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Why work life balance needs service design

Once upon a time....

I want to tell you a story about work life balance, about working men and women, about kids and the platitudes that 'women cannot have it all'.  This story is about what happens when you use a wide angled lens and when we use tools like service design to generate a work life balance of the adjacent possible... 

The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.

The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations. Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven't visited yet. Once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn't have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors and eventually you'll have built a palace.

Work life balance succeeds or fails on the dedication of the individual and the support of the business...

I have 2 children and I work for one of Australia’s big 4 banks (the break up one).  I work full time.  My employer is very supportive of flexible work options and work life balance. 

So why do I feel so stressed... ?  It MUST be my fault huh...

The value of my employer's flexible working options are diminshed because my city does not support work/life balance and flexible work.

The facts

I live....

• 9 km from Melbourne City Centre 
• 12 km from home to work...
• ...in one of the world's most liveable cities.
  

The choices 

 

Travel time : up to 1 hour and 20 minutes 

Parking:      $15 - $30 per day 

Cost:           -  2 1/12 hours of wasted time doing nothing

                    - environmentally costly, pollution, noise.. 

                    - Communities choked by traffic, reduced family and social time.

Personal:    up to 2 1/2 hours a day sitting in a car instead of being at work or with family. 

Then there’s evenings – in peak hour it can take up to 50 minutes just to get out of Docklands, and then there’s the tunnel, the eastern suburb tram/bike and car loaded roads… To be sure of being at school by 6 I MUST leave work at 4.30 at the latest. 

Travel time :        7 mins to station, 25 mins to Docklands – 35 ish mins.

Parking:               $0… but...

                           have to get to the car park by 7.25 to get a park.

 

Cost:       - Long days at work

                 - Very early starts that don’t line up with school hours or care hours.

                - Stressful – lack of parking, crowded trains, poor facilities for ticket purchase. 

Travel time:        Up to 1 1/2 hours depending on traffic 

 Cost:                   - Long days spent neither at work or with family. 

...and it's not just transport  

 

 

 

School starts at 9 and finishes at 3.30.

Before school care starts at 7, and after school care finishes at 6…

 If I drop my children at 9 - the earliest I can get to work is really 10. 

• Can’t take the train – no parking. 
• Tram – doesn’t get me to work until 10.20
• Driving, well I’ll get there, in about 50 minutes.  I may miss early bird parking, parking now $30 /day.

The Experience 

None of the services integrate - it's like they operate in different worlds and the user pays... 

Maximum stress, always worrying about being late, unfocussed in meetings as it gets close to time to leave…  Not quite feeling like I'm doing anything well... complex work and childcare arrangements to cater for…um.. who..??

All the benefit of my employer's flexible work offerings are diluted... 

Communities….? Families…? Workplaces…? Sustainability..? um nope…..

Weird huh…?

 We've designed a service landscape that:

• Reduces productivity
• Increases anxiety and stress
• Has gridlocked our cities
• Created clogged roads and dirty polluted streets
• Reduces time that families and communities can spend together.
• Works against flexible workplace initiatives put in place in industry

Dream dream dream... 

Imagine if service providers, councils, corporations, communities used integrative thinking to design solutions to whole problems…dyamic solutions – again a prototype ecosystem.

The story might look something like this..... 

 

I wake up on a work day.  My kids can choose to attend their base school (in the community) or their other school - in Docklands.  The Interwebs mean that the curriculum is the same, but they get a broader range of teacher, friends and belonging - a new resilience.  They belong in two communities. 

The public transport system considers families and investment takes place to support it.  It takes a 20 minute trip on a tram with my kids to eat breakfast by the water.  We eat lunch together in my workplace and instead of after school care and rushing across town, they come to a space at work.  Because we're in town we go for a meal in one of the many restaurants to talk, laugh and miss the traffic.  Local businesses have whole new opportunities for business, city based schools use city facilities.  Then we’d travel home together with time to talk about the day and arrive home with a spare – well at least 1½ hours in our day….

What if.....?

• School didn’t start at 9 and finish at 3.30
• School/community/business better integrated their efforts to produce a dynamic adaptive system.
• Education and transport and business worked together to look at new patterns in the complexity.
• Councils built multi storey car parks so that more people could take trains?
• State built rail links and supported trams.
• Kids in docklands meant a flourishing and rediscovery of the area?  
• Workplaces had children in them? (sometimes)
• Corporate investment in work life and flexible work initiatives was fully supported by courageous and integrative thinking around services…

The Experience

Happy families, happy workers, happy businesses...... 

What a world this could be, better for families, better for business..  Which is why i think I think
the iterative, holistic thinking of service design can build better ‘stuff’ and easier lives… 

And imagine the opportunities we might uncover with the extra time! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3 Tiny Habits - reinvent yourself with motivation

New Year's resolutions, a new me, financially responsible, fit, slim and organised...  By January 20 will I be one of the 80% of resolution makers who fail, or will I make it through to September and be one of th 92%?

Thomas Pychyl's attributes this failure to us being unprepared to change habits, particularly bad habits.  He uses the beautiful description of 'cultural procrastination' to describe our annual stampede towards reinvention.

Just before Christmas I was lucky enough to particpate in B.J. Fogg's research into behaviour change through the 3 Tiny Habits process. Through his work at Stanford's Persuasive Technology lab he has identified 3 factors that will cause long term behaviour change:

Option A. Have an epiphany
Option B. Change your context (what surrounds you)
Option C. Take baby steps

3 Tiny Habits

3 Tiny Habits started for me as an option C, but actually evolved into Option A.  Basically you comit to make 3 tiny changes a day with each one requiring no more than 30 seconds.  You choose a trigger in your day - may be getting up, having a coffee or cooking dinner, and then fit your new habits in after one of these regular habits.

The committment is minimal, but the experience is powerful, motivating and exciting.  Successfully doing 3 new things each day with minimal impact to the day made me feel like superwoman.  

My usual experience of motivation to change is a burst of enthusiasm, followed by failure.  It's got to the point where I expect to fail.  Using 3 Tiny Habits made me feel like I could change and inspired me to continue.  This year, my only New Year's resolution was to make 3 Tiny habits each week.  I've committed to mixing new and ongoing habits, and somehow I've started to tame my challenges with work/life balance, fitness etc. 

I feel motivated, powerful and successful, instead of bumbly, hopeless and on a highway to failure.

3 Tiny Habits at work

In my day job as a CX Designer at NAB I'm looking at how we can use 3 Tiny Habits to support change.  If it can do this for me - a serial procrastinator - what could it do to say, capability development at work, pursuit of excellence etc.  

Give it a go - it's fun and it works!

 

If you're not present, you're absent...

..creativity's dark corners that networks need...

Today @mpesce talked on Twitter about the need for protocols for online networks.  It made me think about a convention and a process for being neither present or absent, but processing.

I have recently been through one of those 'life reinventions'.  Unlike the current 'sexy' portrayal of creativity the process was absorbing, consuming and sometimes dark and scary.  During the process  I switched off from my networks. One minute I was talking, the next I was disconnected. 

It was however a rich and a valuable time, productive and exciting, if challenging and complex.

                                                                                                Photo:  Mark Ramsay @ Flickr

Suddenly one morning...

[Deep in the heart of my insecurities]

"Panic, stress.... I haven't been talking to anyone, I'm a leech, when did I last contribute...

So much has changed, what a chasm...how am I ever going to explain where I've been and how I got here..

Does it even matter?"

photo: Fotolog @ Flickr

...and the question is...???

Networks add value by building on individual capacity, stretching peoples' thinking and then empowering  people to explore their own capacity. So, why, in a period of deep contemplation, did I decide not to share, when surely this would be exactly the time not only to ask for advice but to make the best use of it?"

The creative process is wonderful - at the end.  In the middle I found it complex and contradictory.  My online networks felt too public a place to expose such fragile thinking.  Do online spaces in their ephemeral nature provide pressure to present finished thought?  Is it really ok to be fragmented and indecisive?  How does an avatar portray developing thinking?

I have always thought that networks are non-linear.  Am I wrong though, are they very linear, our online social places being,  not places where thought can evolve, but a place to report the results of the thinking process?

There is no word, no hash tag, no convention for being present but processing.  If you are not 'present' then you are 'absent'. 

I have seen very few people I admire talk about the dark spaces of the creative process. 

My question: are our online networks missing an important facet?  Are they 'safe' enough for  emergent thoughts, or do we do our 'composting'  alone only presenting when we have visible evidence of growth...?           

Seems to me that would be a sad place falling well short of our expectations of ecosystems...

I don't know the answers, but I'm very interested in continuing to explore, what do you think?

I'm not sure - over to you.

(Photo:  seir+seir @ flickr)

No No, not the high rise (aka...Melbourne, where are the design thinkers?)

Last year I moved to Melbourne from London (via Perth, Karratha...etc).  Melbourne captivated me from the first moment, it took me 5 years to get here, but I did. It has a creative, innovative quirky approach to grandeur and liveability....  I loved the coffee, the spaces, the buildings (old and new) and the way the new accommodated the old.

I moved my family here secure in the knowledge that I would experience innovative approaches to high density living - surely there would be Jeb Brugmanns in Melbourne....  I was excited to be moving to a  city that famously transformed the City of Melbourne headquarters into a 6 star energy rated building (CH2), surely here I'd see new paradigms of City living, a vibrant place for my kids to grow up...to live healthily, engaged with their surroundings.

CRASH and BURN.... wherever this thinking lies, it is not within the planning department of the City of Melbourne.  This weeks' Age High Rise Push to Halt Urban Sprawl took me full circle from innovation to repeating the mistakes of the past.  From the destruction of the tight communities of Carlton and to the sterile wasteland of Docklands  the pattern is repeated globally across the UK, Canada, the US. After several hours of research I could not find one report lauding the type of high rise development suggested, other than by developers.

I can't bear the thought of this approach winning out.  Why would such an innovative city take such a half hearted, lazy approach to its' community...  We know how to do this:

This focus on collaboration was critical to the achievement of an integrated design concept for CH2. The CH2 design and development process was documented to enable others to learn from the experiences.  

I don't give up, I'm an optimist, but I am deeply puzled and deeply concerned.  I want to be proud of my beloved new city, not ashamed of an old-fashioned paradigm, and old-fashioned view and a deep disregard for those that love it. Give me new ways of looking, not old ways recycled.