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
"A constitution is a very good exercise: write down your system’s principles and values to help guide its behavior."
Peter Van DijckHands-on AI #2: Understanding evals: LLM as a Judge
October 15, 2025
"Having an employee resource group member on interview panels creates a safe space for candidates to disclose more about themselves."
Libby MaurerTreating Diversity & Inclusion in Hiring as a Design Problem
December 5, 2019
"If we put traffic into the street, we'll get traffic; if we put gardeners, we'll get gardens."
Dan HillStrategic design, slowdown, and the infrastructures of everyday life
April 21, 2022
"Building Windows is like ordering pizza for a billion people—everyone is your user."
Sam LadnerData Exhaust and Personal Data: Learning from Consumer Products to Enhance Enterprise UX
June 8, 2016
"No one uses the screen reader with out-of-the-box settings; users customize it to fit their needs."
Sam ProulxUnderstanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users
June 6, 2023
"Design is finally where it can shine — solving human problems beyond just product design."
Wendy JohanssonAn Education on Design Education for Orgs
June 10, 2021
"We encourage one-to-one video calls to build rapport and feel comfortable reaching out for advice."
Marc Fonteijn Ru ButlerIncrease your confidence, influence, and impact (through a Professional Community)
December 3, 2024
"Thank you to our sponsors, we could not do this conference without you."
Bria Alexander Louis RosenfeldOpening Remarks Day 2
March 26, 2024
"Business intelligence already exists in many domains, but design intelligence is still the missing piece for UX."
Emily DiLeo Maria TaylorStronger Together: Lessons Learned from UX Research Ops
September 24, 2024
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
How can research and operations teams collaboratively evaluate new UXR tools for usability and operational fit?
What steps can a team take to make sure their vision gets included in the product roadmap?
How can barriers like childcare and internet access be addressed to promote equitable participation?