Moving on from Snook
By: Sarah Drummond
Tags: Codesign, Scotland, Servicedesign, Snook, UX

Moving on from Snook

This is an excerpt/mashup from the call I had with our team on Thursday 29th July 2021. And yes, I did cry. Sarah Drummond Follow Aug 3 · 7 min read

I’m just going to say it out loud, and that will make it real for me.

I am moving on from Snook. There, I said it out loud!

This, as many of you will recognise, is not a decision I have taken overnight, nor has it been easy for me to make. It’s been my own decision to move on. The time feels right for me to hand over leadership to our fantastic senior team.

When we started, hardly anyone had heard of ‘service design’. We worked hard on demonstrating the power of design, applying it to wicked problems and helping institutions move into the 21st century. We told stories of our projects, time and time again, and we eventually saw traction — small glimpses of meaningful change.

We’ve worked tirelessly to share the impact of our work with anyone who’d listen and needed help with a challenge. We’ve helped create the space for organisations and teams to explore problem and opportunity areas together by design, when previously, that sort of progressive reflection space did not exist.

About a third of my sketchbooks of stories and notes from over the years at Snook

And we grew from those stories, over a decade and more, into an incredible team of collaborators. Starting out in Scotland where there was a tiny studio above a tearoom for the 2 of us, then 4, then 8, then 12, then 20, then 35, and we kept growing. We now have a team of nearly 100 Snooks working between London, Glasgow and all points between.

When I started out in my first internship in a Government department, no one had even considered talking to users. Fast forward to Snook - now we can’t launch a service without proving we’ve tested it with them.

It’s a completely different era from the one we started the company in. The investment in design by companies now is truly encouraging. It creates the space for us to do our work — which is to help design services that balance people’s needs with the planet’s.

The company has gone through many revolutions that I’ve led with the support of an amazing team to ensure we were able to design in the best way possible - for our clients, our team, the planet and everyone on it.

Snook, like all companies, needs to continue to evolve. It has been my long term project but it never finishes- just like a service really. Always live, always needing iterations.

That’s a somewhat tiring prospect for a ‘finisher’ like me!

I’ve taken the company through many design evolutions, each version better than the last, but never resting on laurels and thinking that it can’t be improved.

There’s a new iteration currently underway — a need to authentically champion diversity, to be actively anti-racist in our work, to nurture foundations that support interdisciplinary work and to challenge clients in including the planet as a stakeholder.

Snook is about the team: here they are in a recent incarnation

There’s lots of work to do — that will always need to be done. But I’m choosing to hand the baton on to the current crop of Snooks and the great senior team that supports them;

Phee Kinnear , our Interim MD who is leading Snook through its next iteration in a pragmatic and humanistic way. I’m so psyched she’s doing this role.

, our Interim MD who is leading Snook through its next iteration in a pragmatic and humanistic way. I’m so psyched she’s doing this role. Natalie McFadyen has been bringing together new business and delivery more closely which is needed in any business to ensure what we pitch can be delivered well.

has been bringing together new business and delivery more closely which is needed in any business to ensure what we pitch can be delivered well. Dr Valerie Carr has been leading how we do research and looking after our larger clients. She also houses an infinite amount of knowledge and wisdom of our back catalogue and approach.

has been leading how we do research and looking after our larger clients. She also houses an infinite amount of knowledge and wisdom of our back catalogue and approach. Gavin Mcguire is heading up our service design practice and providing his wisdom in designing great user-centred services, with a side order of good music recommendations along the way.

is heading up our service design practice and providing his wisdom in designing great user-centred services, with a side order of good music recommendations along the way. And Tash Willcox leading our learning at Snook both internally and externally comes with a bundle of enthusiasm and a critical lens on how we teach design.

And, we’re just about to announce our new Chief Design Officer appointment I’m so pleased with who we’ve settled on. It’s really important to me that someone steps into developing our design practice in a way that demonstrates both our collective values and challenges the industry on what good design should be.

Finally, Pete Tucker has come in to support from NEC and invest time over the past 6 months to help ensure Snook is supported to continue to evolve.

Knowing this team is in place makes it easier for me to move on.