Creativity Inc.

What you need in a quick read…

What follows is from: Catmull, Ed, and Amy Wallace. Creativity, Inc. Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Random House, 2014.

Introduction: Lost & Found

A unique culture defines this place.

Pixar’s campus was designed by Steve Jobs with well-thought-out patterns of entry and egress that encourage people to mingle, meet, and communicate.

The unifying idea for the building isn’t luxury but community. Steve wanted the building to support our work by enhancing our ability to collaborate.

We value self expression here. Visitors often tell me that the experience of walking into Pixar leaves them feeling a little wistful, like something is missing in their work lives — a palpable energy, a feeling of collaboration and unfettered creativity, a sense of possibility. I respond by telling them that the feeling they are picking up on, whatever they call it, is integral to our success.

We acknowledge that we will always have problems, many of them hidden from our view; that we work hard to uncover these problems, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; and that, when we come across a problem, we marshal all of our energies to solve it.

We put our faith in a simple idea. If we made something that we wanted to see, others would want to see it too.

There were plenty of moments when the future of Pixar was in doubt. Now, we were suddenly being held up as an example of what could happen when artists trust their guts.

Toy Story went on to become the top-grossing film of the year, but it wasn’t just the numbers that made us proud; money, after all, is just one measure of a thriving company and usually not the most meaningful one. No, what I found gratifying was what we had created…making a great film.

I’d quietly set the goal of making the first computer-animated feature film and I’d worked tirelessly for twenty years to accomplish it. I couldn’t deny that achieving the goal that had defined my professional life had left me without one. Is this all there is? Is is time for a new challenge?

I’d spent two decades building a train and laying its track. Now, the thought of merely driving it struck me as a far less interesting task. Was making one film after another enough to engage me? I wondered. What would be my organizing principle now?

My mandate at Lucasfilm was to merge moviemaking with technology. I was first and foremost a scientist then, not a manager.

Gradually a pattern began to emerge: Someone had a creative idea, obtained funding, brought on a lot of smart people, and developed and sold a product that got a boatload of attention.That initial success begat more success, luring the best engineers and attracting customers who had interesting and high-profile problems to solve. As these companies grew, much was written about their paradigm-shifting approaches. The leaders of these companies radiated supreme confidence. But then those companies did something stupid — not just stupid in retrospect, but obvious at the time stupid. I wanted to understand why. What was causing smart people to make decisions that sent their companies off the rails? I didn’t doubt that they believed they were doing the right thing, but something was blinding them — and keeping them from seeing the problems that threatened to upend them. As a result, their companies expanded like bubbles, then burst.

Trying to solve this mystery would be my next challenge. My desire to protect Pixar from the forces that ruin so many businesses gave me renewed focus. I began to see my new role as a leader more clearly. I would devote myself to learning how to build not just a successful company, but a sustainable creative culture.

It has always been my goal to create a culture at Pixar that will outlast its founding leaders, but it is also my goal to share our underlying philosophies with other leaders and, frankly, with anyone who wrestles with the competing — but necessarily complementary — forces of art and commerce. This book is an attempt to put down on paper my best ideas about how we built the culture that is the bedrock of this place. This book is for anyone who wants to work in an environment that fosters creativity and problem solving.

We start from the presumption that our people are talented and want to contribute. We accept that, without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in myriad unseen ways. Finally, we try to identify those impediments and fix them.

I’ve spent nearly forty years thinking about how to help smart, ambitious people work effectively with one another. The way I see it, my job as a manager is to create a fertile environment, keep it healthy, and watch for things that undermine it. I believe, to my core, that everybody has the potential to be creative — whatever form creativity takes — and that to encourage such development is a noble thing. More interesting to me, though, are the blocks that get in the way, often without us noticing, and hinder the creativity that resides within any thriving company.

I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know — not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur. I believe that managers must loosen the controls, not tighten them. They must accept risk; they must trust the people they work with and strive to clear the path for them; and always, they must pay attention to and engage with anything that creates fear. Moreover, successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be wrong or incomplete. Only when we admit what we don’t know can we ever hope to learn it.

My hope is that by relating my search for the sources of confusion and delusion within Pixar and Disney Animation, I can help other avoid the pitfalls that impede and sometimes ruin businesses of all kinds. What has kept me motivated has been the realization that identifying these destructive forces isn’t merely a philosophical exercise. It is a crucial, central mission. The need for vigilance never goes away. This book, then, is about the ongoing work of paying attention — of leading by being self-aware, as managers and as companies. It is an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.

Getting Started

Animated

We had a table in the large conference room that was long and skinny. It was elegant, but it impeded our work. Everyone was so spread out that it was difficult to communicate. For those unlucky enough to be seated at the far ends, ideas didn’t flow because it was nearly impossible to make eye contact without craning your neck. It was important that the director and producer of the film in question be able to hear what everyone was saying so they had to be placed at the center of the table. To ensure that certain people were always seated together, someone began making place cards.

When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless. That’s what I believe. The closer you were seated to the middle of our conference table, though, the more important — the more central — you must be. It wasn’t until we had meetings in a smaller room with a square table that we realized what was wrong. Around the smaller table, interplay was better, ideas were more free-flowing, and eye contact was automatic. Everyone felt free to speak up. This was not only what we wanted, it was a fundamental Pixar belief: Unhindered communication was key, no matter what your position. Hierarchy was precisely what we were trying to avoid.

Walt Disney was one of my two boyhood idols. The other was Albert Einstein. To me, they represented two poles of creativity. Disney was all about inventing the new, both artistically and technologically. Einstein, by contrast, was a master of explaining that which already was.

Disney’s animators were at the forefront of applied technology; instead of merely using existing methods, they were inventing ones of their own. They had to develop the tools to perfect sound and color. Everytime some technological breakthrough occurred, Walt Disney incorporated it and then talked about it on his show in a way that highlighted the relationship between technology and art. Watching Disney one Sunday evening, I experienced something that would define my professional life. An artist was drawing Donald Duck. As the artist’s pencil moved around the page, Donald came to life. The way the art was imbued with such emotion made it the most interesting problem I’d ever considered. I wanted to climb through the TV screen and be part of this world.

It soon became clear to me that I would never be talented enough to join Disney Animation’s vaulted ranks. I had a far better understanding of how one became a scientist. The route seemed easier to discern. My decision to pursue physics, and not art, would lead me, indirectly, to my true calling.

Much of my research was done at the U of U’s computer science department that was funded by ARPA. ARPA was created in response to Sputnik and one of its key organizing principles was that collaboration could lead to excellence. One of ARPA’s proudest achievements was linking universities with the “ARPANET,” which would eventually evolve into the Internet. ARPA’s mandate was to support smart people in a variety of areas. It was carried out based on the presumption that researchers would try to do the right thing. In ARPA’s view, over-managing was counterproductive. ARPA’s administrators did not hover over the shoulders of those of us working on the projects they funded, nor did they demand our work have direct military applications. They simply trusted us to innovate.

I set a new goal: to develop a way to animate, not with a pencil but with a computer.

At the U of U’s computer graphics department, where every one of us yearned to make computer-generated images look as if they were photographs of real objects, we had three driving goals: speed, realism, and the ability to depict curved surfaces.

I left Utah with a nice list of innovations under my belt, but I was keenly aware that I’d only done all this in the service of a larger mutual goal. The work I’d championed had taken hold largely because of the protective, eclectic, intensely challenging environment I’d been in. The leaders of my department understood that to create a fertile laboratory, they had to assemble different kinds of thinkers and then encourage their autonomy. They had to offer feedback when needed but also had to be willing to stand back and give us room. The most valuable thing I was taking away from the U of U was the model my teachers had provided for how to lead and inspire other creative thinkers. I walked away from Utah with a clearer sense of my goal: making the first computer animated film. My self-assigned mission was about much more than technology. To pull it off, we’d have to be creative not only technically, but also in the ways that we worked together.

Back then, no other company or university shared my goal of making a computer-generated film. Then, I received a mysterious call from a woman who worked at the New York Institute of Technology. She hung up because someone was supposed to call me before she did. The next phone call I received changed my life.

Pixar is Born

By taking a series of jobs and working for three iconoclastic men, I received a crash course in leadership. As I gained experience, I was asking questions that intrigued me even as they confused me. One thing is for sure, I never stopped questioning.

My first boss, Alex Schure, was starting a research lab whose mission was to bring computers into the animation process. Money was not a problem. They needed someone to run the place. We were grateful for Alex’s eagerness to fund our work. He left it to me to assemble a team. He had total confidence in the people he hired.

I needed to attract the sharpest minds; to attract the sharpest minds, I needed to put my own insecurities away. Since hiring Alvy Ray Smith, the guy who I feared could one day take my job as I interviewed him, I’ve made a policy of trying to hire people who are smarter than I am. Hiring Alvy changed me as a manager: By ignoring my fear, I learned that the fear was groundless. Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.

At NYIT, we focused on a single goal: pushing the boundaries of what computers could do in animation and graphics. As word of our mission spread, we began to attract the top people.

I created a flat organizational structure. It had its limits, but it gave a ton of freedom to highly self-motivated people and enabled us to make significant technological leaps in a short time.

Among the companies that were trying to solve the same problems as us, most embraced a culture of strictly enforced secrecy. Alvy and I decided to do the opposite — to share our work with the outside world. NYIT engaged with the computer graphics community, publishing everything we discovered, participating in committees to review papers written by all manner of researchers, and taking active roles at all the major academic conferences. The benefit of this transparency was not immediately felt, but the relationships and connections we formed, over time, proved far more valuable than we could have imagined, fueling our technological innovation and our understanding of creativity in general.

Thanks to Alex, we were fortunate to have the funds to buy the equipment and hire the people necessary to innovate in the world of computer animation, but we didn’t have anyone who knew anything about filmmaking. As we developed the ability to tell a story with a computer, we still didn’t have storytellers among us. In 1976, the idea of incorporating high technology into Hollywood filmmaking wasn’t just a low priority; it wasn’t even on the radar. One man was about to change that with a movie called Star Wars.

On May 25, 1977, Star Wars opened in theaters. Lucasfilm and its ascendant Industrial Light & Magic studio had taken the lead developing new tools in visual effects and sound design. Thanks to Luke Skywalker, George Lucas had the resources to launch a computer division.

One of George’s key people came to see me at NYIT. Soon after I was on my way to Lucasfilm in California. The first thing I was asked was, “Who else should Lucasfilm be considering for this job?” I rattled off names of several people doing impressive work in a variety of technical areas. My willingness to do this reflected my worldview, forged in academia, that any hard problem should have many good minds simultaneously trying to solve it. Later I learned that Lucasfilm has already interviewed all the people I listed and when they were asked the same question, not one of them suggested any other names. George said he hired me because of my honesty, my clarity of vision, and my steadfast belief in what computers could do. I was offered the job to run his new computer division.

I had to rethink how I managed people. What George wanted to create was a far more ambitious enterprise than the one I oversaw at NYIT. It would have a higher profile, a bigger budget, and given his ambitions in Hollywood, the promise of a greater impact. At NYIT, I’d created a flat structure much like I’d seen at the U of U, giving my colleagues a lot of running room and little oversight. I had been pleased with the results, but I had to admit that our team behaved a lot like a collection of grad students — independent thinkers with individual projects — rather than a team with a common goal. A research lab is not a university, and the structure didn’t scale well.

Our engineers just built a device, which we named the Pixar Image Computer.

Why “Pixar?” Alvy had a fondness for the Spanish language and was intrigued by how certain nouns in English looked like Spanish verbs — like “laser,” for example. Alvy lobbied for “Pixer,” which he imagined to be a (fake) Spanish verb meaning “to take pictures.” Loren countered with “Radar,” which he thought sounded more high tech. That’s when it hit! Pixer + radar = Pixar! It stuck.

The human resistance to change proved to be a big and eternal impediment to our progress. While George wanted this new video-editing system in place, the film editors at Lucasfilm did not. They were perfectly happy with the system they had already mastered, which involved cutting film into snippets with razor blades and then pasting them back together. They couldn’t have been less interested in making changes that would slow them down in the short term. Change meant being uncomfortable. Our certainty that video editing would revolutionize the process didn’t matter, and neither did George’s backing. The people our new system was intended to serve were resistant to it, progress screeched to a halt.

Being confident about the value of our innovation was not enough. We needed to buy-in from the community we were trying to serve. Without it, we were forced to abandon our plans. It wasn’t enough for managers to have good ideas — they had to be able to engender support for those ideas among the people who’d be charged with employing them.

I’d put my version of hierarchy in place by delegating to other managers, but I was also part of a chain of command in the greater Lucasfilm empire. I found it hard enough to hold on, let alone steer. Managing was hard. No one took me aside to give me tips.

George had a fondness for folksy analogies that sought to describe, neatly, the mess of life. The process of moving toward something — of having not yet arrived — was what he idealized. George thought in terms of a long view; he believed in the future and his ability to shape it. He bet on himself — and won.

John Lasseter joined our team after losing his job at Disney. His supervisors felt that The Brave Little Toaster was — like him — a little too avant-garde. For the first time, a true storyteller would be joining our ranks.

The project we enlisted John’s help on was originally going to be called My Breakfast with Andre. John proceeded to save the piece. I could make things move nicely, but not think, emote, and have consciousness. That’s where John came in. His most brilliant stroke was adding a second character, a bumble-bee named Wally for Andre to interact with. The film was renamed The Adventures of Andre and Wally B. We weren’t as focused on the story as we were on showing what was possible to render with a computer.

The movie was designed to run two minutes, but we were still racing against time to complete it. It wasn’t just that the animation process was labor-intensive; it was that we were inventing the animation process as we went along. We had a self-imposed deadline of July 1984 when the annual SIGGRAPH Conference would be held in Minneapolis. Tuesday of the conference week was reserved for “movie night.” Up until then, that had meant mostly 15-second snippets of flying network news logos and scientific visualizations. Wally B. would be the first computerized character animation ever shown at SIGGRAPH.

As the deadline approached, we realized we weren’t going to make it. We could complete a rough version of the film in time, but portions of it would be unfinished, appearing as wire frame images. The night of the premiere, we watched, mortified, but something surprising happened. The majority of the people said they hadn’t even noticed that the movie switched from full color to black and white wireframes! They were so caught up in the emotion of the story that they hadn’t noticed its flaws. For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.

In 1983, George and his wife Marcia split up, and the settlement would significantly affect the cash position of Lucasfilm. George hadn’t lost an ounce of his ambition, but the new financial realities meant that he had to streamline his business. While the computer division wanted more than anything to make an animated feature film, George didn’t share our dream. He had always been most interested in what computers could do to enhance live-action films. Under pressure to consolidate his investments, George decided to sell us. The computer division’s primary asset was the business we’d created around the Pixar Image Computer. Although we originally designed it to handles frames of film, it had proven to have multiple applications, including everything from medical imaging to design prototyping to image image processing for the many three-letter agencies around Washington, D.C. The management team brought in by George to restructure Lucasfilm seemed mostly concerned with cash flow. They became openly skeptical that our division would ever attract a buyer. No deals went through, despite being close, but I am thankful because it paved the way for Steve Jobs to come in.

I remember Steve Jobs’ assertiveness. There was no small talk. Instead, there were questions. Lots of questions. What do you want? Where are you heading? What are your long-term goals? What can the Pixar Image Computer do that other machines on the market can’t? Who do you envision using it? What’s your long-term plan?

Steve was hard-charging, but a conversation with him took you places you didn’t expect. It forced you not just to defend, but also to engage. That in itself, I came to believe, had value.

Steve formally proposed that he buy the graphics group from Lucasfilm and showed us a proposed organizational chart for the new company. As he spoke it became clear to us that his goal was not to build an animation studio; his goal was to build the next generation of home computers to compete with Apple. This wasn’t merely a deviation from our vision, it was the total abandonment of it, so we politely declined. We returned to the task of trying to find a buyer.

This 1985 SIGGRAPH conference was held in San Francisco and we had a booth showcasing our Pixar Image Computer. Steve Jobs dropped by. Since I had last seen him, Steve had founded a personal computer company, NeXT. I think that gave him the ability to approach us with a different mindset. He had less to prove from being ousted from Apple. Steve was ready to make a deal and addressed his previous insistence on controlling and running the company. He was willing to back off on that and was open to letting us explore making a business out of the nexus of computers and graphics. By the end of the meeting, Alvy and I felt comfortable with his proposal and his intentions. The only wild card was what he was going to be like as a partner.

The closing to place February 1986. After signing, Steve pulled Alvy and I aside, put his arms around us, and said, “Whatever happens, we have to be loyal to each other.” The gestation had been trying, but the feisty little company Pixar had been born.

A Defining Goal

There is nothing like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.

I became president of the new hardware company selling the Pixar Image Computer. I had no idea what I was doing.

We had no sales people and no marketing people and no idea where to find them. Steve Jobs, Alvy Ray Smith, John Lasseter, and I had no idea how to run the business we just started.

Not knowing where else to turn, I read books. Most trafficked in a kind of simplicity that seemed harmful in that it offered false reassurance. The books were stocked with catchy phrases like “Dare to fail!” or “Follow people and people will follow you!” or “Focus, focus, focus!” This is nonadvice. When people hear it, they nod their heads in agreement as if a great truth has been presented, not realizing that they’ve been diverted from addressing the far harder problem: deciding what it is that they should be focusing on. There is nothing in this advice that gives you any idea how to figure out where the focus should be, or how to apply your energy to it. It ends up being advice that doesn’t mean anything. These slogans were offered as conclusions, but none of them gave me any clue what to do or what I should focus on.

One thing we definitely had to figure out early for Pixar was working with Steve. Alvy and I appreciated Steve’s vision, but it came with an unusual style of interacting with people. When he attended meetings with potential customers, he wouldn’t hesitate to call them out if he sniffed mediocrity or lack of preparation. His method for taking the measure of a room was saying something definitive and outrageous. He would send out sharp impulses.

My first order of business as Pixar’s president was to find and hire good people. I sought the counsel of experienced people. I sought simple answers to complex questions because I was unsure, but simple answers — so seductive in their rationality — distracted me and kept me from asking more fundamental questions.

We had to quickly learn what it meant to produce computers and a valuable lesson came from the history of Japanese manufacturing. No one thinks about the assembly line as a place that engenders creativity. I’d associated manufacturing more with efficiency than with inspiration. I soon discovered that the Japanese had found a way of making production a creative endeavor that engaged its workers. After World War II, “Made in Japan” had a negative connotation. America, by contrast, was a manufacturing powerhouse. The Ford Motor Company had pioneered smoothly flowing assembly lines for large quantities at low prices. Time saved translated into massive profits. The mantra of mass production became: Keep the assembly line going, no matter what, because that was how you kept efficiency up and costs down. Lost time meant lost money. Hierarchy prevailed and only upper managers were given the authority to halt the line.

In 1947, an American working in Japan turned that thinking on its head. W. Edwards Deming was a statistician known for his expertise in quality control. He taught hundreds of Japanese engineers, managers, and scholars his theories about improving productivity. Among those was Akio Morita, the co-founder or Sony Corp. — one of may Japanese companies that would apply his ideas. Toyota was also instituting new ways of thinking about production that jibed with Deming’s philosophies. “Just in time manufacturing” or “total quality control” described the revolution. The essence was: The responsibility for finding and fixing problems should be assigned to every employee, from the most senior manager to the lowest person on the production line. Instead of merely repeating an action, workers could suggest changes, call out problems, and feel the pride that came when they helped fix what was broken. This resulted in continuous improvement, driving out flaws and improving quality. The Japanese assembly line became a place where workers’ engagement strengthened the resulting product.

In the late 1980s, while we were building Pixar, Steve Jobs was spending most of his time trying to establish NeXT. He came to the Pixar offices only once a year. I was a regular visitor to NeXT every few weeks to brief Steve on our progress. As we struggled to figure out how to make Pixar profitable, we needed frequent infusions of Steve’s money to stay afloat. He often tried to put conditions on the money, which was understandable but also complicated because the conditions he imposed didn’t always correspond to our realities.

We had a few triumphs. Luxo Jr., a short film starring the lamp that is now the Pixar logo, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1987. Tin Toy, a short film garnered Pixar’s first Oscar. We were mostly just hemorrhaging money though and this increased tensions with Steve. We didn’t feel he understood what we needed and he didn’t feel that we understood how to run a business. We were both right. Steve had sunk $54 million of his own money into Pixar. This was more than any venture capital firm would have considered given the sorry state of our balance sheet.

We were so deep in the red because our initial flurry of sales died away almost instantly. Only three-hundred Pixar Image Computers were ever sold and we weren’t big enough to design new products quickly. Hardware could not keep us going. We needed to leap to more stable ground. The only thing that made this leap easier was that we had decided to go all in on what we’d yearned to do from the outset: computer animation. This was where our true passion resided, and the only option left was to go after it with everything we had.

We started making animated commercials for Trident gum and Tropicana orange juice. We won awards for creative content while honing our technical and storytelling skills, but we were still taking in less than we spent. In 1991, we laid off more than a third of our employees. Three times between 1987 and 1991, Steve Jobs tried to sell Pixar. He could never quite bring himself to part with us despite offers. Pixar could not have survived without Steve, but more than once in those years, I wasn’t sure if we’d survive with him.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of Disney’s motion picture division, wanted Pixar to make a feature film and he wanted Disney to own and distribute it. What Disney brought was its marketing and distribution muscle; we brought our technical innovations. In 1991, we struck a three-picture deal under which Disney would provide majority financing for Pixar movies, which Disney would distribute and own. None of us had ever made a movie before — at least not one longer than five minutes. Luckily John already had an idea — Toy Story.

John pitched the basic idea to Disney, and after much revising, we got the green light on the script in January 1993. John had begun assembling a team, surrounding himself with a number of talented and ambitious young people. He’d hired Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter. Our team was strong but fairly inexperienced.

Jeffrey Katzenberg pushed relentlessly for more “edge.” The character of Woody became darker and jealous. Disney almost shut the production down until an acceptable script was written. We worked to rediscover the heart of the movie, the thing that John had first envisioned: a toy cowboy who wanted to be loved. We also learned an important lesson — to trust our own storytelling instincts.

As we struggled to finish Toy Story, the work we started at Lucasfilm was turning heads in Hollywood. In 1991, two of the year’s biggest blockbusters — Beauty and the Beast and Terminator 2 — had relied heavily on technology that had been developed at Pixar. By 1993, when Jurassic Park was released, computer-generated special effects would no longer be considered some nerdy sideline experiment; they were coming to be seen for what they were: tools that enable the making of mainstream entertainment.

John once described Steve’s story as the classic Hero’s Journey. I have much to say about Steve’s transformation and the role Pixar played in it, but for now, I will simply assert that failure made him better, wiser, and kinder. Backing each other through difficulties increased our trust.

One thing we could count on was that Steve would throw use a curveball. As we approached Toy Story’s release, Steve had something much bigger in mind. This wasn’t just about a movie — this film, he believed, was going to change the field of animation. Before that happened, he wanted to take us public. “Bad idea,” John and I told Steve. “Let’s get a couple films under our belt first. We’ll only increase our value that way.” Steve disagreed. “This is our moment,” he said. He laid out his logic: Let’s assume that Toy Story is a big success. When that happens, Disney CEO Michael Eisner will realize that he has created his worst nightmare: a viable competitor to Disney. Steve predicted that as soon as Toy Story came out, Eisner would try to renegotiate our deal and keep us close, as a partner. In this scenario, Steve wanted us to be able to negotiate on better terms. He wanted a 50/50 split with Disney on returns. In order to fulfill these terms, we would have to be able to put up the cash for our half of the production budgets. For that, we would have to go public. Steve’s logic won and he predicted it all exactly right.

We had succeeded by holding true to our ideals with Toy Story. While I could feel the euphoria, I was oddly unable to participate in it. For twenty years, my life had been defined by the goal of making the first computer animated movie. Now that the goal had been reached, I had what I can only describe as a hollow, lost feeling. Now what? Running a company was more than enough to keep me busy, but it wasn’t special. Pixar was now public and successful, yet there was something unsatisfying about the prospect of merely keeping it running. It took a serious and unexpected problem to give me a new sense of mission.

I thought I’d been paying attention. I’d made a point of being accessible to our employees. John and I had very conscientiously tried to make sure that everyone at Pixar had a voice, that every job and every employee was treated with respect. I truly believed that self-assessment and constructive criticism had to occur at all levels of a company, and I had tried my best to walk that talk. As we assembled the crew to work on our second film, A Bug’s Life, I discovered we’d completely missed a serious, ongoing rift between our creative and production departments. Production managers told me that working on Toy Story had been a nightmare. They felt disrespected and marginalized. They were very reluctant to sign on to work on another film at Pixar. How had we missed this? Production managers are the people who keep track of the endless details that ensure that a movie is delivered on time and on budget. They monitor the overall progress of the crew; they keep track of the thousands of shots; they evaluate how resources are being used; they persuade and cajole and nudge and say no when necessary. They manage people and safeguard the process. If there was one thing we prided ourselves on at Pixar, it was making sure that Pixar’s artists and technical people treated each other as equals, and I had assumed that that same mutual respect would be afforded to those who managed the productions. When I checked with the artists and technical staff, they did believe that production managers were second-class and that they impeded — not facilitated — good filmmaking by over controlling the process, by micromanaging.

My total ignorance of this dynamic caught me by surprise. My door had always been open! I’d assumed that would guarantee me a place in the loop, at least when it came to major sources of tension like this. Not a single production manager had dropped by to express frustration or make a suggestion in the five years we worked on Toy Story. Why was that?

Being on the lookout for problems was not the same as seeing problems. This would be the idea — the challenge — around which I would build my new sense of purpose.

I started sticking my head into people’s offices, pulling up a chair and asking them for their view on how Pixar was and wasn’t working. These conversations were intentionally open-ended. There had been a great deal riding on Toy Story and our production leaders felt tremendous pressure to control the process — not just budgets and schedules, but the flow of information. If people went willy-nilly to anybody with their issues, they believed, the whole project could spiral out of control. To keep things on track, it was made clear to everyone from the get-go: If you have something to say, it needs to be communicated through your direct manager. If an animator wanted to talk to a modeler, for example, they were required to go through “proper channels.”

We made the mistake of confusing the communication structure with the organizational structure. Of course an animator should be able to talk to a modeler directly, without first talking with his/her manager. We gathered everyone and said: Going forward, anyone should be able to talk to anyone else, at any level, at any time, without fear of reprimand. Communication would no longer have to go through hierarchical channels. The exchange of information was key to our business and I believed that it could — and frequently should — happen out of order, without people getting bent out of shape. People talking directly to one another, then letting the manager find out later, was more efficient than trying to make sure that everything happened in the “right” order and through the “proper” channels.

We realized that our purpose was not merely to build a studio that made hit films, but to foster a creative culture that would continually ask questions. Questions like: If we had done some things right to achieve success, how could we ensure that we understood what those things were? Could we replicate them on our next projects? Perhaps as important, was replication of success even the right thing to do? How many serious problems were lurking just out of sight? What, if anything, could we do to bring them to light? How much of our success was luck? What could we do to address overconfidence? Figuring out how to build a sustainable creative culture — one that didn’t just pay lip service to the importance of things but really committed to them, no matter how uncomfortable that became — wasn’t a singular assignment. It was a day-in-day-out, full-time job. It was one I wanted to do.

Our mandate was to foster a culture that would seek to keep our sightlines clear, even as we accepted that we were often trying to engage with and fix what we could not see. My hope was to make this culture so vigorous that it would survive when Pixar’s founding members were long gone, enabling the company to continue producing original films that made money, but also contributed positively to the world.

Establishing Pixar’s Identity

Two defining creative principles emerged that guided us through Toy Story and A Bug’s Life.

• Story is King — Reviewers mainly talked about the way Toy Story made them feel and not about the computer wizardry that enabled us to get it up on the screen
• Trust the Process — There are inevitably difficulties and missteps in any complex creative endeavor. Trust that “the process” will carry you through.

Pixar was a place that gave artists running room, that gave directors control, that trusted its people to solve problems. I have always been wary of maxims or rules because, all too often, they turn out to be empty platitudes that impede thoughtfulness. These two principles, however, actually seemed to help people.

In 1997, executives at Disney came to us with a request: Could we make Toy Story 2 as a direct-to-video release? The direct-to-video market had become extremely lucrative. We said yes but we had made a terrible mistake. We couldn’t figure out how to go about it without sacrificing quality. Scaling back our expectations to make a direct-to-video product was having a negative impact on our internal culture. It created an A-team (A Bug’s Life) and a B-team (Toy Story 2). We called a meeting with the Disney executives to sell them on the idea that the direct-to-video model wasn’t going to work for us. We proposed changing course and making Toy Story 2 for theatrical release. To our surprise, they readily agreed. Suddenly, we were making two ambitious feature films at once — doubling our theatrical output overnight.

While the creative team that led Toy Story focus on A Bug’s Life, we picked up two skilled animators and first time directors to helm Toy Story 2. All of us assumed that an inexperienced team — when backed up by an experienced team — would be able to simply replicate the success of our first film.

Eventually directors were requesting more “John time.” To me, it signaled that, as talented as the Toy Story 2 directors were individually, they lacked confidence and weren’t gelling as a team. The reels weren’t getting better. Only after A Bug’s Life opening did John finally have time to sit down and take a hard look at what Toy Story 2 had produced up to that point. Disaster is the word he used.

Before we could come up with a plan for fixing it, a meeting with Disney loomed — a previously scheduled screening to keep the Disney executives in the loop. “We know the film needs major changes and we’re in the process of mapping them out,” Andrew said. The Disney execs disagreed — the movie was good enough and there wasn’t time to do an overhaul. It’s only a sequel. Politely but firmly, Andrew demurred. “We’re going to redo it,” he said.

We had to make a difficult decision with the film. It was the first time I would have to tell the directors of a film that we were replacing them. It had to be done. We couldn’t lobby Disney for the chance to make a theatrical release, insist on our excellence, and then deliver something subpar.

Fixing the story would be the responsibility of a group that had emerged organically and we’d started calling it “The Braintrust.” The Braintrust were proven problem solvers who worked magnificently together.

John pitched the new, more emotionally wrenching throughline of Toy Story 2 to our colleagues who applauded at its conclusion. Steve Jobs added by tell the crew that “Disney doesn’t think we can do this. So let’s prove them wrong.”

For the next six months we worked deep into the night, seven days a week. We were conscious of the need to prove ourselves and everyone gave everything they had. Months to still go, the staff was exhausted and starting to fray. We eventually met the deadline and the sequel topped the original at the box office and according to critics.

From this experience, it became clear to me: If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.

Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is easy to say you want talented people, but the way those people interact with one another is the real key. It is better to focus on how a team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it. Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.

I made a habit, when giving talks, of posing the question to my audience: Which is more valuable, good ideas or good people? No matter who I asked, the audiences would be split 50–50. Statisticians will tell you that when you get a perfect split like this, it doesn’t mean that half know the right answer — it means that they are all guessing, picking at random, as if flipping a coin. Only one person in an audience has ever pointed out the false dichotomy. The answer should be obvious: Ideas come from people. Therefore, people are more important than ideas. Why are we confused about this? Because too many of us think of ideas as being singular, as if they float in the ether, fully formed and independent of the people who wrestle with them. Ideas, are not singular. They are forged through tens of thousands of decisions, often made by many people.

It is the focus on people — their work habits, talents, and values — that is absolutely central to any creative venture.

We had a few traditions that didn’t put people first. We had a development department charged with seeking out and developing ideas to make into films. Now I saw that this made no sense. Going forward, the development department’s charter would be not to develop scripts but to hire good people, figure out what they needed, assign them to projects that matched their skills, and make sure they functioned well together. To this day, we keep adjusting and fiddling with this model, but the underlying goals remain the same. Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.

While efficiency was a goal, quality was the goal. By putting people first — not just saying that we did, but proving that we did by the actions we took — we were protecting that culture. Toy Story 2 was a wake up call. Going forward, the needs of a movie could never again outweigh the needs of our people. We set about addressing the needs of our injured, stressed-out employees and came up with strategies to prevent future deadline pressures from hurting our workers again.

Coming out of Toy Story, we thought that “Story is King” and “Trust the Process” were core principles that would carry us forward and keep us focused — that the phrases themselves had the power to help us. It’s not just Pixar who believed this too. It just rings true. “Story is King” differentiated us, we thought, not just because we said it but also because we believed it and acted accordingly. This guiding principle, while simply stated and easily repeated, didn’t protect us from things going wrong. In fact, it gave us false assurance that things would be okay. Likewise, we “trusted the process,” but the process didn’t save Toy Story 2 either. “Trust the Process” had morphed into “Assume that the Process Will Fix things for Us.” It gave us solace, but it also coaxed us into letting down our guard. It made us passive and sloppy. We should trust in people, not process. The error we’d made was forgetting that “the process” has no agenda and doesn’t have taste. It is just a tool — a framework. We needed to take more responsibility and ownership of our own work.

Imagine a heavy suitcase with handles hanging by a few threads. The handle is “Trust the Process” or “Story is King” — a pithy statement that seems to stand for so much more. The suitcase is all that went into the formation of the phrase: the experience, the deep wisdom, the truths that emerge from struggle. Too often, we grab the handle and — without realizing it — walk off without the suitcase. We don’t even think about what we left behind. After all, the handle is so much easier to carry around than the suitcase. Once you’re aware of the suitcase/handle problem, you’ll see it everywhere. People glom onto words and stories that are often just stand-ins for real action and meaning.

To ensure quality, then, excellence must be an earned word, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves.

As I rail against “Trust the Process” as a flawed motivational tool, I still understand the need for faith in a creative context. Because we are often working to invent something that doesn’t yet exist, early on chaos reigns, responsibilities, pressures, and expectations are intense. How, then, do you move forward when so little is visible and so much is unknown? As Brad Bird said, “The process either makes you or unmakes you.” While this gives the process power, it implies that we have an active role to play in it as well. The individual plays the active role, not the process itself. It is up to the individual to remember that it’s okay to use the handle, just as long as you don’t forget the suitcase.

Toy Story 2 taught us that we must always be alert to shifting dynamics because our future depends on it. Everything we did — everything associated with our name — needed to be good. Thinking this way was not just about morale; it was a signal to everyone at Pixar that they were part owners of the company’s greatest asset — its quality. John coined a new phrase: “Quality is the best business plan.” It is a prerequisite and a mindset you must have before you decide what you are setting out to do. We would be a company that would never settle. That didn’t mean that we wouldn’t make mistakes. Mistakes are part of creativity. When we did, though, we would strive to face them without defensiveness and with a willingness to change. Struggling through the production of Toy Story 2 twisted our heads around, causing us to look inward, to be self-critical and to change the way we thought about ourselves. Our need for and embrace of introspection was just beginning. In the next section, I explore how that introspection developed. The chapters revolve around the questions we would be tackling as a company: What is the nature of honesty? If everyone agrees about its importance, why do we find it hard to be frank? How do we think about our own failures and fears? Is there a way to make our managers more comfortable with unexpected results — the inevitable surprises that arise, no matter how well you’ve planned? How can we address the imperative many managers feel to overcontrol the process? With what we have learned so far, can we finally get the process right? Where are we still deluded?

Protecting the New

Honesty and Candor

Should people be honest? Of course! There are often good reasons not to be honest, though. There are times when we choose not to say what we really think. This creates a dilemma.

The only way to get a grip on the facts, issues, and nuances we need to solve problems and collaborate effectively is by communicating fully and openly, by not withholding or misleading. There is no doubt that our decision-making is better if we are able to draw on the collective knowledge and unvarnished opinions of the group. But as valuable as the information is that comes from honesty and as loudly as we proclaim its importance, our own fears and instincts for self-preservation often cause us to hold back. To address this reality, we need to free ourselves of honesty’s baggage. One way to do this is by replacing the word honesty with another word that has a similar meaning but fewer moral connotations: candor. Candor or frankness communicates not just truth-telling, but a lack of reserve. People have and easier time talking about their level of candor because they don’t think they will be punished for admitting that they sometimes hold their tongues. You cannot address the obstacles to candor until people feel free to say that they exist. Using the word honesty makes it harder to talk about those barriers. There are sometimes legitimate reasons not to be candid.

A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. Lack of candor, if unchecked, ultimately leads to dysfunctional environments. How can managers ensure that his/her working group, department, or company is embracing candor? Institutionalize it by putting mechanisms in place that explicitly say it is valuable. One of Pixar’s key mechanisms: the Braintrust. The Braintrust meets every few months to assess our movies we’re making. It is our primary delivery system for straight talk. Its premise is simple: Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid with one another.

The essential element is candor. Without candor, there can be no trust. Without trust, creative collaboration is not possible.

You can’t address or eliminate the blocks to candor once and for all. The fear of saying something stupid and looking bad, of offending someone or being intimidated, of retaliating or being retaliated against — they all seem to reassure themselves. When they do, you must address them squarely.

The Braintrust came into being organically and was a solid example of what a highly functional working group should be. They were funny, focused, smart, and relentlessly candid with each other. Each of the participants focused on the film at hand and not on some hidden personal agenda. They argued — sometimes heatedly — but always about the project. They were not motivated by the kinds of things — getting credit for an idea, pleasing their supervisors, winning a point just to say you did — that too often lurk beneath the surface of work-related interactions. The members saw each other as peers. The passion expressed in a Braintrust meeting was never taken personally because everyone knew it was directed at solving problems. Because of that trust and mutual respect, its problem solving powers were immense.

The Braintrust had to evolve from a tight, well-defined group that worked on one film together until it was done, to a larger, more fluid group that assembled, as needed, to solve problems on all our films. While we still called in the Braintrust, there was no hard-and-fast membership list.

Candor could not be more crucial to our creative process because early on, all of our movies suck. The Braintrust watches early versions of our movies and discusses what’s not ringing true, what could be better, what’s not working at all. Notably, they do not prescribe how to fix the problems they diagnose. They test weak points, they make suggestions, but it is up to the director to settle on a path forward. A new version of the movie is generated and the process repeats itself.

To understand what the Braintrust does and why it is so central to Pixar, you have to start with a basic truth: People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things — in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for awhile, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, s/he loses it. Where once s/he could see a forest, now there are only trees. The details converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward substantially in any one direction. The experience can be overwhelming. The process of coming to clarity takes patience and candor.

We try to create an environment where people want to hear each other’s notes. We give our filmmakers both freedom and responsibility. We believe that the most promising stories are not assigned to filmmakers but emerge from within them. Our directors make movies that they have conceived of and are burning to make. Then, because we know that this passion will at some point blind them to their movie’s inevitable problems, we offer them the counsel of the Braintrust.

How is the Braintrust different from any other feedback mechanism? First, the Braintrust is made up of people with a deep understanding of storytelling and, usually, people who have been through the process themselves. While the directors welcome critiques from many sources along the way, they particularly prize feedback from fellow directors and storytellers. Second, the Braintrust has no authority. The director does not have to follow any of the specific suggestions given. Braintrust meetings are not top-down, do-this-or-else affairs.

Braintrust notes are intended to bring the true causes of problems to the surface — not to demand a specific remedy. We don’t want the Braintrust to solve a director’s problem because we believe that, our solution won’t be as good as the one the director and his/her creative team comes up with. We believe that ideas — and thus, films — only become great when they are challenged and tested. In academia, peer review is the process by which professors are evaluated by others in the field. I like to think of the Braintrust as Pixar’s version of peer review. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t get tough sometimes. Naturally, every director would prefer to be told that his/her film is a masterpiece. Because of the way the Braintrust is structured, the pain of being told that flaws are apparent or revisions are needed is minimized. The film itself — not the filmmaker — is under the microscope. It is critical: You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged. To set up a healthy feedback system, you must remove power dynamics from the equation. You must focus on the problem, not the person.

Michael Arndt, who wrote Toy Story 3, says he thinks to make a great film, its makers must pivot, at some point, from creating the story for themselves to creating it for others. To him, the Braintrust provides that pivot, and it is necessarily painful. “Part of the suffering involves giving up control,” he says.

Andrew Stanton is fond of saying that people need to be wrong as fast as they can. Candor is only valuable if the person on the receiving end is open to it and willing to let go of things that don’t work.

Frank talk, spirited debate, laughter, and love are all essential ingredients. Newcomers often notice something else first: the volume. Braintrust attendees become so energized and excited that they talk over each other, and voices tend to rise. To the extent there is “argument,” it seeks only to excavate the truth.

Candor at Pixar overrides hierarchy.

It is natural for people to fear that such an inherently critical environment will feel threatening and unpleasant. The key is to look at the viewpoints being offered as additive, not competitive.

A good note says what is wrong, what is missing, what isn’t clear, what makes no sense. A good note is offered at a timely moment, not too late to fix the problem. A good note doesn’t make demands; it doesn’t even have to include a proposed fix. But if it does, that fix is offered only to illustrate a potential solution, not to prescribe an answer. Most of all, though, a good note is specific. There’s a difference between criticism and constructive criticism. You’re building as you’re breaking down, making new pieces to work with out of the stuff you’ve just ripped apart.

Candor isn’t cruel. It does not destroy. Any successful feedback system is built on empathy, on the idea that we are all in this together, that we understand your pain because we’ve experienced it ourselves. The Braintrust is fueled by the idea that every note we give is in the service of a common goal: supporting and helping each other as we try to make better movies.

You don’t want to be at a company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or matters of policy are being hashed out. Seek out people who are willing to level with you, and when you find them, hold them close.

Fear and Failure

I’m going to talk about our misfires, but I’m gratified to say that because we caught them midstream, before they were finished and released to the public, we were able to treat them as learning experiences. Yes, they cost us money, but the losses were not as sizable as they would have been had we not intervened. They were painful, but we emerged better and stronger. I came to think of our meltdowns as R&D.

For most of us, failure comes with baggage. I believe it is traced directly back to our days in school. From a very early age, the message is drilled into our heads: Failure is bad; failure means you didn’t study or prepare; failure means you slacked off or — worse! — aren’t smart enough to begin with. Thus, failure is something to be ashamed of. People resist and reject failure and try mightily to avoid it, because regardless of what we say, mistakes feel embarrassing.

Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new (and, as such, should be seen as valuable; without them, we’d have no originality). Embracing failure is an important part of learning. Acknowledging this truth is not enough. Failure is painful and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth.

As Andrew Stanton said, “fail early and fail fast” and “be wrong as fast as you can.” To be wrong as fast as you can is to sign up for aggressive, rapid learning.

Failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration. If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it. Trying to avoid failure dooms you to fail.

There’s a quick way to determine if your company has embraced the negative definition of failure. Ask yourself what happens when an error is discovered. In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. Being open about problems is the first step toward learning from them.

When experimentation is seen as necessary and productive, not as a frustrating waste of time, people will enjoy their work — even when it is confounding them. Iterative trial and error or experimentation are fact-finding missions that, over time, inch scientists toward greater understanding. That means any outcome is a good outcome, because it yields new information. If your experiment proved your initial theory wrong, better to know it sooner rather than later. Armed with new facts, you can then reframe whatever question you’re asking.

If you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them — if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes that it will spare you failure down the line — well, you’re deluding yourself. You cannot plan your way out of problems. I have found that people who pour their energy into thinking about an approach and insisting that it is too early to act are wrong just as often as people who dive in and work quickly. The overplanners just take longer to be wrong. The more time you spend mapping out an approach, the more likely you are to get attached to it. The nonworking idea gets worn into your brain. It can be difficult to get free of it and head in a different direction. Which, more often than not, is exactly what you must do.

Just because “free failure” is crucial in some industries does not mean that it should be a goal in all of them. When it comes to creative endeavors, the concept of zero failures is worse than useless. It is counterproductive.

Failure can be expensive. We try to make it less expensive to fail. For example, we’ve set up a system in which directors are allowed to spend years in the development phase of a movie, were the costs of iteration and exploration are relatively low. Production is where costs explode.

To be a truly creative company, you must start things that might fail. How many errors are too many? When does failure go from a stop on the road to excellence to a red flag that signals change is needed? There are problems that process can’t fix. We step in only if a director loses the confidence of his/her crew.

There are two parts to any failure: The event itself and our reaction to it. It is this second part that we control. Do we become introspective, or do we bury our heads in the sand? Do we make it safe for others to acknowledge and learn from problems, or do we shut down discussion by looking for people to blame? We must remember that failure gives us chances to grow, and we ignore those chances at our own peril.

The Holy Grail is to find a way that we can teach others how to make the best movie possible with whoever they’ve got on their crew, because it’s just logic that someday we won’t be here.

The goal, then, is to uncouple fear and failure — to create an environment in which making mistakes doesn’t strike terror into your employees’ hearts.

By necessity, the message companies send to their managers is conflicting: Develop your people, help them grow into strong contributors and team members, and oh, by the way, make sure everything goes smoothly because there aren’t enough resources, and the success of our enterprise depends on your group doing its job on time and on budget.

At Pixar, we have begun to welcome the feeling of “Oh, we’ve never had this exact problem before.”

Rather than trying to prevent errors, we should assume that our people’s intentions are good and that they want to solve problems. Give them responsibility, let the mistakes happen, and let people fix them. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.

The Hungry Beast and The Ugly Baby

The success of each new Disney film created a hunger for more. The pressure to quickly create became the order of the day. We had to “Feed the Beast.” This happens at many companies and its unintended effect is always the same: It lessens quality across the board. After The Lion King release in 1994 the studio began its slow decline. From 1994 to 2010, not a single Disney animated film would open at number one at the box office. I believe this was the direct result of its employees thinking their job was to feed the Beast. After all, all those employees couldn’t sit idle.

Originality is fragile and in its first moments it’s often far from pretty. This is why I call early mock-ups of our films “ugly babies.” They need nurturing — in the form of time and patience — in order to grow. What this means is that they have a hard time coexisting with the Beast.

Our job is to protect our babies from being judged too quickly. Our job is to protect the new. If a film in this vulnerable state is exposed to naysayers who fail to see its potential or lack the patience to let it evolve, it could be destroyed. For greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness.

Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on — but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal.

In many businesses, the Beast requires so much attention. If inefficiencies result in anyone waiting for too long, if the majority of your people aren’t engaged in the work that drives your revenue most of the time, you risk being devoured from the inside out. The solution, of course, is to feed the Beast. At too many companies, the schedule (that is, the need for product) drives the output, not the strength of the ideas at the front end. The key to preventing all this is balance. When I talk about taming the Beast, what I really mean is that keeping its needs balanced with the needs of other, more creative facets of your company will make you stronger. The people within each constituency have priorities that are important — and often opposing. Each group is focused on its own needs, which means that no one has a clear view of how their decisions impact other groups; each group is under pressure to perform well.

In an unhealthy culture, each group believes that if their objectives trump the goals of the other groups, the company will be better off. In a healthy culture, all constituencies recognize the importance of balancing competing desires — they want to be heard, but they don’t have to win.

As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization is an ecosystem. “You need all the seasons. You need storms. It’s like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. If every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, though, things don’t grow. The key is to view conflict as essential.” It’s management’s job to figure out how to help others see conflict as healthy. If some employees or constituencies or goals are perceived to matter more, or to “win,” there can be no balance.

I can try to explain to you how to do it, but I could never fully explain how to achieve balance. That you learn only by doing.

I always say that managers of creative enterprises must hold lightly to goals and firmly to intentions. We must be open to having our goals change as we learn new information or are surprised by the things we thought we knew but didn’t. As long as our intentions — our values — remain constant, our goals can shift as needed.

The best ideas emerge when we’ve made it safe to work through problems. So when is the magic moment when we shift from protection to engagement? The fact is, we struggle with this question on every film. The new needs protection. Business-as-usual does not. Managers do not need to work hard to protect established ideas or ways of doing business. The system is tilted to favor the incumbent. The challenger needs support to find its footing. Protection of the new — of the future, not the past — must be a conscious effort.

Change and Randomness

We called an all-employee meeting to announce our decision to sell Pixar to Disney in 2006. While we worked hard to put safeguards in place that would ensure our independence, we still expected our employees to be fearful that the merger would negatively impact our culture. I stood up and assured them that Pixar would not change. It was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever said. For the next year or so, whenever we wanted to try something new or rethink an established way of working, a steady stream of alarmed and upset people would show up at my office. “You promised the merger wouldn’t affect the way we work,” they’d say. “You said that Pixar would never change.” I called another company-wide meeting to explain what I meant. “What I meant,” I said, “was that we weren’t going to change because we were acquired by a larger company. We will still go through the kinds of changes that we would have gone through anyway. Furthermore, we are always changing, because change is a good thing.” I had to say this three times before it sunk in. The changes that sparked so much concern had nothing to do with the merger. It’s folly to think you can avoid change and you shouldn’t want to. There is no growth or success without change. It seemed like every issue, big or small, that arose around this time was chalked up to the merger. People fult vulnerable — and that bred suspicion. People want to hang on to things that work. As we become successful, our approaches are reinforced, and we become even more resistant to change.

Another case study in change and randomness was our tenth movie, Up. The path followed on Up was difficult and unpredictable; there was nothing about where the movie started that indicated where it would end up. It wasn’t a matter of unearthing a buried story; in the beginning, there was no story. “If I start on a film and right away know the structure — where it’s going, the plot — I don’t trust it,” Pete says. “I feel like the only reason we’re able to find some of these unique ideas, characters, and story twists is through discovery. And by definition, ‘discovery’ means you don’t know the answer when you start. I believe life should not be easy. We’re meant to push ourselves and try new things — which will definitely make us feel uncomfortable.”

What is it, exactly, that people are really afraid of when they say they don’t like change? Is it the discomfort of being confused or the extra work or the stress? For many, changing course can be a sign of weakness, tantamount to admitting that you don’t know what you are doing. I think the person who can’t change his/her mind is dangerous. Steve Jobs was known for changing his mind instantly in the light of new facts, and I don’t know anyone who thought he was weak. Managers often see change as a threat to their existing business model — and, of course, it is.

Self-interest guides opposition to change, but lack of self-awareness fuels it even more. Once you master any system, you typically become blind to its flaws; even if you can see them, they appear far too complex and intertwined to consider changing. I am not endorsing change for change’s sake. There are often good reasons to hang on to things that work.

As we try to learn from the past, we form patterns of thinking based on our experiences, not realizing that the things that happened have an unfair advantage over the things that didn’t. We can’t see the alternatives that might well have happened if not for some small change event. In fact, randomness and luck played a key role in our success.

The analysis of outside observers, is often oversimplified. When managing a company that is often in the news, as Pixar is, we must be careful not to believe our own hype.

In general, we seek what we think are simple explanations for events n our lives because we believe the simpler something is, the more fundamental — the more true — it is. I believe that the inappropriate application of simple rules and models onto complex mechanisms causes damage. The simple explanation is so desirable that it is often embraced even when it’s completely inappropriate.

While we are quick to assign patterns and causes to an event after it occurs, beforehand we don’t even see it coming. Randomness is superimposed on the regular and repeatable patterns in our lives and, as such, is often hidden. Sometimes a big event happens that changes everything. It tends to affirm the human tendency to treat big events as fundamentally different from smaller ones. That’s a problem, inside companies. When we use a different mindset for each, we are signing up for trouble. We become so caught up in our big problems that we ignore the little ones, failing to realize that some of our small problems will have long-term consequences — and are, therefore, big problems in the making. What’s needed, in my view, is to approach big and small problems with the same set of values and emotions, because they are, in fact, self-similar.

When you begin to grasp that big and little problems are structured similarly, then that helps you maintain a calmer perspective. It helps you remain open to an important reality: If all our careful planning cannot prevent problems, then our best method of response is to enable employees at every level to own the problems and have the confidence to fix them. We want people to feel like they can take steps to solve problems without asking permission. People who act without an approved plan should not be punished for “going rogue.” A culture that allows everyone, no matter their position, to stop the assembly line, both figuratively and literally, maximizes the creative engagement of people who want to help. In other words, we must meet unexpected problems with unexpected responses.

If we allow more people to solve problems without permission, and if we tolerate (and don’t vilify) their mistakes, then we enable a much larger set of problems to be addressed. The individual or the organization responds with its best thinking, because the organization is not frozen, fearful, or waiting for approval.

You don’t always know how big a problem is when you first encounter it. If you push the ownership of problems down into the ranks of an organization, then everyone feels free (and motivated) to attempt to solve whatever problem they face, big or small. The key is to create a response structure that matches the problem structure.

The silver lining of a major meltdown is that it gives managers a change to send clear signals to employees about the company’s values, which inform the role each individual should expect to play.

Everyone says they want to hire excellent people, but in truth we don’t really know, at first, who will rise up to make a difference. I believe in putting in place a framework for finding potential, then nurturing talent and excellence, believing that many will rise, while knowing that not all will.

Walt Disney was such a singular talent that it was difficult for people to conceive what the company would be like without him. Disney employees tried to keep his spirit alive by asking themselves, “What would Walt do?” This kind of thinking didn’t help with originality or remaining true to Walt’s pioneering spirit. Since the question looked backward, not forward, it tethered them to the status quo. Steve Jobs used to repeat this story to Apple. He never wanted people to ask, “What would Steve do?” No one — not Walt, not Steve, not the people of Pixar — ever achieved creative success by simply clinging to what used to work.

When I look back on Pixar’s history, I have to recognize that so many of the good things that happened could easily have gone a different way. A lot of our success came because we had pure intentions and great talent, and we did a lot of things right, but I also believe that attributing our success solely to our own intelligence, without acknowledging the role of accidental events, diminishes us. We must acknowledge random events that went our way, because acknowledging our good fortune — and not telling ourselves that everything we did was some stroke of genius — lets us make more realistic assessments and decisions. The existence of luck also reminds us that our activities are less repeatable. Since change is inevitable, the question is: Do you act to stop it and try to protect yourself from it, or do you become the master of change by accepting it and being open to it? My view, of course, is that working with change is what creativity is about.

The Hidden

Perception is limiting. How much are we able to see? And how much is obscured from view? At Pixar, we had to address what I’ve come to call the Hidden.

In 1995, when Steve Jobs was trying to convince us that we should go public, one of his key arguments was that we would eventually make a film that failed at the box office, and we needed to be prepared, financially, for that day. Going public would give us the capital to fund our own projects and, thus, to have more say about where we were headed, but it would also give us a buffer that could sustain us through failure. Steve’s feeling was that Pixar’s survival could not depend solely on the performance of each and every movie. We were going to screw up, it was inevitable. And we didn’t know when or how. We had to prepare, then, for an unknown problem — a hidden problem.

I resolved to bring as many hidden problems as possible to light. Having a financial cushion would help us recover from failure, and Steve was right to secure one. But the more important goal for me was to try to remain vigilant, to always be on the lookout for signs that we were screwing up.

There have always been big companies that made mistakes and went off the rails. I believe the deeper issue is that the leaders of these companies were not attuned to the fact that there were problems they could not see. And because they weren’t aware of these blind sports, they assumed that the problems didn’t exist. This brings me to one of my core management beliefs: If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.

If we accept that what we see and know is inevitably flawed, we must strive to find ways to heighten that awareness — to fill in the gays, if you will. The certainty that, some problems will always be hidden from me has made me a better manager. There are fields of experience we have not mastered. Even if it were possible to learn every discipline and master every profession, we’d still have blind spots. The universe of all that you do not and cannot know is vast and far larger than we are even conscious of.

There are a few levels of the unknown. The first level of what’s hidden: As my position changed, people became more careful how they spoke and acted in my presence. My actions didn’t change, but my position did. Gradually, snarky behavior, grousing, and rudeness disappeared from view — from my view. People wouldn’t exhibit bad behavior in front of me. I was out of a certain loop, and it was essential that I never lose sight of that fact. People bring their best selves to interactions with their bosses. The second layer: To what extent do hierarchies and structured environments contribute to the hiding of information? People often shudder when you talk about hierarchy, as if it is inherently bad; they will use hierarchical as a pejorative, as shorthand for a workplace that puts too much emphasis on rank. This isn’t entirely fair, of course, and I’ve worked in some highly structured, “hierarchical” environments that inspired top-notch work and a healthy interchange between colleagues. When too many people begin, subconsciously, to equate their own value and that of others with where they fall in the pecking order, it turns a successful hierarchy into one that impedes progress. The problem is not caused by hierarchy itself but by individual or cultural delusions associated with hierarchy. Most of us do not realize that we distort our own view of the world, largely because we think we see more than we actually do. The third layer of hidden-ness deals with the people in the trenches who are engaged in an incredibly complex set of processes, all of which come with their own attendant problems and idiosyncrasies. The people who are directly involved have the firmest grasp of the problems because they are in the middle of the action and see things that I don’t see. They will know about a crisis before I do. This would not be a problem if you could always count on people to send up a flare the instant they suspect trouble, but you can’t. Even employees with the purest intentions may be too timid to speak up when they sense trouble. They may feel that it’s too early to involve upper-level managers, or they may assume that we are aware of the breakdowns already.

When faced with complexity, it is reassuring to tell ourselves that we can uncover and understand every fact of every problem if we just try hard enough. But that’s a fallacy. The better approach, I believe, is to accept that we can’t understand every facet of a complex environment and to focus, instead, on techniques to deal with combining different viewpoints. If we start with the attitude that different viewpoints are additive rather than competitive, we become more effective because our ideas or decisions are honed and tempered by that discourse. In a healthy, creative culture, the people in the trenches feel free to speak up and bring to light differing views that can help give us clarity.

I am also certain there were an infinite number of “two-inch” events that went our way. The full set of possible outcomes at any time is so astonishingly vast that we can’t begin to fathom them, so our brains have to simplify in order for us to function.

Acknowledging what you can’t see — getting comfortable with the fact that there are a large number of two-inch events occurring right now, out of sight, that will affect us for better or worse, in myriad ways — helps promote flexibility. To be truly humble, those leaders must first understand how many of the factors that shape their lives and businesses are — and will always be — out of sight.

“Hindsight is 20–20” is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20–20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future. While we know more about a past event than a future one, our understanding of the factors that shaped it is severely limited. Not only that, because we think we see what happened clearly — hindsight being 20–20 and all — we often aren’t open to knowing more. The past should be our teacher, not our master.

There is a kind of symmetry between looking forward and backward, plotting our next move, we are selecting paths into the future, analyzing the best available information and deciding on a route forward. But we are usually not aware that when we look back in time, our penchant for pattern-making leads us to be selective about which memories have meaning. Pete was surprised to hear from a neuroscientist that only about 40% of what we think we “see” comes in through our eyes. The rest is made up from memory or patterns that we recognize from past experience. We fill in or make up a great deal more than we think we do. Our mental models play a major role in our perception of the world.

Take a magic trick for example. For the trick to work, the magician must divert our eyes from where the hidden action is actually happening and our brains must fill in the missing information, combining what we already know with what we are perceiving in that moment. The illusion that we have a complete picture is extraordinarily persuasive. However, the magician doesn’t create the illusion — we do. We firmly believe that we are perceiving reality in its totality rather than a sliver of it.

People imagine consciousness to be something that is achieved inside our brains. Alva Noe, a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley who focuses on theories of perception, has suggested another way of thinking about consciousness — as something we do, or enact, or perform in our dynamic involvement with the world around us. Consciousness, in other words, happens within a context. The models we have of our relationships at work, with friends, in our families, and in our society are all even more complicated than our visual models.

We have to learn, over and over again, that the perceptions and experiences of others are vastly different than our own. In a creative environment, those differences can be assets. But when we don’t acknowledge and honor them, they can erode, rather than enrich, our creative work.

Honor the viewpoints of others! When humans see things that challenge our mental models, we tend not just to resist them but to ignore them. This have been proven with the confirmation bias — the tendency of people to favor information, true or not, that confirms their preexisting beliefs.

Since our models are mere approximations of reality, then, the conclusions we draw cannot help but be prone to error. Once a model of how we should work gets in our head, it is difficult to change. We’ve all experienced times when other people see the same event we see but remember it differently. Typically, we think our view is the correct one. Our mental models aren’t reality. They are tools, like the models weather forecasters use to predict the weather. The tool is not reality. The key is knowing the difference.

When we are making a movie, the movie doesn’t exist yet. We are not uncovering it or discovering it; it’s not as if it resides somewhere and is just waiting to be found. There is no movie. We are making decisions, one by one, to create it.

While the allure of safety and predictability is strong, achieving true balance means engaging in activities whose outcomes and payoffs are not yet apparent. The most creative people are willing to work in the shadow of uncertainty.

No matter how intensely we desire certainty, we should understand that whether because of our limits or randomness or future unknowable confluences of events, something will inevitably come. Some of it will be uplifting and inspiring, some of it will be disastrous. We all know people who eagerly face the unknown; they engage with the seemingly intractable problems of science, engineering, and society; they embrace the complexities of visual or written expression; they are invigorated by uncertainty. That’s because they believe that, through questioning, they can do more than merely look through the door. They can venture across its threshold. There are others who venture into the unknown with surprising success but with little understanding of what they have done. Believing in their cleverness, they revel n their brilliance, telling others about the importance of taking risks. I believe that we all have the potential to solve problems and express ourselves creatively.

The Hidden — and our acknowledgement of it — is an absolutely essential part of rooting out what impedes our progress: clinging to what works, fearing change, and deluding ourselves about our roles in our own success. Candor, safety, research, self-assessment, and protecting the new are all mechanisms we can use to confront the unknown and keep the chaos and fear to a minimum.

Building and Sustaining

Broadening Our View

Our models of the world so distort what we perceive that they can make it hard to see what is right in front of us. We don’t typically see the boundary between new information coming in from the outside and our old, established mental models. When we unknowingly get caught up in our own interpretations, we become inflexible, less able to deal with the problems at hand. People who work or live together — for example — have, by virtue of proximity and shared history, models of the world that are deeply (sometimes hopelessly) intertwined with one another.

This third section of the book is devoted to some of the specific methods we have employed at Pixar to prevent our disparate views from hindering our collaboration. I will discuss the following mechanisms we use at Pixar to put our collective heads into a different frame of mind.

1. Dailies, or Solving Problems Together
2. Research Trips
3. The Power of Limits
4. Integrating Technology and Art
5. Short Experiments
6. Learning to See
7. Postmortems
8. Continuing to Learn

Dailies, or Solving Problems Together

This is a daily meeting with the goal of seeing shots as they really are. Dailies are a key part of Pixar culture, not just because of what they accomplish — constructive midstream feedback — but because of how they accomplish it. Participants check their egos at the door since they are about to show incomplete work to their director and colleagues. This requires a safe place for that engagement. Feedback is welcomed and critiques are offered meticulously and specifically. Our dailies have an openness to constructive criticism and they are a group effort. They help teach that everyone at Pixar shows incomplete work and everyone is free to make suggestions. To participate fully each morning requires empathy, clarity, generosity, and the ability to listen. Dailies can be intimidating but the goal is to create the best animation possible. We go through every frame with a fine-toothed comb, over and over and over again. Sometimes there are full-on debates because, truly, we each don’t have all the answers. We work it out together.

Research Trips

References to movies, both good and bad, are part of filmmaking, but if you rely too much on the references to what came before, you doom your film to being derivative. When people in a creative profession merely cut up and reassemble what has come before, it gives the illusion of creativity, but it is craft without art. Copying what’s come before is a guaranteed path to mediocrity, it appears to be a safe choice, and the desire to be safe — to succeed with minimal risk — can infect not just individuals but also entire companies. If we sense that our structures are rigid, inflexible, or bureaucratic, we must bust them open — without destroying ourselves in the process. The question of how to do this must continually be addressed because conditions and people are constantly in flux. Our filmmakers must look beyond what they think they already know. They must go out and do research. These experiences are more than field trips or diversions. Ultimately, what we’re after is authenticity. What feels daunting to the filmmakers when we send them out on trips is that they don’t yet know what they are looking for, so they’re not sure what they will gain. But think about it: You’ll never stumble upon the unexpected if you stick only to the familiar. In my experience, when people go out on research trips, they always come back changed. It is still important to do your homework, but research trips challenge our preconceived notions and keep cliches at bay. They fuel inspiration. They are, I believe, what keeps us creating rather than copying.

The Power of Limits

At Pixar we have a phenomenon known as “the beautifully shaded penny.” It refers to the fact that our artists care so much about every detail that they will sometimes spend days or weeks crafting the equivalent of a penny on a nightstand that you’ll never see. I don’t want to think about how many person-weeks this consumed. The desire for quality had gone well beyond rationality. But because of the way production unfolded, our people had to work on scenes without knowing the context for them — so they overbuilt them just to be safe. To make things worse, our standards of excellence are extremely high, leading them to conclude that more is always more. How, then, do you fix the “beautifully shaded penny” problem without telling people, in effect, to care less or to be less excellent? Of course our people knew there were limits — they just couldn’t see them. This was a failure on management’s part; the truth is, we have consistently struggled with how we set useful limits and also how we make them visible. Many of our limits are imposed not by our internal processes but by external realities — finite resources, deadlines, a shifting economy or business climate. Another area where limits are invaluable is what we call “appetite control.” In Pixar’s case, the demand for resources is literally bottomless. Unless you impose limits, people will always justify spending more time and more money by saying, “We’re just trying to make a better movie.” It is impossible to do everything on the list so you set a deadline, which then forces a priority-based reordering of the list, followed by the difficult discussion of what, on this list, is absolutely necessary — or if the project is even feasible at all. You don’t want to have this discussion too soon, because at the outset, you don’t know what you are doing. If you wait too long, however, you run out of time or resources. Frequently, neither the film’s leaders nor its team members know the true cost of items on the list. We create an “oversight group” to ensure that budget and scheduling goals were met. From the point of view of those who worked in production, the oversight group was a hindrance, not a help. They felt they no longer had the flexibility they needed to respond quickly to problems because the oversight group nitpicked every decision — even the tiniest decision — to death. The oversight group was at war with the production group and morale plummeted. We eliminated the oversight group. In our view, it only added tension to the process. Creating this layer to enforce the limits actually made the limits less clear, diminishing the effectiveness. The oversight group had been put in place without anyone asking a fundamental question: How do we enable our people to solve problems? Instead, they asked: How do we prevent our people from screwing up? That approach never encourages a creative response. My rule of thumb is that any time we impose limits or procedures, we should ask how they will aid in enabling people to respond creatively. If the answer is that they won’t, then the proposals are ill suited to the task at hand.

Integrating Technology and Art

Walt Disney was unrelenting in his determination to incorporate the cutting edge and to understand all available technologies. One of the advantages we had at Pixar, from the beginning, was that technology, art, and business were integrated into the leadership. We have worked assiduously to maintain a balance among all three legs. As John often says, “Art challenges technology, technology inspires art.” We must value the mindset that doesn’t fear change.

Short Experiments

In most companies, you have to justify so much of what you do — to prepare for quarterly earnings statements or to build support for your decisions. I believe that you should not be required to justify everything. We must always leave the door open for the unexpected. Scientific research operates this way — when you embark on an experiment, you don’t know if you will achieve a breakthrough. Chances are, you won’t. But nevertheless, you may stumble on a piece of the puzzle along the way — a glimpse, if you will, into the unknown. Our short films are Pixar’s way of experimenting, and we produce them in the hopes of getting exactly these kinds of glimpses. Our shorts tradition began as a way to share technological innovations with our colleagues in the scientific community. From 1989 to 1996 we stopped producing them to focus on revenue-generating ads and our first feature films. John and I decided to reinvigorate our short film program to encourage experimentation and, more important, become a proving ground for fledgling filmmakers we hope would go on to direct features someday. We justified the expense as R&D. In the end, the payoffs would be many — but not necessarily the ones we expected. While we used R&D to justify the program initially, we soon realized that our feature films were the major drivers of technological innovation — not our shorts. The shorts accomplished other things for Pixar like broadening employee experience, forging deeper group relationships, forging binds with moviegoers, creating a sense of goodwill, and having a relatively inexpensive way to screw up.

Learning to See

Some people draw better than others. What are they doing that most of us aren’t? Art teachers use a few different tricks to train new artists. They place an object upside down, for example, so that each student can look at it as a pure shape and not as a familiar, recognizable thing. Another trick is to ask students to focus on the negative spaces. For instance, in drawing a chair, they would draw what is not the chair — the spaces between the chair legs, for example. The reason is that while the brain recognizes a chair as a chair, it assigns no meaning to the shape of the spaces between the chair’s legs (and, thus, doesn’t try to “correct” it to make it match the artist’s mental model.) That artists have learned to employ these ways of seeing does not mean they don’t also see what we see. They do. They just see more because they’ve learned how to turn off their minds’ tendency to jump to conclusions. This is why it is so frustrating that funding for arts programs in schools has been decimated. And those cuts stem from a fundamental misconception that art classes are about learning to draw. In fact, they are about learning to see. It is possible, with practice, to teach your brain to observe something clearly without letting your preconceptions kick in. Focusing too much on something can make it more difficult to see. The real point is that you can learn to set aside preconceptions. It isn’t that you don’t have biases, more that there are ways of learning to ignore them while considering a problem. It can increase perceptivity. Just as looking at what is not the chair helps bring it into relief, pulling focus away from a particular problem (and, instead, looking at the environment around it) can lead to better solutions. We have learned that fixing a scene usually requires making changes somewhere else in the film. Our filmmakers have become skilled at not getting caught up in a problem but instead looking elsewhere in the story for solutions. Like at Disney, the oversight group could have been addressed by questioning the premise on which the oversight group was formed. It was the setup — the preconceptions that preceded the problem — that needed to be faced.

Postmortems

The phases we go through while making a movie unfold over a period of years. When the release date finally rolls around, everyone is ready to move on to something new. But we are not done yet. At Pixar, postmortems are an essential part of the process in which we explore what did and didn’t work. We attempt to consolidate lessons learned. Companies, like individuals, don’t become exceptional by believing they are exceptional but by understanding the ways in which they aren’t exceptional. It’s the spirit of these meetings that I remember most. Everyone is so engaged in rethinking the way we did things, so open to challenging long held ideas and learning from errors we’d made. No one was defensive. Postmortems seemed a bit like having to swallow some kind of bad-tasting medicine. We knew it was necessary, but we didn’t like it much. Over the years, some were profound, and others were a complete waste of time. What was it that made some postmortems so bad, while others had such great outcomes? Give that we all agree, in principle, that postmortems are good for us, I’m always struck by how much people dread them. Most feel that they’ve learned what they could during the execution of the project, so they’d just as soon move on. Problems that arose are frequently personal, so most are eager to avoid revisiting them. In general, people are resistant to self-assessment. Companies are bad at it, too. Looking inward to, to them, often boils down to: “We are successful, so what we are doing must be correct.” Or the converse: “We failed, so what we did was wrong.” This is shallow. Do not be cowed into missing this opportunity. There are five reasons, I believe, to do postmortems.

1. Consolidate what’s been learned. While you learn the most in the midst of the project, the lessons are not generally coherent. A process might be flawed, but you don’t have time to fix it under the current schedule. Sitting down afterward is a way of consolidating all that you’ve learned — before you forget it. Postmortems are a rare opportunity to do analysis that simply wasn’t possible in the heat of the project.
2. Teach others who weren’t there. Postmortems are a great way to pass on the positive and negative lessons learned. It provides a forum for others to learn or challenge the logic behind certain decisions.
3. Don’t let resentments fester. If people are given a forum in which to express their frustrations about the screw-ups in a respectful manner, then they are better able to let them go and move on.
4. Use the schedule to force reflection. Postmortems, like braintrust meetings and dailies, are all about getting people to think and evaluate. The time we spend getting ready for a postmortem meeting is as valuable as the meeting itself. The scheduling of a postmortem forces self-reflection. I would even say that 90% of the value is derived from the preparation leading up to the postmortem.
5. Pay it forward. In a postmortem, you can raise questions that should be asked on the next project. We shouldn’t expect to find the right answers, but if we can get people to frame the right questions, then we’ll be ahead of the game.

Some techniques that can help managers get the most out of postmortems are:

1. Vary the way they are conducted. By definition, postmortems are supposed to be about lessons learned, so if you repeat the same format, you tend to uncover the same lessons, which isn’t much help. Even if you come up with a format that works well in one instance, people will know what to expect the next time, and they will game the process. Try to narrow the focus of postmortems to special topics.
2. No matter how much you urge them otherwise, your people will be afraid to be critical in such an overt manner. One technique I’ve used to soften the process is to ask everyone in the room to make two lists: the top five things that they would do again and the top five things that they wouldn’t do again. People find it easier to be candid if they balance the negative with the positive.
3. Make use of data. People tend to assume that much of what we do can’t be measure or analyzed. That’s wrong. Many of our processes involve activities and deliverables that can be quantified. We keep track of the rates at which things happen, how often something has to be reworked, how long something actually took versus how long we estimated it would take, whether a piece of work was completely finished or not when it was sent to another department, etc. I like data because it is neutral. That allows people to discuss the issues raised by data less emotionally than they might an anecdotal experience. There are limits to data. Some people rely on it too heavily. Analyzing it correctly is difficult, and it is dangerous to assume that you always know what it means. It is very easy to find false patterns in data. I prefer to think of data as one way of seeing, one of many tools we use to look for what’s hidden. A large portion of what we manage can’t be measured, and not realizing this has unintended consequences. The problem comes when people think that data paints a full picture, leading them to ignore what they can’t see. Here’s my approach: Measure what you can, evaluate what you measure, and appreciate that you cannot measure the vast majority of what you do. At least every once in a while, make time to take a step back and think about what you are doing.

Continuing to Learn

When we started our Pixar University program, it wasn’t the class material that directly enhanced our employee’s job performance. It was something about an apprentice lighting technician sitting alongside an experienced animator, who in turn was sitting next to someone who worked in legal or accounting or security — that proved immensely valuable. In the classroom setting, people interacted in a way they didn’t in the workplace. They felt free to be goofy, relaxed, open, vulnerable. Hierarchy did not apply, and as a result, communication thrived. Pixar University changed the culture for the better. It taught everyone, no matter their title, to respect the work that their colleagues did. It made us all beginners again. Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. I wanted our people to get comfortable with that idea — that both the organization and its members should be willing, at times, to operate on the edge. It sent a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. We begin life, as children, being open to the ideas of others because we need to be open to learn. Most of what children encounter, after all, are things they’ve never seen before. The child has no choice but to embrace the new. If this openness is so wonderful, however, why do we lose it as we grow up? Where, along the way, do we turn from the wide-eyed child into the adult who fears surprises and has all the answers and seeks to control all the outcomes? It reminds me when I was at an art exhibit for my daughter’s school. I noticed that the first- and second-graders’ drawings looked better and fresher than those of the fifth-graders. Somewhere along the line, the fifth-graders had realized that their drawings did not look realistic, and they had become self-conscious and tentative. The result? Their drawings became more stilted and staid, less inventive, because they probably thought that others would recognize this “fault.” The fear of judgment was hindering creativity. If fear hinders us even in grade school, no wonder it takes such discipline — some people even call it a practice — to turn off that inner critic in adulthood and return to a place of openness. In Korean Zen, the belief that it is good to branch out beyond what we already know is expressed in a phrase that means, literally “not know mind.” To have a “not know mind” is a goal of creative people. It means you are open to the new, just as children are. Similarly, in Japanese Zen, that idea of not being constrained by what we already know is called “beginner’s mind.” And people practice for years to recapture and keep ahold of it. When a new company is formed, its founders must have a startup mentality — a beginner’s mind, open to everything because, well, what do they have to lose? When that company becomes successful, its leaders often cast off that startup mentality because, they tell themselves, they have figured out what to do. They don’t want to be beginners anymore. That may be human nature, but I believe it is a part of our nature that should be resisted. By resisting the beginner’s mind, you make yourself more prone to repeat yourself than to create something new. The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely. Paying attention to the present moment without letting your thoughts and ideas about the past and future get in the way is essential. Why? Because it makes room for the views of others. It makes us willing to experiment, and it makes it safe to try something that may fail. It encourages us to work on our awareness, trying to set up our own feedback loop in which paying attention improves our ability to pay attention.

The Unmade Future

Most of us have a romantic idea of how creativity happens: A lone visionary conceives of a film or a product in a flash of insight. The that visionary leads a team of people through hardship to finally deliver on that great promise. This isn’t my experience at all. I’ve known many people I’ve considered creative geniuses and I can’t remember a single one who could articulate exactly what this vision was that they were striving for when they started. In my experience, creative people discover and realize their visions over time and through dedicated, protracted struggle. Creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint. As we forge ahead, while we imagine what might be, we must rely on our guiding principles, our intentions, and our goals — not on being able to see and react to what’s coming before it happens. Alany Kay said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Invention, after all, is an active process that results from decisions we make; to change the world, we must bring new things into being. But how do we go about creating the unmade future? I believe that all we can do is foster the optimal conditions in which it — whatever “it” is — can emerge and flourish. This is where real confidence comes in. Not the confidence that we know exactly what to do at all times but the confidence that, together, we will figure it out.

Uncertainty can make us uncomfortable. We humans like to know where we are headed. There is a sweet spot between the known and the unknown where originality happens; the key is to be able to linger there without panicking. And that, according to the people who make films at Pixar and Disney Animation, means developing a mental model that sustains you. Somes — especially at the beginning of a daunting project — our mental models are all we’ve got. Now I want to share some concrete examples of the kinds of mental models I believe are essential to fortify and sustain anyone engaged in the hard work of inventing something new.

Athletes and musicians often refer to being in “the zone” — that mystical place where their inner critic is silenced and they completely inhabit the moment, where the thinking is clear and the motions are precise. Often, mental models help get them there. Just as George Lucas liked to imagine his company as a wagon train headed west — its passengers full of purpose, part of a team, unwavering in their pursuit of their destination — the coping mechanisms used by Pixar and Disney Animation’s directors, producers, and writers draw heavily on visualization. By imagining their problems as familiar pictures, they are able to keep their wits about them when the pressures of not knowing shake their confidence.

People want decisiveness, but they also want honesty about when you’ve messed up. It’s a huge lesson: Include people in your problems, not just your solutions. Leadership can be about making your best guess and hurrying up about it so if it’s wrong, there’s still time to change course. A creative project will require working closely with other people, you must accept that collaboration brings complications. Other people will help you see outside yourself; they will rally when you are flagging; they will offer ideas that push you to be better. But they will also require constant interaction and communication. Other people are your allies, in other words, but that alliance takes sustained effort to build. If you’re sailing across the ocean and your goal is to avoid weather and waves, then why the hell are you sailing? You have to embrace that sailing means that you can’t control the elements and that there will be good days and bad days and that, whatever comes, you will deal with it because your goal is to eventually get to the other side. If your goal is to make it easier and simpler, then don’t get in the boat.

If one looks at creativity as a resource that we continually draw upon to make something from nothing, then our fear stems from the need to make the nonexistent come into being. People often try to overcome this fear by simply repeating what has worked in the past. That leads nowhere. It leads in the opposite direction of originality. The trick is to use our skills and knowledge not to duplicate but to invent.

In talking to directors and writers, I’m constantly inspired by the models they keep in their heads — each a unique mechanism they use to keep moving forward, through adversity, in pursuit of their goals. Peter Docter compares directing to running through a long tunnel having no idea how long it will last but trusting that he will eventually come out, intact, at the other end. The key is to never stop moving forward. Rich Moore, envisions himself in a maze. You have to keep your head to find your way out. Bob Peterson compares making a movie to an archeological dig. As you progress your project is revealing itself to you.

I believe that when we work on a movie, we are not uncovering an existing thing that had the bad luck to get buried under eons of sediment; we are creating something new. But they argue that the idea the movie is in there somewhere — think of David, trapped in Michelangelo’s block of marble — helps them stay on track and not lose hope. So while I started this chapter by insisting that what moviegoers see on the screen does not emerge fully formed from some visionary’s brain, I have to allow for this idea: Having faith that the elements of a movie are all there for us to find often sustains us during the search.

Evan Andrew warns that during your excavation, not every bone you unearth will necessarily belong to the skeleton you are trying to assemble. There may be bones of several different dinosaurs — or stories — mixed up in your dig site.

Michael Arndt compares writing a screenplay to climbing a mountain blindfolded. You must feel your way, letting the mountain reveal itself to you. Climbing a mountain doesn’t necessarily mean ascending. Sometimes you hike up for a while, feeling good, only to be forced back down into a crevasse before clawing your way out again. And there is no way of knowing where the crevasses will be. I like this metaphor except for the implication that the mountain exists. It suggests that the artist must simply “find” the piece of art, or the idea, that is hidden from sight. It seems to me to contradict one of my central beliefs: that the future is unmade, and we must create it. If writing a screenplay is like climbing a mountain blindfolded, that implies that the goal is to see an existing mountain — while I believe it should be the goal of creative people to build their own mountain from scratch.

The most important thing about a mental model is that it enables whoever relies on it to get their job — whatever it is — done.

Good managers reach out, they listen, they wrangle, coax, and cajole. They meet people where they are. To communicate effectively with them all, you must meet them where they live. Good managers will admit if they don’t understand. They’ll ask questions and get things broken down as if it was for a two-year-old.

As you construct mental models that work best for you, be thoughtful about the problems they are helping you solve. They should keep fear in its place, maintain balance, help make decisions, admit fallibility, and show progress being made.

I am constantly rethinking my own models for how to deal with uncertainty and change and how to enable people. No matter what image I come up with, questions remain. My model has continued to evolve — and it is still evolving.

I attended a retreat were we spent several days in silence. Most people have heard of the Eastern teaching that it is important to exist in the moment. It can be hard to train yourself to observe what is right now (and not to bog down in thoughts of what was and what will be), but the philosophical teaching that underlies that idea — the reason that staying in the moment is so vital — is equally important: Everything is changing. All the time. And you can’t stop it. And your attempts to stop it actually put you in a bad place. It causes pain, but we don’t seem to learn from it. Worse than that, resisting change robs you of your beginner’s mind — your openness to the new. The retreat resonated with many of the issues I spent so much time thinking about at Pixar: control, change, randomness, trust, consequences. The search for a clear mind is one of the fundamental goals of creative people, but the route each one of us travels to get there is unmarked. For me, a man who has always valued introspection, silence was a path I hadn’t tried before. I’ve gone on a silent retreat every year since, and in addition to benefiting personally, I have done a lot of thinking about the management implications of mindfulness. If you are mindful, you are able to focus on the problem at hand without getting caught up in plans or processes. Mindfulness helps us accept the fleeting and subjective nature of our thoughts, to make peace with what we cannot control. Most important, it allows us to remain open to new ideas and to deal with our problems squarely.

Kelly McGonigal, who teaches at Stanford University, discussed how recent studies of the brain’s inner workings proved that the practice of meditation can lessen human suffering — not just the existential angst kind of suffering, which is bad enough, but actual physical pain. She mentions a study at the University of Montreal in 2010, in which two groups — one made up of experienced Zen meditators, the other of non-meditators — were given the exact same type of pain experience: a thermal heat source strapped to one calf. Even though the experienced meditators weren’t actively meditating in the course of the experiment, their threshold for pain was much higher than the non-meditators’. The meditators’ brains were playing attention to the pain, McGonigal explained, but because they knew how to turn off the inner chatter they could tolerate it better. A similar study was done at Wake Forest University that focused on a group of brand new meditators who’d undergone only four days of meditation training. They were given the same pain test and some were able to tolerate greater levels of pain than others. Their minds were doing the opposite of what experienced meditators’ brains do. Instead of paying attention to the moment they were in, McGonigal said they were inhibiting sensory information — somehow shifting their attention to ignore what was happening in the present moment. And that was giving rise to less suffering: inhibiting awareness rather than carefully attending to it. McGonigal was talking about the brain’s tendency to suppress problems instead of facing them head-on. What makes this even more difficult is that the people who were suppressing thought that they were doing the same thing as the people who were addressing the problem. It is sobering to think that in trying to be mindful, some of us accidentally end up being exactly the opposite. We deflect and ignore.

This model of paying attention to what is in front of you, not hanging on too tightly to the past of the future, has proved immensely useful to me as I have tried to sort out organizational issues and to dissuade my colleagues from clinging to processes or plans that have outlived their usefulness. Likewise, the notion of acknowledging problems (rather than putting in place rules that seek to suppress them) has meaning to mean.

What’s essential is that each of us struggles to build a framework to help us be open to making something new. The models in our heads embolden us. They enable us to do the exhilarating and difficult work of navigating the unknown.

Testing What We Know

A New Challenge

“I’m thinking about selling Pixar to Disney,” Steve said. This chapter is largely devoted to some of the ways we went about making a sustainable creative environment. This was our chance to prove that what we’d created at Pixar could work outside of Pixar as Pixar joined Disney. First, I’ll talk about how the merger came to pass in the first place, because I believe we did several things in the very early stages that put our partnership on a strong footing.

“Get to know Bob Iger, CEO of Disney,” Steve said. So John and I did. I liked him immediately. The first thing he did was tell me a story. He told me that animation would always be Disney’s lifeblood, and he was determined to see that part of the business rise again. Bob preferred asking questions to holding forth — and his queries were incisive and straightforward. Something unusual had been built at Pixar, he said, and he wanted to understand it. His agenda was clear: reviving Disney Animation while preserving Pixar’s autonomy. Bob seemed to share our core values, but we were worried about the acquisition destroying what we held most dear: a culture of candor and freedom and the kind of constructive self-criticism that allowed our people, and the movies they made, to evolve into their best selves. We believed Bob had good intentions but were wary of the larger company’s ability — even inadvertently — to roll over us. Bob reassured us that he was putting his reputation on the line and didn’t want to endanger the value of the asset Disney was buying, though. We agreed that we would have to make sure the people at Disney Animation felt like they didn’t lose. We had to make them feel good about themselves. At the end of the day we agreed that the future would be brighter if Pixar and Disney Animation joined forced. Both companies had to trust each other and felt a personal obligation to live up to the intent of the agreement — and I believe this was the ideal way to begin our relationship.

I arrived at Disney Animation to get the lay of the land for a tour and the first thing I noticed was the lack of personal items on employee’s desks. Everybody had been told to clean off their desks in order to make a good first impression. We had a lot of work ahead of us. The real problem wasn’t the lack of individuality represented, it was the undue emphasis put on preventing errors, even for something as small as office decor. The building layout also seemed to impede collaboration and exchange of ideas. It struck me as a lousy work environment. Our first order of business was basic remodeling. We moved the executive suites from the top floor to the middle floor and removed the secretarial cubicles. We made a point to leave the shades to our offices open. Our goal was to communicate transparency. They may sound symbolic or even superficial but the messages these changes made set the stage for major organizational changes.

Since we didn’t know much of anything about the people, we did a quick audit to find out who the actual leaders were. These weren’t necessarily the people in the biggest offices.

Instead of asking employees to set a perfect route to achieving future goals and sticking to it unwaveringly, we asked them to be open to readjusting along the way, to remain flexible, and to accept that we would be making some things up as we went.

We immediately removed Disney’s oversight group and put together their own version of a Braintrust. While everyone embraced the idea of organized candor on an intellectual level and could begin to approximate it when instructed, it would be a while before it came naturally. Telling the truth isn’t easy. But I can say that today, Disney’s Story Trust is made up of individuals who understand not only that they must do the difficult work of leveling with one another but how to do it better.

We decided to keep Pixar and Disney Animation separate because we wanted each studio to know that it could stand on its own and solve its own problems. We didn’t want to mask problems by allowing one studio to borrow people or resources from the other. We wanted to force problems to the surface to face them head on. It was important, we felt, for each studio to know that when they finished a film, nobody had bailed them out — they’d made it themselves.

John and I called a company meeting and I gave what some at Disney call “the Toyota Speech.” I described the car company’s commitment to empowering its employees and letting people on the assembly line make decisions when they encountered problems. We stressed that no one at Disney needed to wait for permission to come up with solutions. What is the point of hiring smart people, we asked, if you don’t empower them to fix what’s broken? We challenged them to step up and fix problems. For too long the leaders of Disney Animation placed a higher value on error prevention than anything else.

Disney directors respected the studio’s heritage, but they wanted to build on it — and in order to do that, they had to be free to forge their own path.

All we could do at Disney, I knew, was create a healthy creative environment and see what developed. We had applied our principles to a dysfunctional group and had changed them, unleashing their creative potential. They had become a cohesive team, stocked with standout talents. Now we had a creative roster that was as good as the one at Pixar, yet quite different.

Notes Day

When I began this book, I hoped to capture some of the thinking that underlies the way we work at Pixar and Disney Animation. The clarity didn’t come easy. It was elusive because I don’t believe in simple, prescriptive formulas for success. I wanted this book to acknowledge the complexity that creativity requires.

There are forces in any company that are hard to see. Among them the impact of growth and the reverberations of success — had sparked several problems. We had taken in quite a mixture of people. We now had more recent arrivals. Some of these people learned quickly, absorbing the ideas that made our company work and becoming new leaders, others were in awe of the place — respectful of our history to the point that they could be hindered by it. Many brought good new ideas with them, but some were reluctant to suggest them. After all, this was the great and mighty Pixar, they thought — who were they to call for change?

Pixar had the kind of diverse problems that any successful company has. But chief among them, to my mind, was that more and more people had begun to feel that it was either not safe or not welcome to offer differing ideas. There is nothing like a crisis, though, to bring what ails a company to the surface. We had three crises brewing at once. 1) Our production costs were rising; 2) External economic forces were pressuring us; 3) One of our central tenets — good ideas can come from anywhere, so everyone must feel empowered to speak up — was faltering. Too many of our people — and to my mind, “too many” is the same as “any” — were self-censoring. We tried something that we hoped would break the logjam and reinvigorate the studio. We called it Notes Day. The premise of Notes Day was to ask ourselves: How do we tap the brainpower of our people? Notes Day was a success in part because it was based on the idea that fixing things is an ongoing, incremental process. Creative people must accept that challenges never cease, failure can’t be avoided, and “vision” is often an illusion. But they must also feel safe — always — to speak their minds. Notes Day was a reminder that collaboration, determination, and candor never fail to lift us up.

What makes me most proud is how our people respond to crisis. When we have a problem, the leaders of the company don’t say, “What the hell are you guys going to do about it?” Instead there is talk of “our” problem and what “we” can do to solve it together.

As Pixar had grown, it had changed. We needed to stay ahead of trouble by keeping our costs down. At the same time, we did not want to stop taking risks. Not every film had to tackle unconventional stories, of course, but we wanted every filmmaker to feel free to propose them. When costs are low, it’s easier to justify taking a risk. Thus, unless we lowered our costs, we would effectively limit the kinds of films that we would be able to make. Moreover, there was another benefit of lowering costs. Cheaper films are made with smaller crews, and everyone agrees that the smaller the crew, the better the working experience.

We sensed that our people, having enjoyed years of success, were under a great deal of pressure not to fail. Our determination to avoid disappointments was causing us to shy away from risk. As at many companies, one of the consequences of wild success is the pernicious distortion of reality. I thought people had gotten too comfortable. We needed them to feel excited — to feel like we once did: on fire and buzzing with possibility.

We wanted to cut costs by 10%. We decided to ask Pixar’s people — all of them — for ideas about how to do it. We decided to closer Pixar for the day and have everybody come in to work but all we’d talk about was how to solve this problem. We made notes our shorthand term for candid feedback. It was to be a day in which employees would tell us how to make Pixar better. We made it clear what Notes Day was and wasn’t It was not a call for working faster or doing more overtime or making do with fewer people. It was to realize areas in which we could improve and we needed everyone to speak up.

The suggestion box prompted something that we hadn’t expected. Many departments, without any prodding, created their own wiki pages and blogs to hash out what they believed the core issues at Pixar really were. Weeks before Notes Day, people were talking among themselves in ways they hadn’t before about how, specifically, to improve workflow and enact positive change. Four thousand emails poured into the Notes Day suggestions box — containing one thousand separate ideas in all. We discarded the ones that felt like general grumbling and made room for the interesting ideas that might lead somewhere. Our major criterion was imagining if twenty people would talked about the topic for an hour. We distilled the thousand ideas to 293 discussion topics. We then whittled it down to 120 and organized them into several broad categories.

We needed to find out roughly how many people were interested in each discussion topic so that we could plan the day accordingly. We circulated a survey and learned that the number one topic most people wanted to talk about was how to achieve a 12,000 person-week movie. The problem of doing more with less was interesting to them, and they wanted to engage with it.

It’s all well and good to gather people to discuss workplace challenges, but it was extremely important that we find a way to turn all that talk into something tangible, usable, valuable. How the day was designed, we felt, would be the deciding factor in accomplishing that. We decided early on that people would determine their own schedules, signing up for only the sessions that interested them.

The goal was meaningful engagement that would lead to action. We didn’t just want to make lists of cool things we could do. The goal was to identify passionate people who would take ideas forward. We wanted to put people with clever insights in front of Pixar’s executive team. The day was about speaking up and honesty. It was about making Pixar better forever.

To start, everyone headed to their own departmental meeting where they shared ideas with their closest colleagues about how to be more efficient. These departmental meetings, we felt, would serve as a sort of warm-up for the day; it’s always easier to be candid with people you know than with strangers.

We separated out Pixar’s executives, directors, and producers so that people would speak freely. We wanted the best ideas to be pushed forward, not to languish. In the weeks after Notes Day, all those who volunteered to be “idea advocates” were called in to hone their pitches. We immediately began moving to implement the ones that made sense. In the weeks after Notes Day, we implemented four good ideas, committed to five more, and earmarked a dozen more for continued development. All of them stood to improve our process, culture, and/or the way Pixar is managed. Most importantly, we broke the logjam that was getting in the way of candor and making it feel dangerous. The biggest payoff of Notes Day was that we made it safer for people to say what they thought. Notes Day made it okay to disagree. That and the feeling our people had that they were part of the solution were its biggest contributions.

What made Notes Day work? First, there was a clear and focused goal. This wasn’t a free-for-all but a wide-ranging discussion organized around topics suggested by the company’s employees aimed at addressing a specific reality: the need to cut our costs by 10%. While the discussion topics were allowed — even encouraged — to stray into areas that might seem only vaguely related to this goal, the fact that it was there was key. It provided a framework — and it kept us from falling into confusion. Second, this was an idea championed by those at the highest levels of the company. Employees wouldn’t have bought into the idea because they’d sense that management hadn’t. Third, Notes Day was led from within. Many companies hiring outside consulting firms to organize their all-staff retreats. I believe it was key that our own people made Notes Day happen. Their commitment was contagious. They remembered why they worked at Pixar. Notes Day wasn’t an end point, but a beginning — a way of making room for our employees to step forward and think about their role in our company’s future. Problems are easy to identify, but finding the source of those problems is extraordinarily difficult. Notes brought the problems to the surface. Notes Day didn’t solve anything by itself. But it shifted our culture — repaired it, even — in ways that will make us better as we go forward.

Things change, constantly, as they should. And with change comes the need for adaptation, for fresh thinking, and, sometimes, for even a total reboot — of your project, your department, your division, or your company as a whole. In times of change, we need support.

PERSIST. PERSIST. On telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision. My goal has never been to tell people how Pixar and Disney figured it all out but rather to show how we continue to figure it out, every hour of every day. How we persist. The future is not a destination — it is a direction. It is our job, then, to work each day to chart the right course and make corrections when, inevitably, we stray. To keep a creative culture vibrant, we must not be afraid of constant uncertainty. Uncertainty and change are life’s constants. And that’s the fun part.

As challenges emerge, mistakes will always be made, and our work is never done. We will always have problems, many of which are hidden from our view; we must work to uncover them and assess our own role in them, even if doing so means making ourselves uncomfortable; when we then come across a problem, we must marshal all our energies to solve it. Unleashing creativity requires that we loosen the controls, accept risk, trust our colleagues, work to clear the path for them, and pay attention to anything that creates fear. Doing all these things won’t necessarily make the job of managing a creative culture easier. But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.

Afterword: The Steve We Knew

Steve had a passion for excellence and developed a lasting bond with our directors. I recognized there was something very important about what they shared. When directors pitch an idea, they invest totally, even though a part of them knows that in the end, it may not work at all. Pitching is a way of testing material, taking its measure — and, importantly, strengthening it — by observing how it plays to an audience. But if the idea doesn’t fly, they are extremely adept at dropping it and moving on. This is a rare skill, one that Steve had too. Steve had a remarkable knack for letting go of things that didn’t work. He didn’t hold on to an idea because he had once believed it to be brilliant. His ego didn’t attach to the suggestions he made, even as he threw his full weight behind them. One of the dangers of this approach can be that if you are pitching intently, your very exuberance can make others reluctant to respond candidly. The trick is to shift the emphasis in any away from the source of an idea and onto the idea itself.

Countless times, I remember watching Steve toss ideas — pretty far-out ideas — into the air, just to see how they played. And if they didn’t play well, he would move on. This is, in effect, a form of storytelling — searching for the best way to frame and communicate and idea. He was gauging reactions to his ideas to see whether or not he should become their advocate. Part of his bond with our directors stemmed from the fact that he knew how important it was to construct a story that connected with people.

Steve recognized that many rules were in fact arbitrary. We frequently support the idea of pushing boundaries in theory, ignoring the trouble it can cause in practice. A characteristic of creative people is that they imagine making the impossible possible. Imagining — dreaming, noodling, audaciously rejecting what is (for the moment) true — is the way we discover what is new or important. Steve understood the value of science and law, but he also understood that complex systems respond in nonlinear, unpredictable ways. And that creativity, at its best, surprises us all. Steve believed, as I do, that it is precisely by acting on our intentions and staying true to our values that we change the world.

Starting Points

Here are some of the principles we’ve developed over the years to enable and protect a healthy creative culture. I know that when you distill a complex idea into a T-shirt slogan, you risk giving the illusion of understanding — and, in the process, of sapping the idea of its power. An adage worth repeating is also halfway to being irrelevant. You end up with something that is easy to say but not connected to behavior. The trick is to think of each statement as a starting point, as a prompt toward deeper inquiry, and not as a conclusion.

• Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. If you get the team right, chances are that they’ll get the ideas right.
• When looking to hire people, give their potential to grow more weight than their current skill level. What they will be capable of tomorrow is more important than what they can do today.
• Always try to hire people who are smarter than you. Always take a chance on better, even if it seems like a potential threat.
• If there are people in your organization who feel they are not free to suggest ideas, you lose. Do not discount ideas from unexpected sources. Inspiration can, and does, come from anywhere.
• It isn’t enough merely to be open to ideas from others. Engaging the collective brainpower of the people you work with is an active, ongoing process. As a manager, you must coax ideas out of your staff and constantly push them to contribute.
• There are many valid reasons why people aren’t candid with one another in a work environment. Your job is to search for those reasons and then address them.
• Likewise, if someone disagrees with you, there is a reason. Our first job is to understand the reasoning behind their conclusions.
• Further, if there is fear in an organization, there is a reason for it — our job is (a) to find what’s causing it, (b) to understand it, and © to try and root it out.
• There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right.
• In general, people are hesitant to say things that might rock the boat. Braintrust meetings, dailies, postmortems, and Notes Day are all efforts to reinforce the idea that it is okay to express yourself. All are mechanisms of self-assessment that seek to uncover what’s real.
• If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings, you have a problem.
• Many managers feel that if they are not notified about problems before others are or if they are surprised in a meeting, then that is a sign of disrespect. Get over it.
• Careful “messaging” to downplay problems makes you appear to be lying, deluded, ignorant, or uncaring. Sharing problems is an act of inclusion that makes employees feel invested in the larger enterprise.
• The first conclusions we draw from our successes and failures are typically wrong. Measuring the outcome without evaluating the process is deceiving.
• Do not fall for the illusion that by preventing errors, you won’t have errors to fix. The truth is, the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.
• Change and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capability to recover when unexpected events occur. If you don’t always try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
• Similarly, it is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.
• Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.
• Trust doesn’t mean that you trust that someone won’t screw up — it means you trust them even when they do screw up.
• The people ultimately responsible for implementing a plan must be empowered to make decisions when things go wrong, even before getting approval. Finding and fixing problems is everybody’s job. Anyone should be able to stop the production line.
• The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goal — it leads to measuring people by the mistakes they make rather than by their ability to solve problems.
• Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. It’ll be pretty when we get there, but it won’t be pretty along the way. And that’s as it should be.
• A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.
• Be wary of making too many rules. Rules can simplify life for managers, but they can be demeaning to the 95% who behave well. Don’t create rules to rein in the other 5% — address abuses of common sense individually. This is more work but ultimately healthier.
• Imposing limits can encourage a creative response. Excellent work can emerge from uncomfortable or seemingly untenable circumstances.
• Engaging with exceptionally hard problems focuses us to think differently.
• An organization, as a whole, is more conservative and resistant to change than the individuals who comprise it. Do not assume that general agreement will lead to change — it takes substantial energy to move a group, even when all are on board.
• The healthiest organizations are made up of departments whose agendas differ but whose goals are interdependent. If one agenda wins, we all lose.
• Our job as managers in creative environments is to protect new ideas from those who don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so greatness. Protect the future, not the past.
• New crises are not always lamentable — they test and demonstrate a company’s values. The process of problem-solving often bonds people together and keeps the culture in the present.
• Excellence, quality, and good should be earned words, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves.
• Do not accidentally make stability a goal. Balance is more important than stability.
• Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Working on our process to make them better, easier, and more efficient is an indispensable activity and something we should continually work on — but it is not the goal. Making the product great is the goal.

Learn more at www.FractalSolutionsLLC.com