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Harness the Power of Storytelling to Grow Your Influence

A course for designers by designers

Corporate Training

Live Online Course

Common Roles

This course is for designers and design researchers across various practices (such as service, product, UX, digital and interaction design).

Get a sneak peek of the course

Pragmatic Design courses are facilitated by experts and built within Miro—a visual collaboration platform—for an immersive, interactive learning experience. Explore what to expect in the course with this preview.

What you’ll learn in Influence Through Storytelling

Understand the power of storytelling

Recognize opportunities to build influence and align stakeholders.

Inspire action through stories

Set and achieve goals through compelling, well-structured narratives.

Tailor narratives to resonate with specific audiences

Frame and adapt stories for diverse, cross-functional stakeholders.

Map typical stakeholder perspectives in an organizational ecosystem
Narrow in on the right framing, perspective and degree of detail
Ensure success by prototyping, testing and iterating on your stories
Anticipate stakeholder challenges and proactively develop responses

Ensure your design work isn’t wasted

Help the business understand the value of design and embrace new opportunities to leverage it.

Preview the toolkit: Story Planner

The Story Planner is your step-by-step process for designing strategic stories that achieve goals. It culminates in a Story Blueprint, the foundation you’ll use to create your next great presentation, share-out or project update.

YOUR STORY PLANNER INCLUDES

COURSE TESTIMONIALS

What your peers are saying

"Storytelling, like products, deserves thought, care and user-centricity. I liked how this course solidified concepts by connecting them to real stories and examples—weaving in learning with interactive and engaging activities. I realized the importance of not just what you say but also how you say it."

“Influence Through Storytelling was an engaging course that offered great collaboration with new folks and an intuitive process for storytelling. Now, I can improve my storytelling to have a more compelling rationale for designs and get buy in. And I can communicate more effectively with the cross-functional team.”

“Storytelling is not just about presenting mocks! In this interactive course, you’ll learn effective storytelling methods and apply them to your real-world scenario. Everyone on my design team should take this class.”

“This course gives a blueprint on how to build your storytelling skills and present design work to just about anyone.”

“This course breaks down aspects of the storytelling process that many of us overlook. Simply identifying and setting an intention to think about things designers usually gloss over was so helpful.”

"Influence Through Storytelling is a great course for designers! The instructor did an amazing job facilitating and was super helpful in helping me to craft a better storytelling experience."

Teresa Brazen has spent 15+ years working in the design industry as a design consultant, educator, business leader and executive coach. She’s helped teams at NASA, Rail Europe, Cisco, Clorox, Charles Schwab and more adopt human-centered ways of working and designing products and services. Prior to Pragmatic, Teresa spearheaded the global expansion of Cooper Professional Education—a leader in design and creative leadership training—to 10 countries. Her mission today is to help professionals expand their potential and increase their impact.

Teresa Brazen

Shannon McGarity has spent more than 20 years solving clients’ design challenges in roles ranging from head of product to UX director. Prior to Pragmatic, Shannon was a director at strategic design firms Cooper and Designit—leading teams on projects, creating curriculum, coaching innovation teams and teaching service design, design leadership and more. She is also a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach, focusing on leadership coaching.

Shannon McGarity

Lisa Pertoso is a learning designer, facilitator and organizational coach. The driving force behind her 20+ year career is helping leaders prepare for the future of work by developing our most important human skills: adaptability, communication, creativity, innovation, empathy and self-awareness. Lisa has educated design, tech, business and nonprofit leaders in the U.S., Asia, Australia and Europe. Her past clients include BMW Group, Brooklyn Public Library, Hyper Island, Parsons School of Design and TBWA.

Lisa Pertoso

Instructors

Pragmatic Design instructors have proven expertise in facilitating learning experiences for design practitioners and leaders and coaching teams to increase their impact.

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Influence Through Storytelling

7 hours
1-2 sessions
No travel
Team exercises

Our learning experiences are developed by experienced facilitators and instructional designers—focusing on interactive learning and practical application.

Our training provides immersive, hands-on practice with the skills that matter for expanding the influence of design in your organization.

We offer live online training for teams who want to engage with instructors in real time without the hassle of travel. We also offer an onsite option for corporate training clients who want to bring their team together in person.

INTERESTED IN CORPORATE TRAINING