By Michael Raymond | Member
FADE IN: The hero of our story, a rather introspective-looking man, steps off the elevator of his office building and turns past a large mural of Walt Disney. The image of Walt seems like an omnipresent being, watching our hero walk past and arrive at his desk for a day of endless adventure and space travel….
Okay, wait a minute. Truth be told, I don’t actually get involved in any space travel and I suppose “adventure” might be a relative term, but when you work at The Walt Disney Company, this type of wistful daydreaming is not only a job requirement, it’s encouraged and something you’d expect at a place where all employees are referred to as cast members—but never employees.
If you’re wondering why a company like Disney, with a rich history steeped in creativity and storytelling, would have any use for a Sr. Technical Writer such as myself, you might be surprised. More to the point, are the 43 “technical writers” (as found on an internal Disney website) any different from the thousands of other “writers” scattered across the Disney organization? The answers are intertwined and might surprise you.
At the 2011 STC Summit in Sacramento when Scott Abel said to “think about a strategy to get people involved in your story, don’t think only in terms of deliverables,” I could barely contain myself. I wanted to leap from my seat and do a fist-pump and pirouette next to my chair.
It’s no secret that Disney has a storytelling culture that’s ingrained in every single thing the company does. No, really. Everything. It’s part of our DNA. I constantly find myself using phrases like “frame the narrative,” “who is my audience,” or “what (user) story are we trying to tell?” On the other hand, this approach to communication and content might not differ all that much from your own organization. If it doesn’t sound familiar, maybe it should. Perform an Internet search sometime for “storytelling” and “technical writing” and then sit back let it all wash over you.
As for me, some of the key components of what I do here at Disney involve (using some of our own fancy industry phrases) developing content strategies, performing the role of content curator, and delivering interactive content via Web 2.0 initiatives. I am, first and foremost, a storyteller who happens to have the words “technical” and “writer” in his job title.
Specifically, I create community online Help environments and content for training collateral, though my audience tends to be Disney-internal business users, developers, and other knowledge workers. Just like any other company with an IT presence that seeks to innovate and develop next-generation technologies, Disney develops custom tools, applications, and services that a range of cast members need to use and understand. Training, content, and documentation are key components—in various shapes, sizes, and delivery vehicles. The stories I tell are as varied as the audience and the content itself.
At the risk of making my job sound like some sort of reality show Disney movie, or Snow White singing in the meadow, there are emerging challenges that are emblematic of our changing industry. Because our engineering-centric community in Seattle uses a slightly unstructured community-authored developer Wiki, when the focus shifts to our customers or “external” audience, my group coordinates a more measured and customized content strategy and solution.
My immediate group (known as Technology Enablement Services) focuses on customer engagement and on-boarding, so we’re working with our social business technology team and others to create a more unified content lifecycle ecosystem so we can integrate elements of socially enabled documentation with more vetted and professional-looking content…. The best of both worlds, you might say. I’m trying to find a way to let the inmates run the asylum, but keep them out of certain rooms, if possible. It’s exciting and scary—much like a movie.
So you see, it turns out the hero of our story is actually someone who might look familiar and do many of the same things you do every day. Disney is no different than many other enterprises, although content truly is king. Since storytelling is such a part of the culture, it’s only natural it should be endemic to my job in a very organic way.
So what’s your story?
