As a ser­vice designer, I’ve been involved in build­ing the way a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of pro­grams, prod­ucts and tools hang together. And, as some­one who works rel­a­tively often with gov­ern­ment, where many agen­cies, poli­cies, reg­u­la­tion and in the end, peo­ple, need to come together to make some­thing hap­pen, I’m usu­ally called upon to deal with com­plex issues. It often the case that the peo­ple I’m deal­ing when design­ing ser­vices, par­tic­u­larly, just don’t know where to start. It all looks too hard. Over time, I’ve devel­oped a set of ques­tions I use to help me under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing (ver­sus why it’s hap­pen­ing) as I go through a dis­cov­ery process. These ques­tions are focussed on activ­i­ties rather than val­ues, moti­va­tion or what some­one wants to achieve (the why ques­tions). Those value-​​​​based ques­tions are a whole other part (though not sep­a­rate from this part) of the design process. I’ll post about those in my next piece. These …