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

by Ed Catmull

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.

see. I believe the best managers acknowledge and make room for what they do not know—not just because humility is a virtue but because until one adopts that mindset, the most striking breakthroughs cannot occur. 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.

Sincerely believing that we were in an inclusive meeting, we saw nothing amiss because we didn’t feel excluded. Those not sitting at the center of the table, meanwhile, saw quite clearly how it established a pecking order but presumed that we—the leaders—had intended that outcome. Who were they, then, to complain?

I was too young to realize such a synergy was groundbreaking. To me, it just made sense that they belonged together.

The United States government’s response to being bested was to create something called ARPA, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Though it was housed within the Defense Department, its mission was ostensibly peaceful: to support scientific researchers in America’s universities in the hopes of preventing what it termed “technological surprise.” By sponsoring our best minds, the architects of ARPA believed, we’d come up with better answers. Looking back, I still admire that enlightened reaction to a serious threat: We’ll just have to get smarter.

Sutherland and Dave Evans, who was chair of the university’s computer science department, were magnets for bright students with diverse interests, and they led us with a light touch. Basically, they welcomed us to the program, gave us workspace and access to computers, and then let us pursue whatever turned us on. The result was a collaborative, supportive community so inspiring that I would later seek to replicate it at Pixar.

They couldn’t have been less interested in making changes that would slow them down in the short term. They took comfort in their familiar ways, and change meant being uncomfortable.

There is nothing quite like ignorance combined with a driving need to succeed to force rapid learning.

These books were stocked with catchy phrases like “Dare to fail!” or “Follow people and people will follow you!” or “Focus, focus, focus!” (This last one was a particular favorite piece of nonadvice. When people hear it, they nod their heads in agreement as if a great truth has been presented, not realizing that they’ve been diverted from addressing the far harder problem: deciding what it is that they should be focusing on.

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.

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.

While they were generous with their advice, the most valuable lessons I learned were gleaned from the flaws in that advice.

The pricing advice I was given—by people who were smart and experienced and well-meaning—was not merely wrong, it kept us from asking the right questions.

In retrospect, when I sought the counsel of these more experienced men, I had been seeking simple answers to complex questions—do this, not that—because I was unsure of myself and stressed by the demands of my new job. But simple answers like the “start high” pricing advice—so seductive in its rationality—had distracted me and kept me from asking more fundamental questions.

Deming’s approach—and Toyota’s, too—gave ownership of and responsibility for a product’s quality to the people who were most involved in its creation. Instead of merely repeating an action, workers could suggest changes, call out problems, and—this next element seemed particularly important to me—feel the pride that came when they helped fix what was broken.

While Toyota was a hierarchical organization, to be sure, it was guided by a democratic central tenet: You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.

We had succeeded by holding true to our ideals; nothing could be better than that.

This was a revelation to me: The good stuff was hiding the bad stuff. I realized that this was something I needed to look out for: When downsides coexist with upsides, as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what’s bugging them, for fear of being labeled complainers. I also realized that this kind of thing, if left unaddressed, could fester and destroy Pixar.

we still needed to understand what it was they were upset about. To that end, I started sticking my head into people’s offices, pulling up a chair and asking them for their view on how Pixar was and wasn’t working. These conversations were intentionally open-ended. I didn’t ask for a list of specific complaints.

we had made the mistake of confusing the communication structure with the organizational structure.

We realized that our purpose was not merely to build a studio that made hit films but to foster a creative culture that would continually ask questions. Questions like: If we had done some things right to achieve success, how could we ensure that we understood what those things were? Could we replicate them on our next projects? Perhaps as important, was replication of success even the right thing to do? How many serious, potentially disastrous problems were lurking just out of sight and threatening to undo us? What, if anything, could we do to bring them to light? How much of our success was luck? What would happen to our egos if we continued to succeed? Would they grow so large they could hurt us, and if so, what could we do to address that overconfidence? What dynamics would arise now that we were bringing new people into a successful enterprise as opposed to a struggling startup?

We were blessed with a remarkable group of employees who valued change, risk, and the unknown and who wanted to rethink how we create.

It was the first time we gave a position to someone believing they could do it, only to find that they couldn’t.

Talented storytellers had found a way to make viewers care, and the evolution of this storyline made it abundantly clear to me: 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.

Find, develop, and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop, and own good ideas.

To ensure quality, I believed, any person on any team needed to be able to identify a problem and, in effect, pull the cord to stop the line. To create a culture in which this was possible, you needed more than a cord within easy reach. You needed to show your people that you meant it when you said that while efficiency was a goal, quality was the goal. More and more, I saw that by putting people first—not just saying that we did, but proving that we did by the actions we took—we were protecting that culture.

Parroting the phrase “Story Is King” at Pixar didn’t help the inexperienced directors on Toy Story 2 one bit.

“Trust the Process” had morphed into “Assume that the Process Will Fix Things for Us.” It gave us solace, which we felt we needed. But it also coaxed us into letting down our guard and, in the end, made us passive. Even worse, it made us sloppy.

To ensure quality, then, excellence must be an earned word, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves.

Around this time, John coined a new phrase: “Quality is the best business plan.” What he meant was that quality is not a consequence of following some set of behaviors. Rather, it is a prerequisite and a mindset you must have before you decide what you are setting out to do.

Struggling through the production of Toy Story 2 twisted our heads around, causing us to look inward, to be self-critical and to change the way we thought about ourselves. When I say this was the defining moment for Pixar, I mean it in the most dynamic sense. Our need for and embrace of introspection was just beginning.

To understand what the Braintrust does and why it is so central to Pixar, you have to start with a basic truth: People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things—in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. Where once he or she could see a forest, now there are only trees.

For example, we believe that the most promising stories are not assigned to filmmakers but emerge from within them. With few exceptions, our directors make movies that they have conceived of and are burning to make. Then, because we know that this passion will at some point blind them to their movie’s inevitable problems, we offer them the counsel of the Braintrust.

By removing from the Braintrust the power to mandate solutions, we affect the dynamics of the group in ways I believe are essential.

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.

Michael Arndt, who wrote Toy Story 3, says he thinks to make a great film, its makers must pivot, at some point, from creating the story for themselves to creating it for others. To him, the Braintrust provides that pivot, and it is necessarily painful. “Part of the suffering involves giving up control,”

In this analogy, it’s important to remember that the movie’s director and producer are doctors, too. It’s as if they’ve gathered a panel of consulting experts to help find an accurate diagnosis for an extremely confounding case. But ultimately, it’s the filmmakers, and no one else, who will make the final decisions about the wisest course of treatment.

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.

“So what do we blow up?” Jonas asked. “What do we go backwards on? And what do you love? Is what you loved about the film different now than it was when we started?” “The way the movie opens,” Pete responded, “I love.” Jonas raised his hand in a salute. “Okay, that’s the movie, then,” he said. “How we set up the story has to handshake with that.” “I agree,” Pete said. They were on their way.

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).

A good note says what is wrong, what is missing, what isn’t clear, what makes no sense. A good note is offered at a timely moment, not too late to fix the problem. A good note doesn’t make demands; it doesn’t even have to include a proposed fix. But if it does, that fix is offered only to illustrate a potential solution, not to prescribe an answer. Most of all, though, a good note is specific. “I’m writhing with boredom,” is not a good note.

Telling the truth is difficult, but inside a creative company, it is the only way to ensure excellence.

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.

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. I don’t care who it is, the janitor or the intern or one of your most trusted lieutenants: If they can help you do that, they should be at the table.

Believe me, you don’t want to be at a company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or matters of policy are being hashed out.

“It’s really strange,” I told him. “We haven’t had a single big problem on this film.” Many people would have been happy with this news. Not Steve. “Watch out,” he said. “That’s a dangerous place to be.

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).

he’s known around Pixar for repeating the phrases “fail early and fail fast” and “be wrong as fast as you can.

Says Andrew: “You wouldn’t say to somebody who is first learning to play the guitar, ‘You better think really hard about where you put your fingers on the guitar neck before you strum, because you only get to strum once, and that’s it. And if you get that wrong, we’re going to move on.’ That’s no way to learn, is it?

searching for mechanisms that turn pain into progress.