Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams

by Peter Merholz

Design’s inability to have meaningful organizational impact is often the result of an unintentional or polluted team culture. Before attempting broad, company-wide change, make sure the design team’s culture has been purposefully constructed to encourage the best work. The Elements of Culture It’s one thing to have a vision for a culture. It’s another thing to deliver on it every day. To break down culture into actionable items, we use the simple framework illustrated in Figure 8-1. Figure 8-1. A simple framework for understanding the components of design culture It begins with Values, which form the bedrock of a team’s culture. These are the mindset and principles the team upholds. Those values are made manifest through an Environment, the figurative and literal context and spaces in which the team works. And then the values and environment in turn drive Activities, the behaviors and practices of the team. In this chapter, we unpack each element to show how a design culture can get built.