The Secrets of Innovation Revealed at 3DEXPERIENCE World 2021

Hello, my name is Duncan Wardle. I was the former head of innovation and creativity at Disney. I started as a cappuccino boy in the London office. I’ve opened parks around the world, including in Disneyland Paris in Marne-la-Vallée in 1992. That makes me feel quite old.

I worked my way up through the ranks. I helped Pixar with some story lines for Marvel, Lucasfilm; Disney Imagineering, creating new parks around the world; and about 10 years ago I got a call from our chairman, who said, “You’re the guy with all the big ideas who actually seems to get them done. You are going to be in charge of innovation and creativity.

“What on Earth is that?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. ”We just need to learn to innovate at scale.”

So, the first thing I did was survey 5,000 people at Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel and Disney parks and ask them what the barriers are to being more innovative and creative. The number one barrier I got was “I don’t have time to think.”

The second was “We’re a risk-averse organization.” We’ve got quarterly results to meet, so we can’t take risks.

The third one was “We say we’re consumer centric, but we actually care more about our quarterly results.”

Therefore, we’re sort of product centric. None of us could say the last time we spent a day with the consumer.

Ideas get stuck, diluted or killed as they move through our approval processes was the fourth.

The fifth reason was we all had a different definition of innovation.

Now think back to your childhood for a moment. Perhaps an early birthday or Christmas or Hanukkah, and you got a gift and it was a toy in a giant box. The box was bigger than you were. And it took you ages to take that toy out of the box, and you got it out and you played with the toy for an hour or two, but what did you spend the next week playing with? Yes, the box. Because it was your fort, your rocket ship … it was anything you wanted it to be.

We were all born playful. We were all born creative. Are you encouraged to be playful every day at work? Most people would say not, but I want to explain to you the great importance of playfulness.

What are you doing when you get your best ideas, answers? In the shower, walking, running, commuting, falling asleep or waking up? Nobody ever says at work. Well, that’s a bummer, isn’t it? You’re paid to have big ideas at work.

Now close your eyes and picture a long argument that you had with somebody. You screamed at them; they screamed at you. You walked away from the argument angry. Maybe you went to a local coffee shop for a coffee, a croissant. It’s five minutes after the argument and you’re beginning to relax, get more comfortable … and what pops into your head? The killer one-liner, that one beautiful line you wished you had used in the argument. Oh, yeah. That would have been the perfect line.

But it didn’t come to you during the argument. Always five minutes later. This is why we need time to think. When we’re in an argument, our brain is defending ourselves. When we’re in the office, we’re doing emails, presentations, meetings.… We hear ourselves saying, “I don’t have time to think.”

But the moment you gave yourself time to think, you came up with a killer one-liner. You stepped into the shower—you came up with a big idea.

How can we get there on demand through playfulness? We live through four brain states in any given day: Busy Beta, Amazing Alpha, Thoughtful Theta and Dreamy Delta. Busy Beta is the stage where you say, I don’t have time to think. And the door, otherwise known as the reticular activating system between your conscious and subconscious brain, is firmly closed and you don’t have access to 87 percent of the capacity of your brain. Eighty-seven percent of your brain is subconscious. When that door is closed and you don’t have time to think, you’re only working with 13 percent of the capacity of your brain. So how can you move from Busy Beta to Amazing Alpha?

I run a fun 60-second exercise designed specifically to make you laugh, just like a child. Why? Because the moment I hear you laugh, I know I’ve opened that door between your conscious and subconscious brain to give you access to the other 87 percent of your brain.

For those of you that get [your] best ideas in bed falling asleep or waking up, here’s an exercise from Thomas Edison, the Penny Drop, to capture that eureka moment, the big idea. Edison used to fall asleep at night in an armchair with a penny between his knees and a tea tray on the floor. As he would relax and fall asleep, the penny would drop and hit the tin tray and he would wake up and write down whatever he was thinking.

You could be thinking, “That’s stupid. I would never do that.” But who had more inventions in the 20th century than anybody else?

The importance of being playful when you’re trying to have ideas is incredibly important creative behavior.

Again, most people tell me again their biggest barrier to innovation is I don’t have time to think. But I would argue differently. I would argue the biggest barrier is, in fact, your own river of thinking.

You own your expertise and all of your experience. My expertise and experience come from 30 years at Disney. My river of thinking at Disney is very fast, very wide and very deep—as yours is. It allows me to make quick and informed decisions.

Yet, we’re being asked to get out of our river of thinking more and more often because of the disruption that happens during the day. So, I want to share some innovation tools to help you stop thinking the way you always do and give you permission to think differently. The first one was created by Walt Disney: what if? What if the rules no longer applied? Disney did this for Fantasia. He was showing a movie in which he wanted you to come into my theater during the fire sequence and have mist pumped in during the rain sequence. The theater owner said no.

What are the rules in a movie theater? You have to sit down. You have to be quiet. You have to watch one movie at a time. Disney wrote down all the rules. He couldn’t control the environment, and that frustrated him greatly. So, he asked, “What if I could control the environment?”

Well, that’s not provocative enough. The more provocative and absurd your what-if statement is, the further out of your river thinking you will get.

What if I take the movies out of the theater? Well, that was an absurd suggestion in 1940. How are you going to do that?

The answer is iteration, not innovation, Disney said. If I take my movies out of the theater, they couldn’t be two dimensional. I don’t own movie theaters. What do you think is three dimensional? How would I do it? Oh, wait a minute. What if I had people play the characters? In order for people to believe them, I’d have to put them in costumes. If they were in costumes, the princesses couldn’t live next to the pirates because people wouldn’t be immersed in their stories. What if I put them in different lands? Or wait a minute … what if I call it Disneyland?

It was the biggest creative suggestion of the 20th century.

The “what if?” tool also gave birth to Uber. Two gentlemen walked into a pub in Chicago. It was raining, it was one o’clock in the morning and they had too much to drink. They couldn’t get a cab. They asked, “What if every car was a taxi? Bang! Uber.

I'm sure you, like me, used to go to a video rental store. Someone listed the rules of going to a video rental store. I have to drive to a physical store. I can only get three at a time. They never have the one I want.… He said, What if there was no physical store? YouTube had already existed for about seven years streaming amateur content, he said. What if I just stream professional content? I’ll do a deal with movie studios. Nobody would have to drive to physical store. They will get the movie they want on opening day weekend. They don’t have to return anything. I’ll cut the rental off at the end of 24 hours. I’ll name it Netflix, I take my idea to Blockbuster five times. They’ll turn me down five times. I’ll take them out of business in less than five years.

It’s easy to look at Disney and Netflix and say, “But we just don’t have the resources.” This is a great tool for any size of company. There was a small company in Great Britain in the 1970s that made drinking glasses. They found too much breakage when the glasses were being wrapped to ship. So, they went down to the shop floor and listed the rules by watching the production process. Twenty-six employees at a conveyor belt. Twelve glasses in a box. Glasses were separated by corrugated cardboard. Glasses were wrapped individually in newspaper. Employees were reading the newspaper. Somebody asked a very provocative what-if question. What if we poke their eyes out? Well, that’s not very nice and it’s against the law. But because they had the courage to ask the provocative and absurd what-if question, the lady sitting next to him immediately got out of her river of thinking and said, “Wait a minute. Why don’t we just hire blind people?” They did. Production went up over 40 percent. Breakage went down over 70 percent. The British government gave a 50 percent salary subsidy for hiring people with disabilities.

List the rules of your industry. Ask what if. Pick one rule and ask, what if that rule no longer applied? You will be amazed at the ideas you come up with.

The next tool at your disposal is the naïve expert. What is a naïve expert? That’s someone who doesn’t work in your line of business. Why should you invite one into every session you run? What can they do that you can’t? They won’t solve the challenge for you. That is an unrealistic expectation. but they will ask the absurd question that you’re too embarrassed to ask in front of your peers. They’ll throw out the absurd idea while ungoverned by your restraints. Something they say will help you stop thinking the way you always do and help you think differently.

I was designing a retail dining and entertainment complex for Hong Kong Disneyland. In the room I had 12 white male American architects over 50. That’s called groupthink. I invited in a young female Chinese chef. Why? Because she was the antithesis of everybody else in the room and I knew she could help them think differently. I gave them the following task, which I would give to you if you’re here now. I gave them seven seconds to draw a house. All of them drew exactly what you would draw one of those. The door in the middle, at the front two windows. What shape is the roof? It’s a triangle. Why? Because all in their river of thinking, their experience and expertise tell them that’s what a house looks like. Except the young female Chinese chef. She drew one of these [see picture below]. Dim sum architecture. Well, she would. She’s Chinese and she’s a chef.

And that gave us permission to consider audacious architecture. On the way out the door, one of the Disney Imagineers put a Post-it note over her drawing and said “distinctly Disney, authentically Chinese.” Seven years later, the strategic brand positioning for the Shanghai Disney Resort became distinctly Disney, authentically Chinese.

Most people don’t understand the power of diversity. Diversity is innovation if somebody looks different to you. They think different than you, so they can help you think differently.

Think about a naïve expert you can bring to your next session.

Carwash—Or Auto Spa

Another tool at your disposal is simply reframing the challenge. It can stop you from thinking the way you always do and give you permission to think differently. This tool was also created by Walt Disney. On July 17, 1955, when he opened the doors to Disneyland for the first time, he said, We will not have any customers in our park. We will only have guests. We will not have any employees in our park. We will only have cast members. With that, a simple reexpression of a job, he got people to think completely differently about the hospitality industry and created a level of hospitality that’s never been replicated or duplicated since.

I want to show you how this might work. Let’s say that you and I are going to go into a new line of business. We’re going to open a carwash together. Close your eyes and tell me the four things we must have in our car wash. I’m going to hear words like “water,” “brushes,” “dryer.” Let’s stop there. What if I had framed it differently. We’re not going to open a carwash. We in fact are going to open an auto spa. I will hear “champagne,” “aroma therapy,” “masseuse,” “coffee,” “mani-pedi.”

In less than 10 seconds, I stopped you from thinking the way you always think, your river, or thinking about what belongs in a carwash. I gave you permission to consider what you could put in an auto spa.

It is a remarkably simple but powerful tool.

In 2011, if we had asked the question that companies ask themselves every day: How might we make more money? We could have put the gate price up at Disney theme parks by 3 percent and we’d have made our quarterly results. But instead of that, we change the question, like from carwash to auto spa, from “How might we make more money?” to “How might we solve the biggest consumer pain point now?” Everybody knew what it was. It was standing in line. So, we asked what if there were no lines? An absurd suggestion. Where are the pain points? Checking into the hotel. Getting into the theme park. Going through the turnstiles. Waiting for your favorite attractions or to pay for food or merchandise. What if there were no lines? When you are hosting millions of people a year, that is an absurd suggestion. But we looked around the world. We saw RFID [radio frequency identification] technology. We put it in what we called the Disney Magic Band. It’s RFID enabled. It is my room key. I don’t check in or check out in my hotels anymore. It is my theme park ticket. I just go through the turnstile. I don’t wait any more. It has my reservations for my favorite three-character meet and greets or my favorite three rides today. If I want an item of merchandise sent to my hotel room, I touch it once. If I want to send it to my house, I touch it twice. The average guest at Walt Disney World today has over two hours [of] free time they didn’t have four years ago. What do they do? They spend money.

The Magic Band resulted in record retention, record recommendations and record revenue. We had data from the millions of people pouring through the gates every year: live crowdsourcing the future design of every product and service Disney created by essentially crowdsourcing—consumers telling Disney what they like and what they don’t like.

I mentioned playfulness earlier. As a child, you were born curious. If I were to ask you what did you as a child or your children ask you time and time again every day, you would answer, “Why?”

Why? Because your children are very inquisitive. Let’s get into it.

The insight for innovation is sometimes even better than your data, believe it or not. By constantly asking why, the fourth or fifth time may bet that insight for innovation. If I were to run a survey today of tens of thousands of people and ask them why they go to Disney theme parks, the data would tell me they go for the new ride and the new attractions. The data would tell me to spend hundreds of millions of dollars with a capital investment strategy. But if I pause for a moment and ask why.

Why do you go on these trips?
“Well, I remember It’s a Small World.

Why is that important to you?

“I remember the music.”

Why is that significant?
“It reminds me of the time I always used to go with my mom.”

Why is that important to you today?
“I take my daughter now.”

There. On the fourth “why?” you’ve got the real reason she’s going. Call it consumer truth. She’s not going for the new attractions at all. She’s actually going for her memory and nostalgia. And that can be addressed with a communication campaign—not a capital investment strategy.

Sometimes when we only rely on our data that only goes one or two steps deep and it is getting better. But simply by asking why, why and why again—being curious.

But then we get a job. And we’re told to stop asking why because there’s only one right answer. And so, what happens to curiosity and freshness? How to get fresh stimulus in your life? Think about the last time you commuted home and you got home (obviously pre-COVID), and you looked at the front door of your apartment or your house and in that moment you thought, “How did I get here?” That was because your brain shut down on the way home, physically shut down. No new stimulus it because you commute on the same route every day. You were bored—no new stimulus. No fresh ideas.

Think about how you might get fresh stimulus in your life every single day.

They say that artificial intelligence will eliminate some 20 to 30 percent of the workforce across North America and Eastern Europe in the next decade. How will we compete against artificial intelligence 10 years from today? I’ve worked with several AI programmers and ask them questions. Do you believe you can actually program the very four core human traits that we were all born with? We were born creative. Remember that box you used to play with? We’re all born with intuition. You have 100 million neurons in your first brain and a hundred billion in your second brain, yet you make most of your decisions with your first brain. You used to ask, why, why, why. You have an amazing imagination. You have those weird dreams every night. These core human traits will be the most employable skill sets of the next decade simply because they can’t be programmed into artificial intelligence.

I asked you earlier on, What was the biggest barrier to innovation? And I heard, “I don’t have time to think.” But there’s a very famous expression “There’s no time like the present.” I’ll reverse that for you. There is no present like time. Give yourselves time to think.