How to Use the Disney Strategy For Creativity - an Easy Brainstorming Method

The Disney Strategy For Creativity is a practical brainstorming method that you can easily plug into the Design stage of Appreciative Inquiry , or as a standalone process for generating new ideas with any size of group.

This simple but powerful process was developed by?NLP ?pioneer Robert Dilts, who based it on the way Walt Disney used to organise his creative teams to come up with ideas.

The biggest block to creativity in business is the tendency, culturally ingrained to a greater or lesser extent depending on country, industry sector and profession, to shoot down new ideas before they get off the runway by pointing out all the reasons why they couldn’t work.

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of this treatment, you will be familiar with how rapidly it shuts down your imagination and your willingness to contribute.

In fact, when imagining new ways of doing things there are no bad ideas! The least practical or most 'ridiculous' suggestion may, by association, spark the eventual solution. If new ideas are critiqued too soon they can’t develop, and creativity is stifled.

The Disney Strategy gets round this problem by separating idea generation into three distinct phases: a ‘Dreamer’ mode where all new ideas are encouraged, a ‘Realist’ or ‘Implementer’ mode which looks at how to make the ideas work in practice, and finally a ‘Critic’ mode which looks for flaws in the ideas and what could go wrong.

The result is that people can generate many more ideas quickly, and the ideas that look promising have a chance to develop and mature a little before they are examined for potential failings.

Any problems or flaws found at the Critic stage can be processed through the cycle again – Dreaming up ways of fixing them, working out how to Implement the fixes, and running a Critical eye over them to identify any new problems.

There are many different ways you can implement the Disney Strategy – here are some possibilities:

• Guide the whole group through each phase. It works best when you make the ‘rules’ for each phase explicit (for example, ‘all ideas are good ideas’ for the Dreamer phase, and ‘we're looking for how it could work, not how it could fail’ for the Implementer stage).
• To emphasise the distinction between the phases and make them 'feel' different, you could get participants to move to a different table, a different room or a different physical location for each phase - or even borrow an idea from Edward de Bono and have them wear different hats.
• To warm the group up for each phase, you could invite them to remember a time when they were creative, when they made something work in practice, or they successfully hunted down and fixed problems.
• Divide a larger group into teams, each Dreaming up ideas. Then rotate their ideas to another group for the Implementer phase, and rotate again for the Critic phase.
• Assign the Dreamer, Implementer and Critic roles to different people. Some people will be naturally suited to one role or another. You could spread the process out over time, or you could have everybody present throughout – for example, if you have a natural Critic in your team, you could brief them to silently take note of any flaws that they spot in the Dreamer and Implementer phases, only revealing the criticisms that are still relevant when it comes to the Critic phase.
• If you're training or coaching people to develop their creativity, you could assign them a role for a while that they're not naturally suited to, to get them out of their comfort zones and stretch their capablities. Don't do this when you're solving critical issues!

You can also use the Disney Strategy by yourself as an idea generation method. Between each of the three phases, make sure you move to a different physical location, take a break, or do something completely different to make a clean distinction between each of the three phases.

I know this method works, because I've successfully used it with some of the least creative people on earth: insurance underwriters, actuaries and finance people - people who by both inclination and training are about the most detail-focused and risk-averse you could find.

Back when I was working for a branding and product naming company, the extremely talented Brand Guardians , we were commissioned by an insurance company to help them think up ideas for TV ads.

The company reckoned that their claims service was actually much better than any of their competitors, but unfortunately nobody knew this, because they hadn't advertised for a while. Our job was to help them decide what they should be telling their customers about in their upcoming advertising campaign.

We actually ran two idea generation workshops, one with the backroom finance people and one with call centre staff. About a week before the workshops, we sent out idea sheets (decorated with the traditional lightbulb picture) to each group so they could record and bring in any ideas they had.

The call centre people came into their workshop with stacks of ideas, some workable, some wacky. The underwriters and actuaries came in with three or four cautious proposals between them.

We used the “whole group with three phases” format (the first option listed above). We made the rules for each stage explicit at the start.

At first, the finance people, as you would expect from their professional roles and the industry they were in, were very quick to find the faults in each idea. Sometimes, even the person whose idea it was would break off their explanation half way through and start pointing out reasons why their own idea wouldn’t work.

However, because they knew what the rules were for the Dreamer phase, they stopped themselves half-way through their critiques, as soon as they realised what they were doing. In some cases they even criticised themselves for criticising!

Gradually, they eased up on the habit of instantly scanning for flaws, and the ideas started to flow more freely. We ended up with 30-40 ideas stuck up on flipchart pages on the wall.

I’m not pretending it was an easy ride, like it was with the call centre group (who took to the process like naturals). The backroom people heaved a sigh of relief when we exited the Dreamer phase and started coming back to earth for Implementation. And they really came into their own in the Critic phase. We didn't get as many ideas as we did from the call centre workshop, but the ideas that were still standing at the end of the underwriters' workshop were pretty much bullet-proof.

If we were able to use the Disney Strategy to generate ideas with a detail-oriented, problem-scanning, risk-averse group like that, you can use it with anyone!

If you'd like to get started using Appreciative Inquiry confidently with teams and small groups, join my upcoming?Practical Appreciative Inquiry course . At the time of writing there are still some places available.

"I really enjoyed the course and feel confident enough to begin using what I have learned with groups in the coming months." - Aoife Collins, coaching and consulting, Ireland

Get the full course information and how to book here