Organizations live or die by human behaviors.

If the leaders of a company behave in a way that inspire, encourage coerce or otherwise motivate behaviors within the organization that efficiently and effectively motivate partners and customers to behave in ways that support the organization’s goals, that organization will flourish.

If leaders motivate the wrong behaviors or fail to motivate the right behaviors, and if behaviors within the organization fail to support or undermine an organization’s goals, or if they do so inefficiently or ineffectively, and if, consequently partners and customers stop engaging with the organization, that organization will fail.

Service design begins and ends with behaviors. It begins with what people are currently doing, and it inquires into why people behave the way they do. It ends with systems of behavior that cause an organization to flourish. And it looks for ways to make people want to behave in organization-supporting ways, and to willingly and spontaneously support it because that organization supports what they want.

The best service design inspires genuine loyalty.

I’ve called service design “win-win engineering”.