True Lasting Change Through Innovation: What We Built at Disney

By Miylie Roan

At our annual retreat, I had the opportunity to facilitate an afternoon session called True Lasting Change Through Innovation. The theme was a genuine challenge to our team: how do we move innovation from something that feels risky to something that feels expected, supported, and part of how we work every day?

Here's how the afternoon came together.

Innovation Can Come From Anyone

We opened with a simple but powerful concept of "plussing," a Disney creative practice that operates on one core belief: nothing is ever final. Every idea, every process, every product can always be made better. The question is how to create an environment where people feel safe enough to innovate.

The Honest Bowl

Before we got into the group work, we did an exercise that stopped the room.

Everyone wrote an anonymous answer to one prompt: "The reason I haven't pushed harder on an idea I believed in is because..." The responses went into a bowl and were read aloud to the group. What followed was one of the most powerful moments of the entire retreat. The room went silent. Heads nodded. People whispered "same" and "wow" as they heard their own fears reflected back to them through someone else's words.

What started as a plan to read two or three responses turned into reading the entire bowl because no one wanted it to stop. They related to every single answer. Fear loses power when it's shared in a room full of people who feel the same thing, and that room proved it.

Walt's Rule: Never Accept the Current Version as the Final Version

This became the anchor for our small group innovation work. Each group was given a real challenge tied to Lawline's business and asked to work through three questions: Where is the friction today? What would better actually look like? What is one action we can take in the next 90 days?

The groups tackled topics including how AI can improve customer communication, how to streamline faculty booking and retention, how to better connect our B2B and B2C experiences, how to engage faculty in ways that also drive acquisition, and how to streamline Trello. The energy in those working groups was about having conversations our team genuinely cares about and about becoming innovative pioneers.

What This Session Was Really About

Innovation doesn't fail because people run out of ideas. It fails because people don't feel safe enough to share them. This session was designed to change that, even just a little, by giving our team a structured space to be honest about what holds them back and then do something about it together.