills). Few channels (#general, #random, #interests) are created for internal updates or shared chat between the members. Instead, others are open to assume specific functions, like promote social participation (#social) or provide IT support (#IT-support).

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EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION: SOCIAL MEDIA, GMAIL AND GOOGLE MEET AND CALENDAR For external communication with the school, possible commercial partners and other stakeholders, Gmail is the selected tool, due to its inclusion in GSuite. Google Meet, for meetings and webinars, and Calendar, for scheduling and planning, support Gmail in an integrated system. Social media includes Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and Twitter.

They are used to keep the Poliferie community up to date, launch recruiting campaigns and share valuable pieces of information related to the industry.

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SLACK CHANNELS

OTHER TOOLS AND SOFTWARE Since the organisation includes an app development team and other vertical teams, other tools for design (Adobe Suite), code (Github, Flutter, etc..) and project management are used but not diffuse to an organisational level.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE (SFIDA ALLE IDEE) ▶ WHAT: A business challenge in collaboration with local governments (enti pubblici), associations, or businesses, to put into practice the skills acquired and to enhance the local community. ▶ WHERE: In suburban professional high-school (technical institutes et similia) with a signed partnership with Poliferie.

3.5 | SERVICES

▶ WHO: One or two selected classes of students followed by a lead teacher. A reference employee (or more) from the collaborator entity to present and guide the results of the challenge. A local team of Poliferie for introduction, moderation, support during the process and data collection.

The offering of Poliferie is divided into three services/products. Each service provides key education and information to facilitate the passage of high-school students to the university, higher education or professional world.

▶ WHY: Traditional schools’ curriculums usually lack opportunities to help students to put in practise what is learned in books and in class. This missing ring generates a gap between the importance of academic knowledge and the professional problem-solving pragmatic attitude.

HIGH-SCHOOLS CURRICULUM (AND CONCENTRATED CURRICULUM)

▶ WHEN: In 1-2 day (during the school hours) at the end of the program, when a suitable timing between volunteers, speakers, teachers and class availability is found.

▶ WHAT: A series of 3-5 training workshops about topics that traditional education usually does not touch within its curriculum. ▶ WHERE: In suburban professional high-school (technical institutes et similia) with a signed partnership with Poliferie. ▶ WHO: One or two selected classes of students in the last or fourth year followed by a lead teacher. External speakers to share their professional experience or working knowledge. A local team of Poliferie for introduction, moderation, in case of any emergency (e.g. external speaker steps back), data collection. ▶ WHY: Traditional schools’ curriculums lack soft-skills training, post-diploma orientation, professional world introduction, for time and economic limits. Students, especially in the suburbs are left behind and have to find the way by themselves. ▶ WHEN: In 3 to 5 days (during school hours), when a suitable timing between volunteers, speakers, teachers and class availability is found. Usually, the lead teacher uses the time dedicated to her subject to host Poliferie’s meetings instead. ▶ HOW: Frontal and interactive lectures with support of presentations.

▶ HOW: Interactive workshop in teams, with support of presentations and tools (pencils, paper, etc) to enable ideas sharing, presentation and decision-making.

ORIENTATION PLATFORM (APP) ▶ WHAT: A post-diploma/graduate orientation app to browse, save and compare university, courses, or professional training courses in the simplest, fastest and clearest way. ▶ WHERE: Mobile app downloadable via the app store, and usable in local anytime, anywhere. ▶ WHO: Whoever wants to discover universities (bachelor and master courses) or professional superior training, and understand in a few taps: offer, costs, opportunities, reviews, etc. ▶ WHY: Information about university courses or professional training are usually hard to collect and even more to compare, making the selection process painful for students post-diploma, contributing to the abandonment rate, lowering the awareness about opportunities. ▶ WHEN: The service is available 24/7, 365 days.

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▶ HOW: Via mobile application.

CURRICULUM STRUCTURE: OCTRI SYSTEM The method that Poliferie follows to organise the curriculum lectures has been developed internally to foster the comprehension of five key features that the job market acquired in the latest years. It is divided into five main tracks that are tackled during lectures. ▶ Opportunities: Post-diploma orientation via app and comparison on the world of work with corporate HR to better understand opportunities. ▶ Technologies: Analysis of the top-notch world of innovation and contemporary tools such as social media marketing and coding.

Through the various activities and services organised by the association, the expected impact that Poliferie wants to reach is trifold. To start, raise the educational level of children equally or above the parents one. This, in order to reach a higher specialisation in the population. Consequently, fresh graduates should find a job position easily and quickly, generating economic independence from the family. In the end, both these impacts contribute to lowering the amount of NEET in the country.

Further studies to understand how to measure the social impact of Poliferie will be conducted by the dedicated team. Steps forward will be achieved in data collection in quantity, quality and in time. In parallel, the offerings of the association should take care of the research outcome, and be an update to provide a higher social value.

▶ Relations: Overview of interpersonal skills mandatory for social relations, how to work in a team and communicate effectively professionally. ▶ Ideas: Development of creative thinking through “design-thinking” methodology by learning how to look problems, share your thoughts and seek solutions. ▶ Community: Exploring the meaning of communities and the added value of cooperation to generate value together.

3.6 | IMPACT In an attempt to assess its impact, the association started a research and analysis process. The first milestone for assessing the impact is the formulation of the Theory of Change (TOC) (Reynolds et al., 2018). The TOC is a diagram that shows how the problems detected are connected to the impact expected throughout resources, activities, outputs and results. On the side, a series of hypotheses are generated the organisation poses in both generation and achievement of the results. They require confirmation in the next steps of research.

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The Poliferie’s TOC, reported below, displays four problems that Poliferie wants to tackle. The first one is the lack of an effective orientation program delivered from both highschool (in exit, in uscita) and universities (in ingress, in entrata). Hence students are not supported from the top in awareness, discovery and engagement of future opportunities.

The second problem is the limited intergenerational social mobility, which means that senior generations keep power and richness, and few chances are left to youngsters to build their own future. Thirdly, Italy shows high unemployment rates and NEET (Neither in Employment nor in Education nor Training) part of the population increase. Lastly, inequality in richness and opportunities among regions, especially between North and South of Italy.

TAKEAWAYS Poliferie is a young and energetic association that shows good growth figures in its first three years.

Fresh graduate and undergraduates members build a passionate group, but with limited experience. Anyway, the team is attempting to define a corporate-clear structure but with a startup-culture. Moreover, the focus has been placed on one main service, the high-school curriculum, in its standardisation and diffusion with few implementations.

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In the meanwhile, a long-term project, an orientation app, is taking life. With a flexible and receptive system and volunteers at ease with digital collaborative software, the association seems fertile soil for the application of Service Design. Indeed, firstly, the inquiry will focus on understanding the challenges of the association.

Secondly, it will narrow down the research to the identification of a suitable role and a practical application of Service Design within the association.

Field Research

1. Cycle 1: User Observation 2. Cycle 2: In-depth Interviews 3. Cycle 3: Co-design Session

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4.1 | CYCLE 1: USER OBSERVATION 1. FRAMEWORK The first cycle of inquiry consists of divergent research based on unstructured interviews and user observation. From the background research, it is evident that organisational structure and culture might invisibly generate negative effects on service delivery, scaling and improving. Indeed, the aim is to collect and detect problems and understand deeper their interconnections by using the Social Organisation Quadfecta and the Service Spectrum.

CYCLE QUESTIONS

Is the organisation level connected to the service level in Poliferie? How? Which are the main challenges evinced?

▶ 2 lectures from the Poliferie’s curriculum (virtual under COVID-19 lockdown) to understand how the volunteers engage with students (main target), professors and speakers. One lecture was an introduction to design thinking under the “I-Ideas” chapter of the OCTRI system. Instead, the other was a test of the “Sportello” (help desk for orientation), in a new school that the association could not reach before. ▶ 8 weekly meetings of the task-force, during which the team was exploring possible solutions to the problem, trying to organize internally, defining roles and tasks.

2. DATASET To collect evidence and reduce at minimum personal biases, an unstructured approach of interview and observation has been used. The first cycle lasted approximately two months during which the observation took place in multiple meetings and wrote down meaningful sentences and findings reported by other collaborators during the discussion.

The data were collected in:

▶ 2 general feedback calls where the Poliferie community dial-in to share feedback and have the chance to unearth common challenges, as well as discuss possible solutions;

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The findings reported come from 15 members of the association, plus personal observations. Their positions in the organisation go from new-entry to the director, assuring a good

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▶ 2 unstructured 1-to-1 interviews. One with the City chapter coordination, Giulia Monteleone. She is an early member and she is highly involved in the management, with over 20 hours a week dedicated to the project. The second interview is with Isabella di Paolo, who is a new entry in the impact evaluation team. Both the candidates were an interesting subject due to their professional careers in consulting studios for social enterprises and startups;

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3. ANALYSIS

MANAGEMENT

In order to start to understand the connection amongst the elements in the game, all the notes (post-its) have been organised, first of all, on the social organisation quadfecta based on their macro-areas (culture, sustainability, processes and resources). The map shows that the main part of the challenges perceived is on the sustainability-processes side of the diagram. In a second moment, each sticky note has been marked with a colour representing one of the steps of the service spectrum. Each cluster was then reported on an individual map and commented.

The management is a topic diffused in three of the four quadrants. It displays how coordination is crucial across the organization to manage different topics: from funds, passing from psychology support to scaling the service scale. On the other hand, it is showing how culture seems less connected and perceived as manageable.

SUSTAINABILITY

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The sustainability of the service is clearly a point connected to the homonymous area.

However, it spreads affecting the resources area via the processes one. It shows how the sustainability of the organization is rooted in the volunteers, their capabilities and the processes to let individuals manage the service delivery, as well as relations.

OFFERING

Instead, service providers-related findings seem to focus mainly on the culture and resources areas. This demonstrates somehow the bond between the two areas. The map also unearths certain blindness or not interest in sustainability and processes. It could be related to the mission attachment of the volunteers, who do not consider the chance to participate more strategically to the association.

The main concerns about the offering are shown as an evident combination of strategy connected to sustainable thinking and process establishment. Some questions are then open towards the resources area, suggesting how members think about how to improve the services of the association.

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PROVIDERS

DELIVERY

Communication appears more diffused in all the quadrants, showing how the usage of misleading glossary or targeting a not clear user could generate confusion across the whole organization. The general feedback was that if mission and vision result clear, the operational part of Poliferie remains known solely by the practitioners.

Following directly the Offering map, the delivery one rotates slightly clockwise including the resources area and partially the culture box. It states how the physical delivery of the service is the moment when the back-end work of internal culture and processes design come to life.

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COMMUNICATION

ELEVATION & RESEARCH Evaluation and research step back on cultural matters and focus mainly on proving the organization’s impact. Many thoughts focus on understanding how to assess the social impact of Poliferie with clear and simple processes that could be executed by different teams. These sticky notes come mostly from the two interviews and just one is about understanding users behaviour to improve engagement during the curriculum.

4. INSIGHTS ▶ There is evidence that the service spectrum is connected with multiple areas of the organisation matrix. Hence, the four areas of the matrix are linked and tight by the service spectrum. The strategy is connected to the operations as the organization is connected to the services that provide. ▶ Multiple phases, in both front and back-end of the service, are affected by unclearness present in multiple areas of the organisation. The same challenges could report problems in different areas, making the solution needed systemic and not punctual. ▶ The strategic and operational levels are mutually in a relationship. To properly make the service delivery, the system requires to operate in an integrated and synergic way to keep up the social and the (economical) sustainable parties of the organisation. ▶ The main concerns that emerged from the first iteration are clarity of internal communication, engagement with students and schools, offer improvements, long-term economical and impact sustainability. ▶ Lastly, service design roles could go beyond the direct support to the service offering, focusing on more internal problems.

EARLY DETECTED CHALLENGES A series of six challenges emerged from the first cycle. These problems are directly reported from the personal perspective of the members involved. Further confirmation of these single perceptions must be explored. ▶ The business model is fully based on volunteers and unsustainable long term. It seems mandatory to find a clear revenue stream; ▶ Maintaining relationships with students after the conclusion of the five meetings is nearly impossible. Incentives and new medium must be found; ▶ The association is highly dependent on external speakers. It should strengthen the internal training offer to its members; ▶ There is a high turnover of volunteers who join and get lost quickly; ▶ Internal communication, especially related to sharing mission and vision is limited and dull. A new way has to be found to generate long-term engagement.

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▶ Solid leadership makes friction with the diffuse culture and the scaling process of the main service coverage.

The first cycle resulted in an exploration of the Poliferie’s system on both the organisational level (culture and structure) and the service level (mainly focused on the high-school curriculum). The crossed analysis, by using the social organisation quadfecta and the service spectrum as clustering tools, generated a positive of the diffusion of the challenges. The connection between all the areas showed how the organisational level could impact on the service one, especially in a young and fast-changing growing association like Poliferie.

with a broader perspective on the organisation that could have a vision on both strategic/ managerial and operational respects.

In the group of respondents, the experience in Poliferie was distributed as follows: ▶ 4 co-founders [2017] (out of 6, one is inactive and last is the director); ▶ 7 early members of the association [2018 - Q1 2019]; ▶ 3 members who joined during the past year [2019].

Instead, their roles in Poliferie were distributed as follows:

1. FRAMEWORK During the first iteration, challenges faced by the association were collected spontaneously.

Instead, the second cycle aims to deepen the correlation between the challenges and the organisation. Through a series of in-depth interviews with key members of the association, a more comprehensive understanding of the internal dynamics of the organisation is achieved. By investigating problems in the single areas of the quadfecta and building connections between them, an overview of the main wicked problems affecting the organisation is drawn. Furthermore, it is questioned the perception of design inside Poliferie to have a starting point to insert Service Design into the system.

CYCLE QUESTION

Which are the challenges in each area and how are they connected in complex problems that the organisation should solve?

How is design perceived internally?

INTERVIEWS POOL The members for the 15 in-depth interviews were selected to build a heterogeneous group based on key characteristics: roles, time into the association, working/studying experience and participation in Poliferie’s service delivery on the field. The interviewed were mainly coordinator or in a responsible role. It was chosen to gather data from users

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▶ 3 managers of specific areas (communication, city, R&D); ▶ 4 coordinators of local teams (Milan, Rome, Naples, Genoa); ▶ 5 team coordinators for horizontal/non-local activities (social media, human resources, impact assessment and research). ▶ 3 designers (web design, illustration, UX/UI).

Lastly, 66% of the interviewed had direct experience in the field in the high-school curriculum. The remaining had more back-end duties.

INTERVIEW STRUCTURE The interview was structured according to 6 questions. Four are focused on the areas defined by the social organisation quadfecta to understand the perception of the challenges. On the other hand, the remaining two questions investigate the current notion of design that each of the interviewed has of design (meaning design in general, design thinking or service design) and how this could be applied in the association. Lastly, at the beginning of the interview each person was asked to share their personal experience.

This is because it is their perspective that makes their proof insightful of friction that otherwise cannot be spotted.

The four-question related to the organisational areas were: ▶ Culture: what is the main challenge in sharing our mission and values both internally and externally? ▶ Sustainability: what is the main challenge to guarantee our impact now and in the future?

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4.2 | CYCLE 2: IN-DEPTH INTERVIEWS

▶ Resources: what is the main challenge you have found or you see in terms of human resources, internal capabilities and competencies? ▶ Processes: what is the main challenge you face in acquiring or establishing new processes, both personally and at team-level?

The two design-related quick questions were: ▶ Definition: What does design mean to you? ▶ Role: What do you think is the role of design in Poliferie?

The openness of the question allowed the participants to reason and develop their answers on the go, reaching more meaningful levels in time. Indeed, each interview lasted on average about 45 minutes, for a total of 11:30 hours. In the end, everything was managed via virtual call on Slack, due to COVID-19 lockdown restrictions and geographical distance.

2.DATASET After having conducted each interview, the record was listened again and notes were made per each relevant quote stated by the interviewed. Statements about similar concepts in the same area where aggregate into one. Consequently, findings were displayed on the social organisation quadfecta matrix for the first four questions and in a dedicated box for the design-related ones.

The data analysed in this cycle were a total of 405 sticky notes, divided as follow: ▶ CULTURE: 87 ▶ SUSTAINABILITY: 73 ▶ RESOURCES: 90 ▶ PROCESSES: 84 ▶ DESIGN: 71

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In the following pages are reported cards summarizing each interview note.

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Then, the aggregate amount of findings were clustered by common topics in each area (appendix A). Clusters were then ordered per number of notes and commented. Lastly, mind maps were generated from the connection of topics in between layers.

CULTURE ▶ Unclear target: One of the hottest topics was the communication target or the message to be delivered. It seems that many of the interviewed didn’t have a clear perception of both of them. ▶ Ownership: Motivation, ownership and sense of the responsibility are the hardest values to transmit to in the association. ▶ Internal Culture/Structure: Internal structure was another problem felt as serious and worrying. The growth that the association faced in the last year moved some doubts about the management of the organization: fear of pyramidal hierarchy, not transparency, freelancing rather than volunteering. ▶ Environmental pressure: Pressure generated by the environment without clear actions, but from perception or indirect behaviours. ▶ Missing information and transmission: Few interviewed reported issues in sharing knowledge internally or in general information about where the association is going. ▶ Elite bias: Many interviewed remarked that Poliferie has an elitarian perception rather than one close to the target users. ▶ Coordinators: Coordinators appeared as the keyring connecting the mission with the operational members.

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▶ Value recognition: A general agreement is found in giving as much value as possible to both members’ abilities and students needs. ▶ Spontaneous culture: Some interviewed stated that culture or imposing the culture is not a good move, because culture should be as much as possible spontaneous and bottom-up.

SUSTAINABILITY ▶ Turnover and Hiring: To keep the organization alive for most of the interviews lies in the volunteers turn-over (to lower in frequency and reduce the demand of members) and in the building of a full-time team. ▶ User relationship: To guarantee the organization impact is important also to review the relationship with the final users - the high-school students. Indeed, it has been hard to go beyond the on-spot meetings and establish a thorough relationship to generate impact in time. ▶ Mission and impact understanding: About half of the interviewed express the need to understand better our mission, how we deliver it and how to assess the impact. The organization is young and measuring the impact for a social organization is a key turning point. ▶ Network and reach: It seems homogeneous the need to expand the reach in terms of students engaged in the organization activities. Two levels of engagement are highlighted: a qualitative one, with the physical curriculum; a quantitative one, with the digital informative platform. ▶ Level-up: 1/3 of the interviewed stated that to guarantee our impact a step up to move the association to the next level is needed. Most of the time hopes are given to the platform launch.

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3. ANALYSIS

▶ Cashflow: Cashflow or generally fundraising doesn’t seem a priority for most of the interviewed.

express more the value provided by the association to the single member, that can be a booster for motivation too. And, as well to attract new talents to join.

▶ Leadership and guidance: Leadership is perceived as one of the crucial pillars to guarantee impact and stability to the association. If in the decision or leadership chain something doesn’t work, it can lead to serious damages (loss of members, wrong timing, low-quality service delivery).

▶ Working environment: Many of the interviewed marked the attention on the “working environment”, a concept close to culture. Tensions between old and new members emerged in the passage between founders and managers. A focus has been also done on the feedback culture related to the appearing/real hierarchy of the association. ▶ Technologies and tools: Technology is seen as a turning point in the management and efficiency of the organization, allowing the organization to work properly and scale smoothly, as well as contributing to the professional perception of the system.

Few people would like to foster and upgrade the use of IT tools, to guarantee a waterfall effect on multiple members. ▶ Selection: Most of the interviewed express the fact that the actual level of the association is not appealing to have more requests, rather than demand for talents.

At the moment, the association is hiring almost whoever applies and in some cases, the coordinators were forced to put pressure on direct contact due to the need for support.

RESOURCES ▶ Learning, sharing and internal education: Almost all the interviewed agreed on the need to provide a form of internal education and training, that now it has been only passive and contextual. At the moment, learning has been achieved mainly in leadership, organization and IT manners, but knowledge transmission is limited to a few documents.

▶ Competencies: On the other hand, the growth of the association is demanding more and more different and valuable competencies. This can cause tensions between the volunteering “passionate” side and the “professional” one of the members.

▶ Onboarding and Integration: Onboarding is perceived as one of the key moments for the whole future in the organisation of a new member. Especially, if the new members have to be trained. The risk is to cause friction and lead one the freshman to leave the association for operative pressure, misunderstanding, tension due to personal skills, or simply detachment in engagement. ▶ Motivation: One more clear concern is how to select or support motivation amongst the members. Without motivation, the association is quickly placed on the side and responsibility falls dramatically.

▶ Give-back: Most of the members perceived that the organization is not giving them back enough or the value is not evident. Generally, it has been reported a need to

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PROCESSES ▶ Teams, roles and tasks management: If changing team (in a structured way) was perceived as an insightful and learning activity, unclear roles and tasks division has most of the times perceived as a struggling process. This, also in relation to the

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▶ Roles and tasks: Tasks delivery and role division have been seen as one of the most difficult points for coordinators. With time and motivation limits often scheduling and tasks-division lose control ending up in missed deadlines or extra-efforts.

personal schedule and the limited time of each member. Especially setting up a new project seemed a different experience for different members. On one side, a more task-oriented group felt out-of-timing and disorganized. On the other, more easy-going members felt at ease, but with the need of only detailing the process.

▶ Recognition of milestones: 20% of the interviewed recognized as key milestones the establishment of IT tools, time framing and service standard. It shows how for senior members the change and the add of the value of meaningful systems worked.

▶ Experimenting and standardization: A contrast topic is the increase of decrease in internal procedures. Part of the interview pushed for more process structure, especially in operational purposes. Instead, the rest pushes to have more flexibility from the standard to test new solutions and experiment. It is clear how a trade-off between the option must be found. ▶ Guides and knowledge passage: Knowledge transmission in various forms has been one of the key topics of the area of processes too. Firstly, more integration between teams is demanded to foster the exchange of practices and contact, as well as skills. Secondly, the diffusion of standard information is perceived as a key to the success of a team or the organization. In many interviews, it was stated that this passage is left to the personal touch of specific members.

▶ Participation and motivation: Participation and engagement are felt like a relevant problem if connected to the bonding (team-building) area. Especially in a flat structure as Poliferie, the contribution bottom-up of each member is crucial to complete some massive tasks (from outreach on social media to data collection for the platform). Anyway, it seems hard to find a compromise between the importance of the action and the time/effort required, and reach all the members. ▶ Feedback and transparency: Establishing transparency and feedback sharing culture is perceived as a challenge. The feeling of control or not transparency, maybe related to the environmental pressure, is diffused. Interviewed state similar issues in at least one area. ▶ Coordinators: Also in the processes area, coordinator seems to have a key role.

Indeed, they represent the connection between the top management and the ground members. If their guidance is missing, likely the project direction is missed.

Due to their major commitment, with extra time and efforts, they manage to deliver on time the results. But, the consequence could be an expensive burnout, that will harm the whole area of interest. ▶ Decision-making: The hierarchy or “power” issue appears in the last quadrant too. Sometimes, it seems hard to identify the decision-maker in the team and the situation can cause useless tensions. The challenge is to keep the organization as horizontal as possible while defining the decision-making process.

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DESIGN ▶ Translation of ideas into practice: Most of the interviewed referred to the design as the capability to transform an idea into practice. It includes the setup of a structure that connects the purpose with the final users, delivering an experience (a service, a product or a content). ▶ Guidance: Similarly, most of the interviewed agreed about the fact that Design is a driver of cohesion, direction and organization, especially at a mindset level. ▶ Human-centered: Thirdly, the design was recognized as a human-centric practice.

Focusing on user needs, their research and building on them the project. ▶ Aesthetic, graphic, visual and marketing: Anyway, almost half of the interviewed connected design to the areas of communication, marketing, visual and graphic design (maybe biassed from my role in the association). ▶ Iterative and rapid prototyping process: Lastly, it was recognized that design is an iterative process that research, concepts, prototype, tests and repeat. ▶ Collaboration and simplification: Collaboration and simplification of the user experience were spotted as the other two features of the design. ▶ Anyway, the design is not perceived solely as a practice of a single figure or a team, but mainly a diffuse behaviour and mindset to diffuse throughout the whole association.

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▶ Team bonding: Bonding amongst the members is perceived as a missing aspect that the organization is following. Human touch and relationship are considered a mandatory element to improve effectiveness and efficiency.

HOW MIGHT WES From the clustering on the horizontal direction, then, the process moved vertically, by connecting groups in relation to form mindmaps and generate, in the end, four how might wes (HMW) to guide the following cycles.

How might we enhance and simplify knowledge transmission amongst the members?

How might we support the coordinators in managing projects, teams and tasks?

Coordinator found themselves in the sun position of the Poliferie’s solar system. They are the true key in culture transmission but often could unconsciously generate pressure on members leading to burn-out or quitting. As the primary source of leadership for teams, they need to manage properly tasks division, orchestration, decision making and build a transparent working environment. Such an impressive effort should not be left tacit but supported to retain so valuable members.

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When the journey of information is not defined or presents some gaps, missing knowledge can affect the whole organisation. It leads to a wrong perception or not perception of the impact of each member, Moreover, the sensation of learning from the association is reduced. In this scenario, higher guidance is required to support each member, which can bring to slower procedures and new competencies acquisition. By drawing a clear line tacit and subconscious knowledge evident, the organisation would be reborn simplified and lean.

How might we foster team building, informal bonding and values acquisition internally?

An unclear target user for operations and biases from external stakeholders could make members lose their motivation and sense of ownership. Generate a successful engagement, with more participation or sense of impact, between the users (ideally, the students) and the volunteers are crucial to aliment motivation. On the other hand, allowing them to experiment in a new direction or make more internal knowledge available could boost their attachment to the mission of Poliferie.

Members reported a challenge in maintaining a sense of community in a growing environment, where people start to be foreigners to each other. Indeed, the continuous renovation of the organisational chart generated stronger leadership but raised the feeling of being unheard. It could cause tension and friction in an environment that is fostering opposite values. A stronger bond should be established amongst the volunteers to form stable and truly transparent long-lasting relationships.

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How might we foster user research and understanding to improve members’ mission attachment?

4. INSIGHTS: CYCLE 2

4.3 | CYCLE 3: CO-DESIGN

From the four HMW questions, it stands up that major problems and opportunities to improve the association lies in more integration between the quadfecta areas in terms of:

FRAMEWORK

▶ Coordination and task division, to lower the pressure on key members and redistribute the effort in the association work more efficiently.

If the first and the second cycles looked at the association on the problems-opportunities side, the third cycle attempts to bring solutions to the complex challenges evinced previously. During this iteration, a co-design session, in the form of an internal hackathon, named PoliHack, was designed and conducted to collaboratively generate solutions with a bottom-up approach, responding to the HMW questions.

▶ Close the gap with the target, to generate enhanced motivation, increase the retention rate of Poliferie’s talents, and develop new impactful projects.

CYCLE QUESTIONS

▶ Information and knowledge diffusion, to speed up onboarding, capabilities acquisition and reaction speed in case of emergency.

▶ Affective team building, to build a long-lasting unite transparent community of volunteers capable to become ambassadors of the internal culture.

With an improvement in these aggregate areas, the organisation would be more in control and would guarantee its survival in time.

The second cycle represented an in-depth analysis via interviews of the wicked problems that are affecting the association. For each early detected challenge has been found a network of problems addressable to pivot the direction of the organisation. In the delicate Poliferie’s environment based on volunteering work, lack of time, resources and funds, plus a novice member-base, a set of four HMW is found to drive further research in solution to address these problems. Sustainable changes in the organisational culture and structure must be done by considering the whole system.

Is the association capable to generate solutions internally?

Which degree of change in the organisation will the solutions proposed in the hackathon require?

Will they look for more integration or complication?

Can the organisation implement the solutions easily?

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Three tracks were defined as design questions of the hackathon. They were considering the HWMs defined beforehand. The fourth HMW how might we foster team building, informal bonding and values acquisition internally? was excluded from being a single track. Indeed, it was partially addressed by each track due to the fact that it is focused on improving internal culture and community.

1. How to improve the adoption and sharing of our organizational principles?

The culture track refers to the first HMW, how might we enhance and simplify knowledge transmission amongst the members? The problem to solve here has a main inward direction, looking to an internal need for organisational principles transmission. Being these values transparency, efficiency and ownership, their adoption should improve internal sharing and exchange of information. The solutions could also bring value to the sustainability and resources areas, generating more engagement in the members and more transparency on the management sphere.

2. How to maintain the model of Poliferie in time, growing the number of students reached and volunteers involved?

The growth track considers mainly the second HMW, how might we support the coordinators in managing projects, teams and tasks? The second question aims at both the sides of the association by challenging internal and external issues that could limit scalability in the future. Indeed, it points to the growing number of students reached and new volunteers hired. They are both key assets for impact generation (users and providers indeed), Maintenance of the model means building effective processes and creating an honest environment suitable to welcome new members. Now, most of these efforts are done by the coordinators, who need a new way to approach the future scale of the nonprofit.

3. How to involve our target and, hence, improve our impact?

The mission track derives from the third HMW, how might we foster user research and understanding to improve members’ mission attachment? Instead, the last option requests a specific solution to involve more users and improve the social impact. If apparently it looks a challenge closer to the culture or sustainability area, establishing a new solution of engagement is a matter of establishing new processes. Of course, solutions to this question have clear influences in the adjacent circles, by modifying the organisation impact (sustainability) and by generating better perception of it for the members.

HACKATHON STRUCTURE The hackathon was designed as a condensed version of a design sprint. The design sprint is a design-thinking framework to gather insights quickly by excluding the remaining two phases, building and launching, of a typical new product, service or a feature release on the market. It was invented by Google Ventures in 2010 and brought to the main stage by Knapp, Zeratsky & Kowitz’s book, ‘Sprint: How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days’ (2016). As the title says, it consists in a five days workshop based on six phases: understand, the user and the problem; define, the problem or area to tackle; diverge, look for different possible hypothetical solutions; decide, converge on one or a combination of solutions; prototype, build a highest fidelity possible mock-up; validate, test it with real humans.

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For the Polihack, the timeframe was reduced to a 5-hour sprint, due to availability of the members over the weekend. The time slots were reduced as in the chart fig.4.21.

To balance the brevity of the workshop, teams were kept small and heterogeneous, with senior and junior members, to favours dialogue and rapid exchange. A coordinator was selected to keep track of time. Moreover, most of the members did not know each other

before the co-design session. Hence, the hackathon was also a moment of community generation. Lastly, a presentation was designed to support diversion and decision-making into the groups, which includes dot voting and guiding questions. At the end of it, a brief pitch deck template was provided to guide and standardize presentations.

If the first four phases are left almost untouched, even though simplified in the support material. The last two phases were slightly changed to suit the format. The prototyping session goal shifted to agreeing together about operational parts of the solution decided. Instead, the validation phase summarizes the brainstorming into a pitch deck, to present in the sharing session right after. During it, teams could get relevant feedback about their projects.

2. DATASET The hackathon was a five-hour sprint with 11 teams of four participants for a total of participants, over 2/3 of the association’s members. Four teams were focusing on mission, three on culture, and four on growth. Each team generated one idea for a total of 11 concepts. The dataset base of the analysis is the recording of the hackathon and the set of presentations delivered at the end of the event.

HACKATHON ORGANISATION Topics were selected by the participants via a survey launched two weeks before to collect presences too. And tracks were assigned to guarantee a balance among them. Assigned tracks were communicated five days before the Polihack, with a short description of the challenge to debrief the volunteers. One day before, the teams were instead published to get familiarity with names and faces.

3. ANALYSIS Certainly, the unfamiliarity with the format, the limited time available and the challenge of collaborating with strangers, has produced less detailed concepts. Anyway, to answer the first design question, the association seems to have ideation and concept generation capabilities, at least when provided by a structured framework.

All the solutions were attempting to solve the wicked problems identified in the previous cycle. Indeed, most of the concept proposed changes or upgrades into multiple functions of the Poliferie’s organisational chart. This might mean how members perceive the association or would like to see it in a more integrated perspective. None of the ideas was focusing only on research & development, which displays itself as a hermetic vertical of the organisation, to which most of the members are unfamiliar with.

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Greetings for the organisation of the hackathon goes to Ginevra Ferrarini (HR), which I especially supported in the selection of the topics, set of the design sprint framework and preparation of the presentation. Also, thanks to Andrea Merlo, who contributed to the definition of the framework to team support.

To analyse the 11 projects, first of all, each concept was reported. Then, the key phases of the service spectrum involved were highlighted to understand, if the solution were narrowing down to specific problems. Lastly, a rada, based on the social organisation quadfecta, has been structured. The aim is to represent the degree of change related to consequent benefit, that the organisation would undergo if the project is actually deployed.

parts inside or outside the system. The higher the level, the higher degree of complexity is present and more intensive change is required. Two diagrams, showing the levels of organisational differentiation and learning (based on four degrees of difference), are reported to draw a parallel with the radar designed to interpret the project.

The radar has been built by dividing each quadrant into three concentric levels.

In different parts of the organisational theory (Jones, 2013), different concentric charts represent how designing into an organisation means dealing with multiple layers, starting from the individual, moving to a team that solves a function, then to the greater In the radar are presented three degrees of change and organised on the following ladder: 1. Inner circle → Improvement: changes happen in a known environment, usually regarding few members, with low risk of downsides.

2. Middle circle → Transitional: changes happen in a border environment, touching more members with some risk of failure.

3. Outer circle → Transformational: changes happen in an unknown environment, where members have to face new challenges, learn new competencies and high risk of backfire is likely.

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Ideally, the third level changes allow a greater step forward for the organisation. Second ones less, and first-level the minimum.

The changes per each area were set in this way:

CULTURE → Change in values Enrichment or change in perception of the organizational values at the cost of a learning effort. ▶ L1 - Communication of the values externally; ▶ L2- Implementation of the values internally; ▶ L3- Implementation of the values internally and externally.

SUSTAINABILITY → Changes in sustainability Reduction in operational costs, efforts and/or increase of impact in terms of reach, target, engagement, et al. ▶ L1 - More impact at a reduced effort; ▶ L2 - More impact at a good effort; ▶ L3 - More impact at an expensive effort.

RESOURCES → Changes in competencies Required the implementations of new tools and the learning of new competencies to implement the project successfully ▶ L1 - Shift the attention on a new stakeholder; ▶ L2 - Learning a new tool and coordinate a new team; ▶ L3 - Do something we never did before.

PROCESSES → Changes in tasks, role or teams It demands the assignment of a new task or the remodelling of internal structure. ▶ L1- Add/Change tasks; ▶ L2 - Change of few roles in actual teams;

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▶ L3- Building of new teams to deploy the project.

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phase, but still, it is impressive the difference. What is worthwhile to notice is that wicked problems are gripped in the organisation, and the projects raise steeply the complexity of the system in the attempt to contrast them.

4. INSIGHTS ▶ Almost every concept presented requests a significant change in at least two areas of the matrix. Namely, a step further in management and coordination has to be done. ▶ Fostering internal sharing and ideation can lead to producing concepts to be tested; Namely, ideation is not a critical area that Service Design should focus on in connecting strategy and operations. ▶ Most of the solutions attempt to increase internal integration and social fabric between members, even digitally. Awfully, the raise in this direction usually does not consider the downsides and management cost of proposing multiple roles and responsibilities to members that might be already contributing at maximum.

From the analysis, it emerges that the solutions proposed touch all the steps of the service spectrum, confirming how members have a vision on the service and require more integration to optimize resources available.

Instead, the data coming from the radar revealed that the projects require a medium-high degree of change. With 12 degrees of change per radar and 11 projects, there are 132 levels, which represents the top amount. The total sum of the ideas’ values reaches 98 points. 47 on 66 grades in the strategic areas (culture and sustainability) and 51 on 66 grades in the operational one (resources and processes), showing slightly unbalanced distribution. On a scale between, 0, simplification and, 100 complexity, the concepts from the Polihack will position on the value 74. Hence, the projects generated, even though valid, requires a significant organisational effort to be executed. In a volunteering environment that is difficult to plan with limited resources, it is not ideal to set a future roadmap.

▶ If collaboratively generated concepts could be effective for results and long-term support to the association, more laborious seems their implementation due to lack of time and human resources, namely competencies and capabilities. What if Service Design could support this arduous passage thanks to its envisioning and organizing competencies?

Lastly, the hackathon results are collected, analysed and processed by the “board-team”.

This process can lead to a growing sense of distance in the bottom-up and top-down relationship detected in the interviews cycle.

The Polihack was a true moment of community. With the brainpower of over 40 members, 11 bottom-up collaboratively-designed concepts were generated to tackle wicked problems identified by the HMWs. However, most of them result in a demand for a high degree of internal change that the association does not have the capability to face now. Even though this might look like a failure, the third cycle actually opens an opportunity to the Service Design discipline. Namely, to become facilitator and enabler of the implementation process.

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One last consideration comes from the update of the Poliferie’s offering map with the latest ideas. The association has a limited and selected offer of service and supports (internal guides) at the moment, both internally and externally. Instead, the chart highlights how the offering map would be drastically mutated if the solutions from the hackathon would be implemented. It is not realistic that all the ideas reach the final

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1. Scenario 2. Concept 3. Prototype 4. Next Steps

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Project

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The three cycles of field research evidenced step-by-step the necessity of having a more structured knowledge once new projects need to be designed, tested and implemented.

From the first iteration, it was noticeable how the service and the organisational level are tight together by multiple bonds, due to the small size of the association and, especially, the fact that it is based fully on volunteers. Their competencies and motivation are the fuel that allows the whole system to work properly. If members do not feel connected to the mission, easily they will reroute their free time to other activities, reducing the added value for Poliferie.

During the second cycle, HMWs summarised complex problems that affect the organisation and could jeopardize its future. Four questions were defined regarding knowledge transmission diffusely (#1), responsibility division and guidance by the coordinators (#2), improved user research and enhance motivation (#3), generation of a more engaged internal community (#4).

These HMWs were used to design a co-design session in the third loop. Aim of the activity was to find a possible solution to implement. Actually, these concepts obtained were considered valuables, but often required changes in the four areas of the organisation quadfecta. In an association capable of managing barely all the operations over the proxy for office, deploying similar projects is a risk that could be expensive in terms of time, efforts, and resources.

These learning loops manifested that the service design competitive advantage, for a similar organisation, is not restricted to the conceptualization phase (including the part of user research). Organisational members if tutored properly, as Polihack taught, could generate valid ideas. Consequently, SD might have a broader impact if capable to influence more widely that organisational processes. Indeed, by joining partially the previous HMWs a new question has been generated to attempt to provide a solution to information and responsibilities distribution, as well as user research and members engagement.

CYCLE QUESTION

How might we guide and support the members of Poliferie in developing new solutions to solve internal challenges and improve service offering?

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MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITHIN THE TASK-FORCE FOR ORIENTATION In the middle of April, I was added to a new-born team: the task-force for orientation. It is a temporary team built to tackle the need of taking advantage of the COVID-19 lockdown to provide useful information to the students that attend schools and orientation days.

The 8 members of the team were divided among roles in communication (coordination, social media, visual design, events), research (coordination and platform development) and cities (for the youngest age and on the field presence). The initial brief was to produce contents about the orientation from high-school to university to publish on our social media. If the scope was quite clear, the process to release the first content took 1 month and 3 weeks since I was involved, namely 18th of May, published almost at the end of the strong lock-down in Italy.

In the first calls to set up the project, I found myself as a mediator and director of design and organisation choices: ▶ I’ve researched for examples of similar contents designed by other media and pages; ▶ I’ve break-down their production in a Google Doc guide to transfer the knowledge to the other members; ▶ I’ve pushed on polling relevant questions from the users, to obtain a database of doubts and problems to face in the series; ▶ Foster process simplification (in setting up the recording and post-producing the videos, as well as publication) and timeline definition; ▶ Designed tutorials to educate other members about digital production.

The ongoing project now it has a good-enough tasks division that is requiring shorter and less frequent calls to be adjusted. Anyway, at the moment, it is still missing a KPIs to assess our operations and a thoughtful distribution path. We are working to collect data and adjust the project in the next months.

I would take the task-force as an example/use cases of the usefulness and necessity of a service design approach to drive internal project management, considering all the limitations of an NGO. A brief journey of the experience is reported in the following pages to highlight and understand interactions between members and teams on a timeline.

It is visible how disorganisation causes time loss and unclarity between the members, leading to lower quality outcomes.

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5.1 | SCENARIO

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NEW PRODUCT/SERVICE PROCESS From this analysis, the new product/service development process is mapped to understand how the association collects opportunities, evolve them in concepts, make decisions, build the solution to test and deploy the final package.

Poliferie showed to have different structured methods during the journey. Starting from the data collections techniques as interviews, surveys and polls to submit to users - students - and stakeholders - teachers, speakers, etc. After this step, regular meetings to share feedback, opportunities for improvements or adjust the strategy are held almost every week. Moreover, an automatic horizontal feedback system built-in Slack supports cross-members assessment. In the third step, semester reunions, co-design activities like the hackathon, and a general spreadsheet always open to report new solutions allows ideas generation. Lastly, the green-light comes from a pool of coordinators and members of the board (co-founders). At this moment, the idea should translate into a possible project. Anyhow, after a small group or a person took ownership of the new initiative, there is no infrastructure to follow in building the actual prototype. Consequently, the connection between the willingness to solve a problem and the real scalability of the solution looks like a foggy path with no clear route.

Comparing the diagram with the evolution of a concept proposed by Crawford and Di Benedetto (2014), Poliferie results having a great capability to capture new ideas and opportunities, and as well to scale it later through its network of members and schools, but it is unable to generate testable concepts in a systematic way.

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Moreover, in their ‘The Open book of Social Innovation’, Nesta and the Young Foundation (2010) propose key areas to focus during each phase of the growth of a social enterprise (fig 5.3). Poliferie’s suits perfectly in this scenario for characteristics

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In conclusion, Poliferie should clearly take action on these respects if it wants to be capable of guaranteeing longevity and dynamism to its system. Hence, there is a clear opportunity that Service Design can take to improve the organisation’s integration, competencies and capability to respond to environmental changes.

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and challenges. Excluding cash for the volunteering nature, infrastructure and supply chain since the association is a pure service provider, during the Product Development phase, four respects coincide with the association’s wicked issues. Namely, CEO, team and volunteers - hence, motivation, unity and capabilities -, information and formation knowledge transmission -, communities benefits - user research and social impact -, and product and services - new offering and service improvements - are considered as pillars to achieve the maturity phase.

PERSONAS Four personas are generated from aggregate data of the past three cycles of research and my personal experience in the task-force. Along with other key teams/persons required for the process, they will be the main actors of a sample project developing journey. ▶ Anna is one of the co-founders of the organisation and she is intrinsically motivated in pursuing the mission. She is the actual coordinator of the new project and should give the rhythm to the process. ▶ Paolo is an early member who joined the association to satisfy his passion for hardworking for social causes. He feels that has the knowledge to support the process, but he is not able to create awareness about the roadmap to follow. ▶ Samuele is a member since one year and with his professional background and by having a vertical role in the local team and a horizontal role in graphic design, he can understand the two sides of the organisation but does not have energy to support the project. ▶ Francesca, lastly, is a new-entry in Poliferie. She has good, fresh smart ideas to share. But due to her inexperience in team working, she risks to hide in the shadows and not collaborate.

These users represents the main actors of a new team born to accomplish a novel series of contents without previous experience in the field.

USERS JOURNEY MAP: STATUS QUO At the state-of-the-art, the users’ journey map is an abstraction of what happened during the task-force onboarding process.

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The vertical phases are divided by the steps of the problem-solution timeline reported before. If the journey looks clear before the creation of a new team, with clear roles, reporting flows and information exchanges, after, the interaction becomes chaotic.

Indeed, at the moment new members start to collaborate, a buffer moment is needed to know each other and understand different. This leads to misunderstandings, especially, when priorities are not defined. The weekly agenda starts to get fuzzy and key decisions are postponed to the deadline. The final results of the process is a working prototype which is deployed with lower quality control and poorer outcomes, at a higher effort.

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WHAT IF? From the scenario analysis a ‘what if’ question is formulated to guide the design process of the framework.

What if the organisation could implement a diffuse lean design process to manage projects requiring organisation change?

What if Service Design could foster better project management by providing a lean and light-touch framework to define project management by reducing efforts and risks?

5.2 | CONCEPT

WHAT: a framework to combine strategy (opportunity definition, goal, user needs, service features) and operation (roles, competencies, planning and evaluation) in a guided and easy-to-follow process of design and management for mid/long-term projects that involve organisational changes.

WHO: For coordinators and project managers, as facilitators, and for team members as collaborators.

WHY: Because members with no background in design or project management do not have the competencies to guide the development process. Consequently, it can lead to poor results, time loss, extra effort, internal friction and miscommunication due to the complexity of the challenge.

HOW: A template to guide question by question the team from understanding the problem, to divide the tasks, and define an operation timeline. Plus, a guide to explain the tool step-by-step for novices that approach the tool.

WHERE: On digital collaborative support with (barely) no learning curve for the volunteers. So that they can focus on developing the contents properly. Google Slides for the templates and Google Sites for the guide.

WHEN: At the beginning of a new project, once the decision to pursue an opportunity or plan is made and a new team starts to be built.

The design facilitator will support the members of Poliferie who need to develop a new mid/long-term project (involving organisational changes) by providing a digital collaborative tool (guidelines + editable template) to guide them simply and clearly into the design process.

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The team will enter with an identified opportunity and exit with a framework to guide the development and validation of a solution.

The goals of the project are plural and on multiple layers. However, the main and more generic aim of the tool is to smooth the curve of effort required by the association in launching new projects (services or products, both internally and externally). Displaying on a simple diagram effort and time (fig.5.4), it is visible how through the different iterations without guidance, the curve could rise and fall, as happened in the sample journey.

The remaining goals could be organised on two layers: First of all, on the project level in terms of a service quality improvement, the design facilitator purposes to enhance the outcomes by: 1. Including user perspective of needs at the beginning as the starting point of the process; 2. Narrowing down the scope of the project to an actionable and feasible perimeter to evaluate after each prototype; 3. Fostering a competitive vision of the market and basic benchmarking; 4. Favouring internal cooperation, transparency and ; 5. Providing a sequential structure, based on milestones, and basic design knowledge to improve decision-making among members.

6. Reducing uncertainty and complexity in approaching the various phases of design management.

And on the organisational level in terms of internal environment improvement, the tool aims to foster mindset and competencies change in the members by: 1. Fostering problem definition and user-centred research approaches as sources of competitive advantage; 2. Encouraging internal collaboration in the team, by adopting participatory models of discussion and decision-making; 3. Enhancing the exchange of knowledge among the teams, by creating a common language and standards in project definition; 4. Giving a standard comprehensive vision of key milestones that could be shared internally;

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5. Improving the collaboration with the outside in terms of skills acquired and management competencies (applicable in personal professional life or for projects with Poliferie’s stakeholders); 6. Adopting an approach capable of measuring results to strategically guide the association.

7. Transforming tacit knowledge and information management in explicit processes.

Hence, the advantages could be bi-fold, on both service quality and organisational culture and structure.

SERVICE DESIGN’S ROLE IN TIME The role of the service designer would change in time and in relation to the acquisition of the tool. In the first phase, the designer is a physical facilitator to guide the novice participants through the design process. This step could happen or during a training workshop to coordinators, where the designer could work as an educator to transmit the knowledge to use the tool among the future project managers. Or, it could happen during the first project using the design facilitator, acting as an enabler of the process. In a second moment, the design role shifts to a supporting role, backing up coordinator if they need guidance or solve any issues. Lastly, the designer would become a supervisor and research, gathering feedback and collaborating with project managers to improve or reformulate the framework.

REQUIREMENTS TABLE Most of the Poliferie’s user base does not have any project or design management knowledge, for both educational background or short professional experience. Hence, it is crucial for the tool to adopt the simplest approach and explanatory tone of voice possible, guiding the users step-by-step.

Secondly, the association would like to engage and involve new members in the future that are not necessarily graduated as is now. In this sense, it is necessary to lower the learning curve and make the tool comprehensible by users that might not have an academic background.

Moreover, digitalisation and usage of software peaks differences on the geographical territory of Italy, leading to different competencies in IT and tools. Though, it is necessary to set the design facilitator on an easy-to-use platform, namely the Google Suite one. Indeed, the association already provides all the assets on this platform and Google Slides is widely known. Moreover, the tool should be accessible from everywhere

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GOALS

and allow collaborative sessions. Google Slides satisfy all these requirements, by being cloud-based with desktop, browser and mobile apps.

members that might have the right skill set and interest. Once the team is completed, the tasks should be equally distributed, based on the previous respects.

Lastly, the association established Saturday as a proxy for the office time, when focusing most of the calls and activities. To guarantee participation and engagement, the tool design should consider this day as a keyframe of the process.

Time: time is a critical variable of a project that might not be considered strategic. Actually, the right timing could be a pivot for project success. Then, it is mandatory to understand how the tasks will take place to assure no bottleneck would block the process. Moreover, key milestones should be put in place to set responsibilities and work with a deadline in mind.

TOOL STRUCTURE The design facilitator aims to guide a team from the identification of a problem/ opportunity to the definition of the solution, the required roles and competencies, the timeline of deployment and the evaluation of the results. To do so, the tool integrates the organisational perspective and the service perspective in five stages. These follow the areas of the social organisation quadfecta to foster integration on one hand, and on the other, they could be associated with the steps on the service spectrum, synthesis of others service design tools (Chapter 2: Service Spectrum). Moreover, each step alternates a series of divergent explorative thinking to convergent selective decision-making, which is theorized in the double-diamond design process of the British Design Council (2019).

The double-diamond model of discovery, definition, development and delivery, plus the Design Sprint method (Google Ventures, 2010) is the backbone of the tool in regards to the overall process. Indeed, the design facilitator guides initially the exploration and stepby-step the definition of the internal processes, until the setup of the concept evaluation.

Results: Finally, to make sure that a project is on track and satisfies goals and user needs it is indispensable to set at least one key performance index (KPI), namely a collectable parameter, a data or a value, which reports information about or the status of success of the operation. It is the connection that allows closing the loop with the first chapter of the tool. With a solid understanding of the results that the project is having, the team would know if the goal is achieved or not, and could act consequently in the next iteration.

The five identified topics of project definition and organisation are: Research: before looking into a practical solution, especially in complex situations, it is necessary to have an initial research moment. Firstly, the aim of the project, namely problems to be solved, needs to be explored, questioning the scope of the intention and the needs that the final user has along with the stakeholders. Then, with a divergent perspective, how other players responded to the same problems is investigated to have a benchmark of the possible solutions.

Solution: after collecting a package of strategic information and with a defined goal for the project, it is time to converge on one solution to respond to user needs and achieve the goal. It is the moment to become practical and agree together on the best possible solution. Less stress is placed on the competencies or the viability of the solution to decide the best option, but it should be obviously taken into consideration.

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Team: Once the solution is defined, it is then needed to build the correct team to deliver it. Building a team means understanding if the persons that are now engaged have the competencies (both hard and soft), and the capabilities (mainly time, but also other resources) to bring the project to life. If not, it is the case of looping in other team

The tools are designed for four 60 minutes sessions that should take place during the Saturday’s proxy for the office. In this way, at the end of the fourth week, the team would have a practical framework to guide the pilot of the project.

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During each week, mainly one of the five phases is touched. A slight overlap of two phases happens in the second week, bridging research with solutions, and opening the team phase. The remaining six days are used for further research and exploration on the topic and lead to meaningful decisions during the one-hour session.

Each session is structured with a moment of review and sharing of the weekly advances, a collective brainstorm about the key topic, a process of decision-making and summary, and lastly, a preview of the next week’s topic, to debrief the team ahead of the working week.

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TIMEFRAME AND SESSIONS

Here there is a breakdown of the activities of each session.

▶ 1. REVIEW (10’): Where did you leave on the last call? Let’s recap openly! ▶ 2. DECIDE (10’): How? Assign tasks to each teammate, supported by dot voting. ▶ 3. PLAN (10’): When? What needs to be done first and what can wait? ▶ 4. BRAINSTORM (15’): When? Open perspectives on the timeline.

WEEK 1 → Research session (1:15’)

▶ 5. PREVIEW (5’): Results

▶ 0. WARM-UP (15’): Team building and get to know each other. ▶ 1. GOAL (15’): Why? What is the problem to be solved. ▶ 2. USER (15’): Who? And which are the challenges the user is facing? ▶ 3. CASE STUDIES (15’): Who else is proposing solutions to similar challenges? ▶ 4. BRAINSTORM (10’): What? Open perspectives on various solutions. ▶ 5. PREVIEW (5’): Team

WEEK 4 > Plan and Evaluation session (60’) ▶ 0. REVIEW (10’): Where did you leave on the last call? Let’s recap openly! ▶ 1. DECIDE (10’): When? Fit steps and milestones on a timeline. ▶ 1. SET EVALUATION (15’): Discuss now how can you easily understand the performance of the project ▶ 3. DECIDE (10’): Decide the best KPI and set it on the timeline.

WEEK 2 > Concept session (60’)

▶ 4. RECAP (15’): Do a brief recap using the sum-up slides after each decision process. It will be useful to share internally to the team, or the association.

▶ 0. REVIEW (15’): Where did you leave on the last call? Let’s recap openly! ▶ 1. DECIDE (15’): What? Decide the solution to test, supported by dot voting.

▶ 3. BRAINSTORM (15’): How? Open perspectives on team. Is anything missing? ▶ 4. PREVIEW (5’): Time

WEEK 3 > Definition session (60’) ▶ 0. SUM-UP (10’): If new members joined the team, it is best practise to summarize the process, goals and challenges of the project to generate positive participation and avoid any feeling of “freelancing” support.

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USER JOURNEY MAP: WITH DESIGN FACILITATOR Implementing the design facilitator would allow the team to face a better-organised journey compared to the previous one. Indeed, the four sessions act as columns that set the discussion topics and guide the steps in the weeks after the initial debriefing. Once the tool time is over, the team would have most of the crucial decisions made and be able to organize internally, nail the deadlines set and test, evaluate and iterate the solution, and, finally, deliver an astonishing service/product.

Interaction between team members and external collaborators is made simpler and information mismatches reduced at a minimum thanks to the data collected into the tool template.

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▶ 2. ASSIGN (10’): How? Which competencies, roles and people you need.

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BENEFITS Expected benefits of implementing the design facilitator fall into each of the four areas of the social organisation quadfecta.

Indeed, for the culture area, internal values of ownership, efficiency and transparency would be supported by a practical tool. Moreover, projects would have a standard structure to facilitate comparisons and communication.

In terms of sustainability, improved user understanding and results from evaluation would drive better decisions in a shorter time and costs. Consequently, less risk would be taken to guarantee Poliferie’s social impact, with better quality.

Instead, on the process subject, thanks to the structured timeframe, prototypes or pilots would be available in the standard time of 4 to 5 weeks with steps and efforts defined ahead. This means that members could organise themselves better and know when they should participate in the process. Furthermore, the shift to a more explicit knowledge could streamline information transmission.

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Lastly, in the resource area, volunteers would be able to acquire design knowledge as well as project management skills, which could contribute to the Poliferie’s give-back, claimed by many. Moreover, educational moments of sharing in the team and cross-team would be fostered.

5.3 | PROTOTYPE After designing the framework, a working prototype of the template is designed to be tested and receive critique from the members of the association. The prototype of the template has been realised in Google Slides for the previous requirement of accessibility and simplicity.

Master slides are reported below and key features are commented. ▶ Concept explanatory introduces each phase by explaining briefly the main subject of the discussion and in which perspective approach it.

Talking about visual and communication design, the template is divided in four sessions identified by a cover to mark the transition. Instead, the five phases are highlighted with covers in red (goal and user), blue (solution), pink (team), green (planning). All the elements of the other slides are coloured with the same reference tone to reinforce the concept.

▶ Discussion reports key questions to nurture and focus the discussion on the right respects.

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In each page is present a box on the right-hand side reporting key questions to answer or guidelines to follow in the specific step. On the left, an empty box supports the discussion and allows the coordinator or other members to write notes. Moreover, every step has a timer indicating the minutes dedicated. Lastly, in the comment section, a tip and an example are written to facilitate the process.

▶ Preview displays a pop-up introducing the next week topic

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▶ Decision-making supports the team to converge on one solution with voting dots

▶ Synthesis helps to summarize the decision-making into a key slide to pin in the presentation

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▶ Brainstorm includes some suggestions for the during the week research and gives extra space and minutes to explore the subject.

TEST With a prototype built, the test is set up following the service prototyping framework (Blomkvist, 2011 and Passera, Maila and Kärkkäinen, 2012).

Specifically, it happens in the convergent phase of the last diamond of the overall process with the purpose of understanding if the tool (both structure and communication) results are clear, easy to comprehend, accessible and usable. Hence, gathering early feedback on the value of the project. Moreover, it could be helpful to assess if it is too complex or structured and needs simplification.

FEEDBACK The testing session resulted in a positive sharing moment. All the users shared that the tool could surely help the association and they were surprised by the difference in time and quality the task-force process and this process could have. Moreover, the value in making knowledge explicit and shareable, and supporting the definition of the goals was recognized.

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The high-fidelity prototype realised in Google Slides is tested with 4 task-force members, since they faced a similar challenge to the one the tool wants to solve.

Furthermore, since they are a heterogeneous mix of coordinators in other teams, local members active on the field, it is a good combination of roles and expertise. Also, one designer, external to the task-force, took part to give a design critique, as well as a not biased opinion from the experience. Through a 45 minutes Google Meet’s online call, the attendees are guided by myself, designer of the design facilitator, into the tool shared via a link (15 minutes) and then, for the remaining time (30 minutes), a feedback session takes place.

In particular, four respects are mainly touched by the feedback and might influence the evolution of the project. First of all, the time span of four weeks felt maybe too long and it was suggested to develop a compact version for minor projects. On the other hand, since it is not the aim of the framework to operate in the short-term, it shows the willingness to have a lean and shorter process for micro-projects. Secondly, it was questioned the absence of a guided prototyping phase to complete the process.

However, since long term projects could be tested at a distance of months rather than in the immediate, the tool was designed to provide the foundations to test and not the guidance. In third place, a concern about focusing on only one solution was perceived as risky. A suggestion to have a backup plan emerged. Further explanations should be inserted into the guide to support the selection of the solutions and their prioritization before testing. Indeed, the tool is thought to design one single testable solution at the time. Other options could be kept in the tool template and brought back later in case of failure. Lastly, an improved visual support system was advised to help the discussion more and engage with the team-mates.

The second is a guide to the tool that is designed on a Google Sites webpage.

The guide includes the explanation of the overall process and of the specific sessions.

It would be a useful resource to approach the tool or to refresh the knowledge for the coordinators before a call. ↳ https://bit.ly/DesFac-Guide

DELIVERABLES To enable Poliferie to operate the process independently following the three steps of design role (education, support, supervision and improvement), the association would receive two main deliverables: the tool template and the guide to explain how to use it.

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The first, as mentioned, would be a Google Slide presentation, uploaded as a standard template into the Poliferie’s team Drive system. It includes all the slides to support the process. After the process is completed, a project recap presentation, with all the synthesis slides is exported in pdf format. It could be uploaded in a folder shared with the whole association to enhance information transmission among the members. ↳ bit.ly/DesFac-Template

NEXT STEPS Three steps would follow the completion of the thesis to successfully implement the tool in the association. Before that, the comments from the preliminary feedback session would be considered. Anyhow, a better explanation of the scope of the tool would be provided to use in the proper conditions.

The journey to deploy the usage of the tool in the association consists in: ▶ EDUCATE: The first step would be to organize a general call amongst coordinators and interested members to share the tool functionalities and explain all the work done with a sample journey. It would be the moment of onboarding, from when the use of the tool should start. ▶ TEST: The second step consists in supporting the coordinators in key selected projects and monitoring the usage of the Design Facilitator to make sure that the process is clear. At the same time, feedback is collected to improve the tool in its second version. ▶ IMPROVE: The third and last step would be the consideration of the feedback emerged from the early users. Especially the integration of a fifth prototyping session to give guidance also about this moment of the design journey.

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The options to develop a shorter framework would be also evaluated. However, the acquisition of design and project management knowledge, it would help to approach problems by following similar dynamics automatically. Obviously, the assimilation of the mindset requires time and if the tool could lead to evident results, the passage could be boosted.

The four iterative cycles allowed the passage from an open perspective about how Service Design could be included in a social organisation, in this case Poliferie, to a specific solution to tackle contextual problems that affect the association.

At the beginning of the inquiry, the focus was oriented to evidence challenges in service delivery generating or caused in the organisational level.

These problems were then explored thoroughly and marked as wicked conditions of the system from a top-down perspective. In the last field research cycle, solutions were generated in a bottom-up co-design session. However, even if the concepts could be effective, they did not include the organisational perspective, demanding resources and changes that are not sustainable. This led to shift the attention of Service Design from an ideation or delivery dimension of services to the project management one, adopting an enabling middle-man role.

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the organisation is to be able to tackle properly and strategically these respects, which anyway it is an organisational challenge. To support Poliferie in efficiently designing more effective solutions, a tool, the Design Facilitator, has been developed. It summarizes design methods and tools used by service designers in a digestible language for every member without a specific design background. The tool is also set on the organisation’s timeframe and integrated with the already known tools, allowing a flat learning curve, easy accessibility and smooth integration.

The Design Facilitator concludes the actionresearch process, by moving to the actual implementation of a tool that could enable the association success in the long-term, by simplifying and speeding up projects development

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Conclusion

1. General 2. For Poliferie 3. For Social Organisations 4. For Service Design

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GENERAL The aim of the thesis was to understand what could be the role of Service Design in combining the service and the organisational levels of a small-medium social organisation.

Four iterative learning cycles, backed by a background desk research (appendix B), were completed to investigate the topic in a real environment, namely the nonprofit organisation Poliferie.

From the review of the literature, it clearly emerges how Social Economy contributes to a system’s wellbeing. Indeed, it covers the gaps in offering left open by the private and the public sectors, by providing key services and aiming to generate social impact. SE organisations often have an informal nature, based on individuals cooperating around the social mission. However, to scale social value and impact, it is crucial to design thoroughly the complex system of culture, structure, competencies and processes on which the organisation is built. Indeed, social organisations, especially based on volunteering, face extra challenges compared to a standard for-profit business. Namely, to guarantee their survival it is mandatory to curate the internal community of members and foster engagement, as well as developing sustainable flows in terms of resources, time and expenses. To do so, Service Design could be a fundamental actor due to its envisioning and multi-disciplinary capabilities. Thanks to its human-centred, collaborative, iterative, sequential, real and holistic approach, it could generate an integrated system connecting the different layers of complexity to be kept in consideration.

In the last iteration (cycle 4), Service Design found its actionability in the system, by assuming the role of internal facilitator and enabling the development of new projects (both internal and external). Indeed, the discipline has the capability to discover user needs, design human-centred solutions, organise people and processes, map results and evaluate them, and lastly, engage collaboratively with the journey association’s members and relevant stakeholders.

The final outcome results in a collaborative tool, the design facilitator, a framework to guide the process of designing long-term projects (service, product, event, etc.) that requires organisational changes, which could be operated autonomously by the members after a quick on-boarding.

The journey of this action-research unearthed the potential that Service Design could have if applied in the early stage of a Social Organisation, by providing an integrated and systemic approach to the organisation, as well as including user perspective to improve social impact and driving decision-making.

To conclude, the social organisation quadfecta and the service spectrum would need further validation and research, but might be a useful simplified framework of analyses. Over than this, in the following pages, a bullet point list of outcomes and insights is reported as a sort of vademecum of the synthesis of the thesis.

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These reasons promoted an inquiry in the case study association Poliferie to define the possible role that Service Design could have in tackling complex problems that affect the organisation and can jeopardize its future. During the investigation, connections between issues raising in the service level and the organisation structure and culture (cycle 1) were identified. Then, with in-depth interviews, those challenges emerged as wicked problems with multiple causes in clustered different areas of the association leadership, talent retention, motivation, education, communication, etc (cycle 2). From this discovery, a co-design session was conducted to find solutions. If the concepts resulted were interesting, a lack of consideration for the organisational dimension was spotted. Namely, a vision of changes, internal reorganisations, new competencies and capabilities required to reach the goals proposed (cycle 3).

FOR POLIFERIE ▶ A dedicated analysis of the complex problems the organisation is facing; ▶ The Design facilitator tool design specifically for the association’s needs; ▶ An academic publication in design to support its growth and innovation.

FOR SERVICE DESIGN ▶ When Service Designers are part of a small-medium organisation, their role could aim to an organisational dimension, scaling their impact throughout the whole system. ▶ Project management is not prioritized in the Service Designer toolbox. Actually, in organisations that aim to generate social impact and are composed of multidisciplinary volunteers, it becomes a key resource to drive impactful results quickly. ▶ Being part of a social organisation, it could boost the Service Designer capability to visualise the wider spectrum of a service driven by real user needs and not profit and include an experience of designing for plural stakeholders in an organisation system.

FOR SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS ▶ Including a Service Design perspective in the early stage could save time, effort and failures in defining the organisation’s offering iteratively. ▶ Adopting a Service Design perspective could lead to the identification of systemic problems to solve via organisational change and processes streamlining. ▶ Integration should be the goal to pursue survival and success. Building a strong internal cohesive community generates a competitive advantage, the transparency and the stability required.

FOR SOCIAL ECONOMY ▶ Any form of social impact is valuable, starting from the local stakeholders. However, social organisations should improve their internal structure and culture to scale their benefits and expand their social value. ▶ Digital collaborative tools allow remote work and organisational speed. Visionary corporations (like Slack and Google) are willing to offer them for free to support the social economy mission. It is a unique occasion to adopt digitalisation and boost the achievement of ambitious goals.

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▶ Approaching the social economy as a common for-profit business does not lead to sustainable organisations. Social organisations require innovation to find new organisational structures, cultures and business models and generate values for the final users and reach sustainability.

1. References 2. Appendix A: Cycle 2 Clusters 3. Appendix B: Validation Process

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References & Appendix

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M MARTIN, R., 2009. The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking Is The Next Competitive Advantage. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.

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REYNOLDS, G., COX, C.L., FRITZ, N., HADLEY, D. and ZADRA, R.J., Dec 21, 2018-last update, A Playbook for Designing Social Impact Measurement. Available: https://ssir.org/ articles/entry/a_playbook_for_designing_social_impact_measurement [Jul 7, 2020].

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APPENDIX A: CYCLE 2 CLUSTERS

SANDERS, E.B. and STAPPERS, P.J., 2008. Co-creation and the new landscapes of design.

International Journal of CoCreation in Design and the Arts, 4(1), pp. 5-18.

SANGIORGI, D. and PRENDIVILLE, A., 2015. A Theoretical Framework for Studying Service Design Practices: First Steps to a Mature Field. Design Management Journal, 9(1), pp. 61-73.

SCHNEIDER, B., 1987. The People Make the Place. Personnel Psychology, 20, pp. 437453.

SHOSTACK, G.L., 1984. Designing services that deliver. Harvard Business Review, 62(1), pp. 133.

SMIRCICH, L., 1983. Concepts of Culture and Organizational Analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 28, pp. 373-390.

STICKDORN, M., LAWRENCE, A. and SCHNEIDER, J., 2018. This is Service Design Doing.

1 edn. O’Reilly Media, Inc. STRINGER, E.T., 2014. Action Research. 4 edn. Sage Publications, Inc.

T TEECE, D.J., PISANO, G. and SHUEN, A., 1997. Dynamic capabilities and strategic management. Strategic Management Journal, 18(7), pp. 509-534.

THOMPSON, M., 2020. Social Economy and Social Enterprise. International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 12.

TUKKER, A. and TISCHNER, U., 2006. Product-services as a research field: past, present and future. Reflections from a decade of research. Journal of Cleaner Production, 14, pp.

1552-1556.

TYKKYLAINEN, S. and RITALA, P., 2020. Business model innovation in social enterprises: An activity system perspective. Journal of Business Research, pp. 1-14.

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YOO, Y. and KIM, K., 2015. How Samsung became a design powerhouse. Harvard Business Review, 93(9), pp. 72-78.

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APPENDIX B: VALIDATION PROCESS

RICCARDO AGOSTO SERVICE DESIGNER I am a product-service system designer. In my projects I always look for consistency, drawing a line from user research, through the concept, up to strategy and identity.

Key points to succeed in the actual digital

www.riccardoagosto.cloud

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market. I love unusual points of view and I like to understand ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ behind an idea to map and capture its advantages to successfully innovate, by generating new perspectives.

www.poliferie.org