Designing Org Culture

Collaborators

Partners

Organizations that have brought a real culture challenge to the class. This list accumulates year over year rather than resetting with each cohort.

Autumn 2026 · Open

This could be your organization

This year's class is looking for a health-domain partner. The slot is open.

What you bring
A real culture challenge, and a short session at the start of the quarter to put it to the class in your own words.
What the class does
A multidisciplinary team of Stanford students, undergraduate and graduate, spends ten weeks on it: interviewing your people, mapping how the culture actually works, and prototyping interventions against it.
What you get
A culture diagnosis grounded in your own employees' words, journey maps, and tested prototypes (a ritual, a policy, an artifact), presented back to you at the end of the quarter.

Who we've worked with

12 organizations

Metaphysic AI

Remote-first culture design.

Winter 2025

Intrinsic.ai

Evolve the culture to be more mission-first, collaborative vs. optimizing for individual performance.

Winter 2025

SYPartners

How do you increase AI adoption across employees, and how do you set expectations for managers leading both AI and human teams?

Winter 2025

Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability

Shape the culture, identity, and collaborative norms of Stanford's first new school in 70 years — across interdisciplinary research, daily operations, student and postdoc belonging, and translating research outward.

Winter 2024

Blue Ocean Barns

Keep a decentralized climate-tech team mission-driven and trusting while managing high-stakes execution timelines.

Winter 2024

BenchSci

Bridge the cultures of AI engineering and biomedical science as the company scaled, and build psychological safety into fast-failure R&D.

Winter 2023

Snappy

Scaling culture across a fast-growing sales organization.

Winter 2023

Spenmo

Build cross-regional trust as a Southeast Asian fintech grew across country offices, and align local office cultures with a shared global strategy.

Winter 2023

Boba Guys

Carry founding values from headquarters down to frontline store teams while the retail footprint grew, against shift turnover and burnout.

Fall 2021

Mesa

Establish an intentional asynchronous culture in a remote-first, distributed team — clarifying cross-functional norms without adding meetings.

Fall 2021

Stanford Medicine

Designing rituals for well-being in clinical work environments.

Winter 2020

Airbnb

Workplace ritual design for a fast-scaling org.

Winter 2019