📐 Culture Designer: Kursat Ozenc
Lecturer at Stanford’s d.school, Co-Author of "Rituals for Work," & VP of Design at JPMorgan Chase
In This Edition
🖌️ What Design Can Teach Us about the Workplace
📐 How Culture can be Designed Like a Product
📚 A Syllabus of Resources to Learn More about Organizational Culture
About Kursat
Kursat Ozenc is a VP of Design at JPMorgan Chase’s New Business Ventures team. He specializes in design strategy, user experience, and product design. Kursat teaches classes on organizational culture at Stanford d.school and writes about work, rituals, and culture. His work on rituals has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, Fast Company, 99U, and Canadian Public Radio. He has written two books, Rituals For Virtual Meetings (2021, Wiley) and Rituals For Work (2019, Wiley) to help organizations build healthy cultures. His Medium publication Ritual Design lives here, and his initiative Ritual Design Lab lives here. Kursat holds a Ph.D. in Design from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Sabanci University. He was born and raised in Turkiye and currently lives in California.
What sparked your passion for working in your field?
My passion for design started at an early age. I was really into car design. This steered me into Industrial Design in college in Turkiye. Later on, I became fascinated by Interaction Design which led me to a Master's and Ph.D. in this field. Eventually, I moved to the United States to pursue this at Carnegie Mellon University.
For my thesis, I studied how we can support people during life transitions. One critical insight from that research was that people use rituals to adapt to new situations. After graduation, I wanted to put this insight into practice to help people cultivate meaning in their lives. I’ve done this through teaching a course at Stanford’s d.school, starting with personal rituals and continuing with workplace rituals.
Can you share what inspired your course, Scaling Org Culture, and highlights from teaching it?
After years of teaching, I realized a crucial need for a new class dedicated to designing a human-centered culture. The class is built on two fundamental concepts: that culture can be designed like a product, and culture interventions can take many forms, including artifacts, rituals, habits, and policies. Our perspective is heavily influenced by Ann Swindler, a renowned anthropologist who authored the seminal paper "Culture in Action." Our class prioritizes driving culture change through bottom-up efforts and human experience rather than relying solely on top-down changes.
Our inaugural class was held in 2021, where we emphasized these concepts, and students worked on various interventions, from ritual to policy. The second version of the class in 2022 focused on creating signature rituals and how students would design a culture program around that. It was about creating an experiential solution and scaling it. The class evolves every year.
Overall, the class reached its goals regarding instilling the mindset of a culture designer and working with real-world challenges. We worked with three different startups, all virtually, from Toronto, Tel Aviv, and Amsterdam. The founders are all intentional culture builders, which helped us immensely as means of engagement. The students developed solutions for them that were grounded in research.
I also saw how much communication matters when companies are scaling — how do you communicate your values and decision-making? You can design these rituals but need feedback between executives and employees with healthy communication loops.
As you look back, what is one project you are proud of creating over the years?
I’d say our first book, Rituals for Work. It was a very inspiring project to work on. Having heard many anecdotes from readers, I am happy that it provides a relatable point of view, a distinct vocabulary, and practical tools for people on the ground who have been building culture.
The first two chapters provide a lens and mindset for why rituals in the workplace matter. Then the book features rituals from well-known organizations, ritual design classes, and from our practice. It’s designed as a playbook with illustrations and guidelines. I’ll share three highlights from it:
Design Mad Libs: This seeds a culture of creativity where people are given a phrase and asked to fill it in with random words from a stack of cards. It started at MIT Media Lab to spark creativity.
Secret Handshake: In our class, we ask students to form teams and create secret handshakes. It’s a way to connect when they don’t know each other well.
Wedding of the Orgs: This originated out of IDEO as a way to bring two companies together due to a merger. Following the metaphor, they created vows and interviewed employees to understand their values and weave them into the experience. There were many other carefully planned wedding rituals.
How do you continue your professional learning journey?
Recently, I’m fascinated by behavioral science and economics. I’ve been immersing myself in those topics by learning in these areas. Most recently, I read Robert Cialdini’s books Influence and Persuasion.
I’m also very interested in leadership and how to build teams. This topic of success and high-performing organizations inspires me. Recently, I have been reading Richard Hackman’s book Leading Teams.
I list many of the resources I find in my course syllabus. Here’s a look at 2023 with many links to read more about the topics that interest me.
How are you seeing this work moving forward?
I will continue exploring the intersection of design, org culture, and technology. I want to expand the culture design lens to emergent topics, such as DEI, and emerging topics, such as human-AI teaming.
While exploring these areas, I’d like to develop toolkits — give similar tools like ritual design to people. They might be official culture people or just taking it on to make a difference at their organizations. I also would like to create a community of people who care about culture design.
Thank you for reading The Switchboard. ☎️ Every interview edition is based on a live conversation and personally written by me — Julia Levy. Learn more about why I write. Review the Index of past posts.
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