As organizations race to build new ventures, scale AI, and adapt to constant change, a quieter question keeps surfacing: what actually holds teams together when clarity is missing?

This question is one that I have been pondering for a while. And…it’s exactly why I was so excited to speak with my friend and one-time co-worker, Kursat Ozenc. You see, Kursat has spent much of his career working inside that very question. As a design leader shaping new business ventures at JPMorgan, a longtime educator at Stanford d.school, and the co-author of Rituals for Work and Rituals for Virtual Meetings, Kursat operates where design meets systems, culture, and behavior. His work focuses less on what teams produce and more on how they make sense of uncertainty together.

In our conversation, Kursat reflects on designing when there is no roadmap, why most organizational change efforts fail to change behavior, and how intentionally designed rituals can transform the way teams collaborate, decide, and adapt. We also touch on his recent writing about AI, where he argues that as teams move across different modes of intelligence (automation, augmentation, reflection, coordination), the real design challenge becomes judgment, not tooling.

In many ways, this is a conversation about designing conditions rather than artifacts…

Together, these ideas point to an expanded role for design…one that is less visible, more infrastructural, and increasingly essential as technology accelerates faster than culture can keep up.

Read on for my main takeaways from our conversation. 🎧 And…listen to the recording of our full conversation on the Design Shift podcast on Spotify and Apple and the Design Shift YouTube channel.

— Justin Lokitz

Most design work, at least the kind that I’ve been around, is still framed as problem-solving. Fix the broken flow. Remove friction. Improve usability. But listening closely to Kursat, it becomes clear that this framing is too small for the kinds of problems many designers now face.

Kursat consistently returns to a deeper definition of design, one that shifts the designer’s responsibility upstream. As he puts it, “Design is the transforming existing situations into their preferred states.” That framing matters because it positions design as directional rather than reactive. The work is not only about responding to problems, but about shaping what becomes possible next.

This distinction matters most at the edges of organizations: new ventures, organizational change, and teams navigating uncertainty, power, and increasingly, AI. These are not environments where linear design processes hold up. They are environments where design becomes infrastructural.

In early-stage ventures, if design fails, it does so because teams mistake motion for progress. Everyone is busy, and everything feels urgent. This is exacerbated in times (like now) when designers feel most vulnerable to change (and the layoffs that come with that change). Yet the most important questions remain unresolved.

Kursat describes venture environments as places where the usual signals designers rely on simply do not exist yet. “You don’t have a clear product roadmap or feature release kind of things,” he explains. Without those anchors, teams often rush toward artifacts just to create a sense of forward movement.

In these conditions, design creates leverage by helping teams slow down the right decisions, rather than polishing UI (or slide decks). Kursat approaches this work with what he calls a systems mindset, “trying to understand the relationships between things.” Instead of asking what should be built next, the designer asks what assumptions are currently shaping behavior, what tensions are emerging, and what the organization is actually learning.

This work often looks invisible from the outside. But…it is decisive. Designers who succeed in new ventures stop thinking of themselves as form-givers and start acting as sense-makers. They help teams see patterns across fragmented signals and surface contradictions that metrics alone cannot explain.

One of the most counterintuitive moves Kursat highlights is resisting the urge to invent everything from scratch. “There might be things that are already working, and your role as a designer is to amplify those.” In uncertain environments, design is often less about novelty and more about recognizing what deserves to be stabilized and scaled. And…just as importantly, sometimes, it’s about deciding what NOT to design (or move forward with).

As ventures grow, many of these same dynamics persist, just at a different scale. Leaders announce change. New strategies are unveiled, and values appear in slide decks and town halls. And…yet, behavior barely shifts.

Kursat is direct about why this happens. Organizations treat culture as an outcome instead of a design material. Strategy alone does not move people. “Strategy is almost like the bridge,” he says, “but design is the driver.” Without changes to how work actually happens, strategy remains aspirational.

Designing for organizational change means designing decision-making, not just vision. It means shaping how teams handle conflict, how risk is distributed, how success is recognized, and how failure is processed. These dynamics live in everyday interactions, not transformation programs.

Language plays a critical role here. Kursat emphasizes that design thinking and visualization are not methods for their own sake. “Design thinking and visualization are my bread and butter because they turn insights into something people can act on.” When systems become legible, people can participate in them differently. Without that shared understanding, change initiatives stay abstract and fragile.

This is where many change efforts break down. They ignore power, incentives, and fear, assuming alignment will emerge once the strategy is clear. Design, at this level, requires engaging those forces directly, not pretending they are neutral.

Where culture design becomes tangible is in rituals. Kursat draws a sharp distinction between rituals and routines, one that many teams overlook. “Rituals are actions that are imbued with meaning,” he explains. From the outside, a ritual may look like a routine. But internally, the difference is felt.

Teams often believe they have rituals when they really just have recurring meetings. The problem is that “people mix ritual with routine a lot,” Kursat notes, “but rituals are fragile because meaning can be lost.” When meaning fades, the ritual collapses into compliance.

This fragility is precisely what makes rituals powerful. When designed well, even small rituals can shape trust, psychological safety, and coordination in outsized ways. Kursat describes moments where a simple, intentional practice during onboarding or transition completely reframed how a team worked together. “That very small ritual sets the tone.”

Rituals are about continuity. They persist even when leadership changes or structures shift. In that sense, they are one of the most durable tools designers have for shaping culture.

As I have been writing about AI so much (x10) lately, and Kursat is a master of human-centered design, I intentionally gave him space to bring AI into our conversation when it felt relevant. That’s why it wasn’t until the very end of our conversation that we went there.

But…we didn’t discuss AI as a tooling problem, but as a cultural one. Kursat describes the current moment bluntly: “AI is pouring down on us.” Teams are adopting new systems faster than they are developing shared understanding about how to use them.

In his Design Meets AI Substack, Kursat argues that teams now operate across multiple modes of intelligence. Sometimes AI automates. Sometimes it augments. Sometimes it reflects patterns humans cannot see. Sometimes it coordinates complex systems. The risk is not misuse, but unconscious drift between these modes.

“AI is simplifying things again,” he says, “but we still need to make sense of what it’s creating for us.” Without deliberate design, teams default to whatever the system produces, outsourcing judgment rather than sharpening it.

This is where rituals re-enter the picture. Rituals create pauses. They mark transitions between modes of work. They help teams decide when to trust automation, when to slow down, and when human judgment must override machine output. In AI-mediated organizations, rituals are not optional. They are safeguards for agency.

What emerges from this conversation with someone I view as a true design master is a view of design that is quieter but far more consequential than artifact production. Designing ventures, organizations, and rituals requires designers to take responsibility for conditions, not just outputs.

This kind of work rarely shows up cleanly in portfolios. But it shapes whether ideas survive, whether teams trust each other, and whether technology serves human goals rather than distorting them.

Design, at this level, is no longer just about making things pretty or usable. It is about making collective action possible.

Want more? Connect with Kursat and tell him Justin sent you! You can also follow Kursat’s work at Design Meets AI.

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