Reframing UX in Complex Organisations: Marijke Jorritsma

When products slow, meetings multiply, and decisions dissolve into “task forces to decide how to decide,” the problem isn’t your interface. It’s your organisation. In a closing talk at UXDX USA 2025, Marijke Jorritsma, Design Manager and Lead UX Designer, made a timely argument: the highest-leverage UX work isn’t skin-deep. It lives upstream. Where structures, language and trust shape the outcomes your users feel.

A Different Kind of Closing Keynote

Marijke began with a promise and a nudge. This wouldn’t be a traditional parade of artefacts. It would be a rethink of where UX spends its energy, plus concrete takeaways you could photograph and try on Monday. Over the week, she’d heard plenty about change in products, teams and skills. One thing hadn’t changed: the unique value of UX in engaging with complex systems.

What We Mean by “Complex”

Drawing on a crisp definition, Marijke framed a complex system as one composed of many interacting parts whose whole exhibits emergent behaviours you can’t easily predict from the pieces. Humans are inherently unpredictable, which means all human systems contain complexity. But her focus was narrower: organisations whose complexity harms delivery. You’ll recognise them by feel. Decisions slow to a crawl. Accountability blurs. Overlap expands. Meetings beget more meetings. When complexity becomes a drag on outcomes, the experience of the product suffers, if the product ships at all.

The Hand-Raise Diagnostic

To make it visceral, Marijke ran a quick diagnostic. Hands went up for cross-functional steering meetings that replaced crisp ownership with crowded calendars. More hands went up for three departments chasing the same goal with mismatched KPIs and no shared plan. Nearly every hand went up for days of back-to-back meetings that left nobody clear on who was actually responsible. And a collective groan greeted the “committee to decide the committee” scenario. These are not annoyances on the periphery. They are experience-shaping forces. So why, asked Marijke, is UX still so often invited only to polish the surface?

The Pivot: Reframing Skills You Already Have

The good news, she argued, is that UX already has the muscle to deal with human complexity. We model systems. We facilitate alignment. We build resilient patterns. We plan for adoption. Rather than learning entirely new disciplines, we can reframe familiar tools to reduce organisational risk. Her talk centred on three moves: understanding how org structures imprint on products, reframing core UX methods to knit organisations together and earning trust upstream so those methods matter.

When Organisations Shape Products

Here, Marijke invoked Conway’s Law. The idea is that organisations design systems that mirror their communication structures. She illustrated the point with a marvel carrying ten scientific instruments and seventeen cameras, operating with a communication delay of six to twenty-four minutes. Certain subsystems cannot run simultaneously without risking irreversible damage. If you reverse-engineer that technical reality back to the organisation, you glimpse the communication patterns, the silos and the hand-offs that created it. Products bear the imprint of the human system that makes them. Change the system, change the product.

Workshops That Create Real Alignment

Marijke’s first reframing was workshop facilitation. Not the performative kind, but targeted, outcome-driven sessions that remove friction. She shared three flavours she adapts to the moment. Terminology alignment is deceptively simple and immensely powerful for zero-to-one work. When leaders draw what they mean by key terms and agree to a shared vocabulary for a project, misunderstandings drop and momentum rises. Strategic positioning reframes “what we’re building” in relation to customers and to the organisation’s portfolio, helping leaders see overlaps and trade-offs. Cross-org roadmap planning stretches the view beyond a single team to expose dependencies and sequence change in a way people can actually execute. If workshops have a bad reputation in your company, Marijke suggested rebranding them as “working sessions,” designing them like products and measuring them by the decisions they unlock.

Mapping Systems So People Can Decide

Next came system mapping and modelling. The quiet power tools of organisational clarity. One technique Marijke uses is mapping stakeholder priorities to the trade space of a system, making tensions explicit rather than accidental. In one project to integrate AI into spacecraft operations, the team visualised three competing qualities: optimality, transparency and flexibility and captured how different groups weighted each. Veterans who had operated missions for decades needed to understand decisions. Others prized performance. Some valued optionality. Putting this on the wall lets leaders make fast, empathetic decisions with their eyes open to the social and technical constraints.

Designing Operations, Not Just Interfaces

Marijke’s third reframing pushed UX into system design. Initiative design, operations design and digital transformation sound grand, but they are simply designed at a different altitude. She showed a BPMN-style process from concept to chassis delivery to demonstrate how end-to-end flows cut across silos. When UX helps stitch those flows together: defining decision points, clarifying ownership and specifying feedback loops, the downstream interface work suddenly has a stable foundation. The artefacts may look different, but the craft is familiar: understand users, define success, expose risks and iterate toward something humans can actually run.

Strategy and Leadership as a Continuum

If you’re running the kinds of workshops and mappings Marijke described, you’re already doing strategy. She recommended moving familiar tools further upstream: design principles that govern not just screens but behaviours between teams; canvases that force a shared picture of value and risk before momentum calcifies. None of this requires a new title. It does require the courage to invite the right people into the room, to publish the language of the work and to make the invisible visible.

Earning Permission to Work Upstream

Many practitioners, Marijke acknowledged, are tasked to deliver wireframes while yearning to influence the system. The path is evolutionary, not revolutionary. Deliver excellent interface work. Use that trust to propose a small alignment session that solves a cross-org snag leaders are already complaining about. Volunteer to schedule and structure stakeholder conversations for the next iteration so the right voices arrive early. Replace “we need a workshop” with “we can have a one-hour working session to resolve the three blockers we’ve all named.” Every small, reliable win edges UX closer to the place where decisions start.

The Q&A: Culture, Careers and Aliens

In questions, the room leaned into the practical. On workshop fatigue, Marijke urged persistence and better design, clear purposes, thoughtful activities and agendas sent in advance. In her career, she demystified the path: no engineering degree required for UX roles, diverse academic and industry backgrounds welcomed and curiosity mandatory. On working within government constraints, she noted that simply bringing human-centred methods into an engineering-centred culture creates constructive tension that moves things forward.

The Heart of It: Change the System, Change the Experience

Marijke closed with Octavia Butler’s line: “All that you touch, you change; all that you change, changes you”. As both an invitation and a warning. Our products are inseparable from our organisations. If we confine UX to the surface, we will keep polishing symptoms. If we reframe our existing tools to tame complexity, clarifying language, exposing trade-offs, designing operations and leading with inclusion. We can change the conditions that make great products possible.

What You Can Do Tomorrow

Start where you have permission and aim one rung upstream. Turn your next hand-off meeting into a one-page terminology alignment and capture decisions in the open. Map the three most important stakeholder priorities against the trade-offs your system actually faces. Offer a one-time, cross-org working session to plan the next quarter’s dependencies on a single sheet everyone can see. Then publish the artefacts so momentum doesn’t depend on your presence alone. That’s how you build trust, reduce noise and shift the curve of outcomes.

A Final Word

Marijke’s message landed because it replaced hand-waving about “org change” with craft we already own. The interfaces still matter. But in complex organisations, the experience your users feel is forged upstream, in language, structures and trust. Reframe your practice to meet complexity at its source, and the surface starts taking care of itself.

Want to catch the full talk?

You can find her talk here: https: https://youtu.be/aqvN_QgSNU4

Or explore all the insights in the UXDX USA 2025 Post Show Report: https://uxdx.com/post-show-report/?utm_source=LinkedIn&utm_medium=Snippet&utm_campaign=Post+Show+Report