What Walt Disney Taught Me About Communication

It was early 2021. Our company had recently experienced a failed acquisition, bankruptcy, layoffs, loss of significant market share to a new Goliath, and for good measure…12 months of Covid that kept us from visiting our customers and each other.

Our March 2021 three-day company and sales kickoff should have been a disaster. There wasn’t much good news to share, but we still had a lot of information to communicate and multiple trainings to deliver. And we would be meeting virtually due to the pandemic, thus losing all the incredible energy that comes from a face-to-face event.

But it was the highest rated kickoff in recent history – how is that even possible? Also, what are the lessons to be learned?

Sometimes a situation is so uncomfortable that it forces a new way of doing something, and in this case, we knew that the tried-and-true method of PowerPoint after PowerPoint would be met with yawns. At least when we were face-to-face, we could pump people up with sugar, caffeine, and energy from each other—but we didn’t have that luxury in 2021 to help overcome a poor delivery.

So, what did we do?

We channeled Mickey Mouse, or to be more accurate, Walt Disney. Let me explain.

We had a great Events team, led by Frank Jones, that liked to be challenged. This gave us the freedom to think outside the box. From there, my event co-host, Jesus Machuca, and I worked to find the best way to deliver all the content so it would be both engaging and memorable. We did our research and ultimately found a quote from Walt Disney that really resonated with both of us:

“I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something, than educate people and hope they were entertained.”

This quote reflects Disney’s philosophy of putting entertainment first, with education as a secondary benefit. He believed that if the primary goal was to educate, the content risked becoming boring. However, if you entertained first, people would naturally and more deeply absorb the key lessons along the way.

This approach felt risky—we weren’t entertainers, and if it didn’t work, we’d look foolish. But we decided to commit and lean into Walt’s philosophy. We still needed to educate our people on a lot of topics, but we had to frame up the delivery in a way that seemed like entertainment.

So instead of presentations, we showcased engaging interviews. We spoofed popular movies in a low budget but effective way to get people laughing but embracing our messages. Instead of providing text and lectures on new concepts, we did role-plays.

In one sales training, we took the four best recorded sales presentations that used the concepts we were teaching (we ran a contest and collected 40+ pitches before the kickoff) and turned them into a “Battle Royale,” where Jesus and I sat (virtually) ringside to call the “fights” in detail. When someone asked great discovery questions or surfaced critical needs, we got animated during the presentation and called it out like a commentator calling a knockout punch!

And we turned the negative of being virtual into a big positive. Because everything was virtual, it gave us the opportunity to prerecord almost all the material. This gave Frank Jones’ incredible team the opportunity to add their special effects magic to make it more entertaining. It also kept everything on time and under control.

After the three-day event, the ratings were through the roof and the trainings were embraced at levels we’d never seen before. The videos were reused for training, new hire onboarding, and other events. Our CEO even used them to get people pumped up.

The takeaways:

o   Even when you’re comfortable, push yourself to try something new and challenge the way you’ve always done things. Everyone’s heard this advice, but it’s often overlooked—even though the benefits can be enormous.

o   Don’t look at obstacles as negatives, reframe them and many times they can become huge positives. This is how David beat Goliath.

o   Don’t be afraid to entertain first and educate second. While this seems counterintuitive, our ability to educate people during our company/sales kickoff jumped dramatically when we followed Walt Disney’s advice. It was scary, but it was worth it.

We all want to be heard, but remember to think about it from the listener’s perspective. Very few people will stay engaged when being lectured, but when being entertained they will stay on the edges of their seats!

Image by ClickerHappy through Pixabay