From Zero to Award-Winning: How Design Thinking Changes Corporate Culture

Sara Conklin is a collaborative and results-driven design leader. She drives business results by transforming organizational culture. She has spent her career creating business success through design thinking and experience design for Fortune 500 companies in different industries.

These days, Sara works to democratize and infuse design thinking throughout a 14,000+ employee organization. She’s a vegetarian, who loves the outdoors. Plus, Sara is proud to say that she can play two songs on the ukulele.

Here is how Sara describes her panel:

We are building a future legacy of design thinking and user-centricity at 100-year-old Pitney Bowes. We’ve always had a User Experience Design department, but as our business and market has changed, we saw that great experiences for end-product-users were necessary but insufficient to meet our most important strategic goals. To create a legacy for our next 100 years, our business needed to fundamentally transform the way we think about and relate to customers, users, and our own internal teams. And so, we stood up a Client Experience Center of Excellence and got to work.

Despite little budget, 3 headcount, and no internal example to draw on, 18 months later – as we celebrate our 100th birthday – we are well on our way to success as measured by our internal business and program goals as well as multiple external industry awards. We are excited about the future legacy we’re building. In this talk, I’ll share how we got started and how we built out the program, and I’ll dive most deeply into our key Client-Centered Innovation Program, which teaches, coaches, promotes and democratizes Design Thinking to teams across our entire business.

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