I have been working on an article for several days about a very simple idea. It keeps diverging and losing its essential simplicity.

It is about one of the core ideas of service design, value exchanges. This core idea is the locus of my hopes for the future.

My hope is based on a premise. Some people have embedded in their souls an impulse to serve in some very specific way. Their lives are animated by this very particular service drive.

If we give people opportunities to serve in their own way, they inject limitless energy into their organizations and social environment.

If they are prevented from doing so — often due to interference from other services they are forced to provide — they lose their motivation. They can even sometimes start sucking energy out of their organizations.

Two examples.

1. Educators, or at least the best educators, live to teach. If they are supported by their leaders and allowed to focus on teaching they bring inspired energy into the classroom, and their students learn. If, on the contrary, administrators demand endless processes and documentation from teachers, to prove that teaching has been executed correctly as specified and that learning has occurred, teachers no longer focus on teaching, and all the processes and documentation harm the outcomes they are supposed to measure.
2. Nurses, or at least the best nurses, live to care for their patients. When they are allowed to focus on care, the best nurses work tirelessly to ensure their patients have everything they need for their comfort and recovery of health. But when nurses are required to attend to the business and administrative side of healthcare, it demoralizes and distracts them. They become disgruntled and burn out.

Perhaps not all people have a service drive. Perhaps some have service drives that are more general or more specific. That’s a quant problem.

Qualitatively, I know it exists, because I have it myself, most of my friends have it and a great many people I have met in the field while conducting design research have it.

I believe the myriad service drives are as powerful an economic resource as money, machines or material resources. These “outward economy” resources are necessary, and they always will be. But they are not sufficient — far from it. The service drive, the resources of the “inward economy” must flow in, in order to ensoul our institutions. Positive outward motivations like money, perks, competition and prestige (or negative ones like fear or shame) can only supplement the inward ones. They cannot replace them. When we neglect or squander the resources of inward economy, and rely too much on outer resources and control mechanisms to compensate — we get that repellant quality we call “corporate”. It might be old-school cubicles-and-chinos corporate, or it might be the new phony bring-your-whole-self, west-coast-quirky corporate, but it is all manifestly soulless and impossible to love. This, I believe, is why so many people are unhappy in the workplace and unhappy in general. I believe it is one root cause of the collective depression the western world seems to be suffering.

But we lack language and justifications to stop it, and reverse it. It doesn’t fully occur to us that we can or should. We look everywhere for the source of our despair than the cause of it, which we take to be an innate and inalterable feature of reality and work. If work were something we did for the intrinsic value of doing it, we wouldn’t need to be paid to do it, would we?

My admittedly pollyannaish mission as a service designer is to fix our deeply broken value exchanges, so we can inject new sources of energy into our organizations, economy and society. We can shape and cultivate organizations that are animated as much by the inward service drives of the organization’s members as by its outward goals. In such organizations, we can can extend our roots deeper into our psychic soil, down to where we can find new sources of inspiration and motivation, and draw them up from the depths to the surface, to bring new nourishment to this meaning-depleted world. If our organizations enable our innate service drives to find real use, they become something we care about — something worth serving and sacrificing for.*

Note: And organizations do require sacrifice. Obviously, not everything we do is intrinsically meaningful. Most things are not. Even the most inspired and rewarding career will be three-quarters chores. But when meaningless chores serve our true service, they are given purpose, and that purpose infuses them with new importance. They are no longer onerous and soul-draining tasks; they become worth doing for the sake of service.