In Winter 2024, I taught Designing Organizational Culture: Purpose-Driven Startups at Stanford d.school, a hands-on course where students explored how to design and prototype culture within organizations. The class focused on helping students tackle real-world startup culture challenges, using behavioral science, human-centered design, and experience design to shape workplace environments that align with an organization’s purpose and values.

This course gave students the tools to make culture tangible—not just as an abstract idea, but as a series of deliberate, designed experiences, policies, and rituals that influence how people work and interact. Working with partner organizations like Blue Ocean Farms and Stanford Earth System Science, students went through the full discovery, design, and delivery process, applying design methodologies to solve real cultural challenges faced by mission-driven startups.

How We Designed Culture in the Course

Students learned key design abilities, including moving between abstract and concrete ideas, experimenting rapidly, and communicating deliberately. The class was structured around three major phases:

Discovery – Conducting user research to understand who we are designing for, what problems we need to solve, and where bright spots already exist within the organization.
Design – Crafting high-impact employee experiences and multi-touchpoint culture programs to shift organizational culture toward desired goals.
Prototyping & Testing – Using a rich array of prototyping methods to test new culture practices and applying behavioral experiments to measure their impact.

By working directly with partner organizations, students saw firsthand how organizational culture is not static—it can be designed, tested, and evolved.

Why This Course Matters

For purpose-driven startups, culture isn’t just an afterthought—it’s a key driver of success, innovation, and long-term impact. This course empowered students to think beyond traditional HR policies and explore how culture is shaped through rituals, work environments, team dynamics, and leadership behaviors.

At the d.school, we believe in learning by doing, and this class was no exception. By the end of the quarter, students had developed real, tested interventions that could help startups align their internal culture with their external mission.

This class is part of my broader work in helping organizations design intentional, meaningful cultures that drive engagement and performance. It was a privilege to guide students through this process and see how they applied human-centered design to one of the most complex and critical challenges in the workplace today.

Explore the class site here.