My new vision for service sustainability

Posted Wednesday 14th July 2010

I've a new vision for sustainability in services.

I’ve recently had the honour to work with the Sustainable Business Network (SBN), providing service design expertise and tools to help them develop their offering to members. 

We’ve since started a sustainable service design interest group, with its own evolving web page and a member-only ning. In time you’ll find brief presentations and cases studies on service design and service sustainability. On the cards is a seminar or workshop in sustainability in services too. Which is the reason what I've evolved a new vision.

Traditional views of service sustainability have emphasised three things: energy and resource use, responsibilities to staff and community, and use of information technologies. More recent versions such as Lean Services and Six Sigma approaches are ever more sophisticated and powerful. In parallel, current systems for certifying a service’s ‘greenness’ are oriented to the organisation’s carbon footprint (typically measured by energy and resource use).

I suggest these are only a quarter of the story: they represent production- and product-focused views. The service business model is essentially to charge for time, so this approach to certification isn't telling us how sustainable the use of people's time  is, both staff and customers.

For this reason it bothers me particularly that consumption-focused views aren’t being made a priority of service sustainability. Where are the impacts on consumers and through consuming? Where do we account for a service/s time-wasting as well as real value-adding time? Time, after all, is all of money, energy and goodwill. 

A service's direct impacts are those arising in service consumption – the environmental, economic and social impacts of being a service's consumer. The indirect ones are those arising with externalities transferred to other services.  Wasting time in one service leads to ostensibly high-value time in another, though that's not how it should actually work.

To take my favourite example at present, what’s a ‘sustainable mortgage’? What outcomes might it seek: are these purely ‘ethical’ (social) or are there economic and environmental impacts to aim at too? How would a customer 
experience it in real time and over time? What touchpoints and services would it include? What externalities might it seek to manage (internally or by supporting other services)? And is it really more sustainable to provide the mortgage via the Internet or a mobile phone? 

This is probably just a way of saying service sustainability isn’t a well-defined or well-understood topic yet - yet another example of something we all know already. Perhaps the key for now is the lack of meaningful credentialing for services, such as the service equivalent of Life Cycle Analysis – one that can take into account key impacts downstream (such as of a mortgage).

For well-intentioned services, I think the crux is the very limited attention given to the design of the ‘sustainable’ service and its offerings. By ‘design’ I mean a process that starts by defining the desired sustainability outcomes for customers and their communities, then purposefully evolves the service in ways that lead to these outcomes (be they environmental, economic or social). 

At present the tools that might be useful focus on measuring outcomes rather than designing from them (though the latter is perhaps implicit). These include tools by the London Benchmarking Group, the New Economic Foundation’s proving and improving tools for measuring social return on investment (SROI) and the SROI Project. 

Along these lines, and at the risk of seemingly taking off on a tangent, I recently attended and highly recommend Kath Dewar’s excellent course onHow to Market Sustainability. It’s for anyone working on sustainability in business, as much as sustainability in marketing. And it’s very well developed, taking you from the basics through to the latest and most challenging examples.

So to the point. This's my very simple vision for sustainability in services.

I look forward to the day we can explore and discuss sustainable services in the way we did on Kath's course (which will mean of course, that we have a well-established discipline to teach)!

Previous Blogs

These blogs are also available for response at Supplejack's wordpress page.

Measuring the good stuff in sustainability - posted  Wednesday 31st March 2010

Social sustainability and service design - posted Wednesday 17th August 2009

What's a sustainable service business? - posted Friday 19th June 2009