Many design students are assigned Christoper Alexander’s classic “A City is Not a Tree”, a 1965 essay about how urban designers unintentionally produce cities that lack the richness of cities that develop organically.

He offers a structural diagnosis. The planned-out cities that feel artificial are organized around function. Each part of the city has a clearly-defined purpose and is optimized to perform its function well. Alexander’s complaint, though, is not a functional one. It is how these cities feel. They feel artificial, he explains, because, in the effort to optimize functions the system is abstracted into a clean hierarchy — a tree — where each element of the city has one set of functions to perform, which each sub-component supports. This kind of order is efficient, easily thought out, understood and managed, but devoid of life and hard to love. Alexander calls these “artificial cities.”

The structure of “natural cities” so beloved by Alexander (and so many other connoisseurs of urban life) is a semi-lattice. In a semi-lattice each element serves multiple overlapping functions. Alexander gives an example:

In Berkeley at the corner of Hearst and Euclid, there is a drugstore, and outside the drugstore a traffic light. In the entrance to the drugstore there is a newsrack where the day’s papers are displayed. When the light is red, people who are waiting to cross the street stand idly by the light; and since they have nothing to do, they look at the papers displayed on the newsrack which they can see from where they stand. Some of them just read the headlines, others actually buy a paper while they wait.

This effect makes the newsrack and the traffic light interactive; the newsrack, the newspapers on it, the money going from people’s pockets to the dime slot, the people who stop at the light and read papers, the traffic light, the electric impulses which make the lights change, and the sidewalk which the people stand on form a system – they all work together.

The important thing about this complex overlapping of purposes, though, is that it is conducive to social life. He makes what I would call a “pluricentric” observation: Each person who experiences a part of the city sees it according to a slightly different schema — their own personal tree structure, their own mental model. A patch of city with semi-lattice structure can accommodate a range of such structures. But if a designer has imposed a tree structure, there is only one way to see it. Every person conforms to the designer’s own perspective, and we do not sense the presence of many personalities, who inhabit our shared world in a variety of ways, we just that one monologic that ordered this place.

Rereading it today, it is striking how much a service, also, is not a tree — and the extent to which we service designers also try to force services into tree-structures, for the same reasons as urban planners, and with the same kind of result.

In an effort to make work manageable, we adopt structures like Teresa Torres’s Opportunity-Solution Trees, meant to help us clarify problems, focus on solving those problems, and then track how well our solution solves the problem and addresses the opportunity. At the scale of a single product or touchpoint, this approach is effective, which is why it has been so widely adopted.

But at the scale of services, this causes a kind of team siloing, and encourages each touchpoint to address different discrete sets of opportunities, just like what happens in Alexander’s artificial cities. And the result is services that work well, and perhaps even without gaps or glaring inconsistencies, but which lack life. Instead of the kind of service that creates emotional connection, the organization remains generic, impersonal, anonymous — corporate.

In a world of broken services, an artificial-feeling service that is not infuriating is probably sufficient. It will not repel customers. But it also won’t keep them. It will not create positive emotional memories or inspire loyalty in the long-term.

What do we do instead? How do we provide services that feel organically coherent and alive?

One obvious way, of course, is to give frontline employees the support they need to relate  to customers as human beings. Unhappy, stressed-out, overburdened, micro-managed, micro-measured and thoroughly dehumanized employees cannot provide human interactions that create strong relational bonds. They create an impression of an impersonal or deteriorating or tyrannically controlled organization. But allowing employees to flourish as human beings is expensive. Most companies are under pressure to prune staff to the bones, and wring maximum productivity out of each remaining human resource. The humane treatment option tends to be off the table, or at least severely limited.

Another way is to reweave multiple touchpoints, that for the sake of efficiency and speed have been combed straight into siloed teams, back into a rich interconnected fabric that shares opportunities across touchpoint teams. Teams collaborate in order to orchestrate complex solution systems that address opportunities over time across multiple touchpoints.

These complex touchpoint systems might be implemented separately, but they must be researched, designed, measured and evolved as a unit.

Journey management can help with the measuring and evolving part of the work, if it is embraced organization-wide and journey management teams are fully empowered to do their connecting work.

But the first step is kicking the “divide and conquer” mentality. Never forget the origin of this expression, which was advice to conquerers wishing to defeat, subdue and control a population by undermining their solidarity and preventing them from responding in a coordinated and effective way.

The alternative to divide and conquer isn’t a softer, blurrier “more human” version of the same strategy, nor is it more collaborative workshops. It is setting different and more ambitious goals, that address not only customer pain or functional needs, but aims at relationship, emotional connection and specialness. And it involves asking different questions. Instead of asking “who owns this part?” we need to ask “what are we trying to do?” with an expectation that the answer convene people across teams and solutions. And last, these cross-team collaborations should be small and frequent, part of the rhythm of every workweek.

Services that feel alive will be dense with these kinds of overlapping opportunities to serve and complex semilattices of collaborators, and at every scale. The opportunity to serve is not achieved through mere touchpoint connect-the-dots. It’s in weaving and reweaving these connections among dots and people, into rich lattices of service.