Chronicle No. 45 · Lessons
Safety, Courtesy, Show, Efficiency: Disney's Order of Operations
Disney did not just give its people values. It ranked them, so that a cast member knows which one wins when two collide.
When Disneyland opened in 1955, new employees went through an orientation that became known as Traditions. It is still the first thing a Disney parks recruit does, and its subject is not job skills but the company's history and its idea of the guest.
Much of what it teaches is vocabulary, and the vocabulary does the work. Employees are cast members. Customers are guests. Anywhere a guest can see you is onstage; everywhere else is backstage. A theatre metaphor sounds like a gimmick until you notice that it silently answers a hundred questions a day about how to stand, what to say and where a conversation belongs.
The operating core is the Four Keys, taught from day one and, unusually, ranked in strict order of priority:
- Safety — never traded for any other key
- Courtesy — treat every guest as a VIP
- Show — everything a guest sees, hears and touches is part of the production
- Efficiency — last, deliberately
Most companies publish four values and leave staff to guess which one to sacrifice under pressure. Disney answers the question in advance, and puts speed at the bottom.
In 2020 the company added a fifth key, Inclusion, described as welcoming and respecting different viewpoints and people, and worked it into global training the following year.
The science behind it has a name too. Bruce Laval, the industrial engineer who built the parks' operations research tradition from 1971, called his craft guestology: studying, in measurable detail, what guests actually expect. Warmth on the front line, arithmetic behind it.
“You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.”
Lesson: Values only help at the moment of decision if you have said, in advance, which one comes first.
