Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

by Ed Catmull

Healthy cultures and healthy companies are not stable. They are ever-changing. And that change requires that leaders need to remain vigilant and nimble and, above all, that they make sure that core values are protected.

My aim at Pixar—and at Disney Animation, which my longtime partner John Lasseter and I have also led since the Walt Disney Company acquired Pixar in 2006—has been to enable our people to do their best work. 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 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.

During all my years at Pixar and Disney, we always had people who were unhappy about something. Instead of avoiding those people, I sought them out, welcoming them into my office to talk. Why? Because I saw their complaints as early warning signals. If they had a gripe, chances were good someone else had a similar or related one. The trick was figuring out what, exactly, was causing their problem.

Creativity flourishes when we look at ideas in new ways. To my mind, if nurturing creativity is your goal, diversity—the inclusion of all genders, races, and ethnicities, for starters, but also of lived experiences, of viewpoints, of disciplines—is essential.

It has long fascinated me that when people talk about digging deeper, they often use the metaphor of peeling an onion, one layer at a time. But there is a problem with this metaphor—when you peel an onion, you are still left with another (though smaller) onion. And you cry. But that’s not what happens when you’re addressing complex creative challenges. I believe the better metaphor is that you peel the onion, and inside you find a banana! Then you peel the banana, and inside you find an orange. At every step of the creative process, you find new (and often unexpected) fruit.

A characteristic of creative people is that they imagine making the impossible possible. That imagining—dreaming, noodling, audaciously rejecting what is (for the moment) true—is the way we discover what is new or important.

If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings, you have a problem.

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.