Stanford d.school/Design 276/Autumn 2026
Designing
Org Culture
Culture is the policies, rituals, and artifacts people actually live inside, which is usually some distance from what the organization says it values. Student teams embed with partner organizations to find that gap and run live culture experiments against it.
The model
Culture is a living system
Invisible forces (beliefs, values, norms) and visible ones (behaviors, practices, artifacts) are constantly interacting. A healthy culture runs that loop as a virtuous cycle; an unhealthy one runs the same loop the other way. Culture design works on both sides of it.
The vocabulary
Eight designable forces
Every cohort project is tagged with the forces it actually moved, which is what keeps the cohorts comparable across years.
Values
Norms
Policy
Practices
Stories
Behaviors
Artifacts
Metrics
The work
The class is its own first partner
Two weeks in, before anyone meets a partner org, every cohort designs a ritual for the class's own culture — and then has to live inside it.
Musical Stories
Getting to know a team through what they listen to
- Trigger
- The start of a weekly team meeting
- Prop
- A shared playlist the team keeps adding to
Spin the Bottle
Building team culture with a twist
- Trigger
- The beginning of a class, meeting, or gathering
- Prop
- A bottle filled with written prompts
The Magic Pencil
A ritual for giving hard feedback to a friend
- Trigger
- When someone has feedback to deliver
- Prop
- An everyday object that stands in for the workplace — a pencil
Year by year
All cohorts →Autumn · Current
Culture design for technological adoption and human flourishing.
Health domain partner
Winter
Startup culture challenges, tackled as live design experiments.
Metaphysic AI, Intrinsic.ai, SYPartners
Winter
Purpose-driven startups, and the culture of scaling climate work.
Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Blue Ocean Barns
Winter
Scaling culture in startups, taught as Design for Business.
BenchSci, Snappy, Spenmo
Partner orgs
All partners →- Metaphysic AI
- Intrinsic.ai
- SYPartners
- Health domain partner
- Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability
- Blue Ocean Barns
- BenchSci
- Snappy
- Spenmo
- Boba Guys
- Mesa
- Stanford Medicine
- Airbnb
The room
All people →Teaching team
- Kursat Ozenc
- Martin Gonzalez
- Shannon Mahon
- Ted Matthews
- Kajal Khanna
- Josh McVeigh-Shutz
- +2 more
Teaching assistants
- Gabi Gavrila
- Sonya Kotov
- Jeung Lee
- Gatsby Frimpong
Coaches
- Alan Ratliff
- Ian Stuart
Guest speakers
- Martin Gonzalez
- Claudy Jules
- Darren Murph
- Gina “Maya” Rudan
- Michael Norton
- Lisa Wocken
- +15 more