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

by Ed Catmull

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.