Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Discussion
Gold
Thursday, May 14, 2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Share the love for this talk
Discussion
Speakers: Marc Rettig , Julie Baher , Phil Gilbert and Nathan Shedroff
Link:

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."

Ask the Rosenbot
David Cronin
Discussion
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Veevi Rosenstein
Building for Scale: Creating the Zendesk UX Research Practice
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Satyam Kantamneni
Do You Have an Experience Vision?
2023 • Enterprise Community
Peter Van Dijck
Hands on AI #3: Claude Code for UX people
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Michael Weir
Mixed Methods and Behavioural Science
2023 • Rosenfeld Community
Frances Yllana
DesignOps Exposed: What do our peers really think of us?
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Gordon Ross
12 Months of COVID-19 Design and Digital Response with the British Columbia Government
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
Everything You Need to Know about the Civic Design 2022 Call for Presentations
2022 • Civic Design Community
Alba Villamil
Stereotyped by Design: Pitfalls in Cross-Cultural User Research
2020 • Advancing Research 2020
Gold
Sharbani Dhar
Breathing Room for Delight
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
April Reagan
Look, Think, Act: The Futures-Smart Design Organization
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Peter Merholz
The 2025 State of UX/Design Organizational Health
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Russell Blair
Killing the blank page
2024 • Designing with AI 2024
Gold
Jacqui Frey
Setting the Table for Dynamic Change
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Marc Fonteijn
First Insights from the 2025 Service Design Salary(+) Report
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Nidhi Singh Rathore
Embracing participation to unlock deeper truths in commercial research
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold

More Videos

Chris Chapo

"By studying the best store leaders, we learned patterns that informed a dashboard reducing 424 pages of data to a few key, actionable metrics."

Chris Chapo

Data Science and Design: A Tale of Two Tribes

May 13, 2015

Alexandra Schmidt

"The future of our technology cannot and should not rest solely on the ethics of individual designers."

Alexandra Schmidt

Why Ethics Can't Save Tech

November 18, 2022

Dr. Jamika D. Burge

"The storytelling is what ultimately supports actual change more than just data."

Dr. Jamika D. Burge Jemma Ahmed Chris Geison

Bridge Building across Research Disciplines

August 26, 2021

Samuel Proulx

"If we think disability as a mismatch between user and environment rather than a medical problem, it becomes easier to understand how accessibility benefits everyone."

Samuel Proulx

From Standards to Innovation: Why Inclusive Design Wins

September 10, 2025

Samuel Proulx

"DWI should stand for damn Warren's infertile machine because it was designed on Warren’s typos to solve Warren’s problem."

Samuel Proulx

Designing for Disability, Innovating for Everyone

March 11, 2025

Jemma Ahmed

"We need to democratize insights, not just democratize research."

Jemma Ahmed Subhasree Chatterjee Robert Fabricant Alexandra Jayeun Lee Ben Robins

Collaboration: learning from other fields beyond our own [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

August 7, 2024

Emily Williams

"Mentioning incentives can build trust by signaling reciprocity."

Emily Williams Nora Fiore

When UX Research and Institutional Racism Collide: A Case Study

March 12, 2021

Isaac Heyveld

"The trusted partnership between the chief of staff and the executive is critically important."

Isaac Heyveld

Expand DesignOps Leadership as a Chief of Staff

September 8, 2022

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW

"Nothing is inherently better because it was produced by human intention or machine learning; interrogate the goal first."

Rachael Dietkus, LCSW Llewyn Paine Nishanshi Shukla David Womack

AI: Passionate defenses and reasoned critique [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]

September 18, 2024