Bad Services Book Club
A ready-to-run book club template based on Lou Downe’s Bad Services to run 4 sessions of reflections and interactive tasks as a service team to reflect on causes for bad service.
What it is
Four sessions that combine a short input, a story from the book and an exercise people do on their own project. Nobody has to have read the chapters to join.
Four session frames, one per meeting, each following the same rhythm: input → story → exercise → sharing.
Session 1: What is a service? Product vs. service, the product trap and the weakest link. Exercise: each person maps a product they work on and the service around it.
Session 2: Purpose and Users. Exercise 1: draft your project’s purpose in one sentence, then find other ways to deliver it (funding, regulation, community, education…). Exercise 2: name the contradicting needs of your users and reflect on whose needs you currently prioritise.
Session 3: Materials and Risk. A pre-clustered materials map (people, technology, policies & rules, data, spaces) with dot voting: which materials do you rely on most, where are the opportunities, where are the constraints? Plus the reflection “Who holds the knife?”: where do you protect your organisation by passing risk to your users?
Session 4: Structure and Fixing Services. Horizontal and vertical silos mapped onto a service blueprint. Exercise: find the silos in your own delivery process and in your users’ journey. It closes with a recap of all five causes of bad services and a dot vote on the most valuable chapter.
Every session also includes a header with date, reading target and “what to expect”, ready to copy into your invitation.
How to use it
1. Before you start: set a rhythm. Four sessions, one every two weeks, worked well, giving people time to read and you time to prepare. Announce the reading target for each session and make clear that joining without having read is fine.
2. Prepare each session: replace the quotes and images with the passages that stood out to you. One strong story per chapter works better than a summary.
3. During the session: give the input in about 10 minutes, then let people work quietly in their frames (5 minutes per question), then share. Duplicate the participant frames to match the size of your group.
4. Leave room for conversation: two chapters in 60 minutes is a lot. If you have the time, pick one focus chapter per session and keep the second one as a short input only.
Tips from running it
Exercises about people’s own projects produce the richest answers.
Light formats like dot voting leave more room for discussion than long writing tasks.
In hybrid sessions, actively invite the remote participants in. Conversations in the room tend to carry on among themselves.
Newcomers can join any session. The format doesn’t depend on having attended the earlier ones.
Credits
Based on Bad Services by Lou Downe (2026). Sessions and Miro template developed by Linda Klotzbach.
