Summary
In this talk, Phil and Nathan engage in a deep discussion about transforming corporate culture through design thinking and relationship-driven work, particularly within IBM. Phil shares his ongoing journey since 2010 in scaling design practices across a vast, distributed organization, emphasizing organic team-level adoption and executive support for designers. Nathan highlights the centrality of relationships and shared meaning in driving value, asserting that culture and innovation emerge from deliberate, sustained conversations and experiences rather than mere persuasion. Both speakers underscore the importance of listening deeply to individuals across silos and acknowledging the complex risk environment of organizations. The discussion reveals how design must not only speak the language of business but innovate it, balancing youthful openness with experience, and how successful change initiatives require finding allies, framing wins in business terms, and piloting safely to gradually shift mindsets. Practical tactics include ethnography on internal stakeholders, framing successes to evidence new possibilities, and reframing risk to enable experimentation. The speakers reflect on historical shifts that emphasized numbers over relationships and articulate a hopeful, adaptive approach to embedding design as a cultural craft in traditionally rigid business settings.
Key Insights
-
•
Design transformation in large companies like IBM succeeds when designers are embedded within business teams rather than centralized in studios.
-
•
Changing organizational culture is more effective through experiential learning and behavior change than through mere persuasion or theory.
-
•
Relationships are fundamental to innovation and culture, yet difficult to visualize and quantify within organizations.
-
•
Listening deeply and non-judgmentally to individuals at all levels enables building empathy and meaningful connections that foster change.
-
•
Risk-taking is essential for innovation, but organizations must balance it with risk management through dialogue and safe-to-fail experiments.
-
•
Embedding design at scale requires executive support with direct communication channels while enabling organic growth from the team level.
-
•
Meaning and identity in design add value especially when buyers and users differ, requiring research on both to align priorities.
-
•
Youthful openness to learning can be more valuable than years of experience when adopting new cultural approaches to design.
-
•
Framing design efforts in terms of existing business goals and language helps secure allies and advance cultural change.
-
•
Top-down mandates alone often fail to create lasting change; combining grassroots adoption with leadership support is more effective.
Notable Quotes
"It’s really about design doing, not just knowing the theory but acting and behaving differently."
"Without relationship, there is no value. You can’t have culture without relationships either."
"Every team that’s come into the program has self-selected in. They want in and are trying to do the right thing."
"A leader is someone who clearly communicates a vision that other people want to follow."
"The conversation about risk needs to shift to what’s the acceptable amount compared to the value of the opportunity."
"Listening deeply with no judgment allows you to start making profound invitations across silos."
"Most people don’t come to work to make their own life harder or work on a bad product."
"We rejected a studio model because designers should take business direction from the teams they’re embedded in."
"We’re building a program here that lasts through 2025 and 2030, so we can take risks on entry level folks."
"You have to speak the language of business and innovate that language to show what design can do together."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"The success of SLDS is not about the technology itself but about people and relationships."
Nalini P. KotamrajuAn Organizational Story: Salesforce Lightning Design System
June 9, 2016
"When someone stops learning, they get bored and look for something new — continuous learning is essential for retention."
Nicole UmphressDelivering Design Education During a Global Pandemic: Lessons Learned
June 9, 2022
"AI tools can help synthesize large documents or conduct literature reviews to support researchers’ secondary research."
Jen Cardello Dr. Shadi Janansefat Alex WrightCurating insight: Strategies for integrating knowledge across research functions
March 11, 2025
"Fear of AI comes from not trusting the inputs, the data powering these models."
Tricia WangFrom Users to Shapers of AI: The Future of Research
March 25, 2024
"Sponsors bring so much color and so much light into the community."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
October 3, 2023
"The Guild is much more than a community; it’s actively driving standards and creating conditions for success across the company."
Jess GrecoCreating a Basis for Change: Scaling Design Maturity
June 8, 2022
"Many times when planning to hire, we first assess our team competencies to identify the necessary talent."
Ebru NamaldiDesigning the Designer’s Journey: Scaling Teams, Culture, and Growth Through DesignOps
September 11, 2025
"UXers are less satisfied because we have failed to set proper expectations about what the real work of UX is."
Peter MerholzThe Trials and Tribulations of Directors of UX
July 13, 2023
"When I heard ‘when are you going to be done?’ my answer is it’s never really done if you do it well."
Nathan Curtis Nalini P. Kotamraju Jack Moffett Dawn ResselDiscussion
June 9, 2016
