Learning How to Innovate, with Duncan Wardle

Duncan Wardle has sent Buzz Lightyear into space on a space shuttle, built an Olympic-sized swimming pool in Main Street USA to welcome gold medalist Michael Phelps, and flown a giant Mickey Mouse hot air balloon into the Soviet Union. The former PR executive and Vice President of Innovation and Creativity at Disney, he uses his wealth of experience to help companies worldwide foster a culture of creativity and innovation.

SPEAKING.COM: Why is it that most people don’t get their good ideas while they’re at work?

WARDLE: If I were to ask you to close your eyes and ask you where you are and what you’re doing when you get your best ideas, there will be a pause. Then you’ll hear, “shower, driving, walking, commuting, jogging, reading the paper, listening to music, on a train, on a plane.” In fact, the only two words you won’t hear are “at work.”

Now, on another note, picture that last really big verbal argument you were in with somebody: the argument’s over, you’re angry, and then you walk across to the coffee shop, get a cappuccino, and begin to relax. It’s 5 or 10 minutes after the argument and suddenly that killer one-liner just pops into your head: that one perfect line that you wish you’d delivered during the argument always comes five minutes later.

Being in an argument is the same as being in the office: we don’t have time to think. We are busy typing an email, creating a presentation, scheduling a meeting, and so on. And yet the moment we give ourselves time to think, we come up with a killer one-liner or that big idea.

Here’s why: We use only 13% of our brain 95% of the day. The other 87% of your brain is subconscious, the place you store all your life’s experiences: every mad idea you’ve ever had, every place you’ve ever been, and every person you’ve ever met. However, you can’t access them when the door between your conscious and subconscious brain (officially known as the reticular activating system) is firmly closed.

That’s why I run activities called energizers at the beginning of every workshop I create for my audiences. I know that when you come in in the morning or from a break, you’re stressed, you’re late, or you’ve got a deadline. You’ve closed the door between your conscious and subconscious brain.

I don’t need people to be playful every minute of every day, but I do need people to be playful when they’re trying to have big ideas. When I run an energizer, all I’m listening for is laughter. The moment I’ve got laughter, I realize that I’ve opened the door just wide enough between your conscious and subconscious brain for you to come up with the killer one-liner or the big idea.

For those people who say falling asleep or waking up is that eureka moment when they get the big idea, there’s a very famous expression called “When the Penny Drops” that comes from Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison used to sit in an armchair with a tin tray on the floor, put a penny between his knees, and fall asleep. When his muscles would relax, the penny would drop, hit the tin tray, and he would wake up and write down whatever he was thinking. So for those of us who have our best ideas when we’re falling asleep or waking up, keep a notepad by the bed.

One of the most innovative companies in the world, Google gives their employees “percent times,” which is time to think. In turn, their engineers give them Google Maps and self-driving cars, which is not a bad return on investment. You may not be able to give everybody at your company one day a week, but what if you had one day a month for the company with no presentations, no emails, and no meetings? What if you took the first Friday of every month and just had a brown bag breakfast with your team where you stood around and talked about anything except work? You’d be amazed at the ideas you could tie back to that breakfast conversation.

Now, many people say, “Oh, I can’t be playful. I’ve got to be serious at work,” so one other tip I would give is, if you are briefing in evaluation session or innovation session or design thinking session, brief in two or three days in advance of when you want results. That way, you give people time to take a shower (hopefully), walk the dog, go running, and go all the places they are when they have their best ideas. That is the importance of playfulness when you’re trying to develop some real breakthrough thinking.

SPEAKING.COM: How do innovative people’s styles of thinking differ from the average person’s?

WARDLE: Most of them give themselves time to think. When you saw Walt walking the parks, he was giving himself time to think.

Innovative thinkers also use very simple, easy tools to get them out of their own expertise. The more expertise you get in any one discipline or any one industry, the more reasons you know why this new idea won’t work, and so you shoot it down.

Fantasia was considered a masterpiece, but Walt wanted to make it an interactive experience. He wanted mist inside the theater during some of the scenes with the flowers. He wanted heat pumps in during “Night on Bald Mountain”, but the theater owners said, “No, Walt. That’s too expensive.”

To break this rhythm of thinking, Walt started to list the rules of his challenge of showing a movie in the movie theater and counter them with “What if” questions. For example, he wrote, “I, Walt, can’t control the environment.” and then he asked, “What if I could?” Then he listed the most silly “what-ifs” he could come up with as quickly as he could. One of those was: “What if I could take my movies out of the theater?” -a pretty provocative idea in 1940.
That sparked a chain of thought that went something like this:

“Imagine a world where I might make that work…If I take my movies out of the theater, they can’t be two-dimensional because people wouldn’t be able to see them, so what if I made them three-dimensional?… If I made them three-dimensional, they’d need a place to live…If they had somewhere to live, the princess couldn’t live next to the pirates because people wouldn’t be invested in the stories, so I have to put the princess in her own area.” So, Disneyland, one of the biggest creative solutions of the 20th century came from asking the provocative “what if.”

Another great tool to use is to re-express the challenge to get people to think differently. On July 17th, 1955, when Walt opened Disneyland he said, “We will not have any customers in our park. We’ll only have guests.” Think about the difference in how you feel when you’re in a store and treated as a customer as opposed to when you’re crossing the threshold of a friend’s house. Feel that difference.

Walt also said, ” We’re not going to have any employees. We’ll only have cast members.” Suddenly he gave people a sense of pride by simply re-expressing the challenge and getting them to a completely different place of: “I’m a cast member. I’m cast in this show. I wear a costume, not a uniform. I work onstage or backstage.”

One more thing innovative people do is invite naive experts into the room. We were designing a new retail dining and entertainment complex for Hong Kong Disneyland and, of course, we had all the architects there, but I invited a chef as my naive expert. The role of the naive expert is not to solve the challenge for you; their role is to get you out of your expert thinking and thinking differently. They ask the silly question that you’re too embarrassed to ask in front of your peers. They’ll throw out the audacious idea because they’re not governed by politics.

When I asked the architects to draw a house, they gave me the house with a door in the middle at the front, two windows above the door with crosses over them, and a triangle at the top of the house. The chef, who was Chinese, drew this brown bamboo dish with a prawn bowl, a pork bowl, and a little lady waving out of a chimney. When everybody showed their pictures, people laughed because they realized they didn’t have creative thinking of what architecture should look like. The chef gave me permission to put out what everyone else would consider audacious architecture. On the way out the door, somebody slapped a post-it note over her drawing that said, “Distinctly Disney. Authentically Chinese.” Seven years later, that was the strategic ground position for the Shanghai Disney resort: “Distinctly Disney, Authentically Chinese.”

SPEAKING.COM: What do companies get wrong about innovation?

WARDLE: They do one of two things. First they hire the big innovation consultancies who run the project for them for three months and take a big fat check. Afterwards, the executives sit back and realize that their people haven’t learned anything about how to innovate themselves, so they go to Option B and create “an Innovation Department.” Then, the message subconsciously for the rest of the organization is, “You don’t have to be innovative. You’re off the hook.”

So every CEO wants innovation and they want it now, because there’s three different dynamics coming to the marketplace:
1. Artificial intelligence, which is scheduled to take away 10% of the workforce in the next 10 years.
2. Moving from a product-centric – we build it, they will come, – to a consumer-centric approach. Most of the executives still remember the good old days of the product-centric approach, which worked for the last 100 years, and have a really hard time being consumer-centric.
3. The trend most people aren’t really focused on just yet – Generation Z, who are coming underneath the millennials and care more about what you stand for than your products or services. In fact, this generation cares about this so much, that your purpose will be more important than your quarterly results in less than a decade.

One of the most simplest tools companies can use to innovate and take on these challenges is curiosity. Most big innovators dig deeper. When you’re a child, you ask why…and then you ask why again and again until your parents get upset. Later, you go to school and get into corporate life where you’re taught there’s only one way to do something so you stop asking the second why. However, the real insight for innovation comes on why number five or six, not why number one.

If you ask people why they go to Disney parks they’ll tell you, “For the rides.” If you ask them, “Well, why do you go for the rides?” “Well, I used to ride them with my mum.” “Well, why is that important?” “Well, I take my daughter now.” What they just told you has nothing to do with capital reinvestment, but rather their memories and nostalgia, but if you stopped on the first why as most of us do, you wouldn’t find that out.

I would also argue getting out and spending time with your consumer is a great tool for getting innovation right. I was asked by one of the world’s leading tool companies to go talk to them about innovation, so I thought, “What do I know about tools?” I changed a light bulb in 1973, fell off a ladder doing it, and I haven’t done anything like that since. I figured that I needed to go find out what was important to their consumers so I went down to Home Depot and Lowe’s and I hung out some creepy guy in the aisle for about four hours where I just listened and took notes.

Then I went back to talk to the tool company and said, “Look, Generation Z doesn’t care about your brand. At the point of decision-making, they’re not talking about your products or the prices. What they’re talking about very excitedly is, ‘We’re going to build our dream kitchen, our dream bathroom, our dream house.’ If you choose, your purpose could be to help people build their dreams.”

And they looked at me like, “Why would we want to do that?” They focus on quarterly results and the industry they’re in today. Meanwhile we’re at the point where we’re printing houses in Houston, Texas on a 3D printer, so imagine 12 years from now. Amazon’ll probably give me the 3D printer for free, because they’ll save on shipping, packaging, and production. If we want a chair, we won’t have a printer big enough so we’ll go down to our local printers and they’ll print it for us. If I can print anything I want on demand 12 years from today, what will I be using a hammer, a chisel, or a saw for?

That’s what purpose is all about and people are missing that. CEOs want to embed innovation into everybody’s DNA, but the consultant and the Innovation departments aren’t helping. It’s about creating a toolkit that takes creativity and makes it tangible, and takes innovation and makes it easy and fun. Of course, design thinking has to have a purpose, but you cannot change a culture unless Sally and David who have worked there for years want to use these tools when you’re not around, so you’d better make it fun, too.

SPEAKING.COM: What is design thinking and how does it help people think differently?

WARDLE: Design thinking is about starting with the consumer in mind. It’s about developing a deep understanding of what’s driving that consumer’s decision-making and creating a product or service that sorts to that truth. Design thinking is not just relying on big data (although big data is getting more intuitive) but also spending time with your consumer.

Now I’m not talking about focus groups where we have 12 people around the table and we ask them questions. How many of us live in a room with a boardroom table around it with some gray chairs and a two-way mirror with no windows? However, if you get into somebody’s house, it’s not just what they tell you, but what you see. When you’re in somebody’s house, they’re twice as more relaxed as they will be in a focus room. They might be sitting next to a loved one and that’s when you get real insight – whether it’s boyfriend to boyfriend, husband and wife, boyfriend and girlfriend, sister and brother. When you get one individual in the room you might ask, “Sir, what do you do when you’ve got spare time at Disney World?”, “I play golf and drink beer. I’m a manly man”. If he’s sitting next to his wife, though, she’s going to burst out giggling, bust in straight away and say, “No, no, dear, didn’t you do Small World 17 times back-to-back last year?” They’ll both laugh. Meanwhile, you’ve found a real insight.

I call this the self-regulating honesty policy. It’s about going out and looking for clues in places where your competition isn’t. I use a method where I interview a weird, a deep, and a normal. A weird is somebody who has a tangential relationship to your challenge but doesn’t work for you. A deep is somebody who works in your industry but does not work for you. A normal is your consumer.

You go spend a day with them. You write down everything you see, hear, and experience. You do not interpret it. For example, we were trying to get more Hispanics to come to Walt Disney World. Our weird was a New Jersey car dealer, a Mexican-American selling cars to Mexican-American families. He knew who could afford his brand, who had the affinity to his brand, and who’d been looking at cars. He said, “I’m going to go leave a car on their driveway tomorrow for two hours, and I’ll tell them they can do what they want with it.” So we went along to observe and what we noticed was the more family members that were inside the car, the louder the laughs and the bigger the giggles.

Fast forward to our deep, a travel agent out of Los Angeles selling packages to Hispanic families to visit relatives. She said, “I try to find something for everyone. Once they understand there’s something for everyone, they’ll book and I can sell them what I want.” Then she talked about her own family. “My parents from Mexico chose to go on a cruise for three or four days out of Galveston, Texas for their 50th wedding anniversary . They didn’t care which brand of ship they went on or what islands the ship visited. What they wanted was five tables of 10 together for dinner because they realized that would be the most important point of the cruise for them.”

On our last stopping point, our normal, we spent a day with 26 mothers in different houses. I was in one where this lady was talking about her six-year old’s birthday party the week before. She said they had 54 people over, but the party wasn’t complete because Juan’s uncle, her brother, wasn’t there.

Now you tie all those clues back together. The more people there were in the car, the louder the laughs. Once they realize there’s something for everyone, I can sell them a package at any rate. The party wasn’t complete because Juan wasn’t there. The opportunity that we found was the shared emotional value that Hispanic families get out of being together in larger numbers, but we weren’t just relying on our big data. These insights actually come from going out and looking in places where your competitors aren’t looking. Otherwise, it’s not innovation.

SPEAKING.COM: What is your advice for people who share their out-of-the-box ideas at work only to see them get killed by coworkers and supervisors?

WARDLE: There are a couple of things. First, signalling is very important. We as adults don’t live in the world of makebelieve or “how might we” for very long. We immediately try and shoot things down. One step to stopping people from thinking reductively, is clearly signalling to them from the beginning that “we’re in an expansionist session today and you’re expected to be expansionists.”

For example, Shanghai Bank went out and hired some local students to paint a greenhouse around their entire room. The greenhouse was a very clear signal that when anyone in the organization was in the greenhouse, they’re expected to be expansionists.

At Disney, we had a room called ID8 and when you were in ID8, you were expected to be an expansionist. Pixar has a meeting called a plussing meeting where they pitch new storyboards. When people are in a plussing meeting, they know they’re there to add value. Having these spaces sends a very clear signal right from the beginning.

Second, there are two magical words that I learned from the world of improv: “yes and.” Do a brainstorming exercise twice with a group of people. The first time, get everybody to start their feedback with “No, because.” You’ll hear statements like, “No, because we’ll never get it past legal…No, because I can’t justify that…No, because we tried that last year.”

After a bit, ask them, “Did the idea get bigger or smaller?” and they’ll say, “Smaller.” Ask them, “How was the experience?” and they’ll say, “Very frustrating. I knew they were going to shoot the idea out before I threw it down.”

Now the second time you do the exercise, get people to start their feedback with the words “yes, and.” The energy level rises 100% and the amount of laughter goes up 150%. When you ask them how it was, they’ll tell you it was fantastic. You ask them if they went over budget and they’ll say, “Hell, yes.”

Here’s the critical question, though. Ask them, “Whose idea was it when you finished building it?” They’ll smile, pause, and say, “Ours.” The moment you can transfer the power of “My idea” to “Our idea” inside a big organization is the moment you can accelerate its opportunity to get done. Remind people, when you’re greenhousing ideas, “Guys, we’re not greenlighting the project today; we are greenhousing it.” In fact, I would very clearly separate whether or not you’re in an expansionist session or a reductionist session because the two mix like oil and water. You always want to give very clear signals at the beginning of the session about why you’re there.

SPEAKING.COM: Why don’t you fear automation?

WARDLE: Because I was taught not to fear automation. Automation helped us bring about Disney’s MagicBand, a project that solved our biggest consumer pain point.

Most organizations tend to ask, “How might we make more money?” If we had asked that question back in 2008 or 2010, we’d have put our Disney Park gate prices up by X%, and we’d have made Y% profit for the year, and people would have grumbled, “That’s iteration, not innovation.” Instead, we turned that question on its head and applied design thinking, asking: “How might we solve for the biggest consumer pain point?” We listed all the “rules” of going to Disney World: You have to buy a plane ticket and stay in a hotel. You have to rent a car, etc.

We took the biggest consumer pain point and asked. “What if there were no lines?” What an absurd suggestion. What if there was no front desk at the front to our hotels? What if there was no entrance at the front of our parks? What if I could meet Mickey Mouse without standing in line? What if I didn’t have to stand in line to pay for my merchandise or my food?

It turns out that the technology already existed and we applied it to create this magic band, a small band that comes in the mail before you go to Disney World. It is your room key. You just touch it and you go into your hotel room. It is also your theme park ticket; you swipe and go. It has your reservations each day for your favorite character meet-and greets and your attractions on it so you don’t wait in line. In certain resorts where it’s piloted, you touch an item of merchandise once and it goes to your hotel room. You touch it twice and it goes to your house.

The average guest in a Disney theme park now has between 90 and 120 more minutes of free time a day. What will that result in? Record revenues on food and beverage and merchandise. Not only that, if you actually think about it in terms of real data, every guest, every second of the day wearing a Disney magic band is openly crowdsourcing what they like and what they don’t like, and therefore every product and service that is created for the future. This is design thinking in action.

Implementing the Magic Band also taught us about how we can better use our talent. We could have laid off all the front desk staff at the Contemporary Resort Hotel, but I said, “Hang on, let’s do a pilot. Let’s move them out from behind the front desk and make them personal concierges to all the people who can’t afford to be on the concierge floor”. Intent to recommend and intent to return hit record levels, so much that we piloted it elsewhere.

In conclusion, technology enables you. If you know how many people enter the front of your gate as a percentage before a certain time of the morning, Johnny, who used to work eight hours a day at the front gate, probably doesn’t need to be there anymore. Automation helps me discover how I can redeploy Johnny to where I need him whether it’s the parade route, a merchandise shop, or an attraction whereby Johnny’s job is far more fun.

To bring innovation keynote speaker, Duncan Wardle to your organization, please contact Michael Frick at: Mike@Speaking.com