Walt Disney and implicit modeling

I’ve just found out this great Walt Disney story originally posted by John F. Miller as a reply to this stackoverflow question ):

“There is a story told that Walt Disney never used story boards. He would simply tell the story and then work with the animators to make it happen. When Mr. Disney passed away the team tried to continue this approach since it had been so effective, but found that they could not makes things work without the storyboards. They reached the conclusion that they had always had storyboards, but that previously they had been embodied in Walt Disney himself.”

Even if I have no idea whether this story is real or not, it is perfect to illustrate the fact that we always use mental models of what we pretend to create (as we originally discussed in this post: to model or not to model – that is the wrong Question . Whether it is worth to make this implicit mental models explicit (and to which degree) depends on the circumstances of the project/team/… In this case, once Walt Disney was gone and (I guess) the storyboards had to be created following a more collaborative approach, they were forced to make the models explicit so they could share and discuss them.