Our Fall 2021 Class
From COVID-19 to racial injustice, lack of diversity to economic inequality, our current state of unsettledness simultaneously presents both grand challenges and unprecedented opportunity for how we work and how we define work culture. This class will tackle how organizations can build strong, human-centered cultures to address the urgent challenges of our times.
Organizations’ culture matters because it affects both the performance of the org’s teams -- and it affects the individual’s satisfaction, well-being, and sense of meaning. Often, though, there is a gap in organizations’ culture. What an organization says it wants its culture to be (through mission statements, manifestos, constitutions, and otherwise) diverges from what people actually do in the workplace. Or the organization goes toward ‘default culture’, without considering what kind of culture would work for their teams and individuals. Human-centered design offers an approach to create culture that is more intentional, more attuned to people’s needs, and with more of a bottom-up and participatory process.
We look forward to seeing some of you this quarter!
Students will get the opportunity to apply their culture design toolkit from the first half of the course to a challenge with real partner orgs.
Amidst massive changes in workplace dynamics during the pandemic, "Designing Organizational Culture" was born as an experiment to bring a design thinking lens to culture design.