Over time my immediate bookshelf has resolved itself into three categories.
Writing, drawing and systems.
I have more books than shelf space in my office.
Every once in a while I cull them, moving ones that I don’t read often into storage.
On my systems shelf is a slim tome called “Systems thinking in the public sector” by John Seddon, a title that I picked up in a charity shop in 2019.
It’s one of the few books that had such an impact that I wrote to the author, who kindly invited me to a seminar.
The big idea, the one that changed how I looked at things and underpins my research now, is that you have to think differently about services than products.
In essence, when you run a manufacturing operation that makes products your objective is to reduce variation from a nominal value.
You want all your car doors to be identical – if they all vary a little that’s going to be problematic.
As you vary from that box you’re trying to make costs go up and quality suffers.
In services, however, the nominal value is not quite as easy to grasp.
Take what I do, for example. If you’re doing carbon accounting it’s easy to start by reaching for an objective standard – the GHG protocol, the UK’s SECR and so on. You ask – what must we do, how do we know we’re doing it right?
The answer, unsatisfyingly, is that it depends. Guidance is descriptive rather than prescriptive.
A few quick examples. If you have a large UK portfolio and a small global one, can you just focus on the large one? Similarly, if a particular raw material is the bulk of your Scope 3, can you focus on just that category. If you’re in a hard to abate sector is it ok to set targets for just the elements of emissions that you control?
In situations like these, the approach we take is a negotiation – leaders, advisers and auditors review the position and talk about how to approach it and agree what to do next.
And each company does this differently, in a way that’s often squiggly.
The data collection and reporting service we design for these different companies has to be able to cope with the variety of demands they have – a one-size-fits-all solution often isn’t enough.
If you’re selling a box – something that focuses on reducing variation, that standardises, systematises an approach, then you probably have customers.
If you’re designing a service that wraps around the individual needs of the stakeholders in an organisation – then you probably have clients.
What matters is knowing the difference.
Handcrafted insight 