One organisation, four ways of looking at it.
I apply different lenses to make sure I’m solving the right problem. Take someone who moves home, switches energy supplier, and gets a first bill that’s wrong. Where you look decides what you’d fix.
Below is one service viewed four different ways. The facts never change, but how you understand them does.
The four lenses
The mover feels the pain at the first bill, but the cause happened two stages earlier, in a journey they never see.
The drawing scrolls sideways.
One wrong reading, followed through every view. A typical UK energy switch, drawn to show the shape of the problem, not a client's service. The faint lines are the rest of the service, still connected but not the story.
Service design
The relationship to the person being served.
Treats that relationship as the unit of work. The artefacts are familiar (journeys, blueprints, propositions), but the question underneath them is always the same: what is this service actually for, for the person at the other end of it.
The mover feels the pain at the first bill, but the cause happened two stages earlier, in a journey they never see.
In the drawing: A service blueprint. Five stages run left to right: moving home, switching, the first bill, the call, resolved. Above the line of visibility, what the mover does, what it feels like at its worst, and what the agent does. Below it, the teams, systems, decisions and measures that produce each stage. The wrong reading starts with a low smart meter signal at stage one, travels the industry data flows, surfaces in the first bill at stage three, and is only put right by a refund at stage five.
Organisational design
The structure that produces the relationship.
Where people sit, how decisions move, what gets rewarded, what gets measured. Most customer-facing problems are organisational design problems wearing a customer-facing costume.
Four teams touch the call, but the one that could fix the cause never hears about it.
In the drawing: The same nodes regrouped by team, each box headed with the team's name. Sales and onboarding, contact centre, billing, metering and data hold the activities, systems, decisions and measures that sit with them; complaints and priority services sit small at the bottom. The call is handed from the contact centre to billing and on to metering and data, but dashed broken links show the connections that should exist and do not: the data problem never reaches the team who check the industry feeds, and the complaints team is capturing similar complaints from other movers without passing the pattern on. Along the bottom, a dashed box drawn for the team that does not exist holds moving in and taking the reading, and the decision nobody has made: who owns moving home end to end.
Systems thinking
The model that lets the other three lenses talk.
Ways of seeing a service or a function as a system rather than a stack of steps. The reason a fix in one place keeps reappearing as a problem somewhere else.
Fixing one bill doesn't solve the problem. The contact centre handles the issue, but feedback never reaches the data team, so future movers experience the same pain.
In the drawing: A causal chain drawn around a ring that never closes. It starts beyond a dashed boundary marked outside the organisation: the third-party smart network that owns the signal. A low signal delays the reading, an estimate travels the industry data flows, and a wrong opening reading produces a wrong first bill, a call, complaints, rising cost to serve and pressure on handling time, a pain the contact centre absorbs as its own. There the chain stops. In the ring's empty slot sits metering and data, joined only by dashed missing links: the feedback about the signal, the data collection and the billing calculation never returns to the team who could change them, so nothing changes and the same reading goes wrong for the next mover. Two levers are drawn in green: at the boundary, better meters and boosters where the network allows, since most fixes for bad signal are hopes about someone else's network; and at the data team, billing differently when the data is late, the lever that works whatever the network does. Low inside the ring, the decision nobody has made.
Positive psychology
The question of what any of it is for.
Not engagement, not satisfaction, but the older idea of human flourishing: the conditions that let people do good work, and the conditions that let the people being served actually have a good day.
The same gap that costs the business money makes the agent's day difficult and the mover's move stressful.
In the drawing: Two people at the centre. The mover, with what they wanted from the move and what they got: a fresh start, control over cost, fear of a wrong bill, twenty minutes on hold. The agent, with what they came to work for and what the day gave them: helping people, systems that do not talk, low internal visibility, apologising for what they cannot fix. Between them, the wrong bill, the call that cannot fix it, and the decision nobody has made. Beneath each person, drawn in green, what better would feel like: for the mover, confidence the bill is right and attention back on the move; for the agent, teams that talk to each other and being empowered to fix the cause.
If seeing a problem from a different angle could help you move it forward, that’s usually where a conversation starts.
How we can work together
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Work shaped for the problem
The shape of the work should fit the problem you’re solving for. It tends to start in one of three ways, but often moves between them.
- Advisory
- Regular support for the people leading change, over months rather than weeks. We get into the problems together, and you have a second view on decisions while they are still being made.
- Fractional
- A set number of days a week or a month inside the leadership team, building the capability rather than covering the gap.
- Project work
- A piece of work with a clear start and end, scoped around what you are trying to solve.
How it starts With a conversation about what you are seeing, before anyone writes a proposal. Even if we never work together, you should leave it with a clearer view of where the problem sits.
If you’d rather start small, three pieces have a name and a clear end, which makes them easier to ask for and easier to get agreed.
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Service Architecture Sketch
The journey map says it should work, and it doesn't.
What changes You can see why the service behaves as it does and where a change would make a difference, in a model your team keeps using after I’ve gone.
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Design Capability Diagnostic
The design team has grown and the impact hasn't.
What changes Your leadership group knows where capability is being built, where it’s being lost, and which barriers are structural rather than personal, so the next hire or restructure goes where it counts.
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AI Adoption Workshop
AI is arriving faster than our ways of working can absorb it.
What changes Your leaders agree how the team works with AI: who decides, what gets rewarded, and where judgement stays with people. Adoption stops being something that happens to you.
When you're ready
You don’t need to know which of these fits before we talk. Most first conversations begin with a problem rather than a request, and the shape of the work comes out of them.
Tell me the situation hello@willosborn.com
If you want more first Where I have done this before What I think about it