Steve Parks

What Walt Disney Can Teach You About Business Plans

I've always believed that there are lots of techniques and ideas that business could do well to borrow from the arts.

And here's one of those - storyboarding. Developed by Walt Disney in the 1920's as a way of getting the movie as he wanted it before it actually went into production, storyboarding is now widely used in the movie industry. It's simply a case of drawing sketches of each scene on cards and pinning them up on the wall in the right order. They don't have to be brilliant drawings, they just have to communicate what is going on. Then they can be moved around, removed, new scenes can be inserted and so on - until it all feels right - then the expensive production work can begin, and will be done faster and more cheaply. Not only that, but it will be the best movie it could be because the creative juices were allowed to flow before changes became expensive - and then that creative vision was right in front of all the artists and technicians who had to actually make the movie happen.

The video above explains the background of storyboarding, and how it's used in the movie industry.

So how can you use the technique? This blog entry by presentation guru Garr Reynolds suggests using storyboarding as a technique to develop your presentations - but I think you can go a step further and use it to visualise the future of your business... otherwise known as a business plan.

Sketch out (you don't have to be a good artist), or cut and paste images from magazines or the web, to create pictures of the journey you're going to take. What are the milestones? Draw them. What will the products or services be? Draw them. How will you market it? Draw them. Where will you be in 5 years? Show us.

A visual story is so much easier to follow than a business plan (which generally gets put in a filing cabinet and forgotten about anyway) - and it's a great way to communicate it to, and enthuse, your team.

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