Structure Is Culture Change: How Shared Power Becomes Shared Decisions

Culture change is often pursued through new programs and good intentions. Washington built it through structure. After Initiative 200 removed the race- and gender-conscious tools the state had used to pursue equity in public contracting, Washington built the Governor’s Subcabinet on Business Diversity (GSBD): a multi-agency executive body that seats the state’s highest-spending agencies and business community members as co-governing peers. By building shared power into how it operates, the GSBD brings agencies, and the people who hold authority and those who hold the knowledge, into the same conversation, so frontline insight reaches the room where decisions are made.

This workshop teaches the human-centered method underneath that structure: listening and immersing at the frontline, surfacing what is actually happening, and turning it into structure rather than another program. It shows how psychological safety, drawn from Project Aristotle, lets people speak honestly across the hierarchy and trust that what they share will travel up. Attendees leave able to run the method, and to see why structure is what makes culture change durable.

Kimber Starr, EMPA, is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and Manager of the Governor’s Subcabinet on Business Diversity and Tribal Relations at Washington State’s Office of Minority & Women’s Business Enterprises. She leads the Subcabinet’s work building the structure that advances contracting diversity across state agencies. Her focus is collaborative governance, targeted universalism, and human-centered policy design: turning shared power and honest input into durable, systems-level change.