This LinkedIn post illuminates the source of my current dismay with the direction service design has taken, which is toward journey management.

None of this is a complaint about journey management per se, only the notion that journey management is a natural extension of service design — something for which service designers should feel affinity.

Journey management is an emerging field, with few trained specialists to fill the roles it creates.

Service designers are among the most qualified.

This is not unusual. Designers often find themselves at the edges of emerging fields, and often flow into these domains, and infuse them with designerly sensibilities.

The tragedy in this case, however, is that here design has flown too close to the sun, or rather, taken the elevator too close to the sun, up in the top floors of the glass tower where the executives hold court.

Up here, some key parts of the service design skillset are indispensable.

All except the design part. The design part is not only useless, it is a liability.

All those specialized methods human centered designers learn in order to be service designers are retained. But the heart of the discipline — design — is checked at the boardroom door.

All service, no design.

This is a tragedy because the radical promise of design is collaborative decision-making. It involves everyone exercising empathy, together. It is exercised mutually, by all involved. It is not exercised in order to spare executives the burden of thinking outside their own narrow focus, as der Veer suggests.

Empathy is not, cannot and should not be done asymmetrically for someone else, who is not expected to reciprocate. That is not empathy. That is submission.

Nobody should be exempted from the challenge of relating as a human to other humans — least of all the most powerful people whose duty it is to lead.

The whole point of design is to humanize the world. When, in the name of empathy we spare the most powerful people in the world the duty to lead empathically, design has betrayed both itself and the world.

Journey management is not a design discipline.

It is a strain of management consulting that systematically organizes customer data to inform business strategy decisions. In this time, in these conditions, journey management is a necessary and important improvement on older, more piecemeal ways of understanding customers.

Service designers might be able to transition to journey management, but they cannot make this transition as service designers. At best, they will harness their vestigial design skills in service of their new managerial function.

For service designers — and all designers — effective collaboration with journey managers will be an essential skill. It will expand design’s sphere of effectiveness.

But make no mistake: if journey managers “win a seat at the table” this is no more a win for design than when product managers won their seat. These “offering management” disciplines add new organizational layers between design and leadership, and rather than representing design, they push design further from power.