Designing Organizational Culture

Catalog description

In an era of rapid technological disruption, culture design must do more than engage employees. It must work toward both human flourishing and technology adoption as a path to sustainable transformation. In this course, we view today's business challenges as an opportunity to invent entirely new ways of working and connecting. In this course, we view today's business challenges as an opportunity to invent entirely new ways of working and connecting. Serving as embedded culture designers, student teams will partner directly with forward-looking organizations to tackle real-world organizational friction. You will leverage behavioral and experience design frameworks to diagnose systemic challenges, analyze how disruption alters human dynamics, and run live cultural experiments. Throughout the quarter, you will follow a rigorous discovery, design, and delivery process to prototype and implement actual culture policies, collaboration rituals, and organizational artifacts alongside your partner organizations. In doing so, you will sharpen core design abilities critical for leading modern, evolving systems: (i) Moving between abstract and concrete: Grounding high-level organizational strategies and cultural values into tangible, daily team behaviors. (ii) Experimenting rapidly: Launching and iterating low-fidelity culture prototypes to test psychological safety, adaptability, and team adoption. (iii) Communicating deliberately: Designing transparent feedback loops, alignment strategies, and communication norms that keep human teams connected amidst rapid change.