An immersive mismanagement experience

Photo by Jayson Hinrichsen.

You’ll have to forgive us. We’re a bit sleepy this morning. We’ve been slowly working our way through the four-hour Star Wars hotel video. Yes, the one that went viral last month. At least seven and a half million people have already seen it. Perhaps you're one of them.

If, like us, you're late to it, here's a much-truncated recap from The New York Times:

Jenny Nicholson’s epic “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel,” ... breaks down in microscopic detail her visit to Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser ... While it highlights a litany of problems with the hotel itself, the video can also be viewed as a diagnosis of the entertainment industry’s current ills writ large ... And she does this against a backdrop of stuffed animals and while wearing various costumes, including, at one point, a giant suit resembling a Porg.

On the surface, this is a 20-part series about super-fans and the corporations who fail them. But under that, if you're paying attention, is an MBA without any student debt. Here's the wild part. We've been watching the video at 1x. It's four hours long! And when we tried to put it at 1.25x, we had to slow it back down.

While we're not all the way through it (yet), here's what we've got so far:

This is a story about business

The obvious angle on this whole video, the thing it purports to be about, is business. And when we tell you that there's an MBA's worth of reflection in here if you want it, we mean it.

You don't have to watch the entire thing. But jump anywhere into that four-hour epic and you'll find that Jenny is grappling with the core trade-offs that every business deals with. Cost vs value. Marketing promises vs product reality. Legal's desire to protect trademarks vs sounding like a shill when you make everyone speak in legalese.

The central, painful, unrelenting theme of the review is how each individual team at Disney did their own jobs (albeit with varying levels of competency), but no one seemed to hold the overall experience. And that, as a result, the human beings showing up for this expensive, exclusive experience ended up feeling less excited and more...exploited.

This is not unique to the Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser Immersive Experience. And while not every organization is able to bet $500M+ on a new product, every organization is making some version of the same trades. What will it take to make this project viable and sustainable? Who are we doing this work for, and what matters to them? How do we tell them what we're doing and get them invested, without making promises we can't keep?

And when those priorities inevitably come into tension with one another, who makes the call? Are the big incentives driving that decision short-term ones, or long-term? And what happens if they make the wrong call?

This is a story about passion

Most orgs will tell you they'd love to have a passionate, engaged community using their products. And most will tell you a passionate, engaged workforce sounds way better than the alternative. So far, there's not much to dispute.

But as two folks who spent decades building free, open source software, um, there's a difference between saying you want that and actually wanting that.

Because...passionate and engaged people are a pain in the ass to deal with. The heat that they bring to your work cuts both ways. Your biggest advocates and your biggest detractors are often the same people. This is true for community management and for regular old management management.

These folks have high expectations. They will check you, loudly (and often publicly), if you veer off course. That's not to say you can never screw up, but if you invite a group of people to follow along closely, you can't be mad when they notice. And then want to talk about it. Courting near-obsessive engagement means courting a level of scrutiny that most corporations find uncomfortable.

Throughout the video, it's clear that Jenny is rooting for the Disney team. Even while outlining the myriad ways they fall short, she's still hoping they pull it off. The video manages to be both gentle and excoriating. And a large part of why is that you've got someone willing to do far more than 50% of the work to make the experience great. And it just...isn't.

This is a story about learning

The most interesting part for us in this whole grand adventure is the question of what happens next. You launched something gigantic. You overpromised and underdelivered. You let down people who were invested in your success. And you've been publicly, artfully flayed by a fan and former employee. Now what?

The test of the leaders in that organization right now is how they're learning from it. When MobileMe (an early Apple cloud product) failed, Steve Jobs infamously gathered the entire team into a theatre. The reporting at the time called him "furious." He said they had tarnished Apple's reputation. He fired people on the spot. He told the team that they should hate each other for what they'd done.

To be abundantly clear: fuck that shit. Someone might give that a pass by calling it "accountability," or "passion," but we have zero time for that. Accountability delivered abusively is still abuse. It's not a tool anyone with power in an organization should be reaching for.

That doesn't mean accountability and reflection don't matter, though. There are large theatres on the Disney campus. Has someone already booked one of those out for a private screening of all four hours, with the entire team responsible in attendance? Followed, not by a tantrum, but by some sessions where we catalogue and bucket the process, ownership, empathy, and listening gaps, and then start to make some structural changes? When people say "never waste a crisis," this is what they mean. There's an opportunity to treat this as a Moment within the history of the organization. The kind of disaster that makes a culture change and adapt and reinvent itself.

Or, you know. Maybe no one has booked that screening. Like, the obvious playbook is very obvious, right? Offer Jenny a very large consulting contract. Put a team on integrating her insights. Stand up at an all-hands and say things will be different. And then gradually lose interest when some of the changes run up against internal political barriers, or some executive changes seats. Wrap up the contract. Tell each other that Star Wars is Just Too Hard. And backslide into mediocrity.

This is a story about your organization

James Joyce has this line where he says, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."

If you want to watch four hours of the Walt Disney Corporation getting dunked on purely for the corporate schadenfreude of it, we won't stop you. They've earned it. But in the particular is contained the universal. The failures she describes are particular, but every one of the root problems is universal. Your organization has to make trade-offs. Your organization risks having departments misaligned on the overall experience, and failing to integrate well. And your team is rooting for you, too.

No one wants to work in an org that's hopeless or doomed. There's at least one but usually several employees who are ready to throw their creative energy into making things excellent. Your passionate people are the ones who care a whole awful lot. The question is whether your team (or your org) can consume that much caring.

We don't know if Disney is going to learn what they need to from this four-hour video. But you can.

— Melissa & Johnathan