The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it
– Marcus Aureilius
I watched an interview with a biologist in which he made a radical insight: we’re leaving the era of the mean and moving into the era of the standard deviation. Meaning the world is becoming highly volatile and unpredictable, and we should instead prepare for fluctuations rather than averages. We can all see it—new record-breaking temperatures, once-in-a-century storms becoming the norm, a new virus mutation; the list goes on.
Outside of ecology, I’ve seen this in organizations. As service designers, we are hired to craft the future, be it North Star visions, future-state journeys, and transformation roadmaps. We identify and imagine where an organization needs to go, then work backward to determine how to get there. And increasingly, that future doesn’t hold still long enough for the plan to catch up. New technology changes customer expectations and organizations’ priorities. A disruption exposes a weakness in the system we didn’t know existed. A regulatory shift changes the rules. A climate event turns into a recurring condition. This isn’t just a hypothetical list; it’shappened with the last few projects I have worked on. What happens next? Five-year plans get thrown aside to focus on a new disruption or risk, and organizations apply quick fixes, layer on band-aids, and let tech and experience debt accumulate.
I have written this blog three times over because every angle comes back to this: optimization isn’t everything. Our work in service design focuses heavily on optimizing for the future, streamlining processes for customers and employees, and creating new efficiencies. But if an organization becomes extremely optimized around the mean, around what usually happens, it can actually become brittle and less resilient when there are fluctuations. If you optimize out slack, redundancy, discretion, and human judgment because, under average conditions, those things look inefficient. But those are often exactly what allows a system to absorb a shock.
And on a personal note, if you’re continuously optimizing for the future, do you even enjoy your present? I know I have to keep this work-related, but I want to take a moment to say overnight oats are not the efficiency hack I want in my life!
Nature Didn’t Get the Memo About the Happy Path
Ecosystems don’t survive because they’re optimized for the average conditions. They survive through species biodiversity, redundancy in essential tasks, and the ability to respond differently when conditions change: outbreaks of new diseases, extreme weather, invasive species, increased human activity, and pollution, to name a few. Some species are having to adapt quickly, so much so that scientists coined a new term for this in 1999: contemporary evolution. Contemporary evolution is turbocharged genetic change that can occur within years, decades, or centuries, rather than millions of years. Not every organism responds to a changing environment by waiting for conditions to return to normal or through hyper adaptations. Some can change their behavior or characteristics in response to the conditions around them.
Biologists call this plasticity: an organism’s ability to change its characteristics or behavior in response to its environment. It can be behavioral, physiological, or physical.
One example is the raccoon, particularly those that dwell in city habitats. Raccoons that live in urban environments show high physical and behavioral plasticity, with recent adaptations such as shorter snouts, smaller teeth, and calmer responses to urban stimuli that help them fit into a dense, human-driven environment.
While I am not suggesting you or your organization should get really good and finding trash, there’s something to be said by how resilient these animals are. A system can survive changing conditions not because it perfectly anticipated them, but because it has the capacity to change in response to them.
Design for Change, Not Certainty
We don’t need to predict every exception or fluctuation the future might hold. We need to design systems that can respond when fluctuations happen. Designing for the edge case can be a seemingly endless task that can lead to more swirl. But some edge cases may be telling us something about where the system is changing. They may signal the ecotones in our services: places where different expectations, systems, and realities collide, a subject my colleague Darwin Muljono has written about.
The goal, then, isn’t to anticipate every possible scenario. It’s to build the capacity to respond when the scenario changes. This is where modern service design has to evolve. At Harmonic, when we help teams design services, we’ve shifted from asking ‘What is the ideal static journey?’ to ‘Where does this system need room to flex? Taking a cue from nature, we can focus less on designing for every exception and more on designing systems with the capacity to adapt:
- Keep some slack
Capacity that looks “unused” under normal conditions can become critical when demand spikes. - Give decision-making authority
Give people closest to the situation enough authority to respond without waiting for the new plan. - Design principles, not just procedures
When you can’t anticipate every situation, clear principles can help people make decisions without requiring a rule for every exception. - Build feedback into the system
Shorter learning loops make it possible to notice changing conditions and respond before yesterday’s solution becomes tomorrow’s problem. - Design for recovery and change
Don’t only ask, “How do we prevent failure?” Ask, “How can this system recover, learn, and become something different?”
Designing for Plasticity in the Real World
Shifting away from rigid, hyper-optimized future states doesn’t mean abandoning strategy, it just means being honest about how work actually happens. When we work with teams at Harmonic, we don’t drop in with a cookie-cutter framework and tell everyone to start over. We have to meet people where they’re actually at, mapping where their current systems are brittle, discovering tensions and competing priorities, finding where frontline teams are already quietly adapting to survive, and helping build the slack and permission needed to let that responsiveness scale.
In the Age of Exceptions, Be the Raccoon
If we’re entering an age where exceptions arrive more frequently, plasticity may become more valuable than optimization. Perhaps that’s a more useful way to think about the future of service design. Our job isn’t always to create the perfect future state. Sometimes it’s to create services and organizations that can keep becoming something else as the world around them changes.
