How students learned to design solutions for organizations
Living through the last few years has meant living through disruption after disruption, change after unwelcome change, continuously having to redefine what life is, what normal means.
No one was prepared for the onslaught of challenges a pandemic and racial awakening brought with it — but in the midst of that chaos, d.school lecturer Kursat Ozenc recognized an “inflection point,” an opportunity to use this time to design effective change.
“I thought, with the pandemic, Black Lives Matter, even the Me Too movement, things are in flux,” said Ozenc. “So I asked, how can we design some interventions to help define a new, better normal?”
Ozenc wanted to use this time to imagine our world reset. Now that so many preconceived notions have fallen, why shouldn’t we redesign a new normal? As political theorists, writers, scientists and designers, all grappled with the same questions, Ozenc started dreaming up a syllabus.
After some research and discussions with his colleagues, Ozenc pitched a new class idea to the d.school for Fall of 2021. A few months later, the course was named “Designing Organizational Culture.” Alongside Ozenc, d.school Lecturers Anand Upender and Ida Benedetto also led the course.
“People were really excited,” he said. “So was I, so were my colleagues. We were ready to dive right in.”
Designing interventions for a new normal is a pretty lofty goal for a three unit class, but Ozenc found a way to make the challenge a bit more manageable. Students were given case studies of companies that famously failed to adapt their company culture to change (like Snapchat) and were tasked with designing rituals the companies could implement to prevent their inevitable downfall. Then, they were paired with companies to ideate solutions for real organizational problems.
Constanza Hasselmann, a Sustainability coterm student, worked with Mesa, a company that aims to solve organizational problems for other companies. The problem? How to keep their contract workers engaged. Hasselmann and her team pitched two solutions to the company’s CEO, something that would have felt impossible without the skills taught in Kursat’s class.
“For me, the specific value add of this class was that it began to give me a design toolkit, or a set of ways of thinking and frameworks,” said Hasselmann. “And sometimes even just a graph that’s useful to put information on from which I can extrapolate meaning and insight to create programs and organizational design projects that are specific to organizations and will ultimately bring meaning to employees.”
This “design toolkit” is the basis of Ozenc’s designing interventions research. Ozenc has been studying how people adapt long before we all had to transition to a Covid-19 world. In 2011, he got his PHd in design at Carnegie Mellon, before working in product design and eventually teaching at Stanford in 2014.
Transitions, especially in corporate environments, are made easier by rituals, Ozenc explained. That’s the philosophy behind his latest book, “Rituals for Virtual Meetings” and what he tried to instill in students throughout his class.
“Rituals crystalize corporate culture,” Ozenc said. “And that moment [when a ritual is performed] really can be a manifestation of the culture itself.”
Midway through the quarter, students were put in groups and (in typical d.school fashion) asked to act out how they would implement rituals into corporate settings that had previously failed. Some students had bosses put out a jar of compliments, others implemented an environment in which less senior employees were able to disagree with CEOs, others made use of the age-old talking stick. Ozenc was in the back of the classroom nodding along and asking questions.
“This class is somewhat of an experiment itself,” he said. “I learned that rituals can still be relevant when looking through a systems lens. I’m still absorbing — I’m excited to see what I keep taking from the class.”
