Sustaining Creativity Inside Organizations: Lessons From Pixar
All businesses are rife with risk. But more so the entertainment business, subject to shifting audience whims, competitive pressures and the commercial imperative to deliver returns on huge production costs. It’s hardly a sector for the faint-hearted. Marrying the subjective construction of stories with the vagaries of technology would seem to multiply the chances of failure.
Yet Pixar has consistently defied market and audience expectations. By miraculously combining complex computer animations with vivid, emotionally-charged narratives that make us forget – like children do – that the toys in Toy Story are 3D cartoons and not real characters. And not just once, but again and again, in Coco, Toy Story 2, Wall-E, Ratatouille, Up to name a few of their legendary productions. How did a technology powerhouse also manage to create the ineffable, and that too on repeat?
Ed Catmull’s Life Story in Brief
Reading Creativity Inc., by Ed Catmull, the erstwhile President of Pixar and Disney Animation (Pixar was bought by Disney in 2006) might offer some clues. Catmull himself had a rather unusual background for someone in the entertainment business. As a child growing up in the 1950s, he had been riveted by a TV show titled “The Wonderful World of Disney.”
In that show, an affable Walt Disney deconstructed the technology that went into making his artful films. Catmull yearned to become a Disney animator. At high school, he realized his art skills weren’t going to lead him down that path. He opted to pursue Bachelor’s degrees in Physics and Computer Science instead.
Later, however, inhabiting Ivan Sutherland’s lab at the University of Utah with other legendary geeks led him closer to his Disney dream. While completing his doctorate in Computer Science, he started forging realistic, curvy computer graphics. Eventually, the visionary creator of Star Wars, George Lucas, tugged Catmull into the arcane world of storytellers and filmmakers.
The leader also had a condition called “aphantasia” – which alludes to an inability to hold mental imagery inside the brain. Quite counterintuitively, some other brilliant animators and artists also have the condition. In an interview with the BBC, Catmull describes his condition as having a “blind mind’s eye.”
Brains often compensate for deficits with unusual strengths. Clearly, in Catmull’s case, it wasn’t just the ability to create and imagine, but also to do something more difficult: to shepherd creative teams and to identify the processes that lead to consistently brilliant films, many of which smashed box office records and won Academy Awards. An astounding feat in a business where productivity and efficiency measures collide with mystery and magic.
What are some takeaways from Pixar for other businesses or organizations?
- It’s Not Just About the “Initial Idea”
Movies, or for that matter, products or services, are often sold with elevator pitches. A sort of concept note that details what you are going to do. As Catmull discovered, even for films, the plot summary is only a short step in a much longer, more painstaking process. Most startups realize that the initial product idea is not necessarily the one that will takeoff. Or even if it is, the execution is far more strenuous than a momentary brainwave.
2. Creativity Entails Many Retakes
Fortunately, Pixar permits its creative teams to take four or five years for each movie, allowing for many micro-failures and iterations and retakes during the production process. This allows for the final product to emerge with more ingenuity and polish than rushed production processes would facilitate. Stories too are constantly reshaped, based on ongoing discussions and internal viewer responses. About Toy Story, Catmull remarks: “We’d rebooted the story completely, more than once, to make sure it rang true.”
3. Talent Matters
While producing Toy Story 2, Catmull learned a critical lesson. That an alternative, less talented team might mess up on a “good idea”. On the other hand, as he puts it, “if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.” In other words, whom you hire and retain is possibly more important than merely generating great ideas that will be poorly executed.
4. Foster a Democratic Culture Where All Suggestions Are Considered
Regardless of the function, level, or role of the employee, people ought to feel safe enough to express opinions and offer suggestions. It’s up to the creative leaders to accept or discard these suggestions, but interactions across the organization should be designed to ensure communication across silos.
Pixar famously leveraged its building design to cultivate serendipitous encounters in an atrium space. But building designs are futile if leaders are unwilling to listen to valid, dissenting views.
Besides the office design (or the design of Zoom meetings, in the hybrid era), leaders ought to attend to hidden details that might silence some voices, while overplaying others. For instance, in one of the Pixar conference rooms called West One, meetings were traditionally held around a long, thin table designed by a friend of Steve Jobs. The table however, required the ‘leadership’ to be bunched together at the center, with others distributed towards the ends. With time, some smart aleck added place cards to ensure that the leaders’ positions were reserved.
For about a decade, Catmull did not think there was a problem. Till they had a meeting in another room with a square table, where he could make eye-contact with many more folks. And where employees spoke up in a way they hadn’t, so far. The earlier table was discarded, and so were the place cards. “Even after all these years, I’m often surprised to find problems that have existed right in front of me, in plain sight.”
5. Ensure New Hires Feel Confident About Speaking Up
Such sensitivity is particularly important when it comes to handling new employees – who lack relationships inside the organization, and who are often wary about speaking up in spaces where the power dynamics are unknown. Catmull was particularly attuned to new hires being subject to uncertainty about their own position in an organization. And to their inevitable dismissal by veterans, who might carry a “not-invented-here” type of chip on their shoulders.
6. Create An Objective, Intensely-Talented Sounding Board
During the making of each film, directors and producers et al would bounce off their problems with a very experienced committee or what Catmull calls a “Braintrust” consisting of a host of talented filmmakers. Stumbling blocks, obstacles or ideas would be thrashed about inside the group, allowing for collective intelligence to supersede the fragility of individual ideas.
But one of the necessary factors for this kind of advisory board to succeed is that they cannot be authoritarian. In other words, they should lack the power to impose views. They can offer suggestions or critical comments, but the decision to take those views into account should lie with the respective director/producer team. If not, there will be an expected pushback to such views from the executing teams.
7. Build in Frequent Reviews
Given his own strong technology background, Catmull instilled corporate-type daily review processes on what can often feel like the vague meandering of imaginative minds. In these reviews, teams were encouraged to share rough drafts of works-in-progress, allowing for early criticisms and suggestions. Besides, teams could inspire each other with fresh ideas.
Much later rework was averted by sharing one’s thoughts – as pencil sketches, or possible story directions – before converting them into high-cost animations. Startups are often encouraged to “Fail Often, Fail Fast” but equally Catmull emphasizes that “Share Often, Share Fast” can help in a company, where failures and bad ideas are not castigated.
8. Stay Introspective
Catmull was also one of those rare leaders who dreaded complacency. Or about permitting success to derail their beginner’s mindset. He had watched many other technology companies blaze towards dizzying heights, only to surprisingly fizzle out. Even as a leader, he was conscious about retaining a storyteller’s empathy. While Jobs is often credited with being a creative pioneer, kind, modest and reflective leaders like Catmull also offer invaluable insights.
References
Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace, Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, Random House, 2014
https://hbr.org/2008/09/how-pixar-fosters-collective-creativity