Fisher challenges the negative perception of circuses as chaotic, explaining instead how they operate like clockwork with diverse teams who trust each other completely. He outlines three key themes for business success: chemistry (team collaboration and trust), creativity (structured innovation with clear goals and parameters), and customer experience.
Drawing from his unique background as both a former performer and current executive, he shares insights on building credibility, fostering innovation within organizational structures, and maintaining global team connectivity through regular communication.
Putting the Customer First
All Things Insights: We’re here with Duncan Fisher, Chief Show Operation Officer for Cirque du Soleil. Thank you so much for coming here to TMRE 2025.
Duncan Fisher: I’m absolutely delighted to be here.
All Things Insights: We are so delighted to have you. You’re doing an amazing keynote later, and probably one of the best headlines of the show conference, “How to Run Your Business Like a Circus.” Can you tell us a little bit about that theme and about your keynote?
Duncan Fisher: The idea for the keynote came about because you hear so much these days that this is like a circus, and that is like a circus. It’s never in a positive way. It’s always referring to a dysfunctional chaotic situation that something is like a circus. Well, to be honest, that’s complete nonsense. The circus is a place that runs like clockwork, and it’s managed by teams of people, from all over the world, from all backgrounds, all colors, and creeds who literally trust each other with their lives.
So I created the keynote as a way to dispel that notion that the circus is a negative thing. It really is an example of clinical operations, of really putting the customer first in everything that we do.
All Things Insights: The theme of TMRE this year is the next era of insights, and it’s looking forward into the future of market researchers and their teams. How does your background and your keynote kind of tap into that? What can the insights professional take away from your presentation in terms of running their operations?
Duncan Fisher: There’s three themes that I touch on in the keynote, and that’s chemistry, creativity, and customer experience. In the chemistry bit, it’s how to get teams to work together, to trust each other, to empower your employees.
In creativity, it’s about the company empowering and encouraging creativity within the ranks. And then, you know, if you have chemistry and you have creativity, you will naturally deliver excellent customer experience, and customer journeys to your customers.
Bringing Innovation to the Stage
All Things Insights: Understanding the customer is ultimately a key philosophy to market research. Building the chemistry and the diverse teams that they need to have, creating a structured mindset for their own teams and operations is important. Can you tell us a little bit about how you can bring innovation to the team?
Duncan Fisher: Cirque du Soleil has been innovating for 40 years now. But we have a structure that encourages creativity. Creativity is not just something that you can make. It has to come from the top. It has to be a mindset. It has to be nurtured and become part of the culture of a company and as we work. Whether it’s creating a show in the artistic aspect of it or even in operations; there’s plenty of creativity in operations such as, how do you solve a problem differently? How do you operate more effectively? All these things come down to having a goal and having parameters.
When you’re talking about innovation, or creativity, whichever word you want to use about it, if you just sit down with a blank piece of paper, that doesn’t work. It’s a myth that you can just say, think of something. There has to be direction. There has to be a goal, where you’re trying to get to, what are you trying to do, and there has to be basic parameters that you have to adhere to. So, no matter what you’re trying to innovate or create, you have to have that framework to work in. Otherwise, people are going to spin in circles and not accomplish very much. So we set up that structure to serve both for the artistic innovation and also the operational innovation.
Empowering Teams to Reach New Heights
All Things Insights: How do you empower your teams? Certainly, that’s a theme that always resonates in market research. And insights teams are always trying to bring leadership from the top. But how do they empower the team to reach their fullest potential?
Duncan Fisher: That starts with having shared goals, having an understanding of the big picture of what we’re trying to accomplish. There has to be a goal. There has to be guiding principles that you’re going to use to be able to get to that goal. Then after that, it’s about everybody understanding their role within that bigger picture, how their work fits into delivering the goal. And then when you have that understanding, when you have that transparency of what people do, that’s when you can build trust within the teams. And when you have that trust, then you can start to have empowerment, and everybody can be empowered to make decisions, in line with the company’s goals.
It’s all about getting people to understand that goal, which goes then to communication. How do you communicate that goal? How do people understand the intent of what it is that you’re trying to do? For example, we’re a global company. We have teams all over the world. But every day, I put everybody onto video conferencing. Now we can do it without even thinking about it.
But, actually, we don’t just have one huddle a day. We have two because we have people on every different time zone almost that there is. So we have what we call a west, and east, huddle, and we have a west huddle at the end of the day because it’ll be different people coming to work at a different time. But it connects everybody. It’s so important that everybody understands what everybody else’s role is in addition to theirs, to get that unity, that common pursuit of the same goal. But it all comes down to us giving the intent, giving the goals, and then empowering people to be able to deliver that.
Life & Careers Under the Big Top
All Things Insights: We noticed in your biography, you were actually a performer at one point in your career. How does that relate to your position now? What were some lessons learned there that you take with you?
Duncan Fisher: I was a gymnast in school. I was in the junior British gymnastics team, and then at some point, I was offered the chance to literally run away with the circus and be an acrobat. And I did that. It’s given me the advantage in that I’ve seen things basically from the very bottom of the ladder and now towards the top. But when I started performing, basically, as soon as I arrived on the circus, I was asked, do you want to make some extra money? Of course, I wanted to, I was twenty years old and broke. Of course, I wanted to make some extra money. So I started loading the seats into the back of the truck when we moved from city to city. Then I learned how to put the tent up. Then I became in charge of the crews, and it kind of went from there. But the point is that I’ve learned every job on the way up the ladder. It gives me that credibility with the staff now that I’ve been there and done that.
I’m actually the only ex-performer to be in the C-suite at Cirque du Soleil since Guy Laliberté, the founder. It doesn’t just give me credibility with the technicians, but also with the artistic and performance side as well. I’ve seen it from both sides, and I’ve seen it all the way from the bottom to the top. That credibility is something that helps me.
All Things Insights: How to run your business like a circus. It’s not chaos, but it’s actually how the magic happens. Duncan, thank you so much for coming here today and talking with us. Good luck with your keynote today.
Duncan Fisher: Thank you very much.
Editor’s Note: The next TMRE will take place on October 5-7, 2026, and will be co-located with Content Marketing World at the Colorado Convention Center, Denver, CO.
