Bob Gurr on Imagineering

On July 30, 2015 Imagineering Legend Bob Gurr visited Google's Headquarters in Mountain View California, sharing his reflections and experiences as an Imagineer.

The full presentation lasted an hour with the last half devoted to questions from the Google employees. Bob covered a lot of ground, but his comments about Walt and the way Imagineering was done "back in the day" were very interesting. (I've edited the first part down to 6 minutes.)

My key takeaways were that when you are doing something that's never been done before, trying to apply an existing process doesn't have a high probability of success.

Although Bob initially says "we don't use processes", he follows up with; "we just do it."
While he doesn't provide a short list of what that means, he describes "just do it" in his stories.

When you put all the pieces together; non-judgmental brainstorming ("French cats bouncing off the walls"), daily, tight communication (Empathic Inquiry), prototyping (build-it), Bob's non-process fits the Express-Test-Cycle basics of Design Thinking / expert class problem solving model perfectly.