Everything can benefit from having a dose of storytelling to it. At the same time, the stories being presented to broad audiences are almost certainly flawed in

Everything can benefit from having a dose of storytelling to it. At the same time, the stories being presented to broad audiences are almost certainly flawed in ways reflecting the power structure, as you've detailed. Marketing teams tend to live and breathe story and so will often draw upon myths that please the key stakeholders - management and executives. Those myths then circulate into the atmosphere and at times reinforce themselves, but it is absolutely necessary to combat them and demonstrate strength. The best way to do so is to have counterexample myths available: not just your personal story or "buttoned-down" aspirations of serious productivity, but a bit of a fairy tale, with symbolic and metaphorical aspects, and perhaps something comedic as well. When you move the conversation away from the concrete and into the fictional you gain a lot of room to manuever and define your role: not a hapless geek or myopic code monkey, but a brave knight or a spellcasting wizard, suddenly embodying the powers of those archetypes. Indeed, there is an extant tradition of programmers using those metaphors and others as well: the ninja, the Zen master, the blacksmith, and so on. From this cast of stock characters you can adapt the specific theme you need to address into a small plot spanning perhaps a few sentences - something you can scribble down during a meeting. The result will carry far more rhetorical power than a plain argument. As a follow-up, I recommend Nancy Mellon's "Storytelling and the Art of Imagination" as an inspirational resource and reference for getting out of literal thinking and into the myth-making frame of mind. This was the text for class on storytelling I took recently and it was a good kick in the pants - I've recommended it to friends, too.