Page 207 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

188 The Disney Way

Storyboarding, however, works to reverse this outcome. It is a fully
participatory activity that places the entire sequence of a project, a company
policy, or plan of action clearly in everyone’s line of sight.

Overcoming Skepticism
We generally acquaint clients with the concept of storyboarding early in our
association. Even though we emphasize its enormous value, acceptance is not
a foregone conclusion. The idea of congregating around a space decorated
with rows of cards on the wall seems totally outlandish to people who have
never witnessed a storyboarding session.
A utility that we worked with in Indianapolis, for example, had spent
almost two years trying to devise a plan for changing their culture. After untold
hours of management meetings, brainstorming, and arguing, the executive team
still couldn’t agree on a plan. When we arrived with a stack of cards and dozens
of markers, the group listened politely as we explained storyboarding, but they
were clearly dubious about the whole approach. Nevertheless, they agreed to
give it a try.
The group appeared far from convinced at the outset of our session
that tacking cards on a wall would do anything to solve those problems that
had baffled them for two years. We began by asking them for their ideas
for potential solutions, which they wrote out and we put up on the board.
As the cards were moved around and new ideas added, a structure for their
implementation plans gradually developed.
The storyboarding process is like building a house; it entails a logical
progression. Just as a house begins with the architect’s conceptual rendering
and then moves through the various stages—foundation, subflooring, walls,
and roof—so, too, the storyboard process starts with the “concept,” or the
problem to be solved, and moves along in a creative interplay of ideas and
suggestions until the desired solution has taken shape.
And that is exactly what happened in the session with the utility after only
two hours of storyboarding. The once-skeptical executives were astounded.
One of them admitted to us afterwards that the group initially thought story-
boarding was, in his words, “a real Mickey Mouse technique.” They couldn’t
imagine that it could be of benefit in their situation. But more progress was
made in two hours of storyboarding than the group had made in the previous
two years of endless meetings and unproductive wrangling. Everyone agreed
that the storyboarding technique had crystallized the overall concept of what