What is Organizational Culture Design and Why Does it Work?

When teams aren't working well in health and science, the consequences are dire. But team culture is often an after thought. What if we put human centered team culture at the center of our organizations?

Last week, I talked about how most "communication problems" aren't really about communication—they're about systems that weren't designed for collaborative success. This may lead you to ask: "How do we actually redesign organizational systems? What does that look like in practice?"

Today, I want to take you deeper into Organizational Culture Design (OCD)—the methodology I've developed that transforms how organizations approach culture, performance, and innovation.

The Foundation: Universal Design Meets Organizational Systems

Organizational Culture Design emerges from one of the most powerful principles in designing accessible buildings, spaces, and products: Universal Design.

Here's how it works in architecture: instead of designing buildings for the "average" person and then retrofitting accommodations, Universal Design creates environments that work for as many people as possible from the start. Curb cuts are the classic example—originally designed for wheelchair users, but they also help parents with strollers, delivery workers with hand trucks, travelers with rolling luggage, cyclists, and really anyone. Critically, curb cuts don't make navigating between the street and the curb more difficult for anyone.

What if we designed organizational cultures based on the needs of your diverse team that is beneficial to all.

Curb cuts help everyone! Image description: A woman rolling a suitcase up a curb cut.

The Organizational Translation

Instead of designing processes for the "typical" employee and accommodating everyone else with exceptions and workarounds, Organizational Culture Design proactively creates workplace systems that leverage and support diverse strengths from the beginning.

This approach recognizes that high-performing teams include people with different:

• Cognitive processing styles and learning preferences

• Cultural backgrounds and communication patterns

• Career trajectories and professional development needs

• Working styles and collaboration approaches

• Life circumstances and accessibility requirements

When we design organizational systems that work for this cognitive and cultural diversity from the start, we don't just create more inclusive environments—we create higher-performing ones.

The Six Core Principles of Organizational Culture Design

Over the next six weeks, I'll be diving deep into each principle that forms the foundation of systematic culture transformation. Here's what we'll explore:

1. Trust & Transparency: Trust flows in all directions—leaders need to trust teams, teams need to trust leaders, and team members need to trust each other. Trust increases exponentially with transparency: pay transparency, policy clarity, open hiring and promotion processes, operational visibility. I'll go into how to get comfortable with transparency and create a more trusting environment.

2. Expect & Respect Expertise: Every team member brings expertise—not just from their formal credentials, but from their rich life experiences, diverse backgrounds, hobbies, relationships, and learning. A software engineer might have insights about patient care from caring for aging parents. A lab technician might understand supply chain issues from their previous retail experience. When we systematically seek and respect diverse expertise, we access innovation that formal qualifications alone would miss.

3. Collaboration and Conflict: Healthy collaboration requires healthy conflict. We need systems that encourage questions, challenges, and healthy debate—ensuring that initiatives are thoroughly vetted and everyone's perspectives are integrated. This is particularly critical in science, where debate is a core value to progress. Innovation emerges from productive friction between different ideas.

4. Embedded Flexibility: Instead of rigid systems that require individual exceptions and accommodations, embed flexibility into organizational processes from the start. This idea may make some leaders nervous, but flexibility can have defined parameters. Proactive flexibility prevents the bureaucracy and stigma that come with reactive accommodation requests.

5. Question the Status Quo: Regularly examine policies, procedures, and practices by asking: "Why are we doing this?" If the answer is "because that's how we've always done it," you've identified an improvement opportunity. Systematic status quo questioning prevents organizational systems from becoming outdated, inefficient, or exclusionary.

6. Celebration: Celebrate team members, celebrate yourself, identify future goals worth celebrating, and create clear pathways to achieve them. Recognition systems shape behavior and reinforce values. Every innovation, breakthrough, and success builds on countless contributions from people whose names history often forgets—make sure your culture remembers and celebrates those contributions while they're happening.

A System Built on Evidence

This isn't about implementing six separate initiatives. These principles work together as an integrated system—trust enables expertise sharing, collaboration requires embedded flexibility, status quo questioning drives celebration-worthy innovations, and the cycle continues.

This methodology is grounded in research from organizational psychology, disability studies, cross-cultural communication, and performance science. But more importantly, it's grounded in practical experience with organizations that have transformed their cultures using these principles.

A Personal Note

You may be wondering if I'm aware that the acronym for Organizational Culture Design is OCD. I am and happen to also be diagnosed OCD! The irony isn't lost on me—someone with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder creating a systematic methodology called OCD.

But this connection reflects my broader disability advocacy: we need to be open and honest about our disabilities and the unique strengths they bring to our lives and work. My OCD gives me particular abilities in systematic analysis, pattern recognition, and persistent focus on comprehensive solutions—cognitive patterns that can be challenging in daily life but become professional assets when applied to organizational diagnosis and design. I'm proud of my OCD, the diagnosis and the professional framework.

Your Reflection Question

Before we dive into the six principles, take a moment to think about your organization's current culture. If you could redesign one system—hiring, meetings, performance review, communication, decision-making, whatever comes to mind—to work better for everyone on your team, what would you change? What barriers might you eliminate, and what strengths might you better leverage?