Jesse James Garrett

Being an agent of change is often part of the point of the job for design leaders. They got into design to change products; they got into leadership to change organizations.

But the path to that change—process change, culture change, mindset change—is anything but a straight line, according to Berkeley business school professor Sara Beckman on the latest episode of our design leadership podcast Finding Our Way. “Nobody’s going to come to you and say, ‘I empower you to change how I think,’” she reminds us. “It just isn’t that way.”

Many leaders feel the need to go straight for the data to support the change they want to create, but Sara’s approach starts somewhere more basic: storytelling. “If you open with a story and then provide the data, it’s heard in a different way,” she says. “When we have a product that’s languishing, I use storytelling to figure out whether I should just kill it or what I need to do to fix it. Because you can’t tell a good story if you don’t have a good story to tell.”

Persistence in delivering that story is key because not everyone will get it the first time around—and many who do get it will still need reminding. “You have to sort of, with humor, be a bit of a pain in the neck, you know?” Sara says. “Pretty soon you start to hear it back again and they’re not even attributing it to you.”

Don’t take that the wrong way though—for Sara it’s a sign you’re succeeding. “You can’t take credit for it,” she says. “Because you’re just trying to get them to understand something and eventually it’ll click and then they’ll say it in their own terms.”

Patience may be the hardest part of the change equation for leaders. “I don’t have to change the whole company at once,” Sara says. “I just have to redesign one product, and show that redesigning one product increased acceptance, adoption, whatever it is… But you can’t expect it to happen overnight. It just doesn’t.”

Thanks Sara (and as always my co-host Peter Merholz!) for a terrific conversation! Check it out in your favorite podcast app or on the Finding Our Way website.