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

by Ed Catmull

For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if you are getting the story right.

He came to Lucasfilm one afternoon for a tour of our hardware lab. Again, he pushed and prodded and poked. 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? His aim didn’t seem to be to absorb the intricacies of our technology as much as to hone his own argument, to temper it by sparring with us. Steve’s domineering nature could take one’s breath away. At one point he turned to me and calmly explained that he wanted my job. Once he took my place at the helm, he said, I would learn so much from him that in just two years I would be able to run the enterprise all by myself. I was, of course, already running the enterprise by myself, but I marveled at his chutzpah. He not only planned to displace me in the day-to-day management of the company, he expected me to think it was a great idea!

The acquisition process was complicated by the fact that the negotiators for Lucasfilm weren’t very good. The chief financial officer, in particular, underestimated Steve, assuming he was just another rich kid in over his head. This CFO told me that the way to establish his authority in the room was to arrive last. His thinking, which he articulated out loud to me, was that this would establish him as the “most powerful player,” since he and only he could afford to keep everyone else waiting. All that it ended up establishing, however, was that he’d never met anyone like Steve Jobs.

With that vision came something else, however: an unusual style of interacting with people. Steve was often impatient and curt. When he attended meetings with potential customers, he wouldn’t hesitate to call them out if he sniffed mediocrity or lack of preparation—hardly a helpful tactic when trying to make a deal or develop a loyal client base. He was young and driven and not yet attuned to his impact on others. In our first years together, he didn’t “get” normal people—meaning people who did not run companies or who lacked personal confidence. His method for taking the measure of a room was saying something definitive and outrageous—“These charts are bullshit!” or “This deal is crap!”—and watching people react. If you were brave enough to come back at him, he often respected it—poking at you, then registering your response, was his way of deducing what you thought and whether you had the guts to champion it. Watching him reminded me of a principle of engineering: Sending out a sharp impulse—like a dolphin uses echolocation to determine the location of a school of fish—can teach you crucial things about your environment. Steve used aggressive interplay as a kind of biological sonar. It was how he sized up the world.

The first question was pretty basic: How do we figure out how much to charge for our machine? I was told by the presidents of Sun and Silicon Graphics to start with a high number. If you start high, they said, you can always reduce the price; if you lowball it and then need to raise the price later, you will only upset your customers. So based on the profit margins we wanted, we decided on a price of $122,000 per unit. Big mistake. The Pixar Image Computer quickly gained a reputation for being powerful but too expensive. When we lowered the price later, we discovered that our reputation for being overpriced was all anyone remembered. Regardless of our attempts to correct it, the first impression stuck.

Several phrases would later be coined to describe these revolutionary approaches—phrases like “just-in-time manufacturing” or “total quality control”—but the essence was this: The responsibility for finding and fixing problems should be assigned to every employee, from the most senior manager to the lowliest person on the production line. If anyone at any level spotted a problem in the manufacturing process, Deming believed, they should be encouraged (and expected) to stop the assembly line. Japanese companies that implemented Deming’s ideas made it easy for workers to do so: They installed a cord that anyone could pull in order to bring production to a halt. Before long, Japanese companies were enjoying unheard-of levels of quality, productivity, and market share.

You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.

Three times between 1987 and 1991, a fed-up Steve Jobs tried to sell Pixar. And yet, despite his frustrations, he could never quite bring himself to part with us. When Microsoft offered $90 million for us, he walked away. Steve wanted $120 million, and felt their offer was not just insulting but proof that they weren’t worthy of us. The same thing happened with Alias, the industrial and automotive design software company, and with Silicon Graphics. With each suitor, Steve started with a high price and was unwilling to budge. I came to believe that what he was really looking for was not an exit strategy as much as external validation. His reasoning went like this: If Microsoft was willing to go to $90 million, then we must be worth hanging on to. It was difficult—and enervating—to watch this dance.

You’ll recall the question I asked Steve just before he bought Pixar: How would we resolve conflicts? And his answer, which I found comically egotistical at the time, was that he simply would continue to explain why he was right until I understood. The irony was that this soon became the technique I used with Steve. When we disagreed, I would state my case, but since Steve could think much faster than I could, he would often shoot down my arguments. So I’d wait a week, marshal my thoughts, and then come back and explain it again. He might dismiss my points again, but I would keep coming back until one of three things happened: (1) He would say “Oh, okay, I get it” and give me what I needed; (2) I’d see that he was right and stop lobbying; or (3) our debate would be inconclusive, in which case I’d just go ahead and do what I had proposed in the first place. Each outcome was equally likely, but when this third option occurred, Steve never questioned me. For all his insistence, he respected passion. If I believed in something that strongly, he seemed to feel, it couldn’t be all wrong.

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.

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. The takeaway here is worth repeating: Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.

It is easy to say you want talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one another is the real key. Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched. That means it is better to focus on how a team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it. A good team is made up of people who complement each other.

There is an important principle here that may seem obvious, yet—in my experience—is not obvious at all. Getting the right people and the right chemistry is ...

This principle eludes most people, but 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 enable yourself, in other words, to focus on the problem, not the person.

Brad is a born rebel who fights against creative conformity in any guise. The smell of artistic victory is his drug, and with his rapid, high-energy delivery, he will turn almost everything into a battle to win for the cause of creativity (even if there isn’t anybody around to fight).

Andrew Stanton spoke next. Andrew is fond of saying that people need to be wrong as fast as they can. In a battle, if you’re faced with two hills and you’re unsure which one to attack, he says, the right course of action is to hurry up and choose. If you find out it’s the wrong hill, turn around and attack the other one. In that scenario, the only unacceptable course of action is running between the hills.

An important corollary to the assertion that the Braintrust must be candid is that filmmakers must be ready to hear the truth; candor is only valuable if the person on the receiving end is open to it and willing, if necessary, to let go of things that don’t work.

Frank talk, spirited debate, laughter, and love. If I could distill a Braintrust meeting down to its most essential ingredients, those four things would surely be among them. But newcomers often notice something else first: the volume. Routinely, Braintrust attendees become so energized and excited that they talk over each other, and voices tend to rise. I’ll admit that there have been times when outsiders think they’ve witnessed a heated argument or even some kind of intervention. They haven’t—though I understand their confusion, which stems from their inability (after such a brief visit) to grasp the Braintrust’s intent. A lively debate in a Braintrust meeting is not being waged in the hopes of any one person winning the day. To the extent there is “argument,” it seeks only to excavate the truth.

The key is to look at the viewpoints being offered, in any successful feedback group, as additive, not competitive. A competitive approach measures other ideas against your own, turning the discussion into a debate to be won or lost. An additive approach, on the other hand, starts with the understanding that each participant contributes something (even if it’s only an idea that fuels the discussion—and ultimately doesn’t work). The Braintrust is valuable because it broadens your perspective, allowing you to peer—at least briefly—through others’ eyes.

As Andrew Stanton says, “There’s a difference between criticism and constructive criticism. With the latter, you’re constructing at the same time that you’re criticizing. You’re building as you’re breaking down, making new pieces to work with out of the stuff you’ve just ripped apart. That’s an art form in itself. I always feel like whatever notes you’re giving should inspire the recipient—like, ‘How do I get that kid to want to redo his homework?’ So, you’ve got to act like a teacher. Sometimes you talk about the problems in fifty different ways until you find that one sentence that you can see makes their eyes pop, as if they’re thinking, ‘Oh, I want to do it.’ Instead of saying, ‘The writing in this scene isn’t good enough,’ you say, ‘Don’t you want people to walk out of the theater and be quoting those lines?’ It’s more of a challenge. ‘Isn’t this what you want? I want that too!’ ”

First, it takes a while for any group to develop the level of trust necessary to be truly candid, to express reservations and criticisms without fear of reprisal, and to learn the language of good notes. Second, even the most experienced Braintrust can’t help people who don’t understand its philosophies, who refuse to hear criticism without getting defensive, or who don’t have the talent to digest feedback, reset, and start again. Third, as I’ll discuss in later chapters, the Braintrust is something that evolves over time. Creating a Braintrust is not something you do once and then check off your to-do list. Even when populated with talented and generous people, there is plenty that can go wrong. Dynamics change—between people, between departments—and so the only way to ensure that your Braintrust is doing its job is to watch and protect it continually, making adaptations as needed.

For most of us, failure comes with baggage—a lot of baggage—that I believe 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. This perception lives on long into adulthood, even in people who have learned to parrot the oft-repeated arguments about the upside of failure. How many articles have you read on that topic alone? And yet, even as they nod their heads in agreement, many readers of those articles still have the emotional reaction that they had as children. They just can’t help it: That early experience of shame is too deep-seated to erase. All the time in my work, I see people resist and reject failure and try mightily to avoid it, because regardless of what we say, mistakes feel embarrassing. There is a visceral reaction to failure: It hurts.

We need to think about failure differently. I’m not the first to say that failure, when approached properly, can be an opportunity for growth. But the way most people interpret this assertion is that mistakes are a necessary evil. 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). And yet, even as I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledge that acknowledging this truth is not enough. That’s because failure is painful, and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.

They think it means accept failure with dignity and move on. The better, more subtle interpretation is that 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. And, for leaders especially, this strategy—trying to avoid failure by out-thinking it—dooms you to fail. As Andrew puts it, “Moving things forward allows the team you are leading to feel like, ‘Oh, I’m on a boat that is actually going towards land.’ As opposed to having a leader who says, ‘I’m still not sure. I’m going to look at the map a little bit more, and we’re just going to float here, and all of you stop rowing until I figure this out.’ And then weeks go by, and morale plummets, and failure becomes self-fulfilling. People begin to treat the captain with doubt and trepidation. Even if their doubts aren’t fully justified, you’ve become what they see you as because of your inability to move.”

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. Do people shut down and turn inward, instead of coming together to untangle the causes of problems that might be avoided going forward? Is the question being asked: Whose fault was this? If so, your culture is one that vilifies failure. Failure is difficult enough without it being compounded by the search for a scapegoat.

In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously 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. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen.

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, set-in-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.

Here’s what we all know, deep down, even though we might wish it weren’t true: Change is going to happen, whether we like it or not. Some people see random, unforeseen events as something to fear. I am not one of those people. To my mind, randomness is not just inevitable; it is part of the beauty of life. Acknowledging it and appreciating it helps us respond constructively when we are surprised. Fear makes people reach for certainty and stability, neither of which guarantee the safety they imply. I take a different approach. Rather than fear randomness, I believe we can make choices to see it for what it is and to let it work for us. The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs.

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.

So we’ve covered change. Where does randomness fit in? Once, when I was on a retreat in Marin, I heard a delightful—and possibly apocryphal—story about what happened when the British introduced golf to India in the 1820s. Upon building the first golf course there, the Royal Calcutta, the British discovered a problem: Indigenous monkeys were intrigued by the little white balls and would swoop down out of the trees and onto the fairways, picking them up and carrying them off. This was a disruption, to say the least. In response, officials tried erecting fences to keep the monkeys out, but the monkeys climbed right over. They tried capturing and relocating the monkeys, but the monkeys kept coming back. They tried loud noises to scare them away. Nothing worked. In the end, they arrived at a solution: They added a new rule to the game—“Play the ball where the monkey drops it.” Randomness is part of the folklore of history and literature; it has been studied extensively by mathematicians, scientists, and statisticians; it is deeply embedded in everything we do. We are aware of it in the abstract sense, by which I mean we have developed methods to acknowledge its existence. We talk about lucky breaks, good days and bad days, crazy coincidences, fortune smiling upon us, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time; we know that a drunk driver can come out of nowhere or, as the saying goes, that we could be hit by a bus tomorrow. Yet randomness remains stubbornly difficult to unde...

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. Many fear this side of the door. We crave stability and certainty, so we keep both feet rooted in what we know, believing that if we repeat ourselves or repeat what is known to work, we will be safe. This feels like a rational view. Just as we know that the rule of law leads to healthier, more productive societies or that practice makes perfect or that the planets orbit the sun, we all need things that we can count on. But 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, unbidden, through that door. Some of it will be uplifting and inspiring, and some of it will be disastrous. We all know people who eagerly face the unknown;...

Given 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. Who looks forward to a forum for being second-guessed? People, in general, would rather talk about what went right than what went wrong, using the occasion to give additional kudos to their most deserving team members. Left to our own devices, we avoid unpleasantness. It isn’t just postmortems, though: In general, people are resistant to self-assessment. Companies are bad at it, too. 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.

Many of us have a romantic idea about how creativity happens: A lone visionary conceives of a film or a product in a flash of insight. Then that visionary leads a team of people through hardship to finally deliver on that great promise. The truth is, this isn’t my experience at all. I’ve known many people I consider to be creative geniuses, and not just at Pixar and Disney, yet 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. In that way, creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint. You have to pace yourself. I’m often asked to predict what the future of computer animation will look like, and I try my best to come up with a thoughtful answer. But the fact is, just as our directors lack a clear picture of what their embryonic movies will grow up to be, I can’t envision how our technical future will unfold because it doesn’t exist yet.

That uncertainty can make us uncomfortable. We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where. That requires us to step up to the boundary of what we know and what we don’t know. While we all have the potential to be creative, some people hang back, while others forge ahead. What are the tools they use that lead them toward the new? Those with superior talent and the ability to marshal the energies of others have learned from experience that 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. It might sound silly or woo-woo, this kind of visualization, but I believe it’s crucial. Sometimes—especially at the beginning of a daunting project—our mental models are all we’ve got.

Brad has told me that he thinks of directing the way he thinks about skiing. In either pursuit, he says, if he tightens up or thinks too much, he crashes. There are moments, as a director, where there is so much work to do and so little time to do it that he can’t help but feel fear. But he also knows that if he lingers too long in that frightened place, he will freak out. “So I tell myself that I have time, even when I don’t. As in, ‘Okay, I’m going to proceed as if I have time—I’m going to sit back and muse rather than looking at the clock—because if I sit back and muse, I’m more likely to solve the problem.’

Instead, he favors being decisive, then forgiving yourself if your initial decision proves misguided. Andrew likens the director’s job to that of a ship captain, out in the middle of the ocean, with a crew that’s depending on him to make land. The director’s job is to say, “Land is that way.” Maybe land actually is that way and maybe it isn’t, but Andrew says that if you don’t have somebody choosing a course—pointing their finger toward that spot there, on the horizon—then the ship goes nowhere. It’s not a tragedy if the leader changes her mind later and says, “Okay, it’s actually not that way, it’s this way. I was wrong.” As long as you commit to a destination and drive toward it with all your might, people will accept when you correct course.

This is key to an idea I introduced earlier in the book: The director, or leader, can never lose the confidence of his or her crew. As long as you have been candid and had good reasons for making your (now-flawed-in-retrospect) decisions, your crew will keep rowing. But if you find that the ship is just spinning around—and if you assert that such meaningless activity is, in fact, forward motion—then the crew will balk. They know better than anyone when they are working hard but not going anywhere. People want their leaders to be confident. Andrew doesn’t advise being confident merely for confident’s sake. He believes that leadership is about making your best guess and hurrying up about it so if it’s wrong, there’s still time to change course.

Adapting to your environment, like a lizard that blends into whatever background it finds itself in, is Lindsey’s way of managing the competing—and potentially crazy-making—forces she encounters in her job. “I’m a firm believer in the chaotic nature of the creative process needing to be chaotic. If we put too much structure on it, we will kill it. So there’s a fine balance between providing some structure and safety—financial and emotional—but also letting it get messy and stay messy for a while. To do that, you need to assess each situation to see what’s called for. And then you need to become what’s called for.”

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. Some people make the mistake of thinking that they are being mindful because they are focusing diligently on problems. But if they are doing so while subconsciously bound up with their worries and expectations, with no awareness that they can’t see clearly or that others may know more, they aren’t open at all.

My thinking about this was enriched further when I happened upon a podcast of a talk given in 2011 at an annual event called the Buddhist Geeks Conference. There, a woman named Kelly McGonigal delivered a talk called “What Science Can Teach Us About Practice.” 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.

First, she talked about a study done 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. They were hooked up to monitors that tracked which areas of the brain were stimulated. What researchers later discovered by looking at the brain imaging was that 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 paying attention to the pain, McGonigal explained, but because they knew how to turn off the inner chatter—the running commentary our untrained brains, or monkey minds, so happily serve up—they were better able to tolerate pain than those who did not practice meditation. Next, McGonigal cited a similar study done at Wake Forest University that focused on a group of brand new meditators who’d undergone only four days of training. When they were brought into the laboratory and given the same pain test, some were able to tolerate greater levels of pain than others. Why? The temptation might be to surmise that these people were simply quick studies in the art of meditation, that they were better at it than others. Brain imagery showed, however, that in fact their minds were doing the opposite of what experienced meditators’ brains do. Instead of paying attention to the ...

“Disney Animation was sort of like a dog that had been beaten again and again,” Byron Howard, the director, told me when I asked him to describe the mindset back then. “The crew wanted to succeed, but they were afraid of pouring their hearts into something that wasn’t going to succeed. You could feel that fear. And in notes meetings, everyone was so afraid of hurting someone’s feelings that they held back. We had to learn that we weren’t attacking the person, we were attacking the project. Only then could we create a crucible that boils away everything that’s not working and leaves the strongest framework.”

Why was a problem that took a few days to solve originally projected to take six months? The answer, I think, lay in the fact that for too long, the leaders of Disney Animation placed a higher value on error prevention than anything else. Their employees knew there would be repercussions if mistakes were made, so the primary goal was never to make any. To my mind, that institutional fear was behind the Bolt rerigging snafu. With the best intentions, the film’s production managers had responded to the crisis with a timetable that would ensure a character that was fully functional with no errors. (The irony is that if a solution only takes a few days to find, then you don’t care so much if there are errors because you will have plenty of time to fix them.) But seeking to eliminate failure was in this instance—and, I would argue, most instances—precisely the wrong thing to do.

In big organizations there are advantages to consistency, but I strongly believe that smaller groups within the larger whole should be allowed to differentiate themselves and operate according to their own rules, so long as those rules work. This fosters a sense of personal ownership and pride in the company that, to my mind, benefits the larger enterprise.

path. Thus, reality distortion. I disliked the phrase because it carried a whiff of negativity—implying that Steve would try to will a fantasy world into being on a whim, without regard to how his refusal to face facts meant that everybody around him had to pull all-nighters and upend their lives in the hopes of meeting his unmeetable expectations. Much has been made of Steve’s refusal to follow rules—realities—that applied to others; famously, for example, he did not put a license plate on his car. But to focus too much on this is to miss something important. He recognized that many rules were in fact arbitrary. Yes, he tested boundaries and crossed the line at times. As a behavioral trait, that can be seen as antisocial—or if it happens to change the world, it can earn you the label “visionary.” We frequently support the idea of pushing boundaries in theory, ignoring the trouble it can cause in practice.

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.