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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ed Catmull
Started reading
October 13, 2017
The fear of saying something stupid and looking bad, of offending someone or being intimidated, of retaliating or being retaliated against—they all have a way of reasserting themselves, even once you think they’ve been vanquished. And when they do, you must address them squarely.
The one thing that has never changed is the demand for candor—which, while its value seems obvious, is harder to achieve than one might think.
People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process.
We give our filmmakers both freedom and responsibility.
The first is that the Braintrust is made up of people with a deep understanding of storytelling and, usually, people who have been through the process themselves.
The second difference is that the Braintrust has no authority.
While problems in a film are fairly easy to identify, the sources of those problems are often extraordinarily difficult to assess.
Telling the truth is difficult, but inside a creative company, it is the only way to ensure excellence.
On the contrary, any successful feedback system is built on empathy, on the idea that we are all in this together, that we understand your pain because we’ve experienced it ourselves.
The Braintrust is fueled by the idea that every note we give is in the service of a common goal: supporting and helping each other as we try to make better movies.
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.
“Here are the qualifications required: The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time.
If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it.
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.’
Even if their doubts aren’t fully justified, you’ve become what they see you as because of your inability to move.”
Part of the answer is simple: If we as leaders can talk about our mistakes and our part in them, then we make it safe for others.
It isn’t enough to pick a path—you must go down it. By doing so, you see things you couldn’t possibly see when you started out; you may not like what you see, some of it may be confusing, but at least you will have, as we like to say, “explored the neighborhood.”
The principle I’m describing here—iterative trial and error—has long-recognized value in science. When scientists have a question, they construct hypotheses, test them, analyze them, and draw conclusions—and then they do it all over again.
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.
that the first two years of a movie’s development should be a time of solidifying the story beats by relentlessly testing them—much like you temper steel. And that required decision-making, not just abstract discussion.
The bottom line was that while everyone was rowing the boat, to use Andrew’s analogy, there was no forward movement.
The criteria we use is that we step in if a director loses the confidence of his or her crew.
the need for decisiveness,
That’s the real goal: Can we teach in a way that our directors will think smart when we’re not around?”
One of the most crucial responsibilities of leadership is creating a culture that rewards those who lift not just our stock prices but our aspirations
The antidote to fear is trust, and we all have a desire to find something to trust in an uncertain world.
Trusting others doesn’t mean that they won’t make mistakes. It means that if they do (or if you do), you trust they will act to help solve it.
What is needed is a thoughtful consideration of the cost of secrecy weighed against the risks. When you instantly resort to secrecy, you are telling people they can’t be trusted. When you are candid, you are telling people that you trust them and that there is nothing to fear.
Since making movies is such a messy process, we need to be able to talk candidly, among ourselves, about the mess without having it shared outside the company.
So ingrained are the beliefs I’ve been describing about failure at Pixar that the people who worked on Toy Story 3 were actually offended by my remarks. They interpreted them to mean that they hadn’t tried as hard as their colleagues on other films—that they hadn’t pushed themselves enough. That isn’t at all what I meant, but I have to admit: I was thrilled by their reaction. I saw it as proof that our culture is healthy.
In an unhealthy culture, each group believes that if their objectives trump the goals of the other groups, the company will be better off. In a healthy culture, all constituencies recognize the importance of balancing competing desires—they want to be heard, but they don’t have to win.
It means that we must be open to having our goals change as we learn new information or are surprised by things we thought we knew but didn’t.
Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room for it to grow.
As much as I admire the efficiency of the caterpillar in its cocoon, I do not believe that creative products should be developed in a vacuum
I know some people who like to keep their gem completely to themselves while they polish it. But allowing this kind of behavior isn’t protection. In fact, it can be the opposite: a failure to protect your employees from themselves.
Whether it’s the kernel of a movie idea or a fledgling internship program, the new needs protection. Business-as-usual does not. Managers do not need to work hard to protect established ideas or ways of doing business.
Moreover, it is precisely because of the inevitability of change that people fight to hold on to what they know. Unfortunately, we often have little ability to distinguish between what works and is worth hanging on to and what is holding us back and worth discarding.
“I tend to flood and freeze up if I’m feeling overwhelmed. When this happens, it’s usually because I feel like the world is crashing down and all is lost. One trick I’ve learned is to force myself to make a list of what’s actually wrong. Usually, soon into making the list, I find I can group most of the issues into two or three larger all-encompassing problems. So it’s really not all that bad. Having a finite list of problems is much better than having an illogical feeling that everything is wrong.”
If people anticipate the production pressures, they’ll close the door to new ideas—so you have to pretend you’re not actually going to do anything, we’re just talking, just playing around.
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.
Once you master any system, you typically become blind to its flaws; even if you can see them, they appear far too complex and intertwined to consider changing.
The danger is that your company becomes overwhelmed by well-intended rules that only accomplish one thing: draining the creative impulse.
Real patterns are mixed in with random events, so it is extraordinarily difficult for us to differentiate between chance and skill.
When companies are successful, it is natural to assume that this is a result of leaders making shrewd decisions. Those leaders go forward believing that they have figured out the key to building a thriving company. In fact, randomness and luck played a key role in that success.
If you haven’t done the work of teasing apart what is random and what you have intentionally set in motion, you will be overly influenced by the analysis of outside observers, which is often oversimplified.
But when it comes to randomness, our desire for simplicity can mislead us. Not everything is simple, and to try to force it to be is to misrepresent reality.
How can we think clearly about unexpected events that are lurking out there that don’t fit any of our existing models?
What’s needed, in my view, is to approach big and small problems with the same set of values and emotions, because they are, in fact, self-similar. In other words, it is important that we don’t freak out or start blaming people when some threshold—the “holy cow” bucket I referred to earlier—is reached. We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody’s fault.
We want people to feel like they can take steps to solve problems without asking permission.
