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Summary
From finding our balance between ambiguity, process intensity, scaling efficiency, and velocity to enhancing creativity, innovation, and craft, there’s no shortage of stories we can tell as DesignOps managers. But do we do it well enough? Are we reaching the people that we need to reach with our stories? Jon Fukuda will lead this month's DesignOps Community videoconference through the importance of storytelling in DesignOps and why it matters now, more than ever.
Key Insights
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Effective storytelling in design ops requires revealing personal struggle and vulnerability to build authentic connection and trust.
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Design operations acts as a disruptive force challenging decades-old engineering paradigms, necessitating careful narrative framing.
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Resistance to change in organizations is real, physiological, and tied to identity, not just abstract opposition.
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The difference between story and strategic narrative is scale; narratives thread multiple stories into a larger vision that inspires collective action.
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Narratives should make the audience the hero to foster empathy and help them adopt the new vision as their own.
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Leading with emotion and context primes audiences to accept data as proof rather than skepticism.
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Change initiatives often fail due to lack of narrative ownership—if you don’t command your story, others will tell it for you.
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Storytelling must balance disruption with respect so as not to alienate key stakeholders or trigger defensive reactions.
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Currencies of influence beyond cash include authenticity, relationships, motivation, and situational authority.
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Storytelling is an iterative design challenge requiring prototyping, testing, listening, and refining to engage diverse audiences.
Notable Quotes
"The heart of the storyteller is actually the heart of the story."
"Design ops is a change leadership function because you often have no formal authority over the people you need to influence."
"If you haven’t taken command and control of your story someone else has, and it’s likely not the story you want to be told."
"Resistance is real — it’s not an abstract concept — and it’s tied to people’s biochemical and emotional response to change."
"You can be right without making others wrong."
"People will forget what you said, they’ll forget what you did, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel."
"The art of storytelling is the ability to talk about difficult subjects in a way that still leaves people feeling good."
"Disruption and innovation are really the same thing — if you’re not willing to disrupt the status quo, how will you drive innovation?"
"Your role as a storyteller is to be the tour guide of your new world, making others feel at home in it."
"You need to earn your audience’s emotional investment — stories that don’t connect emotionally won’t succeed."
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