Service Design + Journey Management
Life is chaotic and unpredictable, full of twists, turns, and cliffhangers you never saw coming. Career, love, friendships, health—each demands attention, and the pressure to feel fulfilled in every area can be relentless. Balancing and controlling it all starts to feel impossible, as if everything’s blended into a smoothie with too many ingredients—nothing tastes quite right, and it’s hard to tell how to fix it. You start asking yourself those overwhelming, restless questions: How do I focus on what matters? Where should I invest my energy? How can I solve the problems that keep me up at night? All of it, all at once.
This might sound like the start of a self-help seminar, but stay with me. What if your life and organization have more in common than you think? When life becomes overwhelming, you don’t just sit in the chaos—you talk it out, reflect on what’s working, what’s not, and try to make a plan. And businesses? They’re not so different. They, too, drift without direction, struggle under the weight of competing priorities, and benefit from moments of reflection—especially when the noise gets loud and clarity is hard to find.
If life is a journey, then therapy is like having a guide—a space to reflect, adjust your path, and keep moving forward. Businesses, too, need that kind of direction, a way to course-correct, and that’s exactly what service design and journey management provide. Service design is the reflection, analysis, and planning phase of therapy, where businesses assess their current state, define a future vision, and design the plan that can get them there. Journey management, by contrast, is the ongoing practice of keeping that plan on track as companies execute their strategies. It’s the structured, intentional act of maintaining focus and momentum, especially when complexity and chaos threaten to slow progress. Together, service design and journey management form the full bundle—the therapy organizations need to move with clarity and intention.
Diagnosis and Treatment Plan
Let’s unpack this a little more. Before you can fix what’s broken, you need to understand what’s actually going on. It starts with listening to symptoms, digging into your history, and examining the dynamics around you—family, friends, colleagues, and partners. It’s about identifying areas for improvement to craft a personalized treatment plan. Just like therapists start forming a vision for your growth from the first conversation, businesses begin this process through service design.
Service design is the diagnostic phase—a structured approach to understanding the current state of the business, pinpointing misalignments, and identifying areas for improvement. For customer-centered organizations, this often means mapping existing customer journeys and understanding the roles and interactions of service actors to build a clear, contextual understanding of the service as it’s experienced today. Once this current state is clear and opportunities have been identified, service design defines the equivalent of a treatment plan—a kind of evolution map that lays out how the business can progress from where it is to where it wants to be. It’s a plan grounded in reality but driven by the potential for transformation, carefully structured to bridge the gap between the present and the desired future.
Doing the transformational work
But there’s a long road of work ahead: implementation. Making changes, whether in life or business, can feel like trying to turn a speeding train—intimidating, messy, and often overwhelming. Without careful guidance, the momentum can spiral out of control, turning small adjustments into a cascade of unintended consequences. That’s why therapy isn’t a one-time fix—it’s a consistent, ongoing practice of course correction. It helps you track progress, stay grounded, and adjust when necessary. Regular therapy sessions allow you to surface new issues, notice improvements, and ensure each part of your life is supporting your overall well-being.
The same pattern plays out inside organizations. One project turns into five. One priority multiplies into ten. Everyone’s moving, but is anyone moving in the right direction? That is why, when implementation kicks off, journey management must kick in. Journey management provides the structure to cut through the chaos, aligning work to real business goals—not to erase the complexity, but to give teams tools to ensure the effort drives meaningful progress. Journey management serves as the ongoing effort to keep track of progress, to monitor impact, and to stay aligned. It keeps teams connected, breaks down silos, and creates a shared understanding across departments, ensuring everyone is rowing in the same direction.
Seeing the results
Finally, you have to ask: Is it working? In therapy, you notice the signs of progress, those small but meaningful shifts that tell you things are moving in the right direction. But in business, this assessment is more complex. Multiple stakeholders need to see proof of impact, and leadership needs to justify ongoing investment in new initiatives. This is where metrics come in. Journey management introduces the tools to measure change over time. Are you moving toward your goals? Are these changes showing up in customer experience, employee engagement, or financial performance? Metrics aren’t just about proving someone did a good job—they’re about validating that the work is making a difference. When aligned with customer journeys, these metrics become powerful signals for reflection, adjustment, and accountability.
Like therapy, the relationship between service design and journey management isn’t a straight line. It’s a practice, not a prescription—a continuous cycle of reflection, action, and adjustment. Even with a clear plan and aligned teams, some solutions won’t stick. Some progress will stall. These two practices don’t live in isolation. When journeys are placed at the center of a service design strategy, journey management helps activate them and keep them connected to the day-to-day reality of the organization. When journey management surfaces new challenges, misalignments, or unmet needs, it points right back to the drawing board—back to service design to rethink, redesign, and realign. But that’s not failure. It’s the process of meaningful transformation. Whether you’re navigating your own life or leading an organization through complexity, progress comes not from getting it right the first time, but from committing to see clearly and keep moving forward with intention.
