Org Design in Practice
This Moment Needs a Movement: Designing Change People Actually Want
Amy Wilson – Culture Shift Studio
Amy J. Wilson is a culture futurist who helps leaders evolve work with more trust, belonging, and adaptive capacity, designing change people actually want to be part of. She is the Founder of Culture Shift Studio, a former Presidential Innovation Fellow, and the author of Empathy for Change. Over the past 20+ years, Amy has led participatory change efforts across sectors, including launching Innovation.gov and co-creating The Better Government Movement. Her work blends organizational design, emotional intelligence, and movement-building—helping people replace inherited patterns with practices that actually take hold.
We are living through a moment that is forcing every organization to choose: go quiet, or find your voice. In this peer workshop, you’ll move from diagnosis to design, building a 30-day experiment you can take back tomorrow, built for shared ownership, learning loops, and real traction, not compliance theater.
We are living through a moment that is putting pressure on every organization, every leader, every team. And most change efforts aren’t built for it. They arrive as directives, skip the conditions that make change stick, and wonder why people disengage.
This session is about something different. Drawing on 20+ years of culture change work and the lessons of the Better Government Movement, 5,000+ public servants across 112 federal agencies, you’ll learn how to read the forces shaping your organization right now and design change that people actually want to be part of.
Drawing on the Three Forces of Change (to locate where your organization’s change energy is actually coming from), Essential Loveable Culture (as the North Star for what you’re building toward), and the Pattern Shift Wheel (to name what’s keeping your organization stuck), you’ll move from recognition to design. You’ll:
- Surface the patterns hiding in your current change efforts
- Map where your organization is truly ready to move
- Design a 30-day experiment you can take back tomorrow using the Experiment Design Canvas
- Walk away with a concrete starter plan and the confidence to design change with people, not for them
This session is ideal for OD practitioners, organizational designers, and leaders who want culture evolution to feel achievable, shared, and deeply felt, not like one more initiative forced on exhausted teams.