Page 208 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

Capture the Magic with Storyboards 189

management wanted to achieve, clarified the necessary action steps, and defined
the progression of tasks.
Many people wonder how something so simple can possibly work to
unravel complex questions. After all, a five-year-old can be taught to put cards
up on the wall. Yet to paraphrase a line of poetry, simplicity is elegance, and
it usually takes just one session to convince people of the richness of the story-
boarding technique. The power it has to engage and stimulate people and to
unleash their productivity is remarkable.
We believe that the high level of participation demanded by storyboarding
is one reason that it works so well. Instead of the typical meeting situation in
which the troops are forced to endure endless and often garbled rhetoric, in a
storyboard situation the facilitator engages all people in a focused discussion.
This approach also heightens the concentration of individual group mem-
bers as they become immersed in the problem at hand. Participants begin to
embellish and expand on one another’s ideas, unlike what often happens in
brainstorming, when rather than adding to the proposed idea, half the people
in the group are busy marshaling their thoughts to rebut it. “That’s not going
to work,” they think, or “My department will never buy that.”
In addition, the initial anonymity (people don’t have to sign their names to
their idea cards) encourages free expression and critical thinking. The value of
anonymity was brought home to us in a focus group we conducted for Illinois
Power. That group, composed of folks from the community, was set up to help
the Illinois Power economic development team become more effective.
Originally scheduled to run from 8 a.m. until noon, the session was con-
ducted just like a conventional focus group, with people brainstorming and
putting things on flip charts around the room. When we realized after two
hours that no new ideas were emerging, we assumed that everyone had said
everything they wanted to say. To our surprise, however, several of the team
members pressed us to try the storyboarding technique that we had previ-
ously described to them. So instead of ending the meeting early, we spent
the remaining two hours doing a storyboard process. The result: at least three
significant new ideas emerged concerning ways in which the development
team could better serve the community.
As it turned out, some of the focus group participants had been reluctant
to verbalize their ideas in front of the group. In our experience, that is often
the case. Many people are simply frightened by the thought of speaking their
minds in public. But stimulated by the discussion and given the chance to
express themselves anonymously, they too can provide valuable input.