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
Mark Interrante
AI for Prioritization (3rd of 3 seminars)
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Nathan Curtis
Beyond the Toolkit: Spreading a System Across People & Products
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Steve Krug
Don’t Make Me Think 3.0: What Endures and What Evolves in UX
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Conference
Michaela Mora
Advanced Concept Testing Approaches To Guide Product Development and Business Decisions
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Anna Nguyen
Why Our Voice of the Customer is Better Than Yours
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Mansi Gupta
Women-Centric Research: What, Why, How
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Erin Weigel
Failure Friday #6: 90% of Everything I Do is Either Broken or Pointless
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Rachael Dietkus, LCSW
AI: Passionate defenses and reasoned critique [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Ned Dwyer
Right horses for the right courses – how and when to democratize research
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Sarah Fathallah
Beyond insights: Rethinking the role of researchers as stewards of organizational wisdom
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Dem Gerolemou
Climate technology fundamentals
2024 • Climate UX Interest Group
Bria Alexander
Opening Remarks
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Alison Rand
Scaling Impact with Service Design
2021 • DesignOps Community
Suzan Bednarz
AccessibilityOps for All
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Sam Ladner
Methodologies: Beyond the interview [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Alnie Figueroa
Teamwork: Strategies for Effective Collaboration with Other Program Management Teams
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold

More Videos

Bria Alexander

"If you want to take advantage of asking speakers questions and having discussions, join our Slack."

Bria Alexander

Opening Remarks

October 1, 2021

Ari Zelmanow

"Good enough research? Sometimes good enough isn’t good enough."

Ari Zelmanow

Dark Side of Democratization

October 13, 2023

Sam Proulx

"I have never found a product that can’t be made accessible."

Sam Proulx

Accessibility: An Opportunity to Innovate

March 9, 2022

Liz Ebengo

"Knowing your positionality and having native speakers and culturally sensitive methods is vital for authentic data gathering."

Liz Ebengo

The Burden on Children: The Cost of Insufficient Post-Conflict Services and Pathways Forward

December 4, 2024

Nathan Curtis

"I try to position the system as an enabling force for designers to succeed better, not as confines or limits."

Nathan Curtis Nalini P. Kotamraju Jack Moffett Dawn Ressel

Discussion

June 9, 2016

Dane DeSutter

"The framework we tend to use is just, do you play games? Cool, you’re in—stop asking questions."

Dane DeSutter Natalie Gedeon Deborah Hendersen Cheryl Platz

Beyond the Console: The rise of the Gamer Experience and how gaming will impact UX Research across industries

May 17, 2024

Josh Clark

"Traditional software is grounded—accurate and reliable—but lacks radical adaptivity."

Josh Clark Veronika Kindred

Sentient Design: New Postures for AI-Mediated Experiences (2nd of 3 seminars)

January 29, 2025

Peter Merholz

"Without a shared purpose, a team is simply a collection of individuals."

Peter Merholz

Design at Scale is People!

June 11, 2021

Tristin Oldani

"AI is only going to increase consumption, so we must find efficient ways to handle it."

Tristin Oldani

Turning awareness into action with Climate UX

January 16, 2025