Discussion
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
"Meisner taught actors to respond truthfully in the moment, prioritizing presence over preconceived ideas."
Daniel GloydDesigning From the Inside Out: How Method Acting Can Inspire Design Research
February 12, 2026
"Forgiveness is not about forgetting or just getting over something, it’s about making a mission out of it."
Jim KalbachPeace is waged with sticky notes: Mapping Real-World Experiences
June 14, 2018
"Clear and consistent communication really keeps design leadership accountable and promotes transparency via knowledge sharing."
Kim Holt Emma Wylds Pearl Koppenhaver Maisee XiongA Salesforce Panel Discussion on Values-Driven DesignOps
September 8, 2022
"Having a recruitment team that does pre-session phone screenings was a luxury that helped a lot."
Sarah RinkRemote User Research: Dos and Don'ts from the Virtual Field
June 11, 2020
"An ecosystem map depicts relationships between animate and inanimate objects in a system representing value exchanges."
Jennifer FraserWhat would Emmy Noether Do? Math, Models and Mulling in UX Research
March 29, 2023
"Dev plus AI ships directly to production with no one with taste in between."
Paul BakausKilling the handoff: Iterating design live in the browser on real production code
June 10, 2026
"Simple, basic, consistent actions over time deliver big results when working with engineers."
Dan WillisEnterprise Storytelling Sessions
June 14, 2018
"Most people have a marketing or sales strategy, but many research leaders look puzzled when asked about their research strategy."
Chris Geison Cristen Torrey Eric MahlstedtWhat is Research Strategy?: A Panel of Research Leaders Discuss this Emergent Question
March 4, 2021
"Design ops is not execution or tactical, it’s a leadership role that brings design thinking to the whole organization - Patrizia."
Bria Alexander Patrizia Bertini Peter Boersma Jon Fukuda Dave Malouf Theresa Slate Changying (Z) ZhengCharting the future of DesignOps: A community workshop
April 18, 2024
