Fellow Service Designers

I am running a consulting project for a large financial services client in the UK. The work requires that I work together with its lean six sigma staff to drive business improvements. I am very comfortable with lean six sigma, but as I have written elsewhere on the Design Thinking Network, I do not think that it is enough to deliver all the available business benefits. Its overwhelmingly deductive approach severely limits its vision. To bridge this visionary deficit you need a more abductive approach, such as design thinking, or service design as we like to think of it here. But service designers and lean six sigmers famously do not get on well together. Each of them (foolishly) think they alone know the one true way.

But... someone must have been able to make them work together... to deliver business benefits over and above those that each of them on their own can deliver.

Have you seen any new thinking recently on the integration of service design and lean six sigma? Or better still, have you integrated them yourself? 

Please share any new thinking with me. 

Graham Hill
Customer-driven Innovator
graham.hill@web.de 
@grahamhill