No Empty Chairs: The Call to Imagine
No Empty Chairs: The Call to Imagine
The park is a disaster.
It’s July 17, 1955. Disneyland is opening its gates in Anaheim, and by almost every account, it’s a train wreck.
It was supposed to be an invitation-only press preview. Instead, roughly twice as many people showed up as expected, plenty of them waving counterfeit tickets or climbing the fence. Temperatures pushed past 100 degrees. Rides broke down. The asphalt on Main Street, poured just that morning, was so soft that women’s high heels sank right into it. Walt and his team would forever call it “Black Sunday.”
And yet - in absolutely classic form - Walt saw the park (and its inaugural imperfections) differently. As he put it: “Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.”
As long as there is imagination left in the world.
That’s a mission statement for a way of working, one that accepts the mess, keeps building, and treats imagination as the one raw material that never runs out (as long as you keep using it).
Look back at where the greatest creative value of the last century came from, and you’ll find it, again and again, in a room where someone let their own imagination run wild, and gave the great people around them permission to do the same. I’ve been thinking about that a lot these past few weeks, because two very different things reminded me what it looks like. One was a car hanging upside down in central Texas. The other was a blue cartoon dog.
But first, back to Walt.
A Circus Tent With Mouse Ears
As it’s been told, basically no one wanted Walt to build Disneyland. His own studio wouldn’t fund it (he was an OG builder, bootstrapping it by borrowing against his life insurance and selling his vacation home to keep the dream alive).
Then, in 1952, he set up a separate company, outside the studio, whose only job was to dream up the park. Soon renamed WED Enterprises (for Walter Elias Disney), it was staffed with a small group of his animators and some of Hollywood’s best art directors. Construction began on July 22, 1954. Opening day was less than a year later (one must ponder if, today, one could just get permitting done in a year).
It was the quintessential SWAT team, in a separate shop, with tremendous credentials, air cover from the top, and a near-impossible deadline. It’s Kelly Johnson’s circus tent from The Skunk Works Renaissance, but with mouse ears this time.
Different goals? Sure. Johnson’s tent was built to help win a war, and Walt’s was built to delight families on a summer afternoon. But - taking the physically very different outputs aside - the two are more cousins than strangers. In both cases, human creativity, given room to breathe and the freedom to act decisively, made magic, of both the jet-fighter and the amusement-park variety.
In 1986, WED got a new name: Walt Disney Imagineering, a blend of the words imagination and engineering.
Upside Down in McGregor
Which brings me to Thursday night.
On October 15, at SpaceX’s test site in McGregor, Texas, Tesla revealed its new Roadster, in what can only be described as... one of the most unbelievable launch demos in history. The prototype drove up a looping, Hot Wheels-style ramp and hung upside down, held there by suction. Then it lifted off on SpaceX-supplied cold-gas thrusters, did a barrel roll in the air, and floated back down to the ground. Oh, and just for kicks, it went zero to sixty in well under a second.
If you missed it, it was one part auto show, one part sci-fi, and one part skate video. And it produced a cocktail that was awe-inspiring.
Even the best mechanics, engineers, and supercar manufacturers on earth, in their wildest dreams, couldn’t reasonably have imagined this is something a car would ever do. Moments like these, and tools like these (rocket thrusters, on a car, thank you very much), come from somewhere deep in the recesses of the most imaginative and capable minds. Thursday was a landmark moment, yes, for automobiles, but even more so for humanity: a call to arms to remember that the fantastic art of the possible requires an imaginative spirit, and that spirit doesn’t burn brightly unless we keep feeding the fire.
It’ll be some time before cars are doing kickflips over roundabouts, but that seems beside the point. No other carmaker on earth has made anything remotely close, and I think it’s arguable that none of them would have tried. A demo like that tells every young engineer watching that it’s okay to be malleable, playful, creative, and even a little dangerous.
The Pinnacle of Play
Now for a heck of a pivot. Earlier this month, we welcomed a beautiful new niece into the world, and while visiting my sister’s family, I spent a lot of hours watching Bluey with my nephew.
If you haven’t seen it, Bluey is an Australian cartoon about a blue heeler pup and her family, created by Joe Brumm and made by Ludo Studio in Brisbane. It’s quietly become one of the most beloved shows on the planet, for kids, parents, and (as I can now attest) visiting uncles alike.
Besides the moving narratives (yeah, I cried) and some of the genuine laughs the show produces, Brumm’s done something really important - the chassis of the show is built on something called socio-dramatic play. He describes it as the pinnacle of play for four- to six-year-olds, the point where kids are working at their highest level of imagination, cooperation, and group interaction. A piece of asparagus? That’s a magic wand. The house? Nope, this is now a full-scale hotel. Dad? Well, Dad is ready to be whatever the imaginative game needs him to be.
Brumm points out that kids will take roles they don’t particularly want, because “otherwise, the game stops. And kids hate it when games stop.” He also puts it another way that I love: “you can’t be an empty chair.” Everyone has to bring their piece of the story, and everyone has to leave room for the others to bring theirs.
It’s the essence of how small teams gel and create. It’s how improv works, how a jazz trio riffs, and how WED built in 1953. Nobody gets to sit with their arms crossed waiting for someone else to have the idea, and nobody gets to hog the scene.
Brumm has said he hopes the show encourages parents to ring fence play time for their kids, protecting it from everything else competing for those hours. I’d argue the grown-up version is just as urgent: ring fence it for your teams. (Fittingly, you can stream Bluey on Disney+. I think Walt would approve.)
Where the Muscle Went
Rocket thrusters on a Roadster. Bluey turning a tree stump into a helicopter. Lately, the reminders of what our imaginations can do, and how good it feels to play with childlike abandon, have been hard to miss. Which makes it harder to ignore that most of us have let that muscle atrophy.
Back in 2016, I wrote that we’d moved from being time-starved to attention-starved. Ten years later, it reads like a diagnosis. The wandering, unstructured, slightly bored space where original ideas and engaged collaboration form has been leveled, one notification and infinite scroll at a time.
The good news is that awe pushes back. A car hanging upside down, or a kid turning the living room couch into a city bus, reminds us that a bit of wonder can go a long way. Rarely (ever?) does a doomscroll produce that. Awe and play are what’s left of that wandering space, and we have to choose them.
How to Run Wild, On Purpose
So how do you build the muscle back, for yourself or for a team? A few ideas:
✱Give it a tent. A protected place and time, walled off from production and the quarterly plan. Walt had WED. Johnson had his circus tent. You can have a Thursday afternoon.
✱Cast for improv. Hire and staff for people who bring their piece of the story and make room for others. No empty chairs.
✱Make one demo that’s a little ridiculous. Not every product needs a barrel roll. But every team should have shipped at least one thing that made someone gasp. Now is the golden age of building, and playful prototyping has never been this cheap - use it!
✱Encourage boredom. As I wrote at the close of AI Meditations, Pt. 3, sit with boredom (dare I say, embrace it). Leave white space on the calendar, the same way Brumm wants it left for kids.
Never Completed
Walt survived Black Sunday, with its soft asphalt and broken rides and crowds spilling over the gates, and he still insisted his park would never be completed, that it would keep growing as long as there was imagination left in the world.
So, how much imagination is left in yours? In your team? On your calendar?
Here’s my challenge for this week. Play a game with someone (a kid, a cofounder, a partner) where you don’t know how it ends. Take a role you might not have picked. Don’t be the empty chair.
Then come back and tell me what you built.