Design for Business
Scaling Org Culture
A Stanford d.school class, Winter 2023
What's this class about?
The reset button was hit; COVID-19 accelerated changes to work and the reshuffling of the workforce. Work is becoming more digital, distributed, remote, and in many ways, transactional. This is a pristine moment for small and big organizations to reimagine their cultures. This class will tackle how leaders and employees can build ethical, resilient, and people-first cultures by combining the fields of design and behavioral science.
This is a hands-on prototyping-driven studio where students will learn intentional culture design with partner orgs. This year’s culture design focus will be startups. Founders need to think of culture from day one. The momentum of a high-growth company makes it hard to set up the culture right and codify it for scaling. Students will tackle startup culture challenges and design culture experiments during the class by leveraging behavioral and experience design frameworks.
Our point of view
To shape organizational culture, we follow a human-centered design approach supported by behavioral sciences and systems thinking. We make culture tangible by focusing on employee experiences and broader team practices.
Our Process
Discovery
We run user research to identify who we are designing for, what problem (or opportunity) we are solving, and to identify bright spots to see if we can build on top of them.
Design
We use experience design to craft powerful moments to elevate employees' work life and create multi-touch point culture programs to shift culture toward intended culture goals.
Delivery
We prototype culture practices with a rich array of prototyping methods, and leverage behavioral experiments approach measuring the impact of the proposed solutions.