“Stories are the way our teams get excited, aligned, and rallied around the same goal,” says long-time IDEO Project Lead Nicole Kahn. “But more importantly, we know that our designs don’t live on with our clients without a good story attached to them. This is something we wanted to shift — to ensure that all of our designers would also see themselves as storytellers.” Kahn has been instrumental in spreading this philosophy through events now held at IDEO offices across the country. The goal: to provide a model for what good presentations look like, while also giving designers a chance to talk about what inspires their creativity, and get solid feedback from an audience of their peers. At First Round’s recent Design+Startup event, Kahn shared lessons she's captured from these events, which have become a set of best practices for giving high-impact presentations.