Lou  Downe 

Yes, hello! See, it was worth waiting for that, wasn't it?!

Yes, it's really good to be here. I'm going to be talking today about services, that's no surprise. That's pretty much the only thing I talk about, but it's hopefully going to be interesting, entertaining, there'll be some stories, some funny ones, embarrassing ones. So, I now run an organisation called The School of Good Services, it's the three of us in the organisation, it's very small. But we provide support and training and coaching and up‑skilling to all sorts of different organisations in the types of skills that we need as people who work on services to design and deliver better services. So, these are often everything other than service design. So, things like writing business cases for your work and leading your stakeholders and doing all of the really complicated bits around the outside of designing services. That's what I spend my days doing. It gives me a really interesting insight into the problems people have when they try to design and deliver services in these sorts of organisational contexts. I'll that you can about some of these things today.

I'm going to be talking about bad services. Not to depress you at the beginning of this excellent day, but it's always really important to talk about why things don't quite work, because it's only then we can work out how we fix them. I'm going to be talking about bad services and why they happen. And how do we get out of this mess? It feels a bit messy at the moment when it comes to actually interacting with services. I'm going to start with a story, and it's a story about something that happened to my wife Sarah who is somewhere in the front row. Sorry about the embarrassing story! But it starts roughly around close to Midnight, and we are in Dalston. She has just got out of an Uber to go to this place. It's a place called Karaoke Hole in Dalston. Anyone been? Yes, a couple of people! Yes. This is me. This is me on the right-hand side, obviously. And a fantastic drag Queen called Amanda Pet who has been very kind and humouring my terrible dancing going on here. Excellent place, if you haven't been, you should go! She leaves Karaoke Hole having successfully delivered some great karaoke. She reaches into her pocket and has no phone. This has happened to many of us on a night out, partially after several drinks. But, of course, she has left her phone in the Uber. Now, if you leave your phone in the cab, your instinct, I will imagine, like most, is to try to get hold of that driver, somehow, to try to get your phone back. But be if you have ever left your phone in the back of an Uber, you will know that if you phone Uber, or if you try to speak to them over the phone, they'll tell you that you can't do that. So, there is a process that you have to go through if you lose your phone in the back of an Uber, it's basically you have to go to the app and log in, and then you have to basically contact Uber through that official channel. Now, this is what they will tell you. You have to log into the app, go and speak to someone through that process, all very well and good so far. So, Sarah uses my phone, she's downloading the Uber app on to my phone because I'm piously deleting things like that, saying I'm not taking Ubers anymore. It's downloaded on my phone. That is what she does, and of course, goes through the proper process, downloads the app, voila!
and this is what she finds. Of course, where is this two-factor code sent to? It's sent to her phone! Which is in the back of the Uber! Right. Who has been in this process before? Who's had this experience? Yes. Literally probably everyone! If you haven't been through this, you will have lost your phone and not been able to access your email, or your work stuff or something else. This is the reality that we now live in where, if you lose your phone, you really are disrupting your life. In fact, actually, Sarah and I were in Chile a couple of weeks ago and we met a guy who had been on holiday for three months, lost his phone and basically said to us, my phone is my life, I can't get home anymore. So, as much as this was funny for us, this is something that is extremely restrictive for a lot of people. If you are Sarah, you take to Twitter on moan about it online. The poor people at Uber were like, there is a process, please do speak to us. But what do you do when you get to this point where you are the guy who you met in Chile and couldn't get home, and you are Sarah and can't access your phone anymore? You find a way. So, we are in this world where we are constantly having to find other routes to do things. In this particular situation, what you do is use find my iPhone to track the phone around. It's going to be wandering around somewhere in London and of course, it was. I would not advise doing any of the things that happen after this moment! Because Sarah thought it was a really good idea after a night out at Karaoke Hole to get on her bike and try to follow her phone around London, at which point, we realised that GPS is not accurate! This cab was nowhere to be seen, obviously. So, six hours later, extremely dedicated and very sober, Sarah comes home, only to find that, of course, thankfully, her phone's had just enough battery to realise that it's stopped somewhere, and it looks like Chadwell Heath, near Dagenham. This poor driver's gone home at six in the morning. The phone's finally stopped. Now, I don't know how this bit of the story happens. You will have to ask her. But she somehow remembered, despite this night out, basically what the registration number was and so, of course, checked it on DVLA website, thank you DVLA for an accessible website of finding the driver's details and the colour of the car. So, we know what the car is, we know where it is, so we go there! And I'm so sorry, but this is a very hungover shot, complete with sparkling water after a night like this! We find this vehicle, knock on the guy's door and say, excuse me, have you got our phone. And he did! So, there is a happy end to this story. But this is not an unusual thing to happen in the back of an Uber. In fact, it's a funny thing. Actually, Uber make a joke about it. I don't know if you can see the list there, but this is all of the funny things that have been lost in the back of an Uber. They make a joke out of it, including a lot of fish related things which I thought was a bit weird. A cooler full of fish, fresh shrimp, a lot of people taking seafood in the back of Ubers which I don't understand, and lots of rabbit legs ‑ no, weird! But the solution to this, of course, is a bit of a sticking plaster. And I'm thankful to say, Uber have fixed this process. It used to be that you hit a link on the Twitter account, which is mostly people saying they have lost stuff in the back of an Uber and it was interesting to watch the replies. You tell them something is lost, and you never get it back again. I'm telling you this story to partially embarrass Sarah and also to ask the question ‑ is this genuinely the utopia we all imagined? I don't think it is. You can get an Uber anywhere that you want to, but if you lose your phone, then no, you are screwed. Of course, losing your phone in the back of an Uber is note an unusual thing to do. So why are we not thinking about these sorts of occasions? Whenever these things happen to me, I always think to myself, bad services can costing us so much effort and time and yes, it is easier to do many, many different things, but if we stray from the deviated pathway that is right in front of us, then often it becomes much, much harder. And they cost us time, and money. They put us at risk, you know. That poor driver did not want to see us in the morning when we turned up to get our phone. We didn't want to be there either. But think about it, it's not great to have a tracking device in the back of your cab with someone working out where you are. I am sure you can think of examples of public and private sector services, particularly in the news recently where small things that have gone wrong have massive impacts on people's lives.

If we look at this systematically and start to think about the impact this is having, not just on us as individuals but us as society, we start to realise, this is huge. If you look at London, as a city on its own, and the impact of some of the services, essentially, since the dawn of Uber, we have seen a 57% increase in the number of taxis in London.

Now, yes, we have seen a decrease in cars, but in total, no we haven't, because we have seen an increase in the number of taxis. So less private vehicles, more taxis, more cars on the road, that wasn't supposed to happen, it was supposed to be something where we used the existing cars to give people lifts. That wasn't supposed to be the idea. 25% increase in the number of delivery vans in the city as well since the dawn of Amazon. And a £20 per metre rise in rent costs in areas where they are dominated by Airbnb. This isn't me picking on Amazon and Airbnb in particular, these are just some examples of the systematic overhead that we are facing as a society because of this seamless ease of use that we are not necessarily thinking about the impacts of. And what I want to say today is that we took part in this. I took part in this. This particular situation. And does anyone remember the Sharing Economy that whole idea? Yes, kind of. But this was the big idea. Kind of like circa 2005 everyone talking about the sharing economy, we were going to be car‑sharing, sharing things, we could reduce impacts on the planet because we were not having ownership over things and cars and houses. Didn't happen. We were talking about this. This is a journal from Design Network publication which talks about things that are going on in service design and it talks about how amazing the sharing economy will be and how fantastic an impact it will have on public services as well.

This is a map of the searches from the Sharing Economy and where we got excited about it. There is a rumbling around the 2004‑2005 mark, very quiet, didn't kick off. Suddenly, around 2015, it kicks off. I wonder why that was. Austerity. Basically, we started to reduce our public spending on services dramatically and what do we do? We said, you are going to have to fix it yourself and start cooking meals for your neighbours, we can't provide public services for you anymore. So, this idea of the sharing economy, this idea of austerity, are interlinked with each other. And the reason why I'm telling you this is because I think often we just don't really necessarily think about these broader patterns that are happening, that are driving the work that we are working on, but they are, they are right there.

And there's a brilliant quote by the designer that said: There are few professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a very few of them. And that is true, back in the days when we did not have scaled things. We need to update this now. There are few professions more harmful than industrial design and service design can be one of them if we don't think about the consequences of our actions. We can't just be thinking about individual users anymore. The problem we have, is that we are on our own with this. The law is not going to save us. We don't have the legislation and standards out there that are going to stop us from doing these things. A story from 2019, it didn't really make the news very much, but it was fascinating, if you followed it. Basically, Airbnb vs France. Which is quiet, like, kudos to Airbnb to be like, yes, I'm going to take on all of France! But basically, the French authorities were trying to take Airbnb to court to basically prove that they were in fact a holiday rental company, which they are. I hope that's not controversial. They do rent properties. So they basically took Airbnb to court and said, okay, if you are a holiday rental company, you have to start conforming to a law called the Hoguet Law, it regulates property rental in France and says you can't do things like rapidly change prices once someone's already bought something, as a rental or operating company, you have to conform to certain ethical standards, you have to be registered, you know, all these things that make sense and keep that market from being completely wild and out there.

So, what happened as a result of this is, and this is the type of thing that read at four in the morning! It's basically, they lost. France lost. Airbnb won, and they won because they managed to argue that they were not in fact a rental company, that they were in fact an Information Society Service which I don't know about you, but the thing that really springs to mind when I think about that, an Information Society Service is some kind of horrendous debutant ball with all of the information services are coming down the stairs. Anyway... that is what comes to my mind. The origin of the Information Society Service is quite interesting. It was an idea that was created basically to generate a kind of no man's land for Digital Services, right back at the beginning of the Internet. When the Internet was this fantastic, amazing tool, we had net neutrality and all those things that we liked to remember. We created this international piece of legislation that said, if you are a service, that sort of does most of your stuff digitally, then you don't really have to conform to the laws of the country that you are operating in. And this is it. The information society services are defined as services normally provided for remuneration at a distance by electronic means at the individual request of the recipient of that service. That could literally be anything now. Back in the 90s, that was a small number of things, but that's most things now. And we have not updated this law. And it has provided not just a loophole but a massive gaping walkway for so much stuff to happen in our countries, across our borders, with no agreement of the people living there, the communities affected or any other things. This is fantastic. This is an excerpt from the court case, and I will try and read it. Airbnb island and I acting as a real estate agents and claims that the Hoguet law is ineffective. They argued that because no‑one turns up from Airbnb when you check in, they are an Information Society Service which of course won.
So, what we are saying with these pieces of legislation and these sorts of laws that are everywhere. They exist in other standing orders as well. TLDR, if you don't own something, if you don't own the delivery drivers or the property, you are not responsible for what happens as a result of it. So, Airbnb not responsible for the fact that rental prices in some areas have gone up so much that people can't live there anymore? You know, Uber are not responsible for the fact that London is flooded with taxis. It's not their fault. They just provided a great information service. The thing with laws, they represent what we already think, and what we already think about Digital Services is that basically, we don't really have to conform to the law because they are different to physical things. We believe basically being a service allows us to break rules that we'd apply to other things. Just to illustrate this. When we design products that might have harmful effects on us, things like cars, we have to prototype them and test them. There are standards that those things meet. Even when it comes to something incredibly minor like this example over here, this is a list of products that were recalled in the UK recently, it colludes seriously melting pot because the glass pot may break when heated. Now oh I can't imagine anything more British than basically a microwave fondu, but don't buy one because it will break in the microwave! There are two ISO standards for cups of tea. It's kind of a bit silly on the other end of the spectrum. Maybe we should regulate products slightly less. We don't hold services to the same standards as we do with the rest of the world. We are not all sitting around going, what is the impact of the work that I am doing? Just to give you some more examples of the types of things that are normal to us, if you wanted to take a Ryanair flight and you forgot to print your boarding pass. Anyone done that? Yes. Thank you very much, that will be £60. You will be charged £60 to print your boarding pass. If you want to get yourself some insurance, then you will absolutely be able to use any number of the millions of price comparison websites out there, but can you tell whether or not there's support 24 hours when you break your leg at the side of the mountain? No. You can't. These sorts of service elements are not obvious to us when we are buying these sorts of services. And if we want to look at Government, there are some interesting things happening out there, because we don't really think about what we do as services. So, increasingly, we are starting to see API first services, from Government, which is fantastic, excellent, it means that, we can do things like file our tax returns, via other software, we don't have to go to HMRC services, but what we are also starting to see is an increase in the number of API‑only services which means that we cannot now interact with Government directly, with ever to go via a private third party and that can charge us and make a service that isn't potentially accessible, does all sorts of other things. Is this privatisation?

Basic things we all need to start thinking about and enacting in our organisation.  The first one of these is seeing services.  The principal problem we have, as people who are trying to create better services in our organisation, is that we do not see what we do as a service.  We don't see the impact of all of these things collectively.  We don't add them up as a user journey.  We think about our own individual part of that. And really generally, the weirdest part of service provider, the one professional part of design, where we don't have a shared understanding of the thing it is we are designing, which I always find bizarre.  So, a service, just to be very, very clear is something that helps someone to do something.  That thing is often very straightforward and quite simplistic, something like learning to drive, buy a car, employ someone.  These are things that we want to do as a person in the world.  We are all users, of course, but the problem is, of course, our user gets to decide what that service is by what they are trying to achieve that. Is very different, often to the thing that our organisation thinks about providing.  This is something we learned very quickly on gov.uk.  It is a big website with lots of pages and stuff.  All those that stuff, all those things, about 10,000 of those things are services.  But almost nobody visits the homepage because what they are doing, is they are hitting Google and they are looking for that path they are trying to achieve and hopefully, fingers crossed they end up on gov.uk.  Some of you may have seen this slide before.  This is a list of some of the things they might find on gov.uk.  And I love this particular list of services, because it is emblem attic of the types of services we still have in the public sector, you can see, we haven't given them names that make a lot of sense.  We have given them names that we like, things like MEMBERS and RIDDORS and my favourite.  Any guesses as it what this one is, the shooting cattle tracing service.  An excellent Game name for a civil servant to refer back to.  We love a good backronym.  Came up with the name and then the service.  Not good if you are a farmer and hopefully your animal doesn't do that.  But this is a list of some of the most popular stuff on gov.uk people are finding and looking for.  And for the keen eyes at the back, you can see "Contact DVLA" is there at number 8.  Which means the most popular service is the phone number.  People looking for the phone number because they cannot find what they are look for because we have called it all really random stuff.  The problem we have and the probe basically every large organisation has, is Google is behind our service.  That is where people will start.  They will look for the thing.  If they can't find it, they will not find your service.  So, what Government has, is basically this big pile of Googlefail.  Stuff people will not be able to find unless they already know what they are looking for.  How do they know what they are looking for, if they have never found it before, they don't, so that is why they ends up looking for the phone number.  This is the reality of the service.  These services are things we are looking for, verbs, things we are searching for and asking our friends and family members B they are not the names that we like to give them, that make sense to us but doesn't make sense to anyone else.  If you want some examples, if grammar is a little bit early for you, things like "learn to drive" "get a pension" "see a doctor" knotted things like statutory offer vehicle note innovation.  Sorry.  Charity letter forwarding service.  Or I would include anything that starts with he-something, i-something, my-something, hub-something, portal-something, all of those things are not things people are going to be looking for, I'm really sorry, it doesn't matter how much you love it, they are not going to be looking for it.  I have to get that off my chest.  The problem is, of course when we think about services, they get bigger.  So, they go from something that is quite small and quite isolated, this perfectly-shaped portal or thing that we think as a service, to getting much, much larger.  If we think about something like a healthcare journey, yes, going to see your GP, but you have a much larger journey included in that overall task that someone is trying to get done.  And our job is not to design all the bits in the middle, it is to design the areas in between, the exchanges and information that is passed between these parts of the service.  But the problem is, no-one owns this.  These bits between all of these parts of the service are like a genuine no-man's-land of service ownership.  They are not owned by one particular part of the NHS.  Or any other organisation that is in this same situation.  And so, designing this negative space, designing this collaboration between organisations, is the work that we have in front of us.  And when we talk about thinking about the impact of our work on the world, on society, designing the exchanges, it is that as much as it is designing the impact of the things we are working on ourselves.  Services are shared, as much as we don't want them to be, they are.  And because of that, they often end up being invisible and because of that they are often not designed.  We can talk about service design as much as we like but we need to talk as much as we can about service and getting everyone in the same space to understand - what is this thing we are designing?  The problem we have, is when we don't design this ourselves, what happens?  Basically, we force our users to do this.  And I am sorry, thank you for laughing at this because it is 2024 and I am showing you a desire path and I'm sorry but this is a good one, isn't it?  This is what it is like as a user.  You know we might create all of these wonderful journeys, if they are not right, if they are not types of things our user is trying to get done, they will have to trudge across the grass and make the pathway themselves, it is harder than walking across that grass.  We are forcing our users to design our services for us.  But that doesn't just have a negative impact on them, that has a negative impact on us as well.  It means don't know what our services are any more, very often.  That might sound really perverse and really strange but very often we are not aware of what those journeys actually are because we are over here thinking, this is the statutory vehicle note innovation, where is everyone, our users are over here trying to work out how to stop paying tax on the vehicle and creating a different journey we are not aware of.  This is why we end up in the cycle of service doom.  Again, I keep telling you I'm not trying to depress you, but I keep doing it.  This is how it affects us, once you know it is happening, we stand a chance to intercept with it.  Our user often ends up having to design the services themselves.  They are the only person who knows they have to stop paying tax on their vehicle, they are having to put all this together.  We don't know that is happening.  Over time, it has a weird effect on us that we forget why we are doing what we are doing.  We become so focussed on process, and as a result we become collectively afraid to ask what we are doing what we are doing and why we are here and the purpose of our service disappears and we end up becoming worse and worse and we are not designing the right thing and of course this is a vicious cycle.  The worse our services are, the less contact we have with our users and the less we understand what they are doing and the worse decisions we are making, our job, whether or not we are service designers or doing any role that is advocating for service design s to intercept this cycle somehow, this is our job to try and break these arrows, somehow.  But before we do that, we have to acknowledge that those services exist.  So, the first rule of service design is to be able to explain what we mean by services and explain what the process of that design actually looks like.  So, this is a really, really important thing for us to be able to get our heads around.  We talked about seeing services.  The next part of our service literacy journey is helping people to understand what we mean by a good service.  Now, usually I will rattle on about this for hours and hours, I'm not going to.  But I will say one thing:  That is that it is not true that it depends what kind of service we are designing, when we are designing a healthcare service or hotel-check-in service, of course they are all totally different, but there are some things that almost every single user needs of every single service - to use that thing well - that are consistent to pretty much every service we are designing on.  Of course, they are unique but they are all very similar in things that we need from them.  And these are basic things like, ultimately, stuff like being able to find our service.  We all need to be able to find that dog grooming service or healthcare service.  We need to be able to use it from start to finish, without being stuck in the middle because we have lost our phone in karaoke hell.  So, there are 15 principles to good service design.  If you haven't seen them before, check them out.  These are them.  If you want to take a screen grab but they are freely available.  Hopefully none of these things seem like particularly rocket science.  They are very the basics that almost every single service needs in order to deliver the outcome that our user is trying to get to and of course at number 1 is - being easy to find.  If you cannot find a service, you are not going to be able to use it.  Like I said, they are out there, they are on the internet, you can read them in the book, Good Services.  I want to close by talking about this last point, this problem that we have of committing to designing services.  Seeing services is one thing, being able to see them as real things that can and should be designed, not stuff that happens as an accident by-product of all the other things that we do is the first thing.  Being able to understand what we mean by a good service is important as well because, of course, as much as we all share those things collectively as users, when it comes to our own service, it is a bit like the hairdresser having the worst hair or dentist having the worst teeth.  We forget things but sharing what we mean by good is vital.  Understanding what we need, to commit the people, money and time and resources to design the services is a whole other kettle of fish and this is where we get into the real worth of service design, it is about 10% of that stuff, the nice stuff, the user journeys, the research, the thinking about how stuff works and the rest is about 90%, creating conditions for service design to happen and helping all of those people delivering the services to work together.  The problem we have is everything in our organisation affects our service somehow.  Our data, governance, financial model, all these different things will affect our service in some way.  And we often do not have control over all of these things, so, the activity of service design is as much about the things we do, as it is about influencing and making sure the decisions happen in the right way to create the right service at the end of it.  As much as we think it depends what a good service looks like, we also think it depends when it comes to delivering good services.  I have started to realise over the last few years that is not true at all.  And there are, just as much as there are consistencies and the types of things our users need, there are also, very similar things that pretty much every organisation needs in order to deliver a service that works well.  And these are, again, really fundamental basics like:  Understanding you your users are and what they need from you.  So often we don't know who our users are.  We think they are these people over here and there is a whole other group of people that we are either wilfully ignoring or we don't know they are there and we don't think their needs are important.  So, knowing who our users are is vital, obviously but it kind of goes out of the window, doesn't it?  Remembering the purpose of our service.  You know, getting out of the cycle of service doom, remembering what we are here for - again really important to any sort of service.  Know how well our service is performing by allowing our staff the freedom to be able to actually put that learning into action.  So, we know what these things are.  We know how effective not doing them is.  And I want to show you this quick example to show you how effectively not doing these sorts of things can stop progress.  This is a thing called the CIA Simple Sabotage Field Manual.  Look at it, it is a rabbit hole of interesting content and great ideas on how to stop bad things from happening.  It was a guide that was given to CIA agents in the 1940s in the US to intercept with any new organisation.  It includes some fantastic advice:  "Bring up a relevant issue as frequently as possible."  Love that one.  "When possible, referring all matters to committee for further consideration; try to make those committees never less than five."  If you find yourself in a meeting of less than five people, look around.  And this one, "Be reasonable and urge your fellow people to avoid haste which might result in embarrassment or difficulties later on."  I have heard that so many times:  Lou, you cannot boil the ocean, Lou, this sounds really dangerous!  Or this one!  "Insist on perfection on even minor things.  So that the overall point of what you are trying to do is lost."  Perfect.  I wish I had done that so many times.  So, when it comes to getting over this stuff, I just want to say really quickly - I think sometimes we blame ourselves.  We go into a room and think that the thing that we need is confidence.  And that is not the thing we need.  The thing that we need is to understand why people in our organisations are doing this to themselves.  Why are we doing it to ourselves?  What is the problem we have?  What is stopping us from moving forward?  Honestly, the people who overcome this are often the least confident people.  They are the people who prepare for those conversations.  They are the people who research the stakeholders and who understand what the problems of the organisation are.  They don't just walk into a room and assume they know everyone.  So, what we are dealing with is actually genuinely a whole other set of skills, a set of skills that we didn't learn in design school, if we did go to design school or any course we have taken, very often.  And it is the skills that are involved in that 90% of work that we have to do it.  So, I'm just going to run through very quickly a list of some of the 10 causes of bad service design.  I want you to be thinking in the background of whether or not any of these things resonate for you.  But this is something that I'm still working on at the moment.  So, number 1, the cause for bad service design:  You don't know the outcome of what we are trying to achieve.  We think we are delivering a service over here and the reality, our users want something different.  We don't know who our users are or what they need.  You don't understand your materials.  If you don't know how the internet works, we think it is just going to stop and we can do the design and just leave it for another ten years.  You don't know what your services are.  Because of all of these things, we don't understand what the services actually are, we don't know where they are in the organisation.  We don't measure whether or not our services are performing well.  Our organisations weren't structured to deliver services.  Our staff have no ability to change anything.  We are not prioritising enough.  We are afraid to take any risks, doing too much with too little.  Now we are in a state of austerity, we are short-sighted about things at the moment and lastly, I am glad to say this one doesn't affect many people:  We think we can get away with it.  Going back to this point:  To get over these things we need to start developing the skills of about 90% of the work we are involved in and actually acknowledging that genuinely service design is all of this work.  So, if you are interested in all of this, minor plug for Sarah's workshop this afternoon, she will be doing a pub quiz.  She will be doing it sober, though, just to be clear.  So, to wrap up what we are talking about here is creating service literacy, in ourselves, in our organisation.  And that means our ability to see services, as real things that can and should be designed.  Being able to actually share a sense of what we mean by actual good services, all being able to pull in the same direction.  And the ability to overcome all the watered-down situations we know so well and actually get the commitment to design and deliver the better services.  And this means actually creating the conditions for service design is the work, that is the work we are involved in and it means all of these things are as much service design as thinking about what you just need and how our services work and what the user journey actually is.  And this work is not easy.  I think that is really important.  I'm not saying you can flip a switch and go and change a service.  This is a years' long activity.  It is not a sprint or marathon; it is a relay race with all of us working together across the organisational boundaries to actually deliver services that work.  And I want to just leave you with a quote that frightened the hell out of me when I first heard it, my first boss said, "Lou, the people who get stuff done are the people who survive the longest." I was like, that is petrifying, mate, give can you give it a rest!  But it is true, that doesn't mean we have to keep slugging away.  We have the personal choice to prioritise our time to do something else and this is OK but often this is a long game and we have to plant a seed and watch everyone basically trample over it and come back to it and finds it is growing in 18 months' time.  That is the work that. Is how it works.  And this is, like I said a relay race between so many people.  If you think about all those different connections in your service, there are hundreds of people involved in delivering our service.  But just because it is hard t doesn't mean it needs to be complicated.  There are simple things we can work through here.  So, spoiler alert:  There is going to be a new book, it is going to be called Bad Services about what the problems are and how to overcome T I'm saying it here, to gee myself into writing it.  It isn't finished yet.  If you have any ideas, let me know, it will be Bad Services.  If you are interested in anything I have been talking about you can find on God service - that is a good one!  Good Services.  Thank you very much.