Doctor's Note - Issue 34 - Leadership Renewal
In this issue: Leadership Renewal Retreat / Service Design 2nd Edition / Tech's Failure of Imagination / Conferences & Masterclasses / Coaching Reflections / Power of Ten / The Linkhole
Welcome to the latest Doctor's Note! It's been a while, I know.
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Leadership Renewal Retreat
If you're struggling with January blues and already feeling busy, Marzia Aricò and I have the antidote for you. A Leadership Renewal retreat in Bergamo, Italy, 9th-12th April, 2026.
We both coach and both experience coachees feeling overworked, depleted from holding space for others, and often a loneliness of being the only design person at their level.
So we decided to create Leadership Renewal retreat. A small, intimate retreat for senior design leaders at the beautiful and peaceful Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design campus in Bergamo, nestled in the Astino valley.
Take a few days away from busy calendars, calls and kanbans. Time out from performance mode. Away from having to be “on”.
We planned this as a kind of Italian family gathering. Together, we will cook, eat, walk, think, talk, and sit with what leadership really looks like at this point in our careers.
We're not here to solve all your problems, but to enable you to reconnect with energy, clarity, and direction.
We hope you will join us. We're keeping it as a small group, so reserve your place as soon as possible here: https://leadership-renewal.me/
We're so looking forward to welcoming you.
Service Design: From Insight to Implementation 2nd Edition
One of the many reasons for me not getting on with the design leadership book I've been promising is because Lou Rosenfeld asked us to write a second edition of our book, Service Design: From Insight to Implementation.
If I'm honest, I initially didn't want to write a second edition. I felt we'd been there, done that. But when Lavrans, Ben and I started chatting about what has happened in the 12 years since the first edition was published, we realised we did have something new to say.
Obviously, the biggest thing has been the rise of digital product design and product-led organisations. Some of which has been of great benefit, some of which has regressed some orgs back into the industrial mindset service design was trying to get them out of.
We re-wrote every chapter of the book, which is a curious process akin to touching up a mark on wall and trying to avoid re-painting the entire house. Notably, we have many new cases studies and whole load of new evidence for the benefits of service design. We also have some new guest sidebars (thanks Indi Young!) and completely revised chapters on measurement and the final one on future challenges (spoiler: they're still challenges).
The biggest addition is a completely new chapter on organisational change. More specifically, viewing service design as an organisational change methodology. It's the missing piece from the first book. We realised over the years that successful transformations are often triggered by technology, but fail if they don't include and understand people. This chapter explores service design's role in enabling that.
Wrap Up Fatigue
I wrote a quick rant on LinkedIn about the ridiculous amount of "2025 Wrap Up!" content and it seemed to hit a nerve. You can comment on it there, but here it is in case you missed it:
Tech is suffering such a failure of imagination right now.
I’ve had end of year wrap up offerings from Spotify (obviousy), LinkedIn , komoot (a hiking app), Discord and, ridiculously, from Miro.
Imagine your real whiteboard telling you which colour markers you used most.
I’ve seen others from airlines, Loom, Google One (“your storage journey” 🤦🏼 ).
I’ve also been offered to set up my Zoom and Notion email addresses. Nobody needs more email addresses.
Nobody needs another tool trying to become the everything office app (looking at your past sins Dropbox).
And nobody needs AI summaries of articles, since summaries are easy for authors and sub editors to write.
Few people enjoy being the other end of AI sunmarising. “Did you read that email I spent time composing?” “No, but I read the AI summary.”
And of course the utility and imagination to investment ratio of AI is bonkers.
The heart of the problem is a weird juxtaposition of scarcity of time (because velocity remains unquestioned) and an abundance of resources.
Most apps are extremely bloated. Tell me why LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram need to be 400-500MB. The speed and storage of our devices mean optimisation is no longer the honing tool it used to be when we had to create sites that came in under a couple of hundred KB.
Photoshop 2.5 on my old MacBook Pismo opens almost instantly with a snappy 16-bit interface. You can’t open any other apps to multitask because the machine’s memory runs out. You’re faced with the choice of properly stopping and switching or not being distracted after all.
Creativity thrives when it’s given time. And, often, when technical and financial constraints are present.
We currently have it the wrong way around.
There is so much money sloshing around and so much power in our tools, but such a false scarcity of time, that those building digital products and platforms just copy their neighbours.
What a waste of everyone’s time that is.
See also The Greed for Speed
Coaching Reflections Videos
I'm still recording my coaching reflections videos, now on an ad hoc basis, since weekly was just killing me. You'll find the whole series on my Design Leadership YouTube playlist.
Here are a few recent highlights:
Acknowledging your emotions is essential to work relationships
Politics is not a dirty word in leadership (unlike the rest of the world right now)
From these, you can get a sense of the common issues coming up in coaching at the moment.
Conferences & Masterclasses
Hatch Ateliers, Berlin
I'll be doing the kick-off session again at the Hatch Ateliers. This time in Berlin, which is the atelier focused around transitioning into design leadership.
I really loved the one in Lisbon and Damian and his crew really put on lovely, small events (mostly a maximum of 80 people). Each Atelier is in a different city with a different thematic emphasis. If you can go to them all, do! But any of them are well worth a visit with wonderful facilitators.
iF Academy Masterclass
I have put together and will be teaching a masterclass for the iF Design Academy on Advancing Your Design Leadership. It's aimed at established design leaders who want to further advance their leadership journey and mid-career and executive design leaders ready to strengthen their leadership presence and personal impact. My guests in the course are Marzia Aricò, Jason Mesut, Tanarra Schneider and Shen Liu, with whom I had excellent discussions that form part of the content.
There will be three cohorts over the year in different timezones. The Americas/EMEA one runs from 28th January 2026 to 18th March 2026, so book soon!
Service Design Academy Masterclass
I am once again teaching the Pitching, Selling and Getting Buy-In module of the Service Design Academy Masterclass running this Spring Mar 5 - May 11, 2026. The whole masterclass is excellent with each module taught by recognised names. The modules are standalone, but really work together. We consistently received excellent feedback from participants. You can book here.
Power of Ten
I you haven’t checked out my Power of Ten podcast, you’ll find all the episodes and transcripts here. My YouTube channel has both the videos and audio versions. The audio versions are available in all the usual places you get your podcasts, or click on the feed here.
Here are the latest since my last Doctor's Note:
The Materials of Service Design with Johan Blomkvist and Stefan Holmlid.
The Linkhole
I'm keeping it short this issue, since I've burdened you with so much content above.
I'll never get bored of recommending Alex Murrell's excellent essay on the plague of algorithmically determined modern culture: The Age of Average
Jose Coronado and Jason Mesut put together an insightful set of 6 Negative Design Leader Archetypes in Horrible Bosses, Design Edition . I'm ashamed to say I've probably been one or two of these and certainly recognise them all.
Culture Debt by Mike Fisher hits home. "Speed isn’t the enemy. Growth isn’t the enemy. The real danger is assuming culture will take care of itself while the organization races ahead." (via Kate Tarling)
In 2025, I thought a lot about the things I want to say to my boss written by 24 anonymous contributors and curated by Amy McNichol is the inside view of the Culture Debt piece above.
Tom Eldrige has been putting together some super useful blog posts for service designers. This one on Tools for Thinking is a very actionable example you can immediately use in your work.
I nodded along wistfully to Amelia Marschall-Miller's piece, What happened to delightful web design?. I, too, wish for some silliness to come back to the web that doesn't consist of short-form videos or AI slop.
My friend, ex-boss and co-founder of Fjord, Mark Curtis, is sharing his insights on a blog/podcast platform called Full Moon in collaboration with David Mattin.
That’s it for this issue! Thanks for making this far and for reading, listening and watching.
Until next time,
Andy
❤️
