will osborn.
How I work

What I do, how I do it, and what you could expect

The work

The shapes the practice tends to take.

Projects are never the same, but most engagements fall into one of a few recurring shapes. Designing new services, when an organisation has decided to do something it hasn't done before and the service that delivers it has to be drawn from scratch, or improving services that already exist, when something that is running is no longer behaving and the symptoms are not telling you why. Both dive deeply into customer understanding and experience, and most of the time the organisation is also part of what needs working on.

Focussing on the organisation itself, I often work with clients to develop more effective design teams that set vision and deliver customer and business value, or developing effective customer functions so that customer voice, customer data, and customer judgement actually move through the organisation rather than getting stranded. Increasingly I've been working on building AI readiness: the operating-model question of who decides, what gets rewarded, and where judgement is allowed to live, rather than just training on prompt-engineering.

The lenses

Four disciplines, held together, not fighting for priority.

Each lens supplies something the others cannot. Used in isolation each one has value, but held together they cover most of the ground engagements actually sit on. The centre of the diagram is where the interesting work tends to be.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

held together Service design Organisational design Positive psychology Systems thinking

Each circle is one lens. Where they meet is where the practice tends to happen.

Named pieces

A small set of named pieces that have settled into shape.

Most of the work I do is bespoke, but over time some pieces happen often enough to become repeatable tools. These are tried and tested tools I have developed that go beyond the usual Customer Journeys or Design Sprints.