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
"The speakers will share hard-won lessons to help you navigate low corporate design maturity and rapid growth."
Kit UngerTheme 2: Introduction
June 10, 2021
"Agile can feel like a cult, but the data helps show it’s working and not just a belief system."
Mackenzie Cockram Sara Branco Cunha Ian FranklinIntegrating Qualitative and Quantitative Research from Discovery to Live
December 16, 2022
"One of the biggest problems was the gap between what designers designed and what got built."
Nalini P. KotamrajuAn Organizational Story: Salesforce Lightning Design System
June 9, 2016
"Designers thrive on qualitative research because it gives them access to the root of the problem beyond just numbers."
Christian RohrerResearch Operations at Scale
November 7, 2017
"Design system decision records prevent knowledge being stuck in one person’s head."
Dan DonaldDesign Systems as a Vehicle for Systemic Change
June 1, 2023
"Now everyone’s an edge case, so research needs to focus on those edge cases, not just the average user."
Lija Hogan Milan Mijatovic Sam Proulx Louis RosenfeldThree Years Out: Perspectives on the Near-Term Future of User Research
March 15, 2024
"You don’t know how hard it is until you’re leading a user research session yourself."
Anna AvrekhUser Research, Design, and Product - A Love Story
March 11, 2021
"There aren’t enough lean UX experts to collaborate with every team, so we create a lean UX Center of Excellence for each value stream."
Jack MoffettSAFe or Sorry?
May 29, 2019
"Authentically engaging with people traumatized by racism demands a significant abundance of care."
Rachael Dietkus, LCSWTrauma-Responsive Design: Reimagining the Future of Design Now
December 10, 2021
