Culture by Design

The Power of Co-Creating Organizational Culture: Lessons Learned from 12 Years as a Human Centered Designer

A 2024 Year End Reflection

Human-centered design (HCD) has been celebrated, critiqued, and even dismissed as a buzzword. Some claim it’s outdated — overused and diluted by inconsistent application — while others question its relevance in a world reshaped by technology and uncertainty (source). But from where I stand, HCD isn’t dead. It’s evolving — and it’s as relevant as ever. It continues to offer a foundation for reimagining systems, centering human needs, and designing solutions that resonate. At its core, HCD is simply how designers think and work (source). And as the world changes, this approach demands deeper intentionality, sharper focus, and a commitment to pushing its principles beyond deliverables and outputs.

For me, this evolution isn’t theoretical — it’s personal. Over the past 12 years, I’ve led projects with 35 mission-driven organizations — applying HCD to products, programs, and processes aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), shaping a career ecosystem rooted in impact and innovation. With experience founding three companies, growing four organizations as a founding team member, teaching through three institutions, and advising several more, my work blends strategy, design, and impact. This year, I facilitated 45 bespoke experiences with leaders and teams across the Impact Economy, co-led the Anchor School’s second year alongside 200 founding scholars, taught strategy and business design to 600 adult learners at IDEO U, and guided Wish for WASH’s 70+ team members through our 10th year and strategic evolution.

Some of those lessons revealed themselves slowly — through years of iteration and refinement. Others hit like lightning bolts in moments of clarity during high-stakes challenges. Those moments taught me that design isn’t just about what we make — it’s about how we build trust, stay adaptable, and lead with purpose.

Here’s what these experiences have taught me — social impact organizations can’t afford to treat culture as an afterthought. In a world of disruption and complexity, culture isn’t just a backdrop — it’s the heartbeat that drives action. By prioritizing the real needs of people, HCD transforms ideas into impact and values into practice, ensuring they don’t stay stuck on paper — or worse, get weaponized in the name of a mission. By prioritizing empathy, co-design, collaboration, and play, HCD harnesses imagination, inspires a new way of thinking, embeds purpose through process, and cultivates trust

As Peter Drucker famously said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast” (source). When prioritized, culture becomes the foundation for trust, resilience, and sustained impact. Culture, much like design, isn’t dictated from the top down — it’s created collectively, shaped by every action and interaction. Whether it’s a manager setting expectations or a team member modeling collaboration, everyone plays a role in defining culture (source). HCD equips teams to intentionally design environments where trust, accountability, and creativity thrive.

Rooted in my work across the Impact Economy, the insights that follow highlight ways to embed HCD into companies to build human-centered cultures that are purposeful and productive while truly being designed for people.

1️⃣ Harness Imagination

“Imagination will be the currency of the future” (source). This idea underscores how essential human-powered creativity is for driving growth and innovation, especially in an increasingly tech-driven and polarized world. Resilient workplace cultures value imagination — fueling problem-solving and inspiring hope in the face of challenges (source).

In the social sector, imagination is essential for driving sustainable transformation — helping organizations reimagine systems, anticipate challenges, and create inclusive, impactful solutions (source). HCD embeds imagination into an organization’s DNA through empathy, co-creation, iteration, and play — equipping teams with the tools and mindsets to harness human intuition and creativity, capabilities that cannot yet be automated, for strategic foresight. Regardless of tenure, role, or identity, every team member should feel safe and encouraged to contribute their ideas — treating imagination as a shared currency that fuels growth and drives the organization forward. This reinforces the importance of intentional culture-building as a foundation for innovation and lasting impact.

2️⃣ Rethink Thinking

Possibility begins with imagination, but turning ideas into reality often demands a different way of thinking — one that embraces complexity and translates vision into action. Organizations in the social sector need strategies that channel imagination into structured experimentation, helping them reimagine systems, tackle ambiguity, and create transformative solutions. HCD, rooted in design thinking, empowers teams to explore, test, and adapt without losing sight of the big picture.

As the MIT Sloan Management Review explains, managerial thinking optimizes existing systems, while design thinking reimagines them entirely to unlock new possibilities. For example, managerial thinking refines workflows for efficiency while design thinking embraces rapid prototyping and testing to uncover what’s possible. While it is not zero sum, this shift to include more design thinking mindsets into workplace culture invites teams to approach uncertainty with curiosity — turning obstacles into opportunities for growth and transformation.

HCD doesn’t just build on imagination; it provides the tools to move through complexity with purpose, adaptability, and hope. Realizing its potential requires leaders and teams to approach empathy, iteration, and experimentation not as buzzwords but as principles woven into everyday processes and practices, thus requiring new mindsets.

3️⃣ Embed Purpose Through Process

Purpose doesn’t happen by accident. It’s built through intentional habits that show up in how teams connect, collaborate, and create impact. In social impact organizations, organizational purpose has to be designed - — beyond slogans, it has to live in the everyday moments in order for the organization to effectively execute on its mission, vision and core values. Below are some of the shared definitions and tools I’ve seen used to bring purpose to life within organizations:

• Purpose: The ‘why’ that drives decisions and inspires action (source). From an HCD lens, this often looks like creating space for individuals within companies to surface their own personal purposes that they can then map to the company purpose.
• Guiding Principles: Provide frameworks for decision-making, acting as guardrails to keep teams aligned with its purpose (source)
• Empathy: Requires listening deeply to stakeholders, beneficiaries, AND internal staff. It fosters psychological safety and mutual respect, especially when leaders and teams model it authentically by encouraging dialogue, valuing diverse perspectives, and not only seeking out but acting on feedback (source).
• Storytelling: Creates emotional connections and brings both culture and strategy to life, by clarifying “what’s in it for me” for team members based on empathy
• Process: Finally, codified workflows and accountability systems sustain purpose and safeguard company culture. They also reinforce credibility and psychological safety, empowering individuals to embrace HCD methods that often challenge the status quo ways of working (source).

In my experience, these elements provide clarity, alignment, and the structure needed to transform the values of social impact organizations into action to sustain meaningful change while creating a container for trust.

4️⃣ Cultivate Trust

Trust in my view is the glue that holds human-centered cultures together, especially in social impact organizations where relationships drive mission-aligned results. When trust breaks, it fractures teams, undermines collaboration, and erodes credibility — setbacks that are harder for social impact organizations to overcome in today’s polarized and resource-constrained environment (source, source, source).

Cultivating trust requires intentional practices like active listening, creating psychologically safe spaces for dialogue, and following through on commitments to demonstrate reliability and integrity — all of which are elements of a human-centered company culture. Trust builds the foundation for collaboration, empowering internal teams to take risks, share ideas, and innovate without fear. This is critical in harnessing imagination, leveraging design thinking rather than solely managerial thinking, and embedding purpose through process. Clear communication builds transparency, while recognizing contributions reinforces purpose and motivates teams (source). Trust also strengthens accountability, keeping teams aligned and focused on impact.

In the social impact space, where relationships often drive change, trust is the bridge between purpose and action. HCD helps organizations center the needs of stakeholders, beneficiaries, AND employees — ensuring solutions resonate, relationships thrive, and a shared humanity prevails (source).

5️⃣ Design Human-Centered Cultures Together

Overall, I’ve seen HCD equip organizations with a new set of tools that allow them to adapt to the changing social impact landscape without losing purpose — empowering teams to strengthen relationships, design solutions that evolve with communities, AND that prioritize the well-being of their employees. As nonprofits, foundations, and social impact organizations at large face growing demands for accountability amid continued political shifts, economic pressures, technological disruptions, and calls to do more with less, staying rooted in purpose by way of human-centered company cultures is more critical now more than ever (source, source).

As we each reflect on another incredible year of impact and position for 2025, I will leave you with this:

How might we intentionally leverage human-centered design to build resilient and responsive company cultures?

Cheers to the power of human-centered cultures that inspire imagination and build trust. Happy New Year Yall!