Translator: Bella Borahm Hur Vinha Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
Hello.
Good afternoon.
I would like to start by telling you a story.
In Baixo São Francisco, Alagoas,
there is a tribe called Cariri-Xocó.
The Cariri-Xocó people are the result
of several other smaller tribes
that withstood centuries of occupation in their territories.
Currently, there are around 2,500 Indians
who try to keep their traditions alive.
The leadership of Cariris-Xocós
consists of three main parts:
the chief - the great leader,
the shaman - the spiritual leader,
and a council that consists of older Indians
that help the other two make the important decisions in the tribe.
As you can see in this image,
they normally live in great abundance.
They hunt, fish
and live in balance with nature.
However, there are certain natural forces
that make their supply run out
or reduce greatly.
During these moments of crises
they become more like warriors.
They gather around a campfire
and select the most skilled Indians
with a mission to bring back
this balance that they once had.
These Indians are selected
and set off in search for food.
The journey can last for weeks,
during which they use the skills
that they have acquired over the years
in order to serve the tribe.
When they return with the food,
they do not receive any special reward,
statue or medal.
What they do receive in return for their service
is a purpose.
They, indeed, know that they helped the tribe
restore balance.
This doesn't just happen in this tribe.
Contribution is essential in various cultures
and religions all around us.
In Buddhism, the practitioners seek to attain enlightenment
and search for the end of suffering.
There is a central figure: the Dalai Lama.
The Dalai Lama is known in the east as "Ocean of Wisdom".
For him, the root of happiness is altruism,
which is the desire to be of service to others.
It isn't just Dalai Lama: there are others, too.
Mother Teresa is another example.
For her, love is being of service.
Being of service, indeed, is the way to achieve peace.
Others continue on with the same reasoning.
Gandhi, the great pacifist,
said that a great way,
perhaps the best way to be a human being
is to serve others.
This is good for us, too; to serve and to contribute.
Jesus Christ propagated his teachings
and these are followed by millions to this day.
Jesus was sent down to Earth by God
to be of service to the society.
He came not to be served but in order to contribute,
and left us with this mission till this day.
But then again, it's not just in religion.
Science has discovered things
that have helped us understand a little
about the motivation of serving and contributing.
Our brain is composed of approximately 80 billion neurons.
These neurons help us feel the world around us.
It is because of them that we feel the world.
Italian scientists have only recently
discovered a special group of neurons.
These neurons react to the feelings of others,
which can seem a little strange.
This group of neurons are called the 'mirror-neurons.'
They function more or less like this:
when I see someone get hurt,
these neurons yell out, "Pain!".
It is only when the receptors in my body
send out a message back saying, "It's not us. It's okay."
that we stay calm.
This specific group of neurons --
to prove their existence -
they did an interesting experiment.
Two people were made to face each other.
One of them had an anesthetized arm,
and he had to look at
the other person get a cut on his arm.
As one might expect, for them,
this group of neurons yelled out, "Pain!"
when seeing the cut on someone else's arm.
Because the receptors in the arm were anesthetized,
the neurons didn't send back the signal: "We're okay."
So, what happened was that the person felt the pain
of another person in his own brain.
This group of neurons
came to be known as 'neurons of empathy'
because if I do feel things in the body of another person,
I will want to be of help, not see that person suffer.
I suffer, too, when the other person suffers.
Another group of scientists even created a theory,
which says that when humans
developed this group of neurons called 'mirror-neurons',
evolution happened a lot faster
because people actually had a reason to help others.
That is why these neurons are very interesting
and at the end of the day,
the only thing separating you
from the person next to you, is your skin.
Without your skin and the receptors underneath,
you would actually feel everything that the skin feels, in your brain.
But this beautiful act of serving and contributing
isn't so present in our daily lives.
Several corporations and companies
have forgotten this drive to serve.
They have only thought about winning
and making money through client relations.
One clear example of this
was the economic crisis that we just went through.
Several banks wanting to increase their profit from the customers,
began carrying out practices
that ended up harming the entire society
and the whole world.
The current director of IMF
said exactly this.
She said that the banks should worry
also about serving people
instead of serving only themselves.
We do not need to go so far
in order to identify this lack of service.
We live it every day.
Every day, we receive the disservice
from the moment we wake up
and take the public transport to work,
when we call a call center
to be attended
but cannot resolve our problems,
when we try to buy something
and do not receive the expected service.
Because of this lack of balance in relations
between businesses and the society,
we end up having to work even harder
in order to get the services provided by these companies.
This ends up also backfiring
on those who actually work for these corporations
because if I work in a company
whose only objective is to make money,
my personal objective won't be accomplished either.
I will only be another component
within this machine that is run
only to build unbalanced relationships.
This makes the workers very frustrated
and they become unhappy at work and without a purpose to serve.
My objective is to combat this.
What I do is design services.
Designing services is about building
new services that are more balanced
and improving already existing services.
The first thing that needs to be taken into consideration here
is understand the process of using a service.
For example, if I were to design a service for a café,
it wouldn't be present only in the drinking of the coffee.
The service actually begins when the person thinks of coffee.
From there, my company
and I start to influence that person and the whole journey.
It is from that point that I can be of service:
from the path that the person takes
and the interactions along the way
to where I can put the company advertisement.
All of this is part of the user's journey,
where the user always comes first
and is at the front.
But I can't just think about the user
and the service that will be provided.
I also need to think about the ecosystem
that exists around that service.
The previously mentioned café, cannot function on its own.
With a café in a neighborhood, interactions occur and there is traffic.
How does the coffee eventually get there?
What kind of waste is this café going to produce?
Where does the waste go? Here, I can make a difference.
It's important that I do make a difference
by designing new services.
The phrase "service design"
has the word "design" in it.
It is very much based on the same approach used in design.
I'm not talking about the esthetics.
Design entails these three key parts:
empathy, collaboration and experimentation.
First, it's empathy.
If I were to design something for someone,
I will have to understand and observe that person.
I will need to talk to that person,
and analyze the way they use other services
in order to understand the drive that this person has
and be able to design something that is in line with it.
The second point, which is also very important,
is collaboration.
If I were creating a service that would touch many people,
that many people would use,
it's no use creating this service sitting at my office
with air conditioning, while thinking only of myself.
I need to understand the end users.
How do I do that? I need to bring them into the project.
We plan the service together.
Business collaborators providing the services
and the people receiving this service
would actually work with me
in the design of services through this approach.
The third important point
is experimentation.
It's natural to make mistakes. It's part of the process.
I cannot turn a blind eye
and wait for the mistake to be made
when the service reaches the consumers.
I have to anticipate this.
In order to do that, what I do is
come up with controlled test scenarios
in which I can experiment what I'm thinking of creating,
even without reaching the end user,
so that I can make small adjustments
and these little adjustments may contribute.
When my proposal reaches the market,
it'll fit the purpose more,
making much more sense
to everyone who would use it.
In general,
service design is about reconnecting
people and businesses around the act of serving.
Now I'll show you a video that summarizes what I talked about.
(Video with male voice and music) We believe in a new world,
a world in which people seek to have what they love,
not everything that they need;
where ownership is perceived by companies
as an example of contribution
and not as the only path of relationship with the client;
a world in which "sharing" is greater than "owning"
and the desire to have access to something
surpasses that of simply being the owner.
In this world, if you're not serving anyone
you happen to serve others.
Businesses and consumers cocreate results
and, together, redefine standards
to question the current system that is a little inefficient
and destructive, as we know.
It is a choice to imagine that this world doesn't exist,
that it is a utopia, a meaningless delusion,
just like the way we choose to face facts
and conclude that the world, which current management models
were designed for, also doesn't exist anymore.
We believe that in order to navigate in this new world,
we need new lenses
that allow us to see new business models
designed from and around humans;
lenses that allow us to absorb new points of view
to replace the traditional industrial vision, based on products
and that no longer represents the active forces in the economy
in Brazil and the world.
For us, there are no products.
What we usually call "products"
are avatars of services that are being provided.
We advocate that any and every medium of spreading interaction,
be it a tangible good,
a digital manifestation, or a process,
has a service in its essence.
After all, if it were otherwise,
what would it serve?
We need to search for the essence of serving
because it carries the secret
to constructing a new world.
Gustavo Bittencourt: Serve a purpose.
That is my message. Thank you.
(Applause)