From Sticky Notes to System Stewards: Why Service Designers Must Evolve to Meet the Moment

Let’s get real. The world is in flux, and Service Design as it currently stands, is not equipped to hold the weight of what's coming.

Yes, mapping customer journeys, prototyping, and facilitating workshops have their place. But if we don’t expand our lenses, our tools, and most importantly, our mindsets, we risk becoming decorators of decline. Surface-level optimisers of extractive systems. Architects of what Barry Oshry would call “elegant stagnation” (Oshry, 2007).

What’s needed now is a fundamental evolution: from toolkit-based problem-solving to system-sensing stewardship.

And to do that, we must learn from the elders of organisational change. Think Peter Senge, Barry Oshry, Edgar Schein, Margaret Wheatley, Ron Heifetz, Gareth Morgan, and Otto Scharmer. These thinkers didn’t just invent new frameworks - they rewired how we understand change, culture, power, and emergence.

Here’s why their insights matter more than ever for the future of Service Design:

1. Peter Senge: Systems Thinking Is Not Optional

The Fifth Discipline (1990) taught us that learning organisations adapt not through smarter strategies, but through deeper awareness of systemic interdependence.

For Service Designers, this means ditching the fantasy of linear progress and embracing feedback loops, delays, and emergent behaviour. Otherwise, we risk treating symptoms and reinforcing the very problems we claim to solve.

Designing without systems thinking is like landscaping a volcano - it looks good until it erupts.

2. Barry Oshry: The Relational Field is the Real Terrain

Oshry’s work on organisational roles - Tops, Middles, Bottoms, and Customers - shows us how people become trapped in predictable dynamics that undermine change, even with the best intentions.

Designing services without sensing these power plays is like adjusting sails without checking the wind. We need to map power, perception, and pain, not just personas.

Oshry didn’t teach us how to design systems. He taught us how to see them seeing themselves.

3. Edgar Schein: Culture Eats Design for Breakfast

Service Designers often mistake culture for “vibes” or team dynamics. But Schein showed us that organisational culture is made of deep assumptions - invisible, persistent, and resistant to change.

If your design doesn’t challenge or shift these assumptions, it will be rejected like an incompatible organ. That’s why you can’t "scale" prototypes into toxic soil.

Want lasting service change? Start by re-coding the culture, not the interface.

4. Margaret Wheatley: Life Organises Through Relationship

Wheatley reminds us that organisations are living systems, not machines. They thrive in uncertainty and evolve through relationship, story, and shared meaning, not control.

Designers trained to control outcomes must unlearn the urge to steer and instead learn to host. To invite emergence rather than impose direction.

We are midwives, not architects. Hosts, not heroes.

5. Ron Heifetz: Technical vs. Adaptive Challenges

Heifetz draws a crucial distinction: technical problems can be solved with expertise; adaptive challenges require a shift in values, behaviours, and beliefs.

Most service problems are adaptive, but we treat them like technical ones. That’s why so many "solutions" fizzle out. The system isn't resisting your design; it's resisting your avoidance of the real work.

Heifetz’s gift to us? A mirror that says, “This isn’t hard because it’s complex. It’s hard because it changes you.”

6. Otto Scharmer: Presencing and Leading from the Emerging Future

Through Theory U, Scharmer invites us into deep listening - not just to stakeholders, but to what the system is trying to become. He frames change as a movement from downloading habitual patterns to sensing and co-shaping what is emerging.

This is beyond human-centred design. It’s life-centred. Planet-attuned. Uncomfortable, slow, and essential.

Design is not just about creating services. It’s about creating the conditions for new realities to become possible.

7. Gareth Morgan: Every Organisation Is a Metaphor

Morgan’s Images of Organisation (2006) cracks open the idea that organisations are neutral systems. They are stories, metaphors, and mythologies - each shaping what’s visible and possible.

If Service Designers can’t read these metaphors, they’ll keep designing in the wrong language. Worse, they’ll be fluent in solving the wrong problems.

If the organisation sees itself as a machine, your prototype will be judged by its cogs - not its poetry.

8. Why the Future of Service Design Hasn’t Been Invented Yet

Because it requires a new kind of designer.

Not just a facilitator of innovation, but a hospice worker for dying paradigms, a midwife for emerging ones, and a steward of relational depth. Someone who doesn’t just wield tools, but embodies emotional sobriety, relational maturity, and intergenerational accountability.

These are not features of a new framework. They are ways of being that align with the meta-capacities described in Outgrowing Modernity (2025) and Burnout From Humans (2024) - a shift from extractive engagement to metabolising complexity with care.

9. So What Now? A New Compass

We don’t need more toolkits.

We need:

• Emotional Sobriety: Staying present with discomfort, without bypass.

• Relational Maturity: Navigating tension without collapse.

• Intellectual Discernment: Holding paradox without defaulting to binaries.

• Systemic Accountability: Designing with futures, not just stakeholders, in mind.

  
  

This is the work of Service Design’s future - not to resolve complexity, but to compost it into possibility.

Ready to Grow Up?

The next era of Service Design isn’t about making things better.

It’s about becoming different kinds of beings who can hold space for the emergence of worlds that honour interdependence, complexity, and relational repair.

Because what the world needs isn’t more services.

It needs more stewards.

References

Cinnamon Tea, A. and Ladybugboss, D., 2024. Burnout From Humans: A Little Book About AI That Is Not Really About AI. [pdf] GTDF Collective. Available at: https://burnoutfromhumans.net [Accessed 31 Mar. 2025].

Heifetz, R.A., 1994. Leadership Without Easy Answers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Heifetz, R.A., Grashow, A. and Linsky, M., 2009. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Press.

Machado de Oliveira, V., 2025. Outgrowing Modernity: Navigating Complexity, Complicity, and Collapse with Accountability and Compassion. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Morgan, G., 2006. Images of Organszation. Updated ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Oshry, B., 2007. Seeing systems: Unlocking the mysteries of organisational life. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Scharmer, O. and Kaufer, K., 2013. Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Schein, E.H., 2010. Organisational Culture and Leadership. 4th ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Senge, P.M., 1990. The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organisation. New York: Doubleday.

Wheatley, M.J., 2006. Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.