Disney Should Be Making More Things That Fail

Bob Gurr once gave a wonderfully uncomplicated answer to a question that modern corporations can spend a remarkable amount of money making complicated.

Gurr, one of the original generation of Disney Imagineers, had frequently been asked to design things that did not exist. Wasn’t that difficult? Apparently not particularly. If something didn’t exist, he explained, there wasn’t much point wasting time researching how everyone else had done it. You started working and figured it out.

There is something almost quaint about that attitude now.

Large organizations are not generally designed to figure things out as they go. They develop processes precisely so they don’t have to. They collect data, establish standards, study their customers and hire people whose job is to identify risk before risk becomes expensive. A publicly traded company has billions of dollars and the legitimate expectations of shareholders providing additional reasons not to make consequential decisions on the corporate equivalent of well, let’s see what happens.

Disney should be good at those things. There is no virtue in spending money carelessly, and creativity does not become more creative merely because somebody neglected to build a spreadsheet first.

The complication is that Disney’s most valuable assets were once ideas for which the spreadsheet could not possibly have contained much useful information. Before an audience had seen Mickey Mouse, there was no Mickey Mouse audience to measure. Before Disneyland existed, there was no market of Disneyland guests whose behavior could be analyzed. Before Pixar made Toy Story, nobody could point to the commercial history of feature-length computer-animated films and confidently project the result.

Every genuinely new idea encounters some version of this problem. Eventually the evidence runs out.

For a company built on imagination, that raises a question worth taking seriously: How much evidence should Disney require before allowing itself to create something for which evidence cannot yet exist?

The Graveyard Is Part of the Business

Walt Disney Imagineering has a graveyard. Not literally, although given the company’s enthusiasm for elaborate theming, perhaps we shouldn’t give anyone ideas.

It exists in drawings, models, concepts and partially developed projects that never became physical places. Disney historian Dave Smith once noted that preliminary design work had been done on hundreds of parks and attractions that were never built. Some projects were too expensive. Technology defeated others. Priorities changed, leadership changed, economics changed, and occasionally a better idea simply displaced the one that came before it.

We usually encounter these abandoned projects years later, when the possibility of building them has safely passed. They turn up in books, exhibitions, documentaries and old concept art, where they become delightful artifacts of Disney history. Fans can admire the Western River Expedition or any number of unrealized concepts without anyone having to explain what they would cost to operate.

But the discarded work is more than trivia. It tells us something important about the creative process that produced the things that did get built.

A creative organization producing only ideas that eventually reach the public would be a strange creative organization indeed. Either it has discovered a form of prediction unavailable to everyone else, or its people have become very good at knowing what not to propose.

The latter possibility deserves more attention than it usually receives.

Creative failure becomes tidier with distance. Once something wonderful exists, the discarded versions disappear from the story or become charming footnotes to it. The attraction opens, the film premieres, audiences fall in love, and the finished work gradually acquires a sense of inevitability. Of course that was the answer. Look how well it worked.

It did not feel inevitable while somebody was trying to persuade other people to make it.

Disneyland certainly doesn’t look like a reckless idea today. Neither do feature-length animation, Audio-Animatronics or computer-animated films. We encounter them after decades of success have converted uncertainty into history. The people considering those ideas originally had no such advantage.

For some period of time, every unprecedented success has to exist as an unproven idea.

That period matters.

The Problem With Being Reasonable

Joe Rohde has spoken about the skepticism his team encountered while developing Disney’s Animal Kingdom. The project had to overcome an obvious objection: was Disney simply proposing an extraordinarily expensive zoo?

Answering that required more than insisting the idea would be exciting. The team had to explain how this strange combination of theme park, zoological operation, storytelling environment and conservation institution could work as a coherent Disney experience. Rohde later described developing a bias toward presenting ambitious ideas as rational investments that also happened to be surprising.

There is a great deal of wisdom in that. A creative person who can explain why an ambitious idea makes business sense is considerably more useful to a company than one who believes the phrase trust me constitutes a capital plan.

There is also a danger hiding inside the lesson.

The better an organization becomes at evaluating ideas before making them, the more those evaluation criteria can begin influencing which ideas get proposed in the first place. This does not require an executive memo discouraging risk. Nobody has to tell an Imagineer, animator, filmmaker or designer to stop dreaming quite so aggressively.

People learn what survives meetings.

If recognizable intellectual property is easier to defend, more proposals will begin with recognizable intellectual property. If obvious merchandise opportunities strengthen a business case, creative teams will become adept at finding them. If audience data makes an investment easier to justify, concepts supported by existing audience data acquire an advantage before the creative competition has really begun.

None of those tendencies is individually irrational. That is precisely the problem.

An organization can become exceptionally creative within the boundaries of what it already knows how to approve. It can employ brilliant artists and engineers, spend enormous sums, produce beautiful work and still gradually narrow the range of ideas allowed into serious consideration.

Disney is especially vulnerable to this because it possesses something most creative companies would envy: an almost absurd quantity of information about what people already love.

The company knows which characters draw audiences, which franchises sell merchandise, which attractions move guests, which films get rewatched and which properties travel across countries and generations. It owns a library deep enough to supply familiar material for decades. Modern analytics can make that knowledge more precise than anything available to the people who built Disney’s earlier successes.

That information is enormously valuable. It also has a hard limit.

It cannot tell Disney what people will love that nobody has invented yet.

A character who does not exist has no awareness score. A story nobody has heard cannot demonstrate audience demand. An attraction nobody knows how to describe will perform rather badly in a survey asking guests what attractions they would like Disney to build.

Sooner or later, somebody has to make a judgment without the comfort of knowing the answer.

The Useful Kind of Failure

This is where arguments about creative risk have a habit of becoming romantic.

Disney cannot spend billions of dollars indulging every interesting thought produced in Glendale, Burbank or Emeryville. Theme parks are staggeringly expensive. Films employ thousands of people. Streaming productions consume real capital. Every project occupies resources that cannot be used somewhere else, and “take more risks” is wonderfully cheap advice when someone else is financing the experiment.

A bad attraction that consumes billions of dollars and disappoints guests is not secretly a creative triumph because everyone learned something. A film that fails to find an audience does not become successful because making it required courage. Judgment and accountability still matter.

The more useful distinction is when the failure occurs and what it costs.

Disney should want sketches that go nowhere, models that expose bad assumptions, scripts that collapse before production, technologies that misbehave in workshops and blue-sky concepts that survive months of development before somebody finally asks the question that kills them. Those are inexpensive failures compared with discovering the same problem after concrete has been poured or a release date announced.

More importantly, that kind of failure gives unusual ideas time to become better ideas.

Imagineering’s history contains plenty of evidence for the value of experimentation that does not proceed neatly toward a predetermined result. Yale Gracey became famous for effects work that wandered productively. Experimenting with one illusion could produce another useful effect along the way. The process was not always efficient if efficiency meant producing only the thing originally requested.

That is a narrow definition of efficiency for an invention business.

Disney now has tools that should make experimentation cheaper than it has ever been. Digital modeling, simulation, real-time rendering, virtual production, rapid prototyping and artificial intelligence can all reduce the cost of exploring an idea before committing enormous resources to it. Used well, technology can allow more possibilities to be examined, broken, rebuilt or abandoned while failure is still relatively inexpensive.

That may be a more interesting measure of technological progress than how many steps can be removed from an existing process.

A creative company should not necessarily use new technology to fail less.

It might use it to afford more failures before choosing what deserves to succeed.

The Ideas That Never Reach the Room

The rejected projects are at least visible.

Someone proposed them. Somebody drew them. A model may have been built, a script written or a prototype tested. Whatever killed the project came after the idea had been given enough institutional permission to exist.

The harder thing to see is what never reaches that point.

Every mature organization develops invisible boundaries. Experience teaches people which costs are real, which technical problems are harder than they appear and which mistakes do not need to be repeated. Much of that accumulated knowledge is valuable. An institution that never learns from failure is not adventurous. It is merely forgetful.

But institutional memory can harden into assumption without anyone noticing exactly when it happened.

A creative team begins with the things it knows leadership will consider. A proposal is shaped around the questions everyone expects finance to ask. A strange idea gets attached to familiar intellectual property because the familiar name makes the strange part easier to sell. None of this necessarily produces bad work. Quite often it produces very good work.

The concern is what gets filtered out before anybody discovers whether it could have become something better.

Disney has lived through expensive failures and should remember them. It has also lived through periods when ambitious investments, strange technologies and improbable creative bets produced extraordinary returns. The lesson from that history cannot reasonably be that risk is good, any more than it can be that risk should be eliminated.

Perhaps the useful objective is preserving enough institutional irrationality for someone occasionally to ask What if we did this? before everyone starts explaining why it makes sense.

The order matters.

If every new idea must begin by demonstrating its market, identifying its franchise, estimating its merchandise potential and proving its audience, Disney may become exceptionally good at producing things people are likely to consume.

But consumption is not the highest bar this company has ever cleared.

People adopted the best things Disney created. They brought them into their families and childhoods. They quoted them, revisited them decades later, traveled to experience them and, yes, bought ridiculous quantities of merchandise because affection came first and commerce discovered what to do with it afterward.

No financial model can work backward from that outcome and tell us exactly what to invent next.

The thing has to exist before anyone can fall in love with it.

The View From Main Street

One of the great pleasures of loving Disney is knowing that somewhere, right now, someone may be working on something we have never heard of. Perhaps it is only a sketch, or an idea being passed between two people who aren't entirely sure what they have yet. It might be sitting on a workbench failing spectacularly or buried in a few pages of a story nobody has approved. Maybe it's too expensive, too strange, technically impossible or simply not very good.

Most of those ideas will disappear, as they should. Imagination produces more possibilities than reality can accommodate, and there is no shame in the wastebasket when it sits beside the drawing board. The important thing is that people keep putting things on the drawing board without knowing in advance which ones will survive.

Disney inherited an unusual faith in Tomorrow. Not a naïve belief that tomorrow arrives automatically better than today, but a conviction that people can make it better by imagining things that do not yet exist and then accepting all the frustration, uncertainty and failure involved in making some of them real.

That instinct runs through Disney's history. Animation repeatedly attempted things animation had not done before. Filmmakers developed techniques because the images they wanted did not yet know how to exist. Imagineers experimented with ways to make figures move, rooms stretch and ghosts appear. Disneyland itself began with the considerably awkward problem of one man trying to explain a place that existed more clearly in his imagination than anywhere else.

We remember what worked because the successful experiments became part of Disney's identity. What we don't see nearly as often are all the things that failed along the way, including the failures that made the successes possible. Those belong to the inheritance too.

We should hope, then, that there are rooms at Disney filled with terrible ideas. There ought to be drawings that make executives skeptical, prototypes held together with whatever happened to be nearby, stories that collapse halfway through and concepts whose first presentations produce more confusion than enthusiasm. Not because failure is inherently admirable, but because an organization that ventures beyond what it already knows how to do will inevitably be wrong sometimes.

Failing forward is part of the creative process. You try something, discover why it doesn't work, carry what you learned into the next attempt and occasionally arrive somewhere you could not have plotted from the beginning. The alternative may be more efficient, but only because the destination has already been chosen.

For Disney, that alternative must be especially tempting. There is enough beloved material already on the shelves to keep the company busy for generations. We can visit new versions of familiar worlds, watch new chapters of familiar stories and buy new things bearing familiar faces. Some of those things will be wonderful. Familiarity and creativity are not enemies, and originality does not require pretending the past has nothing left to offer.

But there should always be something happening beyond the edge of what we already know.

Fifty years from now, children should be walking through Disney parks wearing shirts with characters whose names mean nothing to us today. They should be dragging their parents toward attractions we couldn't identify on a map, singing songs from stories nobody has written yet and building family traditions around places that currently exist only as somebody's unlikely idea.

We won't get there by being right all the time. We get there by giving talented people enough room to be wrong, learn something from it and try again.

If they succeed often enough, eventually some strange little idea will stop looking strange. People will love it, children will grow up with it, and time will perform its usual trick of making something once uncertain seem as though it had always belonged.

Our inheritance was somebody else's blue sky once. The next generation deserves some of ours.

— Walter B. Good