Chief Change Officer
#235 From Disney Magic to Real-World Teamwork: Tricia & Edward’s Guide to Collaboration That Works – Part One
Sat, 15 Mar 2025
We live in a world where “connections” are made with a click, but real collaboration takes more than a follow and a like. How do we build relationships that actually last?In this episode, I sit down with Tricia Cerrone and Edward J. van Luinen, two former Disney colleagues who turned workplace synergy into a decade-long friendship and a thriving business partnership. Now, they’re co-authoring a book to help others master the art of collaboration.In Part Two, we’ll break down their framework—five key behaviors and a “noble purpose” approach that makes teamwork more than just a buzzword.Key Highlights of Our Interview:Emotional Banking: The Secret to Long-Lasting Work Relationships“Relationships at work thrive on trust, respect, and mutual goals. By making consistent positive deposits into the ‘emotional bank,’ teams can evolve into high-performing units. Delivering results is key, but so is showing up for each other and building something lasting, as Trish and I found over a three-year project.”Collaboration Isn’t Just Tools—It’s Human Connection“The business world is spending almost $40 billion on collaboration tools, which are a band-aid for our failures to communicate. If you don’t have the human behaviours of generosity, resourcefulness, co-creation, action, and gratitude, no technology is going to help your team be happy or collaborate better.”Be the Change You Seek—Gandhi’s Wisdom for Collaboration“There’s a great quote by Gandhi: ‘Create the change you want to be.’ That’s the foundation of our collaboration model—being the change and the leader your team is asking you to be.”_____________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guests: Tricia Cerrone and Edward J. Van Luinen______________________--Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.10 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.130,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today. --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.12 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>140,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: What is the focus of this episode on collaboration?
In today's episode, I sit down with two guests, Edward Van Duden and Tricia Strong, to talk about connection and collaboration. This is part one of our two-part series. Today, Edward and Tricia will look back on their own collaborative journey, which started 10 years ago at Disley. They turned a positive work relationship into a sustainable personal friendship
that has now grown into a business partnership and a co-authoring collaboration on a book about collaboration. In tomorrow's episode, part two, we'll dive into the vision and framework for collaboration. centered on a noble purpose and five key behaviors. What are these behaviors? How can we practice them? And why is collaboration so challenging today?
I assure you, the method isn't just another software solution. is far more human-centered than what we're used to seeing. Let's start collaborating. Good morning, Edward and Tricia. Welcome to my show.
Thank you. Great to be here.
Yes, I'm happy to be here. We always start with a self-introduction. But today's episode is extra special because for the first time ever, I have not one, but two guests joining me. A unique moment for the show. Let's kick things off, Edward and Tricia, whichever one of you would like to go first. Share a bit about yourselves and your personal journey.
Then we'll go into how the two of you came together to collaborate. After all, collaboration is the key theme of today's episode. So let's hear your individual stories and then we'll get into how your paths crossed and what makes this collaboration so impactful.
Thank you very much, Vince. I'm delighted. We're delighted to be here and grateful for this opportunity to chat with your worldwide audience. I'm Edward Van Lunen, and I always start my origin story this way. I was a United States Peace Corps volunteer in the 1980s.
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Chapter 2: How did Tricia and Edward's collaboration journey begin?
And I was sent to the Republic of Guinea in West Africa to be an English as a foreign language teacher at two high schools in a mid-sized town about 600 miles in the interior of the country. And on the first day of my teaching, I had two overriding emotions. One was fear. Edward, these students are listening to you. Are you making any sense? If not, you better start making sense really fast.
And then after about three months or so, I had that other emotion happen, which is, I think I like this. I'm enjoying this work. Fast forward 35 years to where we are today, and I am still making Keem's companies and leaders better. In between, I was privileged to work for some great companies and having been mentored by incredible human resources leaders, mostly female.
at Avon Products, at Heineken, at Sony, and at Disney. And I am really a talent development leader and grateful to be in this space and business and here speaking with you and Tricia today. So thank you for having me.
Chapter 3: What was Tricia's experience working at Disney?
I'll jump in now. I'm Trisha Cerrone and my history really goes back, my entire career has been one of designing and telling stories with new technologies. I think pretty much every project I've ever done had some kind of either new hardware or software or experience that we were trying to create.
And in doing that, working a lot in the interactive world, it led me to Disney, where I spent most of my career. I had an amazing career at Disney, and I really got to do everything I wanted to do. My sweet spot was always in innovation and coming up with new ideas.
I was able to lead our Blue Sky studio for four years and just come up with ideas with the teams there for retail and brides and restaurants and all sorts of things, and I really loved it. But I also was really good at teaching other people how to develop ideas and design and innovate.
That's what led me in my career to start doing a lot of the talent development, which my leader then hooked me up with Edward down the road. And that's really how we ended up meeting.
So you both met in Disley, right? I'd love to hear more about that first experience working together. Let's dive into the details. Edward, let's start with you. How did you feel when you first met Tricia? And how did this collaboration unfold from your perspective? And then, Trish here, we would love to hear your side of the story as well.
I think it will be really interesting to explore both viewpoints.
At Disney, working at Imagineering, I would say a talent leader who gets business. And I met Trish initially when I was new at the company and saw her in a meeting, and I thought, this is a business leader who gets talent. So as in a talent development role, You're always looking for business leaders who get talent as much as their technical or functional skills. And that certainly was Trish.
So I was delighted to meet her. So from a professional support and business relationship perspective now, I had a goal to lead talent development at Imagineering, which was to make sure that leaders and teams globally were working and successfully at building their next level up leadership goals. I could in no way do that by myself. So I was always looking for business partners.
And Tricia was that business partner. And I was just delighted to that early meeting. We had a couple of meetings and I thought this is something that is a beginning of a collaboration that I think could be very promising.
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Chapter 4: How did Tricia and Edward overcome initial collaboration challenges?
my side of the story. I get invited to a meeting in my leader's office and Edward is sitting on the sofa and I'm asked to sit next to him. And then our leader says, we have this initiative. I want you to collaborate. And he's grinning like it was the best idea he ever came up with. And in my mind, I'm sitting there going, What just happened? There's so many problems with this.
People don't collaborate in leadership. Not the way you think. I could see all the barriers to us being successful and succeeding in this project. I thought the project was really important, but I also knew this had been assigned to Edward. And if I jump in, it'll look like I'm taking over the project and all this other stuff. Our leader was just like, he was just happy to have us there.
You guys will figure it out. And so we left. I was thinking, okay, so she wants us to co-lead and all the problems with that. We are a matrix organization. So he reports up to a different leader and I report to a different leader. And you definitely don't want one leader to have more information than the other earlier than the other. So there was going to be politics involved.
There would be, how do we manage the same team? And they don't go to one person or the other and say, he said I could do this, or she said I could do this. There's all those issues. And then there's just like communication and agreeing on a direction that you want to go. And at the end of the day, if something goes wrong, who is accountable?
So I had all these things going through my head when Edward invited me to a coffee for us to talk through what the project needed first and how we were going to do it. I wasn't all gung-ho, like, this is going to be awesome. But I was at least 13 for, okay, what do I know about this new guy? And I had met with Edward a couple times.
I had been in his office, and he was, like, one of the most helpful HR people that I had ever experienced. So in 30 minutes, he gave me a plan that was going to help me with an initiative I was working on. And there was innovation books on his desk. So I'm like, okay, he can't be that bad. We have some common interests there. There's a lot of savants and passionate people at Imaginary.
So corralling a group of us is not an easy thing. And I was in a session where he went leading some development and I was like, oh my gosh, they're going to just run him over. But he managed to get everyone on track. So I had those two positive experiences. But I still felt like we're really different people in terms of our personality and our background and so many other things.
But we had that first coffee and Edward did a couple of things really well in that first coffee that helped me to relax. and realize, okay, so far so good. He understands where I'm coming from, and he's offering to understand how I need to communicate, what my time availability is, and just that little bit of generosity toward understanding me.
opened up space for me and my mind and heart to then reciprocate and to say, okay, what do you need from me? And then we made a plan to meet next. And that's how we got started from my perspective.
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Chapter 5: How did Tricia and Edward's collaboration evolve over time?
That was how long ago? I don't know. Is it 2013 or 14?
Yeah, I would say it was 20, 20, let's see, 14. Yes.
Wow, 10 years ago, that's a long time. So after that first encounter at Disley, how did the working relationship evolve? Was it more day-to-day interaction? Or maybe project-based, on and off? Did you face any moments of confrontation or was it mostly collaborative? I'd like to hear how both of you describe the experience after that initial meeting.
So it was a three-year project, which is rare in a way for people to lead equally. And so it gave us a lot of time to learn all the things that we probably didn't know about collaboration. But I think we had good intuition and previous, we've led, both led a lot of projects and things at other companies before. So we had some skills going into it. We had pretty close contact regularly.
We had a weekly meeting. We had, our teams had task force meetings. We would text each other when we had updates and then talk on the phone if we were available. It was always so positive that I think that contributed to us building a friendship. And also we realized that everything that we were The way that we were treating each other, we were also treating our team and modeling that for them.
So they were emulating us and they were also passing it on to new people who we brought on to the team. So it had this ongoing onboarding effect when you would join our team. We noticed that our team, they weren't just amazing. It's not like we got to pick everyone that we wanted. And sometimes we only had people for a short amount of time.
But everyone who was on the team always just gave us their A game. They were always solving problems. They were always had just positive energy. We're going to work together to help each other and make everything successful. Every night when we left the company we were talking about, just there was something very different about that project and about that experience.
And it's not that neither of us have had, you know, passion and energy on teams. It was just that every positive thing was on that project and in that group and in those people. And so that's when we started deconstructing the experience.
Absolutely agree with you, Trish. And I feel that what was fundamental but still unformed until after we left Disney were the five collaboration behaviors. And we demonstrated them, right? And then others also did. And that was how we first role modeled it and grew the team.
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