Page 210 - Harnessing the Management Secrets of Disney in Your Company

Capture the Magic with Storyboards 191

department within a company. The technique helps break through interde-
partmental barriers because it promotes face-to-face communication and a
lively give-and-take among diverse personalities focused on a common goal.
Working with various client teams, we have repeatedly noticed that
storyboarding enhances a team’s cohesiveness. The interplay of meaningful
communication has a way of binding people together. This is especially true
of cross-functional teams, like those we set up at Whirlpool and at Bristol-
Myers Squibb.
Members of a cross-functional team are often near strangers to one
another. That’s because they work in different departments and receive dif-
ferent training; even their outlook is different. But once team members par-
ticipate in a storyboarding session together, employees from manufacturing
or accounting or purchasing or any other department often find that they are
not as far apart as they once thought. To solidify a team, we suggest that the
group storyboard. That way, any ideas that come out of the team belong to
the group, not to individuals.
The bonding element inherent in storyboarding worked to particularly
good effect with a Whirlpool global team. The members of the team spoke
several different languages and came from wildly different backgrounds—not
just different job descriptions, but different countries, continents, and politi-
cal situations. For example, among them was an engineer who had never been
outside communist China before finding himself set down in the midwestern
United States. How could such diversity be melded into one high-functioning
group of men and women? Storyboards helped us overcome the hurdles.
We storyboarded national character traits and had team members decide
which traits they liked and which they disliked. As it turned out, there was
a high level of agreement on what people liked as well as what they didn’t
like. The best learning of all, they said, was the discovery that they all disliked
“arrogance” in others! The storyboarding experiment helped to clarify the
team concept for everyone. And that was no small accomplishment consider-
ing that many of the participants came from countries in which orders come
from above and are followed without question. In such situations, the team
concept is totally alien to the culture.
Storyboarding, then, can help a company improve communication and
planning at all levels. What’s more, establishing storyboarding as an integral
part of planning brings clarity to an organization’s internal workings.
At Illinois Power, for example, we suggested using storyboarding to help
ease the transition to a new culture emphasizing teams. The plan to introduce