Duncan Wardle

Think Different

In his over 25-year career at the world’s most innovative organization – The Walt Disney Company – keynote speaker Duncan Wardle learned many important things about building a profitable business and winning creative culture. The most important? If you want to be different, you have to think different.

As one of the most impactful creativity speakers, Duncan leans on his experiences as the Head of Innovation & Creativity at Disney to take audiences on a journey. Throughout Think Different, they’ll be given a unique set of Innovation Tools and Techniques – the same ones Duncan used with teams inside the Disney organization. These include the breakthrough “What If” creative thinking tool, made famous by Walt Disney himself, who used it to pivot his company from simply an animation house to an entertainment and theme park pioneer.

After this immersive crash course from the acclaimed creativity keynote speaker, your organization’s ability to mine for creativity and innovation will be drastically improved. In the end, your audience will leave with an actionable set of steps they can take to immediately start reshaping your company’s culture, creating a space where innovation thrives, and teams are encouraged and rewarded when they think different.

Embedding Innovation into Everyone's DNA

Innovation is not something that happens by chance. It’s the result of building an environment in which it can thrive.

Duncan Wardle knows a thing or two about fostering an environment of innovation. During his time as the Head of Innovation for a company known for redefining pretty much every industry they touch – The Walt Disney Company – Duncan’s decades of success weren’t merely a matter of luck or chance. No, his results were a direct reflection of his ability to create an innovative culture, and ensure that everyone on his teams were put in a position to let their inner creativity run wild.

In his Embedding Innovation Into Everyone’s DNA keynote, Duncan will share the exact steps and strategies used to create such an environment. Your team will learn how to create safe spaces for taking creative risks, ensure everyone on your team is empowered and thinking like an entrepreneur, and transition from the ideation stage into action. He’ll also share a creative problem-solving tool called “What Else,” which will prime your organization to discover innovative ideas each and every time you set out to tackle a challenge.

In the end, your team will walk away from this keynote with a fresh outlook on their day to day tasks, and be ready to approach them with new levels of creative thinking, allowing innovation to flourish.

Customer Experience Magic

The best brands in the world don’t thrive simply because of their great product or service. They thrive because of an unrelenting passion and focus on customer experience.

Throughout Customer Experience Magic, creativity keynote speaker Duncan Wardle will show your audience what can happen when your organization transitions from a product-centric focus to a customer-centric one, and the steps you’ll need to take to get there. He’ll share a famous real-world example from his time as the Head of Innovation and Creativity at The Walt Disney Company, where they found themselves facing challenges brought on not by their direct competitors, but by retail behemoth Amazon, whose lightning-fast fulfillment and delivery systems drastically changed how long consumers were willing to wait to be served.

As Duncan walks your audience through this example, he’ll share the exact steps they took to turn this problem into a massive opportunity, and how they used it to reshape the way Disney serves its theme park guests, creating a whole new echelon in customer experience. A new level of experience that’s frequently deemed to be “magic” by their guests.

By the end of this interactive presentation, your audience will have developed a whole new understanding of customer experience, and will be able to reframe all the challenges facing your organization, finding those unique opportunities to create some customer experience magic.

Business as Unusual! [Virtual]

A recipe for not only surviving, but thriving in our whole new world:

1. Take the unprecedented chaos that surrounds us. Add one beautiful silver lining—one that admonishes the #1 barrier to innovation—“Time to Think!” We have more time than ever at present.

2. Sprinkle in hundreds of declining industries that have been in a slow decline for some time, that will now see that decline accelerate really quickly as no one gets to go back to “Business As Usual!”

3. Mix in the fact that people are hurting, employees are scared, and we could all do with a dose of distraction and inspiration.

4. Combine all three ingredients and pivot to a whole new approach, reinventing the way we do business by creating a whole new tool kit that makes innovation easy, creativity tangible, and the process fun.

5. Top off with a dose of Magical Pixie Dust: Duncan Wardle, with 25 years of experience with Disney, the world’s most creative company (most recently as Head of Innovation and Creativity).

6. And bake for an hour. Could be a webinar, a virtual workshop using virtual breakout rooms and whiteboards, to help your team think different and reimagine your way to business as “Unusual!”

A Crash Course in Innovation! [Virtual]

This Workshop is an immersive program that teaches teams how to create an “innovation light switch” within their organization. One that can be turned on at any moment to access creative problem solving and innovative new ideas. Specifically designed to address the 5 biggest obstacles to innovation and creativity in the workplace, workshop participants aren’t just told what needs to be done… they are given the chance to actually do. People learn by doing not by listening! Participants take on a challenge using core Design Thinking principles to help them Think Different, and they then deliver innovative ideas that are embedded in core consumer truths, resulting in significant business results.


Can You Really Have Great Ideas “On-Demand”? [Virtual]

Do you ever wonder why most of your best ideas come to you in the shower, on the commute, while falling asleep, or some other such place? Have you ever pitched a new idea, only to watch it get diluted or killed as it moves through the processes? Have you ever wondered how Walt Disney came up with the idea for Disneyland or how Netflix completely revolutionized the movie industry?

Throughout the Innovation Workshop, Duncan will give each participant a unique set of Innovation Tools and Techniques – one’s honed during his tenure at Disney as Head of Innovation and Creativity. The same tool kit he uses today to teach innovation at companies like Apple, Amazon, and universities like Yale and UNC.