Org Design in Practice
Designing Movements, Not Mandates:
How to Get Beyond Compliance and Into Commitment
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.
What if culture change felt less like a rollout and more like something people actually want to participate in? Design a minimum viable movement: a 30-day participatory experiment you can take back tomorrow, built for shared ownership, learning loops, and real traction.
We’ve all seen it: change initiatives that look great on paper and quietly die in practice. Often the issue isn’t the idea—it’s the delivery. When change shows up as a mandate, people protect themselves. When it’s designed as a movement, people participate. Movements work because they tap into intrinsic motivation and collective agency, the very things mandates suppress.
In this peer workshop, you’ll learn a movement-based approach to change: one that builds shared ownership through small experiments rather than top-down mandates. Drawing on Amy’s federal innovation work (Innovation.gov, The Better Government Movement) and grounded in how people actually mobilize around shared purpose, you’ll get a practical design process you can use immediately.
Using the Thriving Together Framework™ (to understand readiness and pacing) and the Culture Shift Studio process (to design, test, and sustain change), you’ll:
-
- Surface the mandate patterns hiding in your current change efforts
- Map where your organization is truly ready to move
- Design a minimum viable movement: a 30-day participatory experiment with built-in feedback loops
- Walk away with a concrete starter plan, accountability structure, and the confidence to design change with people—not for them
This session is ideal for OD practitioners, organization designers, and leaders who want culture evolution to feel achievable, shared, and real, not like one more initiative forced on exhausted teams.