Creativity, Inc. | Book notes -2
Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration
Part 2 | Protecting the New
Chapter 5 — Honesty and Candor
Ask anyone, “Should people be honest?” and of course their answer will be yes. It has to be! Saying no is to endorse dishonesty, which is like coming out against literacy or childhood nutrition — it sounds like a moral transgression. But the fact is, there are often good reasons not to be honest. When it comes to interacting with other people in a work environment, there are times when we choose not to say what we really think.
This creates a dilemma. On one level, 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 that is to replace the word honesty with another word that has a similar meaning but fewer moral connotations: candor. Candor is forthrightness or frankness — not so different from honesty, really. And yet, in common usage, the word communicates not just truth-telling but a lack of reserve. Everyone knows that sometimes, being reserved is healthy, even necessary for survival. Nobody thinks that being less than candid makes you a bad person (while no one wants to be called dishonest). People have an 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. This is essential. You cannot address the obstacles to candor until people feel free to say that they exist (and using the word honesty only makes it harder to talk about those barriers).
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.
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.”
“They were funny, focused, smart, and relentlessly candid with each other. Most crucially, they never allowed themselves to be thwarted by the kinds of structural or personal issues that can render meaningful communication in a group setting impossible.
Even in its earliest meetings, I was struck by how constructive the feedback was. 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. And largely because of that trust and mutual respect, its problem-solving powers were immense.
The one thing that has never changed is the demand for candor — which, while its value seems obvious, is harder to achieve than one might think.”
“Let’s imagine that you just joined a Braintrust meeting for the first time and sat down in a room full of smart and experienced people to discuss a film that has just been screened. There are many good reasons to be careful about what you say, right? You want to be polite, you want to respect or defer to others, and you don’t want to embarrass yourself or come off as having all the answers. Before you speak up, no matter how self-assured you are, you will check yourself: Is this a good idea or a stupid one? How many times am I allowed to say something stupid before others begin to doubt me? Can I tell the director that his protagonist is unlikable or that his second act is incomprehensible? It’s not that you want to be dishonest or to withhold from others. At this stage, you aren’t even thinking about candor. You’re thinking about not looking like an idiot.”
“I’m not trying to be modest or self-effacing by saying this. Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so — to go, as I say, ‘from suck to not-suck.’
We dare to attempt these stories, but we don’t get them right on the first pass. And this is as it should be. Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process — reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its throughline or a hollow character finds its soul.”
“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 a while, 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, he or she loses it. Where once he or she 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.
All directors, no matter how talented, organized, or clear of vision, become lost somewhere along the way. That creates a problem for those who seek to give helpful feedback. How do you get a director to address a problem he or she cannot see? The answer depends, of course, on the situation. The director may be right about the potential impact of his central idea, but maybe he simply hasn’t set it up well enough for the Braintrust to understand that. Maybe he doesn’t realize that much of what he thinks is visible on screen is, in fact, only visible in his own head. Or maybe the ideas presented in the reels don’t work and won’t ever work, and the only path forward is to blow something up or start over. No matter what, the process of coming to clarity takes patience and candor.
In Hollywood, studio executives typically communicate their criticisms of an early cut of a film by giving extensive “notes” to the director. The movie will be screened and suggestions will be typed up and delivered a few days later. The problem is, directors don’t want the notes, because they are usually coming from people who aren’t filmmakers and are seen as ignorant and interfering.”
“We give our filmmakers both freedom and responsibility. For example, we believe that the most promising stories are not assigned to filmmakers but emerge from within them. With few exceptions, 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.
You may be thinking, How is the Braintrust different from any other feedback mechanism?
There are two key differences, as I see it. The first is that 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 (and in fact, when our films are screened in-house, all Pixar employees are asked to send notes), they particularly prize feedback from fellow directors and storytellers.
The second difference is that the Braintrust has no authority. This is crucial: The director does not have to follow any of the specific suggestions given. After a Braintrust meeting, it is up to him or her to figure out how to address the feedback. Braintrust meetings are not topdown, do-this-or-else affairs. By removing from the Braintrust the power to mandate solutions, we affect the dynamics of the group in ways I believe are essential.”
Chapter 6 — Fear and Failure
“The process of developing a story is one of discovery,” Pete says. “However, there’s always a guiding principle that leads you as you go down the various roads. In Monsters, Inc., all of our very different plots shared a common feeling — the bittersweet goodbye you feel once a problem” — in this case, Sulley’s quest to return Boo to her own world — “has been solved.
And that allowed them to come to work each day engaged and excited, even while in the midst of confusion. This is key: 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.
Experiments 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.
This is often easier to accept in the laboratory than in a business. Creating art or developing new products in a for-profit context is complicated and expensive. In our case, when we try to tell the most compelling story, how do we assess our attempts and draw conclusions? How do we determine what works best? And how do we put the need to succeed out of our minds long enough to identify a true emotional storyline that will carry a film?
There is an alternative approach to being wrong as fast as you can. It is the notion that if you carefully think everything through, if you are meticulous and plan well and consider all possible outcomes, you are more likely to create a lasting product. But I should caution that 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 it will spare you failure down the line — well, you’re deluding yourself. For one thing, it’s easier to plan derivative work — things that copy or repeat something already out there. So if your primary goal is to have a fully worked out, setin- stone plan, you are only upping your chances of being unoriginal. Moreover, you cannot plan your way out of problems. While planning is very important, and we do a lot of it, there is only so much you can control in a creative environment. In general, 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 (and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed). There’s a corollary to this, as well: 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, like a rut in the mud. 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.
“But just because “failure free” 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.
To be sure, failure can be expensive. Making a bad product or suffering a major public setback damages your company’s reputation and, often, your employees’ morale. So we try to make it less expensive to fail, thereby taking some of the onus off it. For example, we’ve set up a system in which directors are allowed to spend years in the development phase of a movie, where the costs of iteration and exploration are relatively low. (At this point, we’re paying the director’s and story artists’ salaries but not putting anything into production, which is where costs explode.)”
“The director had a strong vision, and his crew was excited and working hard, but they didn’t know what they didn’t know: that the first two years of a movie’s development should be a time of solidifying the story beats by relentlessly testing them — much like you temper steel.”
“To be a truly creative company, you must start things that might fail.”
“But where to draw that line? 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? We put a lot of faith in our Braintrust meetings to make sure that our directors get all the feedback and support they need, but there are problems that process can’t fix. What do you do when candor is not enough?
You may ask: If it is true that all the movies suck at first, and if Pixar’s way is to give filmmakers — not the Braintrust — the ultimate authority to fix what’s broken, then how do you know when to step in?
The criteria we use is that we step in if a director loses the confidence of his or her crew.”
“There are two parts to any failure: There is the event itself, with all its attendant disappointment, confusion, and shame, and then there is 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.”
“In the wake of our failures, we still didn’t want to make only “safe” choices going forward; we understood that taking creative and leadership risks is essential to who we are and that sometimes this means handing the keys to someone who may not fit the traditional conception of a movie director. And yet, as we made those unconventional choices, everyone agreed, we needed to outline better, more explicit steps to train and prepare those we felt had the necessary skills to make movies. Instead of hoping that our director candidates would absorb our shared wisdom through osmosis, we resolved to create a formal mentoring program that would, in a sense, give to others what Pete and Andrew and Lee had experienced working so closely with John in the early days. Going forward, every established director would check in weekly with his mentees — giving them both practical and motivational advice as they developed ideas they hoped would become feature films.
Later, when I was reflecting on the off-site with Andrew, he made what I think is a profound point. He told me that he thinks he and the other proven directors have a responsibility to be teachers — that this should be a central part of their jobs, even as they continue to make their own films. “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,” he said. “Walt Disney didn’t do that. And without him, Disney Animation wasn’t able to survive without enduring a decade and a half, if not two, of a slump. That’s the real goal: Can we teach in a way that our directors will think smart when we’re not around?”
Who better to teach than the most capable among us? And I’m not just talking about seminars or formal settings. Our actions and behaviors, for better or worse, teach those who admire and look up to us how to govern their own lives. Are we thoughtful about how people learn and grow? As leaders, we should think of ourselves as teachers and try to create companies in which teaching is seen as a valued way to contribute to the success of the whole. Do we think of most activities as teaching opportunities and experiences as ways of learning? One of the most crucial responsibilities of leadership is creating a culture that rewards those who lift not just our stock prices but our aspirations as well.
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“But when control is the goal, it can negatively affect other parts of your culture. I’ve known many managers who hate to be surprised in meetings, for example, by which I mean they make it clear that they want to be briefed about any unexpected news in advance and in private. In many workplaces, it is a sign of disrespect if someone surprises a manager with new information in front of other people. But what does this mean in practice? It means that there are pre-meetings before meetings, and the meetings begin to take on a pro forma tone. It means wasted time. It means that the employees who work with these people walk on eggshells. It means that fear runs rampant.
Getting middle managers to tolerate (and not feel threatened by) problems and surprises is one of our most important jobs; they already feel the weight of believing that if they screw up, there will be hell to pay. How do we get people to reframe the way they think about the process and the risks?
The antidote to fear is trust, and we all have a desire to find something to trust in an uncertain world. Fear and trust are powerful forces, and while they are not opposites, exactly, trust is the best tool for driving out fear. There will always be plenty to be afraid of, especially when you are doing something new. Trusting others doesn’t mean that they won’t make mistakes. It means that if they do (or if you do), you trust they will act to help solve it. Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t. Leaders must demonstrate their trustworthiness, over time, through their actions — and the best way to do that is by responding well to failure. The Braintrust and various groups within Pixar have gone through difficult times together, solved problems together, and that is how they’ve built up trust in each other. Be patient. Be authentic. And be consistent. The trust will come.
When you are candid, you are telling people that you trust them and that there is nothing to fear. To confide in employees is to give them a sense of ownership over the information.”
“The people at Pixar have been extremely good at keeping secrets, which is crucial in a business whose profits depend on the strategic release of ideas or products when they are ready and not before. Since making movies is such a messy process, we need to be able to talk candidly, among ourselves, about the mess without having it shared outside the company. By sharing problems and sensitive issues with employees, we make them partners and part owners in our culture, and they do not want to let each other down.
Your employees are smart; that’s why you hired them. So treat them that way. They know when you deliver a message that has been heavily massaged. When managers explain what their plan is without giving the reasons for it, people wonder what the “real” agenda is. There may be no hidden agenda, but you’ve succeeded in implying that there is one. Discussing the thought processes behind solutions aims the focus on the solutions, not on second-guessing. When we are honest, people know it.”
“Rather than trying to prevent all errors, we should assume, as is almost always the case, 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. If there is fear, there is a reason — our job is to find the reason and to remedy it. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.”
Chapter 7 — The Hungry Beast and the Ugly Baby
“The only thing it didn’t do was transform our production process. My conclusion at the time was that finalizing the story before production began was still a worthy goal — we just hadn’t achieved it yet. As we continued to make films, however, I came to believe that my goal was not just impractical but naïve. By insisting on the importance of getting our ducks in a row early, we had come perilously close to embracing a fallacy. 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.
I see this over and over again in other companies: A subversion takes place in which streamlining the process or increasing production supplants the ultimate goal, with each person or group thinking they’re doing the right thing — when, in fact, they have strayed off course. When efficiency or consistency of workflow are not balanced by other equally strong countervailing forces, the result is that new ideas — our ugly babies — aren’t afforded the attention and protection they need to shine and mature. They are abandoned or never conceived of in the first place. Emphasis is placed on doing safer projects that mimic proven money-makers just to keep something — anything! — moving through the pipeline (see The Lion King 1½, a direct-to-video effort that came out in 2004, six years after The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride). This kind of thinking yields predictable, unoriginal fare because it prevents the kind of organic ferment that fuels true inspiration. But it does feed the Beast. ”
“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. Their interaction with one another — the push and pull that occurs naturally when talented people are given clear goals — yields the balance we seek. But that only happens if they understand that achieving balance is a central goal of the company.
While the idea of balance always sounds good, it doesn’t capture the dynamic nature of what it means to actually achieve balance. Our mental image of balance is somewhat distorted because we tend to equate it with stillness — the calm repose of a yogi balancing on one leg, a state without apparent motion. To my mind, the more accurate examples of balance come from sports, such as when a basketball player spins around a defender, a running back bursts through the line of scrimmage, or a surfer catches a wave. All of these are extremely dynamic responses to rapidly changing environments. In the context of animation, directors have told me that they see their engagement when making a film as extremely active. “It seems like it’s good psychologically to expect these movies to be troublesome,” Byron Howard, one of our directors at Disney, told me. “It’s like someone saying, ‘Here, take care of this tiger, but watch your butt, they’re tricky.’ I feel like my butt is safer when I expect the tiger to be tricky.”
As director Brad Bird sees it, every creative organization — be it an animation studio or a record label — is an ecosystem. “You need all the seasons,” he says. “You need storms. It’s like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There’s no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow. And if it’s sunny all the time — if, in fact, we don’t ever even have night — all kinds of things don’t happen and the planet dries up. The key is to view conflict as essential, because that’s how we know the best ideas will be tested and survive. You know, it can’t only be sunlight.”
It is management’s job to figure out how to help others see conflict as healthy — as a route to balance, which benefits us all in the long run. I’m here to say that it can be done — but it is an unending job. A good manager must always be on the lookout for areas in which balance has been lost. For example, as we expand our animation staff at Pixar, which has the positive impact of allowing us to do more quality work, there is also a negative impact that we must deal with: Meetings have become larger and less intimate, with each participant having a proportionally smaller ownership in the final film (which can mean feeling less valued). In response, we created smaller subgroups in which departments and individuals are encouraged to feel they have a voice. In order to make corrections like this — to reestablish balance — managers must be diligent about paying attention.”
“At Pixar, protection means populating story meetings with idea protectors, people who understand the difficult, ephemeral process of developing the new. It means supporting our people, because we know that the best ideas emerge when we’ve made it safe to work through problems. (Remember: People are more important than ideas.) Finally, it does not mean protecting the new forever. At some point, the new has to engage with the needs of the company — with its many constituencies and, yes, with the Beast. As long as the Beast is not allowed to run roughshod over everyone else, as long as we don’t let it invert our values, its presence can be an impetus for progress.
At some point, the new idea has to move from the cocoon of protection into the hands of other people. This engagement process is typically very messy and can be painful. Once, after one of our special effects software guys resigned, he wrote me an email containing two complaints. First, he said, he didn’t like that his job involved cleaning up so many little problems caused by the new software. Second, he wrote, he was disappointed that we weren’t taking more technical risks in our movies. The irony was that his job was to help solve problems that arose precisely because we were taking a major technical risk by implementing new software systems. The mess that he encountered — the reason he quit — was, in fact, caused by the complexity of trying to do something new. I was struck by how he didn’t understand that taking a risk necessitated a willingness to deal with the mess created by the risk.”
“Whether it’s the kernel of a movie idea or a fledgling internship program, 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. And protection of the new — of the future, not the past — must be a conscious effort.”
Chapter 8 — Change and Randomness
“People want to hang on to things that work — stories that work, methods that work, strategies that work. You figure something out, it works, so you keep doing it — this is what an organization that is committed to learning does. And as we become successful, our approaches are reinforced, and we become even more resistant to change.”
What is it, exactly, that people are really afraid of when they say they don’t like change? There is the discomfort of being confused or the extra work or stress the change may require. For many people, changing course is also a sign of weakness, tantamount to admitting that you don’t know what you are doing. This strikes me as particularly bizarre — personally, I think the person who can’t change his or 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.
To be clear, I am not endorsing change for change’s sake. There are often good reasons to hang on to things that work. The wrong kind of change can endanger our projects, which is why those who oppose it are in earnest when they say that they just want to protect the companies in which they work. When people who run bureaucracies balk at change, they are usually acting in the service of what they think is right. Many of the rules that people find onerous and bureaucratic were put in place to deal with real abuses, problems, or inconsistencies or as a way of managing complex environments. But while each rule may have been instituted for good reason, after a while a thicket of rules develops that may not make sense in the aggregate. The danger is that your company becomes overwhelmed by well-intended rules that only accomplish one thing: draining the creative impulse.
When companies are successful, it is natural to assume that this is a result of leaders making shrewd decisions. Those leaders go forward believing that they have figured out the key to building a thriving company. In fact, randomness and luck played a key role in that success.
So what if we oversimplify in order to get through our days? So what if we hold tight to familiar ideas that give us the answers we crave? What does it matter? In my view, it matters a lot. In creative endeavors, we must face the unknown. But if we do so with blinders on — if we shut out reality in the interest of keeping things simple — we will not excel. The mechanisms that keep us safe from unknown threats have been hardwired into us since before our ancestors were fighting off saber-toothed tigers with sticks. But when it comes to creativity, the unknown is not our enemy. If we make room for it instead of shunning it, the unknown can bring inspiration and originality. How, then, do we make friends with the random and unknowable? How do we get more comfortable with our lack of control? It helps to understand just how pervasive randomness is.
“There is a crucial yet hard-to-understand concept here. Most people grasp the need to set priorities; they put the biggest problems at the top, with smaller problems beneath them. There are simply too many small problems to consider them all. So they draw a horizontal line beneath which they will not tread, directing all their energies to those above the line. I believe there is another approach: 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. When a random problem pops up in this scenario, it causes no panic, because the threat of failure has been defanged. The individual or the organization responds with its best thinking, because the organization is not frozen, fearful, waiting for approval. Mistakes will still be made, but in my experience, they are fewer and farther between and are caught at an earlier stage.
As I’ve said, you don’t always know how big a problem is when you first encounter it. It may seem small, but it also might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. If you have the tendency to put problems in buckets, you may not know which bucket to put it in. The difficulty is that we prioritize problems by size and importance, frequently ignoring small problems because of their abundance. But 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. I can’t predict everything that our employees will do or how they will respond to problems, and that is a good thing. 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 chance to send clear signals to employees about the company’s values, which inform the role each individual should expect to play. When we respond to the flaws of a movie in development by throwing it out and restarting, we are telling people that we value the quality of our movies more than anything else.”
I know that a lot of our successes came because we had pure intentions and great talent, and we did a lot of things right, but I also believe that attributing our successes solely to our own intelligence, without acknowledging the role of accidental events, diminishes us. We must acknowledge the 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.
Chapter 9 — The Hidden
Why, I always wonder, do we think of Cassandra as the one who’s cursed? The real curse, it seems to me, afflicts everyone else — all of those who are unable to perceive the truth she speaks.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the limits of perception. In the management context, particularly, it behooves us to ask ourselves constantly: How much are we able to see? And how much is obscured from view? Is there a Cassandra out there we are failing to listen to? In other words, despite our best intentions, are we cursed, too?
These questions take us to the heart of this book, because the answers are essential to sustaining a creative culture. In the preface, I wondered why the leaders of so many rising Silicon Valley companies made bad decisions, decisions that — even at the time — seemed so obviously wrongheaded. They had management and operational skills; they had grand ambitions; they didn’t think they were making bad decisions, nor did they think they were being arrogant. Yet delusion set in — and as bright as these leaders were, they missed something essential to their continued success. The implication, for me, was that we would inevitably be subject to those same delusions at Pixar unless we came to terms with our own limited ability to see. We had to address what I’ve come to call the Hidden.
We had to prepare, then, for an unknown problem — a hidden problem. From that day on, I resolved to bring as many hidden problems as possible to light, a process that would require what might seem like an uncommon commitment to self-assessment.
“They started to believe their own B.S.,” they say. “They got complacent.” Others argue that companies go off the rails because of unreasonable growth or profitability expectations, which force them into poor short-term decisions. But 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 spots, they assumed that the problems didn’t exist.
Which brings us 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.
We all know people we would describe as not being self-aware. Usually we conclude this because they don’t see things about themselves that seem obvious to us — and, just as important, they have no clue that they are missing them. But what about our own awareness? 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 gaps, if you will. I, for one, cannot claim a perfectly clear-eyed view, but I do believe that making room in my head for the certainty that, like it or not, some problems will always be hidden from me has made me a better manager.
To gain this understanding requires identifying multiple levels of the unknown, from the trivial to the fundamental.
“Each of us, then, draws conclusions based on incomplete pictures. It would be wrong for me to assume that my limited view is necessarily better.
If we can agree that it’s hard, if not impossible, to get a complete picture of what is going on at any given time in any given company, it becomes even harder when you are successful. That’s because success convinces us that we are doing things the right way. There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right.
When faced with complexity, it is reassuring to tell ourselves that we can uncover and understand every facet 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.”
“That couldn’t have happened if the producer of the movie — and the company’s leadership in general — hadn’t been open to a new viewpoint that challenged the status quo. That kind of openness is only possible in a culture that acknowledges its own blind spots. It’s only possible when managers understand that others see problems they don’t — and that they also see solutions.”
During the intensive research phase of the film, Pete was surprised to hear from a neuroscientist that only about 40 percent 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,” he told me.
This sounds simple enough — honor the viewpoints of others! — but it can be enormously difficult to put into practice throughout your company. That’s because when humans see things that challenge our mental models, we tend not just to resist them but to ignore them. This has been scientifically proven. The concept of “confirmation bias” — the tendency of people to favor information, true or not, that confirms their preexisting beliefs — was introduced in the 1960s by Peter Wason, a British psychologist. Wason did a famous series of experiments that explored how people give lesser weight to data that contradicts what they think is true. (As if we needed more proof that what’s hidden can make us draw the wrong conclusions.)
Not only is writing time-consuming but writers also bring structural thinking to the development process — input that most directors really need.
I’ll say it again: Our mental models aren’t reality. They are tools, like the models weather forecasters use to predict the weather. But, as we know all too well, sometimes the forecast says rain and, boom, the sun comes out. The tool is not reality. The key is knowing the difference.
“There is no movie. We are making decisions, one by one, to create it. In a fundamental way, the movie is hidden from us. (I refer to this concept as the “Unmade Future,” and I will devote a subsequent chapter to the central role it plays in creativity.) I know this can feel overwhelming.
Now I am urging you to attempt a similar balancing act when navigating between the known and the unknown. 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.
Let us return, for a moment, to the metaphor I used earlier in this chapter, that of the door. On one side is everything we see and know — the world as we understand it. On the other side is everything we can’t see and don’t know — unsolved problems, unexpressed emotions, unrealized possibilities so innumerable that imagining them is inconceivable. This side, then, is not an alternate reality but something even harder to fathom: that which has not yet been created.
The goal is to place one foot on either side of the door — one grounded in what we know, what we are confident about, our areas of expertise, the people and processes we can count on — and the other in the unknown, where things are murky, unseen, or uncreated.”
“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 in their brilliance, telling others about the importance of taking risks. But having stumbled into greatness once, they are not eager for another trip into the unknown. That’s because success makes them warier than ever of failure, so they retreat, content to repeat what they have done before. They stay on the side of the known.
As I discuss the elements of a healthy creative environment, you may have noticed that I have expressly not sought to define the word creativity — and that’s intentional. I don’t do it because it doesn’t seem useful. I believe that we all have the potential to solve problems and express ourselves creatively. What stands in our way are these hidden barriers — the misconceptions and assumptions that impede us without our knowing it. The issue of what is hidden, then, is not just an abstraction to be bandied about as an intellectual exercise. 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 to keep the chaos and fear to a minimum. These concepts don’t necessarily make anything easier, but they can help us uncover hidden problems and, thus, enable us to address them. It is to this we now turn in earnest.”
Part 3 | Building and Sustaining
Chapter 10 — Broadening our view
In this chapter I discuss several of the mechanisms we use 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
1. DAILIES, OR SOLVING PROBLEMS TOGETHER
Dailies are master classes in how to see and think more expansively, and their impact can be felt throughout the building.
I give this glimpse into a dailies session because sharing and analyzing a team’s ongoing work every morning is, by definition, a group effort — but it does not come naturally. People join us with a set of expectations about what they think is important. They want to please, impress, and show their worth. They really don’t want to embarrass themselves by showing incomplete work or ill-conceived ideas, and they don’t want to say something dumb in front of the director. The first step is to teach them that everyone at Pixar shows incomplete work, and everyone is free to make suggestions. When they realize this, the embarrassment goes away — and when the embarrassment goes away, people become more creative. By making the struggles to solve the problems safe to discuss, then everyone learns from — and inspires — one another. The whole activity becomes socially rewarding and productive. To participate fully each morning requires empathy, clarity, generosity, and the ability to listen. Dailies are designed to promote everyone’s ability to be open to others, in the recognition that individual creativity is magnified by the people around you. The result: We see more clearly.
2. RESEARCH TRIPS
While they had hoped to convey the sense of their movie idea by displaying examples from other films, every single board was based on these iconic references, with the unintended result that everything presented felt terribly derivative. In one way, this made sense — every director gets into this business because they love movies; it is inevitable that references to other movies often pop up when talking about filmmaking. (At Pixar, we joke that only one mention of Star Wars is allowed per meeting.) References to movies, both good and bad, are part of the vocabulary of talking about filmmaking. And yet if you rely too much on the references to what came before, you doom your film to being derivative.
Whenever filmmakers make a derivative presentation to John, he will often stop them, urging them to slow down, and look beyond what they think they already know. “You must,” he tells them, “go out and do research.” It is impossible to overstate how strongly John believes in the power of research.
John sent a group of artists to see the tepuis in Venezuela up close; not only that, but an ostrich was brought into Pixar’s headquarters to inspire the animators who were modeling the giant bird character.
— “documenting everything, right down to the details of how pathways integrated into the quads,” Nick says, “and what the graffiti scratches looked like on the wooden desks.” The finished film was loaded with these kinds of details — what letter jackets look like up close or those “Roommate Wanted” fliers (complete with rip-off tags) that students post on campus bulletin boards — all of which gave audiences a feeling of reality.
Ultimately, what we’re after is authenticity. What feels daunting to the filmmakers when John sends them out on such 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.
In any business, it’s important to do your homework, but the point I’m making goes beyond merely getting the facts straight. Research trips challenge our preconceived notions and keep clichés at bay. They fuel inspiration. They are, I believe, what keeps us creating rather than copying.
Here’s a curious thing about research: The authenticity it fosters in the film always comes through, even if moviegoers know nothing about the reality the film is depicting. Very few moviegoers have actually been inside the kitchen of a high-end French restaurant, for example, so you might think the obsessive specificity of Ratatouille’s kitchen scenes — the chefs’ clogs clacking on the black-and-white tile floors, the way they hold their arms when they cut up vegetables, or how they organize their work spaces — would be lost on the audience. But what we’ve found is that when we are accurate, the audiences can tell. It just feels right.
Does this kind of microdetail matter? I believe it does. There’s something about knowing your subject and your setting inside and out — a confidence — that seeps into every frame of your film. It’s a hidden engine, an unspoken contract with the viewer that says: We are striving to tell you something impactful and true. When attempting to make good on that promise, no detail is too small.
3. THE POWER OF LIMITS
Many of our limits are imposed not by our internal processes but by external realities — finite resources, deadlines, a shifting economy or business climate. Those things, we can’t control. But the limits we impose internally, if deployed correctly, can be a tool to force people to amend the way they are working and, sometimes, to invent another way. The very concept of a limit implies that you can’t do everything you want — so we must think of smarter ways to work. Let’s be honest: Many of us don’t make this kind of adjustment until we are required to. Limits force us to rethink how we are working and push us to new heights of creativity.
Another area where limits are invaluable is what we call “appetite control.” In Pixar’s case, when we are making a movie 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.” This occurs not because people are greedy or wasteful but because they care about their particular part of the film and don’t necessarily have a clear view of how it fits into the whole. They believe that investing more is the only way to succeed.
In any creative endeavor, there is a long list of features and effects that you want to include to nudge it toward greatness — a very long list. At some point, though, you realize it is impossible to do everything on the list. So you set a deadline, which then forces a prioritybased 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.
Complicating matters is that frequently, neither the film’s leaders nor its team members know the true cost of the items on the list. The director may have only the fuzziest sense, for example, of how much extra work a particular tweak to the story will require. Likewise, an artist or technical director may think that the thing they are working on is essential and may pour his or her heart into it while having no sense of its actual value to the film. In my story of the camper and the blown tire, Dick found it difficult to separate the reality of events from what he wanted to be true. In a complex process such as making a film, that difficulty of separating out what you want from what you can achieve is exponentially larger. It is all the more important to have tools that enable us to see more clearly.
Brad Bird likes to tell a story about exactly this conundrum. During the making of The Incredibles, he became distracted by what he calls
“mirages” — scenes or ideas he fell in love with but that, ultimately, didn’t serve the film. Brad suddenly realized it didn’t improve the movie in any real way. A mirage had led him astray.
John’s system consisted of popsicle sticks stuck to a wall with Velcro. Each stick represented a person-week, which, as I’ve said, is the amount of work a single animator could accomplish in a week’s time. A bunch of sticks would be lined up next to a particular character for easy reference.
“To John and me, the solution was clear: We simply eliminated the oversight group. We believed that the production people were conscientious managers who were trying to bring a complex project in on time and on budget. In our view, the oversight group added nothing to the process but tension.
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.”
4. INTEGRATING TECHNOLOGY AND ART
“Art challenges technology, technology inspires art.”
Our specialized skills and mental models are challenged when we integrate with people who are different. If we can constantly change and improve our models by using technology in the pursuit of art, we keep ourselves fresh. The whole history of Pixar is a testament to this dynamic interplay.
If you were talking about how to draw a better scene, for example, didn’t it make sense to sketch out your thoughts? Wouldn’t that be more efficient?
Michael’s team, known as the Moving Pictures Group, meanwhile, has become an example of the mindset we value — a mindset that doesn’t fear change. We apply this concept throughout the studio — software people rotate in and out of production. This way of doing things is responsive; it is nimble — and it makes us better.
5. SHORT EXPERIMENTS
And yet, for all our faulty assumptions, the shorts accomplished other things for Pixar. People who work on them, for example, get a broader range of experience than they would on a feature, where the sheer scale and complexity of the project demands more specialization among the crew. Because shorts are staffed with fewer people, each employee has to do more things, developing a variety of skills that come in handy down the line. Moreover, working in small groups forges deeper relationships that can carry forward and, in the long term, benefit the company’s future projects.
Internally, because everyone knows the shorts have no commercial value, the fact that we continue to make them sends a message that we care about artistry at Pixar; it reinforces and affirms our values. And that creates a feeling of goodwill that we draw on, consciously and unconsciously, all the time.
The piece meandered, lacked focus, and thus packed no emotional punch. It wouldn’t be the first time we would find someone who was able to invent wildly creative elements but was unable to solve the problems of story — the central and most important creative challenge. So we pulled the plug.
“Better to have train wrecks with miniature trains than with real ones.”
6. LEARNING TO SEE
To stay with our drawing example, some people draw better than others. What are they doing that most of us aren’t? And if the answer is that they are setting aside their preconceptions, can we all learn to do that? In most cases, the answer is yes.
I want to add an important side note: 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. They’ve added some observational skills to their toolboxes. (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.)
I did not introduce this topic to convince you that anyone can learn to draw. 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. Drawing the “unchair” can be a sort of metaphor for increasing 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. When we give notes on Pixar movies and isolate a scene, say, that isn’t working, we have learned that fixing that scene usually requires making changes somewhere else in the film, and that is where our attention should go. Our filmmakers have become skilled at not getting caught up in a problem but instead looking elsewhere in the story for solutions. Likewise at Disney, the conflict between production and the oversight group could have been addressed by insisting that everyone behave better, when in fact, the real solution came from 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.
7. POSTMORTEMS
“Companies, like individuals, do not become exceptional by believing they are exceptional but by understanding the ways in which they aren’t exceptional. Postmortems are one route into that understanding.”
Everyone was proud, not only of the film but of how committed we were to the culture from which the film had sprung. I understood that this was human nature — why poke a sleeping bear when you can just as easily move on to another campsite? In truth, to most people postmortems seem a bit like having to swallow some kind of bad-tasting medicine. They know it’s necessary, but they don’t like it one bit. This was another puzzle for us: What was it that made some postmortems so bad, while others had a great outcome?
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. Who looks forward to a forum for being second-guessed? Looking inward, to them, often boils down to this: “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. The first two are fairly obvious, the next three less so.
Don’t Let Resentments Fester
Many things that go wrong are caused by misunderstandings or screw-ups. These lead to resentments that, if left unaddressed, can fester for years. But 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. I have seen many cases where hurt feelings lingered far after the project, feelings that would have been worked through much more easily if they had been expressed in a postmortem.
Use the Schedule to Force Reflection
I favor principles that lead you to think. Postmortems — but also other activities such as 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. In other words, the scheduling of a postmortem forces self-reflection. If a postmortem is a chance to struggle openly with our problems, the “pre-postmortem” sets the stage for a successful struggle. I would even say that 90 percent of the value is derived from the preparation leading up to the postmortem.
Pay It Forward
In a postmortem, you can raise questions that should be asked on the next project. A good postmortem arms people with the right questions to ask going forward. 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.
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is a maxim that is taught and believed by many in both the business and education sectors. But in fact, the phrase is ridiculous — something said by people who are unaware of how much is 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. And at least every once in a while, make time to take a step back and think about what you are doing.
8. CONTINUING TO LEARN
It puts me in mind of a night, many years ago, when I found myself at an art exhibit at my daughter’s elementary school in Marin. As I walked up and down the hallways, looking at the paintings and sketches made by kids in grades K through 5, 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.
Chapter 11 — The Unmade Future
My old friend from the University of Utah, Alan Kay — Apple’s chief scientist and the man who introduced me to Steve Jobs — expressed it well when he said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
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.
“It’s a huge lesson: Include people in your problems, not just your solutions.”
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. As we’ve discussed, people often try to overcome this fear by simply repeating what has worked in the past. That leads nowhere — or, more accurately, it leads in the opposite direction of originality. The trick is to use our skills and knowledge not to duplicate but to invent.
“In a word: PERSIST. PERSIST on telling your story. PERSIST on reaching your audience. PERSIST on staying true to your vision.… ”
But ease isn’t the goal; excellence is.”
STARTING POINTS
THOUGHTS FOR MANAGING A CREATIVE CULTURE:
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. But while I have been dismissive of reductive truths throughout this book, I do have a point of view, and I thought it might be helpful to share some of the principles that I hold most dear here with you. 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 to 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 percent who behave well. Don’t create rules to rein in the other 5 percent — 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 forces 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 processes 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.
