“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”
-Walt Disney
This week, one of our team members took a family vacation to Disney World. Before she left, I told her to make sure she puts on her “planning” hat to help her appreciate everything developed out of one man’s idea. An impossible idea! One man’s vision, brought to life by an entire team of professionals to brainstorm, plan, design, create and build park after park. But first, they had to BELIEVE!
Believe in him. Believe in themselves. Believe in the possibility.
Do you think he had doubters? And naysayers? And haters? Not to mention the practicality of financial viability!? There are plenty of stories about financial troubles while building Disneyland, so if the banks didn’t believe in him, how did his team?
My guess is that it had to do with storytelling. Walt Disney was a master of making the unbelievable come to life through words and pictures in a cartoon. He then brought these ideas to life in a theme park.
Stories take you to a place that doesn’t yet exist. From music and movies to books and bedtime tales, stories are a powerful tool. They can inspire, or they can divide. They can build up, or they can tear down. They can forgive an old enemy, or they can create a new one. Stories can tell us lessons of love and lessons of history. And yes, stories can even help us build our teams and implement our projects. Stories help us inspire emotion in people, and people who believe they can accomplish something often do.
So…do you have an impossible project or idea? Do you need help telling (or selling) the story? Most projects need a champion to drive buy-in, but that champion needs a team to help them articulate the story to overcome institutional inertia to get the project from idea to implementation. A good story is the starting point – once we have buy-in, then we can plan! But first, we need to help the impossible become so real that everyone on the team can see it.
Ideas are easy. Implementation is everything. Let us help you tell the story… AND take care of the implementation. Because after all, Walt Disney is right, “It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”
BJ Kraemer, President