THE HOME OF
NARRATIVE
DESIGN THINKING
The main tenet of Narrative Design Thinking is shared imagination for the future you’re trying to make real.
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Narrative Design Thinking (NDT) is an approach to designing stories that shape how people understand, believe in, and act on emerging ideas.
At its core, NDT brings together three things:
- What the market needs to understand
- What the company needs the market to believe
- What that belief needs to make possible
Narrative Design Thinking helps founders and teams deliberately design the meaning around what they are building - turning complex or unfamiliar ideas into narratives people can understand, believe in, and carry forward.
Narrative Design Thinking is for people building what does not yet have an established story.
It is designed for founders and teams working with:
New technologies that require new ways of understanding their value.
Emerging categories where the market has not yet developed a shared mental model.
New markets where existing narratives need to be translated, reframed, or redesigned.
Ambitious ideas that require more than awareness - they require a shift in perception.
Storytelling is the practice of expressing ideas through stories. It focuses on how a story is told — the words, structure, characters, and creative techniques used to communicate an idea.
Narrative Design Thinking is an approach to designing the story itself. It focuses on what to tell, what to leave out, how to structure meaning, and what people need to understand and believe.
Think of storytelling as the expression, and Narrative Design Thinking as the design behind it.
THE 5 PHASES OF NDT
These phases offer a shared language for how teams understand emerging ideas, design narratives, and move people from understanding to belief to adoption.
Before designing a narrative, understand the world it needs to
enter.
The goal is not to find a story immediately.
It is to understand:
TENSION
Identify the unresolved gap between
What people believe
today and
What they need to believe tomorrow.
ARCHITECTURE
Narrative Architecture gives an emerging idea a structure people can understand and remember.
DIFFUSION
The goal is not simply to distribute more content. It is to help the narrative travel through the people, communities, and networks that shape perception.
The Measurable Metric where a narrative deeply penetrates an ecosystem.
THE PIONEER
Creator of Narrative Design Thinking™ | Founding Partner, Souls Lab | Stanford GSB | Serial Entrepreneur & Investor
Narrative Design Thinking is a creative and systematic approach to designing narratives that integrates what the market needs to understand, what the company needs the market to believe, and what those beliefs need to make possible.
Follow Souls Lab to see how Narrative Design Thinking is applied to emerging technology, from market entry and GTM to building conviction around new products and ideas.
Explore Souls Lab
The NDT Fellowship is for builders, strategists, creatives, and emerging narrative designers who want to develop the thinking and practice behind Narrative Design Thinking.
Join the NDT Fellowship