Walt Disney’s secret strategy is to inspire creative thinking and transforming dreams from vision to reality.
I bet you’ve heard the name Disney before. Maybe you even admired his productions as a child.
Walt Disney was a great and talented cartoonist. He was one of those inspiring people for whom life has become equal to passion.
Did you know that he was also a great manager and a leader?
His legacy to humanity is not limited to wonderful cartoons — he also left us with tremendous creativity-inducing tools that inspire both individuals and organizations.
Creativity, dreaming and inspiration directly strike from his words:
“If you can dream it, you can do it.”
“First, think. Second, believe. Third, dream. And finally, dare.”
“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”
Walt Disney was always pushing his team further, inspiring them to dream and dare to take actions. He also used to say to them: “there were actually three different Walts. The dreamer, the realist, and the spoiler. You never knew which one was coming to the meeting”.
The dreamer, the realist and the spoiler strategy
The above-mentioned strategy has 3 phases:
- Dreamer phase — creative brainstorming, during which the boards are filled with a lot of ideas.
The atmosphere of Disney’s meeting was extremely important as evidenced by the ban on criticism. All ideas were treated equally — even if someone’s idea was doomed to failure in advance.
The important questions are “what do you want and how can you imagine this wish?”, “what would you like to achieve if there were no obstacles?” - Realist (or planner) phase— The aim of this stage is to find an answer to the question: how can we make the dream turn into reality? What is our plan for this dream?
- Critic (or so called spoiler) phase — the last step is focused on risk analysis and looking for the weak points of the plan or bottlenecks. Important questions of this phase are: “did we miss something in our plan?”, “how can we improve it?”, “what can go wrong if we realize our plan and how can we prevent it?”
Care has also been taken to ensure that the atmosphere of the rooms was appropriate to the characteristics of each stage. The first meeting (The Dreamer phase) took place in a very pleasant room, while the room for the critic phase was far from comfortable — usually, the room was too cold or too warm. The Planner phase had an office-like room — a room that should remind participants about daily work.
What happens most often when you dream? Right after the dream has been defined? Of course, your inner critic starts looking for every possible obstacle that stands in your way of fulfilling your dreams.
Notice that in Disney’s method the critic does not meet the dreamer right away — this is a very smart movement.
Conclusion
You can use this method in your daily work and life or whenever you need a detailed but creative plan that takes risk analysis into considerations.
Just like Socrates that instructed the sculptors to combine different human bodies — taking from each what is most beautiful so that the final sculpture is as perfect as possible, Walt Disney’s message is to combine three, totally different views in order to synergize and give the method to “achieve the impossible”.