Business Thinking for Designers

Identify valued storytelling structures 
Designers, while particularly good at developing insights, 
need to improve how they communicate recommendations, 
risks, and trade-offs in order to activate those insights. In 
my experience, Post-its are not especially effective for these 
types of communications. Nor are sprints, workshops, or 
diagrams.

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Communicate the options
Quality trade-off decisions are made when partners 
understand opportunities, risks, and the choices available 
to them. Embedding the value of design within a valued 
storytelling structure is the way forward. 
Valued storytelling structures provide familiar patterns of data, 
insights, and arguments for a plan moving forward. In using a 
storytelling method which already exists, we hope to:
• Increase the number of decisions made
• Establish trust
• Encourage cross-functional alignment
• Reuse what works
• Reduce formatting churn
If your organization doesn’t have a consistent structure 
driving decision-making, it can be frustrating. It’s also a good 
opportunity to borrow from counterparts in the consultancy 
space.