Disney Chief: How AI Will Change Creativity Forever

Creativity is the key to staying competitive, so why do so many organizations struggle to innovate? Today on Digital Disruption, we’re joined by Duncan Wardle, former Head of Innovation and Creativity at Disney. Duncan and his team helped Imagineering, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar, and Disney Parks to innovate, creating magical new storylines and experiences. Now a global keynote speaker and innovation advisor, he shares his unique Design Thinking approach to help organizations spark creativity, unlock fresh thinking, and embed innovation into their culture. A TED speaker and contributor to Fast Company, Forbes, and Harvard Business Review, Duncan also teaches innovation Master Classes at Yale, Harvard, and the University of Edinburgh. Duncan sits down with Geoff to explore how businesses can break down the barriers to innovation by tapping into their most powerful resource: human imagination. Duncan gives a look into the magic of Disney’s approach to creativity and explains how companies can design cultures that foster curiosity, risk-taking, and collaboration. From solving complex problems with simple questions to creating space for disruptive thinking, Duncan shares practical, transformative advice for leaders ready to think boldly and challenge the current workplace roles. In this episode: 0:00 Intro 2:00 Time at Disney 5:40 Creativity is now the most in-demand skill 8:15 Barriers to innovation 11:30 Tools for creative thinking 14:45 Reframing problems as innovation 18:10 The power of naïve experts 21:00 Innovation at Disney 25:50 Tips for embedding in any organization 29:00 How leaders can foster innovation 32:00 Tools to think differently 33:21 Overhyped tools 34:01 What’s different about Gen Z 36:03 Duncan’s mission to unlock creativity 39:03 Changing culture Connect with Duncan: Website: https://duncanwardle.com/ Twitter: https://x.com/duncanjwardle Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/duncanjwardle LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/duncanwardle/ Visit our website: https://www.infotech.com/ Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@InfoTechRG

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Geoff Nielson?

  Hey everyone. I'm so excited to be talking to Duncan Wardle, who's the former head of creativity and innovation at Disney. He's worked with teams across Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and the Fortune 100 to unlock their boldest ideas. What's cool about Duncan is that he's insanely passionate about creativity and making it not just fun, but actually practical. This is an area where there's a lot of advice that sounds great, but completely falls apart once you try to do it. I really want to know if this practical advice can pass that test. Let's find out.

• 0:35Geoff Nielson?

  Duncan, you're an ambassador for creativity and innovation, and I'm curious to get your perspective on the state of organizational creativity in 2025. You've talked before about AI and the changing technology landscape as it pertains to creativity. Is creativity getting more important or less important?

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Easy, more. No, oh, shocker. So why? So here comes AI. So in the last four years, we've had, we all did really well at doing what we did until 2020. And then we had a global pandemic. Generation Z entering the workforce, but doesn't want to work for any corporations because they're driven by profit, not purpose. And the boomers think that Generation Z will bend to them because the boomers had to bend to their elders. But hey, guess what? Generation Z can tell the planet you couldn't. And so, and until this mandatory return to the office, yeah, good luck with that. You're going to lose all of your talented employees. Then we had climate change. Anybody who doesn't believe in it, welcome to come and look at my back garden. There used to be one in Central Florida, it's now a lake. And then here comes AI. So I've been working with Google on their DeepMind project, and I asked the chief engineer what she believed

• 1:39Speaker 01

  would be the most employable skill sets for the next decade. I said, how am I going to compete with what you're doing? She said, oh, that's easy. I said, well, how's that then? She said, well, the most employable skill sets for the next decade will be the things that will be the hardest for her to program into artificial intelligence. What would those be? The ones with which you were born. Imagination, creativity, curiosity, empathy, and intuition. We were all born, so when you were a small boy and you were given a gift for a holiday, it came with a huge box. And the only thing that, did you have brothers or sisters?

• 2:06Geoff Nielson?

  I have a younger brother, yeah.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  So the only thing that mattered was who had the biggest box underneath the tree. You didn't care what was in it, as long as it was yours. And it took you ages of time to take the toy out of the box. Where you spend the rest of the week playing with? Right, the box. Right, it's your force, it was your castle, it was anything you wanted it to be, till you went to the number one killer of creativity and imagination, uh, western education. And the first thing you were taught to do, and they're telling your first graders to do today's dance, get color in between the lines. Children are born very curious, they, why, why, why, why, why, why? Um, the insight for innovation, the core consumer truth comes on the fourth or fifth why. Uh, but our data only stops at the first or second why today is getting better and getting better every day, but you can't feel data. And so, uh, so here comes empathy and intuition.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Um, if I were to survey five thousand people and ask them why they go to Disney on holiday, the number one response was be, we go for new attractions. If I were to only rely on my data, I'd go spend two hundred and fifty million dollars on a capital investment strategy. But if I were to pause for a moment, that child like not childish and say, well, why do you go for the new tracks? Well, no, I like, uh, I like the classics, but why do you like the classics? I like small world, why on earth do you like it's a small world? I remember the music, oh god, no, not the music, why the music was my mom's favorite ride? And why is that important to you twenty five years later? I'll take my daughter now. Boom, there's your insight for innovation, it has nothing to do with a capital investment strategy. And everything to do with people's personal nostalgia and memories, that's a communication campaign. But then we go to the number one killer of curiosity, uh, western education.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  And the next thing we're taught to do is stop asking why, because there's only one right answer. I did an experiment because I intuitively believed it to be true, but I needed to prove it to myself. So I was giving a speech to the university with three thousand university students, all between the ages nineteen and twenty four. And I brought in one first grade class of thirty little six year olds with their teacher. And I sat them in the middle and said, hands up, who's creative? Me, me, me, me, me, me, thirty hands shot into the air, no hesitation, and the other three thousand stayed down. Um, so will AI replace these skills over time? The answer is, nobody knows today. Uh, but not in the short term, I suspect. And so those things that perhaps were not the most employable skill sets of our, our career up to now, they are now.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  And I define, I do not define creativity as the ability to paint or write music. I define creativity as the ability to have ideas, and we all have hundreds today. I define innovation as the ability to get those ideas done, that's the hard part.

• 4:25Geoff Nielson?

  So with creativity being as important, more important than ever, how much of creativity and our own individual need to bring creativity to work? How much of that is our responsibility versus the organizational responsibility? What's the best way to fuel this in the workplace?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Well, so first of all, I would encourage playfulness. And so why? Because if you ask people, who are the most creative people you ever met? People say kids. You say, well, what do they do better than us? Play. So let me explain the importance of playfulness at the right time. Can I invite you for just a second to close your eyes? I want you to shout out the answer to the following question, providing it's something you can shout out in public on your podcast. When I ask you the following question, where are you usually? And what are you doing when you get your best ideas?

• 5:13Geoff Nielson?

  I'm out walking typically.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Then open your eyes. I've done this with up to 20,000 people in Helsinki. You hear shower, walking, jogging, falling asleep, waking up, in the bathroom, at the gym, commuting. And I get people to write it down. And even with 20,000 people, I write, hands up, who wrote down at work?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Nobody, nobody ever gets their best ideas at work. Well, why not? Well, close your eyes again. Actually, for people listening or watching, close your eyes too. Picture that last verbal argument you were in with somebody, a bit of a shouting match. Angry at them, they're angry at you. Now you turn to walk away from that argument. You're five seconds away, you're 10 seconds, you're 20 seconds away from the argument. And what just popped into your head totally spontaneously? The second you turn to walk away from that argument. What was it?

• 5:55Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, what you wish you said.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, the killer one liner, you can open your eyes. That perfect, beautiful line. Oh yeah, if I'd have said that, I'd have had in the perfect line. We can write volumes and volumes and volumes of the perfect line we never delivered. Why? Because when you're in an argument, your brain is moving at a thousand miles an hour, defending yourself. Guess what your brain looks like at work? Emails, presentations, weekly reports, expense reports, weekly meetings. And I hear myself say. I don't have time to think. The number one barrier to innovation and creativity. And when we hear ourselves say, I don't have time to think, you're on the brain state called beta. I call it busy beta, where the reticular activating system, much easier remembered as a door, between your conscious and subconscious brain is firmly closed. When that door is closed and you don't have time to think, you are working with your conscious brain. And you can Google this, what percentage of my brain is conscious?

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Thirteen percent of your brain is conscious, eighty seven percent of your brain is subconscious. Every meeting you've attended, every innovation you've ever seen, every creative problem you've ever solved is back here to serve as unrelated stimulus to help you solve the challenge you're working on right now. But when the door is shut, you don't have access to it. So what do I do? I run energizers. They're in the book, The Imagination Uproar. But what is an energizer? An energizer is a sixty second exercise specifically designed to make you laugh. Why? Because the moment I hear laughter, I know that metaphorically I've just opened the door and placed you metaphorically back in the shower, where the door between your conscious and subconscious brain is just wide enough open. You can still make an informed decision in the shower or when you're walking, but you can still have a big ideas. I don't expect people to be playful every minute of every day. I do expect people to be playful when they're trying to develop big ideas,

• 7:27Speaker 01

  particularly as a leadership team.

• 7:28Geoff Nielson?

  So as a leadership team, I'm glad you brought that up Duncan. What do you recommend for leaders in terms of, you know, cracking the door open? You talked about energizers, but how do we, how do we structure this in the workplace to make sure people can be playful and be creative?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  This one's easy. I do an exercise. Let's try it. So Jeff, you and I are responsible for a hundred thousand dollar birthday party tonight. You and I are responsible for designing that party. Are we gonna do a Star Wars party or a Harry Potter party?

• 7:56Geoff Nielson?

  A Star Wars.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  So I'm gonna come at you some amazing ideas for a Star Wars party. I'd like you to start each and every response with the words, no because, the words you always hear at work, and tell me why not. So start with no because and then tell me why not. So I was thinking of coming to your house and actually glowing up the structure of the inside of the house and turn it into an intergalactic canteen. And we could have food and wine from Hoth and the Boo and Tatooine or have the Cantina band playing. It'd be great.

• 8:21Geoff Nielson?

  No, because there's not nearly enough space. It wouldn't, it just wouldn't fit.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Right, okay. Right, well, we'll borrow somebody's corporate jet and we'll paint it black and turn it into the Death Star. And we'll go down to Walt Disney World to Galaxy's Edge.

• 8:33Geoff Nielson?

  No, the logistics and the budget would just never work for something like that.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  How about a glow, oh no, cosplay party. All the tall people could come as Lord Vader and all the little people will be E-Box.

• 8:44Geoff Nielson?

  No, it's, people would complain it's too discriminatory and they'd want more control.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. How about glow in the dark lightsaber fight?

• 8:52Geoff Nielson?

  No, because it would have to be in the dark and that causes a whole series of problems.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Right. What if we just show the movies back to back? We'll do a movie marathon, give people free Coca-Cola and popcorn?

• 9:02Geoff Nielson?

  Well, no, because, you know, where are you showing that? It'd be far too long for a birthday party.

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Okay, so we'll stop there. The biggest barrier to innovation is not time to think. The biggest barrier to innovation is our own river of thinking. Well, what's a river of thinking? It's our own expertise and our own experience built on years of of experience in our company and our industry, allowing us to make quick and informed decisions. But the world's changed. We don't get to think the way we always do. So no because has served us very well for the last thirty years. The challenges for the more the leadership team have the experience and expertise, that's the single biggest barrier. Right? And so, so, so let me ask you a question. Do you think our idea was getting bigger or smaller as we were going just then?

• 9:40Geoff Nielson?

  Smaller, a lot smaller.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's try it again. Can we do Harry Potter?

• 9:45Geoff Nielson?

  Sure.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Excellent. So I'm going to come at you some ideas for a Harry Potter party. Same budget, hundred thousand dollars. Only this time I'd ask you to respond with the words, yes, and there'll be the first two words you use in each response, and then you'll build on what I've given you. So I was thinking, right, coming to your house, right? Put a sorting hat outside the front door and all the goodies get to go to the Gryffindor party and all the bad people get the dark mysterious Slytherin party.

• 10:07Geoff Nielson?

  Yes, and we can have, you know, four different parties and completely different experiences for different people.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. And we can have a magic potions room where everybody drinks some amazing cocktail that turns us into something totally freaky.

• 10:19Geoff Nielson?

  Yes, and we can prepare it all in advance and make sure that they're, you know, delicious, made with fresh fruit.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. And we can invite in all the stars from the film, Daniel Radcliffe, Hermione, Hermione Granger, forgotten where Emma was.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  And holograms of those who have passed, Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, we'll actually have, oh yeah, because they could be ghosts, like Headless Nick.

• 10:41Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah, let's, yes, and let's get those invitations out as soon as possible. They're going to be so excited and it'll help us structure the party and what we can do.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Yes, and we could deliver the invitations by owl.

• 10:54Geoff Nielson?

  Yes, and yeah, yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  We'll stop there. A lot more laughter, a lot more energy. Most of us became Italian for the first time this morning. This time around, bigger or smaller?

• 11:03Geoff Nielson?

  A lot bigger.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Now, we work inside big organizations, small organizations with constituents and clients and colleagues and bosses to bring on board with our ideas. By the time we just finished building that idea together, whose idea was it by the time we finished?

• 11:17Geoff Nielson?

  It was all of our, both of ours.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Ours. Two very simple words from the word of improv that have a remarkable power to turn a small idea into a big one really quickly. You can always take a big idea and value engineer it down. Far more importantly, it has that power to transfer the power of my idea, which never goes anywhere inside an organization, to our idea and accelerates its opportunity to get done. The challenge is with the more experience, the more expertise we have, the more reasons we know where the new idea won't work. So we constantly start with no because. As a leadership team, doing this exercise with leaders, they instantly recognize they've become a no becauseer. And here's the thing, that person may have a genius two seconds from now, two hours from now, two days from now, two weeks from now. If the first two words out of your mouth as a leader are no because, that person's never coming back in your office with an idea again. Just remind yourself, I know

• 12:01Speaker 01

  you have responsibilities, deadlines, quarterly results. It's just an idea. We're not greenlighting this idea for execution today. We're merely greenhousing it together using yes and. The other thing we had at Pixar, Marvel and Disney was a space. It was, I called them the expansionist rooms. So you could, I'm sure everybody listening has boring meeting rooms, but you could actually have within your boring meeting rooms, you could invite a local art school in to paint a greenhouse around the wall, call it the greenhouse, and everybody knows when they're in the greenhouse, this is the one room where you don't get to kill ideas. If you don't have that physical space, you'll never succeed.

• 12:37Geoff Nielson?

  Let's, let's talk about that physical space for a second Duncan, because I, I love the idea. I think having, you know, a really creative space can, can change the way people think. You, you mentioned something earlier though, that may or may not be in conflict with that. And that's the, you know, return to office mandate and some of the creativity stifling that happens when you tell people, you know, you've got to be in this space at this time. How, how do you marry those two?

• 13:00Speaker 01

  The technology's changed. Look. I was doing in Covid. I went to Copenhagen in March fifteenth, twenty twenty. As I landed, the Danish Prime Minister said, no more live events. I spoke to three thousand empty chairs and a camera. And they're like, I was unemployed. And so I hired a couple of seventeen year olds out of London. And I turned this room into a full broadcast studio. We were doing over three hundred events a year. I could speak four years ago in thirty seven different languages simultaneously through an artificial intelligence robot. It wasn't that good in the Asian languages in those days, but it was very good in European. Now it's good at all of them. Um Avatar, Avatars, Vibella, V I R B E L A dot com.

• 13:42Speaker 01

  You can go in, create your own avatar, create your own campus. You can white label it and only your employees can get in. And it's fun. They've got a cocktail lounge. They've got a bar. They've got a soccer pitch. They've got offices, break up. And you can want to dress up for Halloween. Here's the Halloween costumes. Now, there's no barriers to entry in Vibella because everybody's got a computer. Spatial, on the other hand, you need a VR headset and I recognize not every company has that today. And today they're too expensive and they're too bulky, but it'll come. And so I was doing a workshop in twenty twenty one with a woman in Johannesburg. I was in Orlando. I handed her my virtual pen with my virtual hand. She took it out of my virtual hand with her virtual hand. Wrote on a virtual post in virtual ink, which she could have actually dictated to and handed me back the virtual post in. That technology existed four years ago.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  So um we just need to catch up. And so, you know, and so, look, everything's changed and I'll give you an example. Anyway, I'm doing some work with the, let's just call it the, one of the largest baseball teams in America, who also earns one of the largest football teams in England. And they probably can seat fifty thousand, sixty thousand in their stadiums. And I said, well, how many fans you got? They said, oh, twenty million. I said, well, what if they could all come to the game? And they looked at me like I was nuts. I was like, hello, it's called augmented reality. Um now today, the, you know, the Vision Pro, phenomenal technology, too expensive, too big. Well, it'll be the pair of glasses that you're wearing within five or seven years from today. And now Johnny in Cairo. So I was actually invited to sit in the dugout of this particular baseball team

• 15:10Speaker 01

  with the Major League Baseball players during the game live. No, we were in the Apple Store in London, but I was in the stadium. Now, fast forward that technology to a day where, not too far distant future, you pay a dollar in Cairo. You'll sit on the back of the stadium, five dollars, you'll sit in the middle of the stadium, ten dollars, you'll sit in the dugout next to the players. Hollywood's dead. Hollywood just doesn't realise it yet. But what outrageous statements been around since nineteen twenty? Yeah, okay. And I went to the movies in the sixties and I've been to the movies last week and what's changed? Oh yeah, the cigarette girl's gone.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Nothing else has changed. There's an industry that deserves to die. I'm sorry, but it just does. Nothing's changed in sixty years. Nothing has changed. Nothing has changed. We've done multi-screens. Oh, great. You still got a set time. You have to watch the previews. You can't participate, blah, blah, blah. So Hollywood went on strike for a year, eighteen months and very proudly announced at the Oscars. Oh, we didn't use AI. It's not coming. Oh, yeah. Good luck with that. Yeah, the coal miners went on strike in nineteen seventy-three. How did that work out for them? AI is here, people, so embrace it or go under. A certain company just lost hundreds of millions of dollars on a certain film with a certain character called Indiana Jones.

• 16:25Speaker 01

  Now, Wall Street would probably suggest they don't do that again. Option A, they could go to another screenwriter and say, give it a go. Option B, they could go to ChatGPT today and say, here's the scripts of the last five movies. Here's what worked. Here's what didn't work. Here's the history. Here's the character analysis. Please, could you do storyline scripts and character development based on the algorithms of the top performing action adventure TV shows or movies of the last six months? That's a three-minute assignment for ChatGPT. Is it good enough today? No. Will it be in less than three years? Of course it will. Tom Cruise, sorry, Tom. Love you. Sally Smith. Sally Smith doesn't have wrinkles, doesn't take bathroom breaks, speaks every language on the planet. And you don't have to pay her. She doesn't exist. The number four selling K-pop in the band today.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Well, today, they don't exist either. They never did. So AI is here. We can embrace it or we can just say it's not coming. And for those who think it's not coming, goodbye. I don't care how big you are as an industry today. The future of Hollywood, the future of education, universities. No, hello. Why? Because they're teaching the same thing they taught me. Well, I went to university a very, very, very long time ago. The future of Hollywood is gaming. A Pokemon Go started it. I want to be in the movie. I want to interact with the characters. I want some level of social status. I want to participate. I believe what you'll see is one of the Hollywood studios who will certainly buy Epic Games in the next twenty-four months. That's my personal speculation.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  And the future of the movies will be, if I want to be Jack Sparrow, I'll be Jack Sparrow. And if I want you to be Captain Barbosa, you'll be Captain Barbosa. Education. Today, I sit in the back of an auditorium, virtual or real, and the professor stands at the front of the room and goes. Yeah, okay, great. Or with my headset, I could walk into the Senate in Rome, debate with the senators and tell Julius Caesar, "Look behind you." So the glasses that you're wearing now, today, when I walk into my dentist, they know me, my optician knows me, my doctor, I've got a bloody clue. However, give it five years from now, when you're wearing those glasses, that will be, you know, Meta started piloting them. They're not great today, but it's just a pilot, of course it is. Now, on your right-hand lens, this will say Duncan Wardle,

• 18:30Speaker 01

  age, prescriptions, medical history, family medical history, issue he's coming in to talk about today. And on my left lens, AI will tell you, and here's how to solve it. So it's coming. It's, we can just continue to duck and hide, or we can just embrace it and get on with it. The number two barrier to innovation after our own expertise is, "I don't have time to think." Everybody says that. Well, what's AI about to give us? Let me think, it's going to do our weekly reports, expense reports, forecasting, coding, accounting. It's going to give us time to think. So I'm not scared of AI, I am scared of man stupidity.

• 19:04Geoff Nielson?

  Right. So lots, lots to digest and unpack there. You talk about the need for more innovation. You talk about the need for more creativity, for fundamentally reimagining a lot of these industries. And, you know, there's this kind of underlying,

• 19:21Geoff Nielson?

  this underlying sense to what you're saying of, "We have to adapt or die," right? These, these industries that haven't changed in 100 years, they have nowhere to go but down if they're not going to adapt new practices. You, you used a few tools there, Duncan, around kind of imagining, right? Figuring out what the rules are and imagining what they could be. Can you, you know, maybe walk you, walk me through your, how we, we suggest organizations do this?

• 19:48Speaker 01

  So when you walk into an office now, this will come across as a pitch, it's not meant to. So here's the thing. When you walk into your office, in fact, your office today, and you have a business book, where's the business book?

• 19:59Geoff Nielson?

  On the desk?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, have you read it? No, I've got my boss needs this by two o'clock. I've got a weekly report to go to. I've got a weekly meeting to go to. Now I don't have time to read a book. So I thought, okay, well, how do I take a non-fiction book and give it to people who are normal, hardworking, busy people and make innovation accessible? So I said about creating a toolkit, not a book, a toolkit that makes innovation accessible to normal, hardworking people, creativity tangible for people uncomfortable with ambiguity, great, far more important, make the process fun, give people tools they choose to use when with all their other deadlines that they've got. So now I thought, well, what non-fiction book have I ever read where I could read one page today? Get what I need and get out and do what I need to do and come back another day. My mom's cookbook, you want shepherd's pie, it's on page sixty seven, sherry trifle, it's on page twelve.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  So the contents page is exactly the same way. Have you ever been to a brainstorm where nothing ever happened? Go to page twelve, fed up your boss shooting your ideas down, go to page fifty four, working a heavily regulated industry, go to page thirty six now, but it also has to appeal to all three learning styles. So let me explain what that means. Can you close your eyes, Jeff?

• 21:05Speaker 01

  How many days are there in September?

• 21:07Geoff Nielson?

  Thirty.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Keep your eyes closed. How did you know? How did you learn? How did you remember or what can you see with your eyes closed?

• 21:14Geoff Nielson?

  Uh, I don't know how to answer that question. I just try and remember which the few months that have thirty versus thirty one days.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Well, that tell, okay, you can open your eyes. You've just told me you're a visual learner. How? Because you were probably looking at a calendar that could tell you which was thirteen, which was thirty one. A third of the audience will recite the rhyme thirty days has September, blah, blah, blah. They just told me they learn by listening. How do I know that? Because they learnt the rhyme when there were six. How did they remember it? Because they heard it. The next at a peak thirty percent will count. Then of course they go January, February, March, April, May, June, July, etc. Those are kinesthetic learners and people who just go thirty, thirty one, they're visual learners. They're just a canda. Um, so the book is designed to appeal to all three learning styles. There's QR codes in each chapter with a Spotify playlist, which will be turning to an auditory book for people who learn by listening. Um, there are animated videos in each chapter. I'm now a cartoon character.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Where I could pop out of the book and show you in a fun way how to use the tools with our visual learners. And for our kinesthetic learners, the QR code on the back cover is AI. You can ask the book how to use a specific tool on page sixty seven to sell more. Orange pencils in the state of Pennsylvania on Valentine's Day to the market of twenty months, twenty four yards, and the book will answer you. Make it fun, make it tangible, make it easy to use. There are tools within there that really cut through the nonsense. So for example, uh, one tool was created by Walt Disney. I call it what if. This is about listing the rules of your challenge, picking one rule, uh, and asking the most audacious provocative outrageous what if statement to get you out of your river of thinking the way you always think.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  So Walt had Fantasia. He wanted to pump Mr. Heat into the theater and the theater owner said, no, Walt, that's not the way we do it here. We tried that last year. That one hit our quarterly results. So Walt listed the rules of going to movie theater. I must go to a physical theater. Uh, it is dark. I must go at a set time. I, uh, have to pay to get, I can't control the environment in which people experience my content. So he took that one, the environment, said, well, what if I could control the environment? Well, he couldn't. Yeah. And besides, it was, uh, wasn't audacious enough. So he said, all right, if I can't control the environment inside the theater, what if I take my movies out of the theater? If you know how to do it, you're iterating. If it scares you, you're innovating. Well, how you could do that, Walt? They're, uh, they're two dimensional. They're all over. What if I made them three dimensional?

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Well, how on earth would you do that? Well, what if I had people dress up in costumes as pirates and princesses and cowboys? But yeah, Walt, you can't have Cinderella standing next to Jack Sparrow. People wouldn't be immersed in her story. No, fair point. What if I put them in different lands? Oh, wait a minute. What if I called it Disneyland? Ooh, we're done here. Simple, powerful, fun. People used to go to Blockbuster Video. The founder of Netflix used the same tool. He was fed up of paying late fees. Step one, list the rules. Had to drive to a physical store. Uh, they had to go at a set time. They never had the one I want. I was only allowed to take out three. I had to return it. I had to rewind it. And if I was late, I paid a late fee. So he took store and in two thousand and five, simply asked the question, what if there was no physical store? And so he said, well, uh, well, no physical store. Well, that's what, and he looked outside of his industry with another tool called where else, which is in the book.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  A lot of insights for innovation, or most of them actually will come from looking outside of your industry. And he found a company called YouTube, six months old, only streaming amateur content. So he said, well, wait a minute, what if I just stream professional content? I could do a deal with the movie studios. Well, nobody have to drive to a store. I'll be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Everybody get the one they want. They won't have to return it or rewind it. I'll cut the rental off at 24 hours. Nobody pays a late fee. I'll call it Netflix. I'll take my idea to Blockbuster five times. They'll tell me down five times. I'll take them out of business in less than five years. Now, for a lot of your listeners, they're going to sit there and go, oh, but I don't have the resources. So I'll give you a smaller example because I want people to know the tools work for them too. Very tiny company in Great Britain, the late 60s, before the days of mass automation, used to make glasses that we drink out of.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Fat and they found too much breakage and not enough production when the glasses were being packaged and shipped. So they went down the shop floor, observed the process, wrote down the rules. 26 employees, cardboard boxes, 12 glasses to a box, six on the top, six on the bottom. Glasses separated by corrugated cardboard, glasses wrapped individually in newspaper, employees reading the newspaper. So somebody asked the somewhat outrageous what if question. What if we poke their eyes out? Well, that's against the law and it's not very nice. But because they had the courage to ask the most absurd what if question of all, the lady sitting next to him immediately got out of her river of thinking. He said, well, hang on a minute, why don't we just hire blind people? So they did. Production up 26%, breakage down 42%. And the British government gave them a 50% salary subsidy, firing people with disabilities. Take the rules of the challenge you're working on next week. List them.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Do not think about them or you'll start thinking of all the reasons you can't break it. Pick one and ask the most audacious what if question. You'll be amazed how it helps you jump out of your river of thinking and think differently.

• 25:44Geoff Nielson?

  I love, I love that approach. I, you know, I find it such a, such a valuable exercise and it can, you know, I, I love the examples of how it can, you know, completely upend what organizations are doing. One of the, you know, I'm curious with your book and your approach Duncan, one of the most common pieces of feedback I hear from, you know, people I talk to is, well, I don't work for Walt Disney, you know, my leadership, my leaders would never go for this. How do we, how can we flip that around?

• 26:11Speaker 01

  You've got to do the, do it with them, do the yes and and no because get them to do exactly what you just watched me and Jeff do. Come up with a party idea, have them do the no because, do it again, have them do the yes and, and they'll realise I'm a no becauseer. And look how big the idea was when I became a yes ander. Again, it's just a question of how, so another tool, how you, just by reframing the challenge. So this tool was created by Walt Disney on July seventeenth, nineteen fifty five, when he opened the doors to Disneyland, he said, we will not have any customers in our park, we'll only have guests, we won't have employees, we'll have cast members. And with that simple reframing of the challenge, he created a level of hospitality that's rarely been repeated since. So, so Jeff, where do you live?

• 26:52Geoff Nielson?

  I live in Toronto.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  So if I was coming to Toronto tomorrow and you and I were going to open a car wash together, tell me if you would, five essential ingredients we must have in a car wash. Go.

• 27:02Geoff Nielson?

  Uh, soap.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Soap.

• 27:05Geoff Nielson?

  Sponges, water, you know, water or hoses.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Hoses.

• 27:10Geoff Nielson?

  One of those automated conveyors, I would say.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  I'll do so. Got water, soap, brushes, vacuum and conveyor. So, close your eyes. We've been invited to open an auto spa. Ooh, ah, spa, new franchise. What have you seen in a spa? Anything you'd like? What would you like to have in your spa?

• 27:26Geoff Nielson?

  Uh, there's probably a good fragrance there. There's.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Oils?

• 27:31Geoff Nielson?

  Sure, yeah.

• 27:34Geoff Nielson?

  Uh, I don't know, nicer soaps, uh, probably more of a human aspect to it. People who will talk to you and say nice things to your car, maybe, or you.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  What's a spa? What do you want in your spa?

• 27:49Speaker 01

  What have you seen in the spa, Jeff?

• 27:53Geoff Nielson?

  Uh, I don't know. I don't go to a lot of spas, Duncan.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Close your eyes and imagine what?

• 27:59Geoff Nielson?

  Uh, I don't know, relaxing music.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Very relaxing music. What else?

• 28:04Geoff Nielson?

  Um. I don't know, a bath.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  A bath, masseuse, mani pedi.

• 28:10Geoff Nielson?

  Sure, yeah.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  So here's the thing, I said car wash and everybody thought the same things you did. Water, soap, brush, dry, a vacuum. I said auto spa, people start to think about other things like essential oils and music and relaxing atmosphere and blah blah. Which one would you rather go to, the spa? It's a simple, simple tool. If we'd asked the question, how might we make more money in two thousand and eleven? We'd have put the gate price up at Walt Disney by three percent and made our quarterly results. But instead, we refrained the challenge and said, how might we solve the biggest consumer pain point? Everybody knew what it was, it was standing in line. And I said, what if there were no lines? Didn't know the answer at the time. We looked outside of our industry using that where else tool? And we found a very small pharmacy in Tokyo, Japan, using RFID technology to enable people not to stand in line. Welcome to the world as Disney's magic band, it's RFID enabled, it is my room key, it's

• 28:56Speaker 01

  my theme park ticket, it's my reservations for my favorite meet and greets, my favorite rides, I can pay for merchandise with it, I can pay for food with it. The average guest today has two hours free time each and every day they didn't have in two thousand and sixteen. What has that resulted in? Record intent to recommend, record intent to return. And what is it we lovely people do with our free time in Disney parks? Spend money, the single biggest revenue generating idea in Disney theme parks history by not asking, how might we make more money? Now, again, that's a big example, so I'll give you a small one. Those people that you said, I don't work for Disney. I was waiting for an appointment up in New York, sat chatting to the young lady behind the reception desk, got upstairs, said to the boss, your, your, your reception is delightful, so friendly, so helpful, so empathetic. He said, well, that is nice to hear. How long were you chatting to her? I thought it's about ten minutes, I suppose he was up. That's odd.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  I said, well, why is that odd? He said, well, we don't have a receptionist. It's like, well, hang on, dude, I was talking to somebody, she, she had some address on, had no sleeves. He goes, oh, that was probably Sarah. So I said, oh, Sarah, yeah. He goes, oh, Sarah's our director of first impressions, that group. Simple re-expression of her form of employment, empowered to own the space she is. The challenge for most of us is this, we don't get fresh stimulus into our lives. So Jack, hands up if you, if you go to your favorite restaurant or cafe, you read the menu, you already know what's on it, you listen to the specials and then you order the same thing every single time.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Hands up if you get sleep on the same side of the bed every night. Even when you're staying in a hotel room by yourself. Uh, if you ever got home when you used to commute from wherever you used to work and you get home and just look at your front door and there's just that split second where you just go, oh shit, how did I get home?

• 30:33Speaker 01

  So, um, on the way home, because you went past the same stimulus day in, day out, uh, your brain physically shut down. Didn't wake up till you got home. No fresh stimulus in, no new ideas out. Different companies do it different ways. Microsoft has Think Week. No meetings, no emails, no presentations. Pixar does not sit by department. They sit by unplanned collaboration. Specifically designed to bring two people together to have a conversation they weren't supposed to have to spark a new idea. Hasbro gives their employees three dollars a quarter to put something on table, but it can't be a toy to spark a different conversation. Google gives their engineers 20% time. It's not an urban myth. They are giving it. Uh, and so I'm not suggesting everybody walks up to their boss on Monday and says, dude, from now on, I need Fridays off. I need 20% time. What if you take one hour a month as a team, real or virtual?

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Invite your team in, no PowerPoint presentation, no, why is it good for the business? Call it first Friday of every month, nine till 10, but be consistent, whatever day or time you choose. Just invite people to come in and talk about something they've seen in their business life, or ideally their personal life that they thought was innovative or creative. You'll be amazed at the new energy and ideas you drive into the organization.

• 31:35Geoff Nielson?

  I, I, I love that approach and you know, I'm, I'm reflecting on, you know, all, all the creative ideas that, that you've shared here and how I can, you know, implement them in my own workflow. I, I, I'm curious, do you have like a, like a number one piece of advice for leaders? You know, how you can get more creativity and more innovation in your organization?

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Give your employees time to think. Stop the, oh, you've got two hours to do a brainstorm. The other thing is this, our legal department, we hired them out of, of college because they, they studied the bar. Our IT team went to coding school. Our sales team got sales training, our operation, et cetera. When it comes to innovation and brainstorming, we just tell people to get the room and have a big idea. With absolutely no training and no tools. And that's why I developed the imagination important to give people a toolkit they can use for things like brainstorming and innovation. Because today it's too ethereal. I get lots of people come to conferences and they leave inspired and motivated and they haven't got a clue what to do next. So I said, creating a toolkit and a workshop where people do the tools, where by the end of the day, they know what to do.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  I want, but yes, people want to be inspired and motivated, but what they really want is two or three tools they can take away and use in their day to day business to help them think differently and grow their business.

• 32:47Geoff Nielson?

  I love that. And one of the reasons it resonates with me Duncan is it's, it's so, it's so practical and it's so oriented around like, what do I actually do? One of the things I've found, and I'm sure you've found it too, is just there's no, there's no shortage of hype right now for, you know, technology or tools or approaches that are, you know, going to change the world and oh, you've got to buy this. I'm curious for you, if you can, you know, call out one or two, you know, things that you've seen hyped and in your mind, you're like, this is not the answer. This is not what's going to make organizations more effective.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Well, I saw an article in half a business review about a year and a half ago that says process beats culture. Good luck with that, mate. Culture beats process for lunch. And most companies are driven by quarterly results and they're obsessed by quarterly results. But, and here's the thing, they, and it worked up until Generation Z entered the workforce or tried to enter the work. They're not working for, how will you remain relevant 10 years from today if a new generation of employees chooses not to work for you?

• 33:46Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah. So let's, let's, I mean, let's talk about that for a minute. What, what do you see as being different with Gen Z? Is it, is it, you know, radically?

• 33:54Speaker 01

  No, we were as passionate as Generation Z about our causes. We could only tell two people down the park when we kick the football around, they can tell the world, it's called Greta Thunberg. I was asked to give a talk to, let's just call them the world's largest tool manufacturer. They make more hammers and chisels and sauce than everybody else. And they wanted to know about how to innovate with Generation Z. So I went down to Home Depot and Lowe's, hung out in the aisle like some creepy dude, just watching their consumers and listening at the point to project that decision-making, I'm taking this home. I was watching Generation Z. And they didn't talk about this brand. They'd never heard of it. They didn't talk about their products, the hammer, the chisel. They didn't talk about the price, but they talked about what's important to them. We had to remodel our dream apartment, our dream kitchen, our dream bathroom. I said, your purpose is you choose to create one is you could be the brand who helps people build their dreams.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  You can see the finance guys rolling their eyes in laughter, thinking this guy's a joke. Let's get him out of here. Okay, fair enough. If you're the brand who can help people build their dreams, could you be in education? Yes. Sports? Yes. Hospitality? Yes. Finance? Yes. Insurance? Yes. Education? Yes. You could be in any line of business. No, no, we make tools. We're really good at it. In fact, we're going to expand in India, Mexico. They have a growing middle class. They will buy our tools. Oh yeah, good luck with that. India bypassed the laptop computer over a decade ago and went straight to a mobile phone. India will be bypassing your tools and going straight to 3D printing. So, but oh no, well, we make tools. So, so yeah, this company, they will make their quarterly results for about seven to eight more years. This company, the world's largest tool manufacturer, will be gone by 2032, six years from today. Yes, they'll make their quarterly results. I don't give a damn.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Because they've got no purpose. They've got nowhere to go.

• 35:24Geoff Nielson?

  So that, that, that purpose for you, that's, that's thing one. You've got to figure out where you should really be playing, how you're inspiring people and everything else follows from that. Is that right?

• 35:35Speaker 01

  It's my why. And, and if you articulate it in 20 seconds, you don't have one. I believe everybody is creative and I'm on a mission to prove it. It's as simple as that.

• 35:45Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  We were all born, we were all born creative. Education just squeezed it out of us.

• 35:51Geoff Nielson?

  Right. I wanna, you know, but before I lose track of it, I do wanna talk a little bit about, you know, Disney and your journey from there to what you're doing now. You've talked about this mission and, and kind of unlocking creativity. How did, how did that come to be for you?

• 36:06Speaker 01

  Thirty years I got the, so I was, when I finished, I was head of innovation and creative at Disney, at Disney, at Disney, at Pixar, et cetera.

• 36:12Geoff Nielson?

  Yeah.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Didn't start that way. I was actually started the cappuccino boy in the London office. But I was the guy who had the mad, audacious, outrageous ideas that used to upset loads of other people, but the difference was I got them done. Why? Because I used tools to help me get them done. Tenacity, patience, but also just ways of thinking differently and giving people. And here's the thing, we tried four models of innovation at Disney. Model number one, I hired an outside consultant. He said, make me look good. They were very expensive. They were never around for execution. They sure as hell weren't going to show me how they did it because then we wouldn't hire them again. Model number two, we're creating an innovation team. Bad idea. Anybody outside of legal do legal? No. Anybody outside of sales do sales? No. Anybody outside of marketing? No. So if you create an innovation team, you've subliminally just told the rest of the organization they're off the hook.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  Model number three, an accelerator program. We bring in some young tech startups, take a 50/50 stake in their business. They enabled us to bring products and services to market much quicker than we normally would because they weren't encumbered by our politics and that's the way we do it here. We will enable them to scale things. But again, we had failed in our overall objective was how might we embed a culture of innovation and creativity into everybody's DNA. So I set out to create a toolkit that we could pass along that other people chose to use when we were not around. That's when you know you're changing the culture. We had a three and a half year waitlist for a two day voluntary training workshop. And so after 30 years, I was given the bronze Jiminy Cricket. Thank you for 30 years of magical service statue. And I thought, you know what, I gotta do someone else. And so

• 37:40Speaker 01

  I love the keynotes, but I love the workshops. You get in a room, you know, you can inspire and motivate people, but you can't help them in 60 minutes. But if you give people a fake challenge at nine o'clock and let them use the tools to solve the challenge by five o'clock, then they know what to do next. And again, here's another industry that needs to be blown up, the conference industry. It's just speaker, speaker, speaker, panel, speaker, panel. No, people learn by doing. They do not learn by listening. Yes, they learn both, but we've got to shake it up. We can't just get on a stage and speak at people. You've got to engage them. And so to me, people always ask me when I get off stage, how did you know if you were successful? I said, that's easy. They say, well, how did you know? I said, if one person is looking down at the telephone, I fail. Simple as that.

• 38:24Geoff Nielson?

  So from, for you, it all comes back to like that muscle memory, right? Like actually practicing these new skills because so, yeah. And I'm just kind of digesting it, but for you, the answer is not, oh, create a chief innovation officer and they'll come in and tell everybody what to do. It's we need to use these tools and put them into practice and get comfortable.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  We need to impart them to the rest of the organization. Every organization that has an innovation team of 12 people, oh yeah, great. Good luck with that. That when we really move the needle was when we imparted our knowledge to other people and get let them do it for themselves. That's when you're really changing a culture.

• 39:06Geoff Nielson?

  Right. I think that's very well said. And I loved your, I loved your walkthrough of why the different models don't work and why this was the right one. And yeah, certainly that just kind of triggered a few different organizational memories I've had as well. So, no, thanks for that. Thank you for that. I think that's, that's really interesting. Duncan, this has been super interesting. I really appreciate you opening my mind in terms of, you know, not just the why of creativity and innovation, but the how. And you've, you know, shared so many great tools that I'm excited to try out myself.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Well, thank you very much indeed. Anybody else, it's the imagination in poor M.com. It will change your lives. So I actually, I'll finish by, I created this character called, this is the importance of diversity. We were doing a new, designing a new retail dining and entertainment complex for Hong Kong Vision Resort. And in the room that day, I had the Imagineering team, but that day it was 12 white male American architects over 50. So I brought in a naive expert or who or what's a naive expert, where somebody doesn't know what you're working on. Why? Cause they'll ask the silly questions that we're too embarrassed to ask. They'll throw out the audacious idea ungoverned by our river of thinking. So I brought in a young female Chinese chef. Why? Cause she was the antithesis of everybody else in the room. And I asked everybody to draw a house and everybody drew what you would draw, Jeff.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Two windows, one door, the roof was a triangle, except the chef. She drew Dinsum architecture. Why wouldn't she? She's a young female Chinese chef, not an architect. On the way out the door, one of the Disney Imagineers slapped a post-it over her drawing which said, "Distinctly Disney, authentically Chinese." Seven years later, the strategic brand position that guided the entire design of the Shanghai Disney Resort, "Distinctly Disney, authentically Chinese." Diversity is in the mission. If somebody doesn't look like you, they don't think like you. And if they don't think like you, they can help you think differently. And so when I was designing the book, I had this character called Archie, who was a direct descendant of Archimedes. Because when you ask people where they are when they get their best ideas, they say, "The shower, what Archimedes was in the bar." And my daughter looks at it, she goes, "Dad, that's an old white guy. You can't do that shit anymore. You're an old white guy."

• 41:04Speaker 01

  So I created three new characters. This is Spark. Spark is male. He introduces you to the crazy behaviors. Zing, gender neutral, introduces you to the energizers. Nova, she's female. She introduces you to the innovation tools. Make it fun and people will use it. But make it practical at the same time.

• 41:21Geoff Nielson?

  Nice. I love it. Well, thanks so much again for joining. This has been awesome and I really appreciate your time.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Cool. Thank you very much. Lovely to meet you.