Tag: od

organization design

Design with the Customer in Mind with Brandon Curry | Unpacking Organizations Podcast S03E17

Sep 3, 2025 Unpacking organizations: the practitioner’s podcast

Are you designing with the customer in mind? 🤔

On this week’s UnpackingOrganizations, Rupert Morrison and Shradha Prakash are joined by Brandon Curry, CEO of Work Arts LLC and a practitioner with deep experience across performance improvement, OD, and HR leadership. And let’s just say—he gets org design where it matters most: in the real world.

In this conversation, we cover:

✅ Why customer-centric design is still rare (but powerful)
🔧 The role of diagnostics, modeling, and scenario thinking
💡 Why “benchmarking” can be a trap that leads to average
🚫 What happens when you design for people—not work
🎯 And how org clarity and talent insight unlock performance over time

Whether you’re designing from a $50M base or leading at $8B scale—Brandon’s approach is one you’ll want to take from. If you want practical, grounded org design that starts with strategy, centers the customer, and scales with clarity—this is a must-listen.

Arts We Like

Julian Chender in Work Arts Interview – June 2021

This Work Arts interview highlights my June discussion with Julian Chender, talking all things Organization Design & Development. We discuss where we’ve come from, where we are going, as well as the foundation of social science and management/business science that shape what we know as organization development.

Julian shares some backstory on the historical foundations of the recent ODReview published article, OD in Times of Disruption, he co-authored with Corrie Voss, MOD, Ed.D. With enduring social science, we continue to appreciate and apply the work of original thinkers like Kurt Lewin, Edgar Schein and Jay R. Galbraith, from the early work in the OD field. On the management/business side, we continue to evolve as organizations face new challenges, leading to the need for both scale and agility. Finally, Julian shares insights on what he is learning as a part of the Fellowship Program at Kates Kesler.

Julian Chender is an Organization Development and Design practitioner and scholar. He oversaw Leadership Development at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease during the global Ebola and Zika outbreaks and then at Veldhoen + Company helped organizations align their culture, technology and physical space to meet strategic goals. He is now a Fellow at Kates Kesler Organization Consulting, part of Accenture, where he consults on large organization design projects. Julian is Founder of the OD Salon and was the 2020 recipient of the OD Network’s Emerging Practitioner Award.

Arts We Like is a series of posts spotlighting great thinkers, ideas, products and partners that we share to help enable remarkable performance through more effective and engaged organizations. Contact Us about how to deploy these solutions as a part of a broader HR Strategy or engagements to develop your organization, capabilities and talent.