By Rick Goldstein
The Food for Thought Luncheon on Wednesday in Orlando, Florida’s, Orange County Convention Center marked the final day of APCO 2024 with recognition of people, agency certifications and chapter membership success. It concluded with a how-to seminar on bringing creativity and innovation to life and work.
APCO CEO and Executive Director Mel Maier introduced the award winners for chapter membership:
- Chapter Growth in Number of Members went to the Florida Chapter for adding 883 new members.
- Chapter Growth by Percentage of New Members went to the New Mexico Chapter for rising by 90%.
- Membership by Population Density went to the Wyoming Chapter.
After the membership awards, Maier recognized agencies whose representatives were present that have achieved the Agency Training Program Certification standard from APCO this year:
- Boulder Police and Fire Communications
- Calcasieu Parish E-911
- Cherokee County E-911
- City of Plano Public Safety Communications
- Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency
- Cobb County Department of Communications
- Delaware State Police Communications
- Fauquier County Sheriff’s Office, Communications Division
- Fremont Police Department
- Gwinnett County Police Department – 9-1-1 Communications Division
- Habersham County Central Communications
- Helena-Lewis & Clark County 9-1-1 Communication Center
- High Point 9-1-1 Communications
- Jeffcom 9-1-1
- Loudoun County Fire and Rescue Emergency Communications
- Mecklenburg County Emergency Communications Center
- New Hampshire Division of Emergency Services and Communications
- Orange County Emergency Communications
- Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office
- Prisma Health Ambulance Service
- Raleigh-Wake Emergency Communications Center
- Rice County Emergency Communications Center
- Southeast Emergency Communications
- Southwest Regional Communications Center
- Tompkins County Department of Emergency Response
- Valley 15 Communications Center
- Virginia Beach Emergency Communications and Citizen Services
The complete list of certified agencies is here.
APCO President Becky Neugent, who rotated to Immediate Past President later on Wednesday, presented the 2024 Presidential Award to Joheida Fister, deputy fire chief of administration and fire marshal, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Fister encouraged and facilitated Neugent’s work as a member of the APCO Executive Committee after Neugent became E911 communications manager, Hilton Head Island Fire & Rescue.
“She was my boss, and she had my respect, but she was also my first friend on an unfamiliar island. She was the first person to believe in me. She made me believe in myself,” Neugent said. “All anyone needs in life is for one person, just one, to believe in them and give them a chance.”
Next up on the lunch program were the conference hosts of APCO 2024 in Orlando and APCO 2025, the upcoming Annual Conference & Expo in Baltimore.
Orlando Chair Ricky Rowell thanked members of the conference committee.
“Your tireless hard work and dedication brought success to this conference. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for joining me in this journey,” Rowell said.
He also thanked the emergency communications centers that allowed tours of their facilities and recognized the volunteers who made APCO 2024 possible.
Following Rowell came 2025 APCO Conference Committee Chairs Tenea Reddick and Thomas Ward who introduced the sights and sounds of Baltimore with a video showing off its museums, baseball stadium, historic personalities and seafood.
Chris Riehl, a tour guide in Baltimore, dug deeper into the charms of Charm City. “If you take a little time to peel back the layers you’ll uncover the truth: that our city is, and always has been, a rich tapestry of diversity and culture, innovation and imagination,” he said.
The final act of the Food for Thought Luncheon came in the form of the rapid-fire delivery and audience participation presentation by Duncan Wardle, head of innovation and creativity at Disney. His topic, naturally enough, was how to bring creativity and innovation to one’s life and workplace.
Wardle named the “river of thinking” as an enemy of new ideas. It’s the tendency to do the same old things in the same old way. Among his recommendations to get out of it were:
- Respond to new ideas with “Yes and (insert your idea)” rather than “No, because (insert reason it can’t be done).”
- Use playfulness and laughter to access the unconscious where the best ideas come from.
- Escape your river of thinking by writing down rules that prevent implementation of a new idea, and then writing down how the rules can be broken.
- Escape your river of thinking by deploying diverse minds to attack problems.
“Ask the most absurd question. You’ll be amazed how quickly it gets you out of your river of thinking,” Wardle said.
Wardle told the story of the 1940 premiere of “Fantasia,” the dream-like Disney animated feature set to classical music. Walt Disney asked: Could he pipe mist into movie theaters while the movie was playing? The answer from theater owners was: no. So Disney wrote down the rules of movie theaters. Among the rules: you can’t change their environment to suit individual movies (at least the movie producer can’t). Then he wrote down the rules that he wanted. Change the environment (e.g., generate mist), bring cast members to the audience …
You may see where this is going. It’s the root of the idea of Disneyland, which opened in 1955 in Anaheim, California.
Movie streaming came about from another apparently absurd question. Why do we have to have late fees for our rental videos? Why not have “rental” movies on demand? The questions may seem obvious now, but they were a bit absurd in the 2000s when thousands of Blockbuster storefronts populated American neighborhoods filled with VHS tapes that came and went. But Reed Hastings asked these questions, and in 2007 introduced Netflix streaming video, which now dominates the way the world watches movies.
Wardle asked the audience in the Orange County Convention Center to draw a house on a piece of paper in 15 seconds. He drew one himself on an easel on stage. It looked like nearly everyone else’s: Triangle roof, rectangle body, one window, one door.
Why did everyone draw this kind of house, Wardle asked. He called it an example of the river of thinking, the impulse to do the same things in the same ways again and again.
Wardle told a story about the struggle to design Shanghai Disneyland. Disney architects gathered in a room and their ideas fell flat. Wardle saw that part of the problem was lack of diversity among the idea-generators. They were all over-50 white male architects.
He brought a 17-year-old female professional chef from Shanghai to the table for brainstorming. Wardle wanted a “naïve expert,” who knew nothing of the project, who wasn’t there to solve the problem, but who could remove the architects from their river of thinking.
He asked them to draw a house. Everyone drew the triangle on top of the rectangle, except the chef. She drew a “dim sum” house. It was a circular building with Chinese dim sum noodles as the roof. As a naïve expert and member of a different culture, she was not embarrassed to draw a different sort of structure. It was informed by her own experiences and influences. Disney used the idea as the foundation for the Shanghai Disneyland architecture.
It takes bravery to exercise creativity and practice innovation, Wardle said. “It’s a good sign, a sign to you and you alone that you are taking risks, and you are thinking differently. You are being brave,” he said. “The opposite of bravery is not cowardice; it’s conformity.”
