The Disney Method

Creative Thinking Requires Structure

In 2009, I went on building a social marketing platform. It was intended to become a groundbreaking solution, both technologically and functionally. The social media space was evolving fast, and I had to move even faster to keep up with the market. I hired a good engineering team, all seasoned developers.

When brainstorming the architecture, the team quickly dismissed the options they knew to be overly complex and expensive and narrowed the decision making down to one very reasonable proposal. It wasn’t a jewel, but we all knew it will work for our purposes.

It worked quite well indeed, up until the moment a few years later, when we moved towards serverless cloud architecture. Then we discovered that the transition would cost us an arm and a leg, mainly due to the shortcuts in the architecture we’d taken.

Even more discouraging was the realization we saved very little by dismissing the more complex options early on. By excluding them from the overall analysis process, we did not see the benefits we could have ripped in other parts of the system. A quick calculation has shown that, had we kept all the options on the table, we would have saved time and money in the long term — and our later transition to serverless would have been a breeze.

This is when I realized that eliminating any of the ideas that come up early on is a systemic mistake and should be avoided, no matter how obvious or appealing such elimination might seem. Naturally, it turned out that I was not the first to identify this problem; there exists a business process that addresses the issue perfectly. The process was originally invented at the most unlikely of all places — the Walt Disney Studios — and is called The Disney Method. Here is how it works.

The Original Disney Method

Imagine three rooms, occupied by three teams.

The first room is occupied by the Dreamers. The Dreamers generate ideas, with no limitations or judgment, no matter how bold or absurd those ideas might seem. Nothing is censored. Nothing is too absurd or silly. All things are possible for a Dreamer. At Walt Disney Studios, the Dreamers create ideas for new motion pictures. The work of the Dreamers is recorded and once a dream (a movie) is fully conceived, it is then passed to the second room.

The second room is occupied by the Realists. The Realists consider each dream and create an execution plan for it. They think of the technologies that might be required, an execution plan, resources, budget, schedule, etc. The Realists create their execution plan without constraining themselves with the cost or complexity of the execution. They may propose multiple plans for executing the same dream. The plans proposed by Realists are also recorded, and then passed on to the third room.

The third room is occupied by the Critics. The Critics review all the implementation plans created by the Realists and try to punch holes in them by playing devil’s advocates. Their main concerns are time, budget, resources, risks, legality, public opinion, customer satisfaction, reusability, etc. It is important to note that the Critics are instructed to criticize the execution plan created by the Realists, but not the original Dream. The Dream is untouchable. However, a connection should be made between the elements of the original idea, the respective parts of the implementation plan, and the criticism. This creates the necessary feedback for the Dreamers to iterate on their ideas going forward.

If the Critics fail to generate significant criticism for an implementation plan, then the plan is ready to be executed. At Walt Disney Studios, this means they move forward shooting the motion picture.

If, however, the Critics provided a significant amount of criticism for the plan, then the whole recorded Dream+Plan+Criticism package is sent back to the first room with the Dreamers. The Dreamers review the feedback, and either (a) ditch the original idea entirely, or (b) modify the original idea, and send it through another iteration with the Realists and the Critics.

The process repeats itself until the idea is ready for implementation, or until it is tabled until another time. At Disney, some movie ideas had to wait until the inception of the computer graphics.

Various Adaptations

While the original Disney Method was invented to brainstorm the creation of motion pictures, it can be easily adapted to creative processes in virtually any field.

For instance, you can brainstorm your product ideas by making your business stakeholders play Dreamers, having your product team play Realists, and asking engineering to fill in for Critics. This process works really well for mapping out new products & services.

Or you can adapt the method for building better software architectures. This process is described in further detail in my recent book Become an Awesome Software Architect. Needless to say, the book goes far beyond creative thinking and addresses a large number of commonplace engineering challenges.

Another interesting adaptation was invented by Robert Dilts in the mid-1990s, to allow a single person to execute the entire method by sequentially taking turns as a Dreamer, as a Realist, and as a Critic. The challenge of this approach is in making yourself play only one role at a time, and prevent your thoughts from being “polluted” by other roles. Dilts used association and disassociation techniques of the NLP framework to make this work. If you are interested, google those terms, or drop me a comment line. By the way, NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

I hope you found this useful. If you did, follow me here on Medium, or on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anatolyvolkhover