How To Build a Company That Can Dance
I have never been the talented person in the room. I can’t draw or paint. I can’t sing or play an instrument. I can’t dance. I’m not very good at making people laugh, except of course should I attempt to dance. Because of this, I have always been in awe of talented people. People who by genetics or intense effort, are able to create something immersive, attractive, beautiful. They can turn a pencil and an empty sheet into beautiful art, they can string random words together in just the right order and tone to make us burst into laughter, and they can design the ideas and products that speak to our soul. In some sense, we often take them for granted. While immersed in their creations, we ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ and give all the praise we can. And then we move on with our lives, forgetting that the actions of these creatives transcend almost all aspects of our existence. For example, in a world without artists, designers and innovators, our buildings will look less like this…
and more like this…
Understanding that we need more creative people to help out-build and out-design ourselves, it becomes even more important to understand how best to work with them. I recently stumbled upon Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Edwin Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar and former President of Walt Disney Animation Studios. A true visionary, Ed is one of the driving forces behind the ascent of the computer-animated movie industry from non-existence to about $270 billion today. He was involved in the creation of Toy Story, The Incredibles, Frozen, and many others. Few people have the insight Ed does into fostering a culture of creativity, and the book has many powerful lessons for anybody aspiring to build or lead an innovative company. I will share two of them below.
Hierarchy Must Go
For many years, the Pixar conference room had a long, narrow table. This table had been handpicked by one of Steve Jobs’ favorite designers, and was truly elegant. The problem with the table though, was that it made communication flow difficult. Because it was so long, it was difficult for someone on the other end of the room to hear what the speaker was saying. I presume it looked something like this.
To solve this problem, the team agreed to allow seats around the center of the table be reserved for the most important contributors. As a result, the most experienced movie directors, producers, and animators all got their seats reserved with placeholders. And so life at Pixar went for 13 years. Until one day, when the creative team happened to hold a meeting in another room with a square-ish table instead. Almost immediately, the leaders observed that the conversation was sharper, ideas were free-flowing and many more members of the team were contributing. Ed immediately realized what had been going on. By putting placeholders and reserving seats in central locations, the previous table had created a hierarchy of some sort, signalling whose contributions were important and whose were much less so. The junior designers, directors and animators had felt disenfranchised from the larger team, and had increasingly kept their ideas and suggestions to themselves. By holding the meeting in a new space, those initial restrictions had disappeared and creative juices were flowing again. They agreed to get rid of the long table and fit a smaller, square-ish table into the conference room instead.
Upon returning for the next meeting, they noticed that the long table was gone and the placeholders had been moved to the new table. Andrew Stanton (co-writer of Finding Nemo and Wall-E) immediately grabbed all the placeholders and threw them in the bin! There are two lessons from this story. First, if you really want people to do their best work, hierarchy has to go. A truly creative environment needs ideas to come from right, left and center. Every member of the team needs to feel genuinely empowered to contribute, and not constrained by overly bureaucratic processes. Second, after solving the main problem, the follow-up problem remained! Had the placeholders been left on the smaller table, they would have continued to signal who was valuable and who was not. Undoing a bad decision is not enough, we should strive to undo all the decisions that followed the main bad decision to really solve a problem.
Art vs Craft
Creating something from nothing is difficult. When trying to implement a new idea, we tend to rely on input from external sources which we assume are already validated. What do I mean? For example, an architect might pitch a previously designed building to a client rather than design a new building from scratch. Humans often try to be efficient, and many times this means copying and pasting what appears to be a working model. In a recent conversation with one of my mentors, I shared with him an education finance research that I had been involved with. Something immediately stood out to him. How did we model the university loan default rate? Because we could not find data on education loans in Nigeria, we added some buffer to the 10.1% US education loan default rate and had built a model with 15%. But that prediction was way off. He reckoned that an ideal default rate for Nigeria would be somewhere between 30% and 50%, especially since our national identity management and judicial systems still have a long way to go. Of course, he was absolutely right. This tendency to copy and paste became a challenge for the creatives at Pixar as well. Brad Bird (animator on Incredibles 2 and Ratatouille) noticed that many young animators were reusing previous scenery and characters. For instance, an animator creating a new movie might decide to build a character while replicating the hair of Rapunzel, the ears of Mickey mouse, the gait of Spider-man and the upper body of Johnny Bravo! Okay that would be a terrible example, but hopefully Frankenstein below illustrates the point.
Ed argues that the model described above would be very good for craftsmanship. A cobbler needs not to innovate on mending shoes, rather perfecting best practices will likely be more effective. Creatives however have an obligation to continually seek out new ways of doing things. Like in art, it is fine to seek inspiration externally but the finished product has to be unique. The art vs craft discussion is one many business teams need to have, because a balance has to be found between the craft of perfecting tried-and-tested products, and the art of originating entirely new products that can potentially transform industries.
As the world continues to evolve with self-driving cars, hotel service robots and countless other innovations, it has never been more important to have humans fuse logic and technology with passion, individuality and creativity. But to design products and processes that make our hearts dance, we need to be a bit more intentional about creating companies that encourage a culture of creativity.
