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

by Ed Catmull

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.