Four years of Snook
Today is my last day at Snook — kind of!
My Snook journey started in a hot tub in New Zealand! I was in the middle of recovering from a relationship breakdown. A friend lent me her car and I rented a holiday home for the weekend. I sat in the hot tub and wrote the story of my career and an accompanying illustration brief for a friend.
Six months later I was finally ready to leave New Zealand. Before embarking on a three month trip around South America I posted my career booklets and handwritten letters to five service design companies I admired in the UK. Snook were one of those companies.
Fast forward to April 2015 and after having lost my letter, Sarah and I had made contact. Snook had secured funding for a London based project and I’d accepted the role of Snook London employee number one.
It’s humbling to look back on everything we’ve achieved together since Snook London started but this is less a list of company projects and more a personal reflection on what the last 4 years have taught me.
Align your career to who you are
It’s a joy to be doing what I actually want to do. Every day over the last four years has been different, interesting, challenging and more. I’m grateful I feel happy coming to work every day. It took me a while to find my way into service design (that’s another story). The last four years have shown me the value of aligning your career with your value set, thinking hard about who you are and how your brain works and finding a discipline that feels like a fit for you rather than just what you ‘should be doing’ or are told you’re good at. Service design fits for me because it combines my creativity with my logical thinking while allowing me to solve worthwhile problems that align with my value set.
The industry is as important as the company
Finding a company you love is important, I have certainly found that with Snook. However something I didn’t anticipate is the open, honest, supportive yet challenging nature of the service design industry. I feel lucky to work within an industry that can look beyond lines of competition to work towards a greater mission together. An industry of people who actually want to help each other. From the large industry events like SDinGov to smaller local meetups like Serv Lab. Not to mention the informal meetups many of us run and the ongoing Twitter dialogue. There is always someone to ask for help. But mainly I’m so grateful for people’s kindness in this industry. Asking for a chat and a coffee will get a yes from most people, if they can — and thats invaluable.
Autonomy builds confidence
Confidence has always been an area of development for me but my time at Snook has helped me build this in so many ways . This has been the most important thing I’ve gained from the last four years. This morning Sarah gave me a School of Life book on that very subject and highlighted a quote to me that sums everything up so well:
“Confidence is a skill, not a gift from the gods.”
This skill has grown for me because I’ve had autonomy over my work at Snook. There is no such thing as micro-management, people take responsibility for their own projects, learning as they go. I’m joining Addaction with my confidence at a comfortable high. That’s because I was allowed to try and fail. I was allowed to cry. I was allowed to be open and honest. There was no such thing as a silly question. But primarily I was trusted to do things my way, and that that would fit with ‘the Snook way’.
Businesses that put people first will thrive
I’ve seen the good and bad of how to run a company over the years. The last four years have been an example of the good, for many reasons but mainly for the focus on people. That’s the big things like an emphasis on nurturing, mutual and trusted professional relationships to the small things like being thanked for a job well done. This runs right through to policies like having a counsellor on hand if you need support. One of the reasons I chose to move onto a secondment was to ensure I maintained the support of Snook as I took on a new challenge. And by putting people first, Snook have retained me as an employee.
Becoming comfortable with discomfort is important
We solve complex problems for a living. This often takes us into completely new areas. In my first few months at Snook I had to facilitate workshops with looked after young people, something I had zero experience of. I had to go and work embedded within Britain’s largest retailer for six months. I had to learn how to run a digital planning project with a multidisciplinary team across three organisations. And next week, I’m jumping into 12 months of mental health and addiction services. I find discomfort of this nature challenging but I’ve learned how important it is to push yourself, recognise the feelings that will come with that and manage your reaction in the best and most professional way you can.
There’s no such thing as a service design emergency
A wise woman, Charlotte Fountaine, once said “there’s not such thing as a service design emergency”. I’m sure some people in NHS Digital’s Emergency Care team might argue against this but fundamentally our day-to-day work isn’t usually a matter of life and death. For people like me who hold their work up as one of the most important things in their life — thats important to remember. It brings perspective when things get too much. Always remember your own physical and mental health come first, aim for good enough not perfect.
Leadership is not something you just wake up and start doing one day
If you read my previous post about my journey over the last year you’ll know I’ve been thinking a lot recently about leadership. Another wise woman, Sarah Drummond (Snook is full of them!) taught me how organic and gradual a progression into leadership can be. How much it’s a way of thinking and behaving and how little it’s about one day waking up and applying new methods and approaches to your work. It’s incredibly reassuring to hear “you’re already doing it” when you’re figuring out how to start doing that very thing.
It’s notable to me that the majority of the learnings I’ve focused on in this piece have been the softer side of myself and my role. And if service design is largely about people — this is no surprise to me.
It goes without saying my professional skillset has grown in leaps and bounds over the last four years. From facilitating young people to building data schemas. The huge variety of things I’ve tried, learned and refined over four years is long and for that I’m hugely grateful to all the talented people I’ve had to opportunity to work with and learn from.
I’ve also talked very little about what I’ve learned about service design. Being honest thats because I find offering thoughts and opinions on this difficult at present— thats something I’ll be working to overcome in the next 12 months as I push my learning around my craft into a new direction.
It’s been a special four years topped off with a big final wave of learning in the last two weeks. If the last week’s announcement taught me anything its that change is hard, sometimes unexpected but increasingly necessary. Snook have always prided themselves on being one step ahead and this recent move is no different. I’ll be watching from afar as our new adventures unfold in parallel.
Thank you to Snooks past and present, collaborators, clients and everyone in between. And remember… I’m not leaving!
