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

by Ed Catmull

As we try to learn from the past, we form patterns of thinking based on our experiences, not realizing that the things that happened have an unfair advantage over the things that didn’t.

Journalists tend to look for patterns that can be explained in a relatively small number of words.

In creative endeavors, we must face the unknown. But if we do so with blinders on—if we shut out reality in the interest of keeping things simple—we will not excel.

Remember that while we are quick to assign patterns and causes to an event after it occurs, beforehand we don’t even see it coming.

When we put setbacks into two buckets—the “business as usual” bucket and the “holy cow” bucket—and use a different mindset for each, we are signing up for trouble. We become so caught up in our big problems that we ignore the little ones, failing to realize that some of our small problems will have long-term consequences—and are, therefore, big problems in the making. 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.

In other words, we must meet unexpected problems with unexpected responses.

For years, Disney employees attempted to keep his spirit alive by constantly asking themselves, “What would Walt do?” Perhaps they thought that if they asked that question they would come up with something original, that they would remain true to Walt’s pioneering spirit. In fact, this kind of thinking only accomplished the opposite. Because it looked backward, not forward, it tethered the place to the status quo. A pervasive fear of change took root. Steve Jobs was quite aware of this story and used to repeat it to people at Apple, adding that he never wanted people to ask, “What would Steve do?” No one—not Walt, not Steve, not the people of Pixar—ever achieved creative success by simply clinging to what used to work.

I know that a lot of our successes came because we had pure intentions and great talent, and we did a lot of things right, but I also believe that attributing our successes solely to our own intelligence, without acknowledging the role of accidental events, diminishes us.

The existence of luck also reminds us that our activities are less repeatable. Since change is inevitable, the question is: Do you act to stop it and try to protect yourself from it, or do you become the master of change by accepting it and being open to it? My view, of course, is that working with change is what creativity is about.

From that day forward, she is doomed to scream into the wind: No one will believe the truths she speaks, and everyone judges her to be insane. Though Cassandra foresees the coming destruction of Troy—she warns that a Greek army will sneak into the city inside a huge wooden horse—she is unable to prevent the tragedy because no one heeds her warning. The story of Cassandra is traditionally taken as a parable about what happens when valid warnings are ignored. But for me, it raises different issues. Why, I always wonder, do we think of Cassandra as the one who’s cursed? The real curse, it seems to me, afflicts everyone else—all of those who are unable to perceive the truth she speaks.

The underlying logic of his reasoning shook me: We were going to screw up, it was inevitable. And we didn’t know when or how. We had to prepare, then, for an unknown problem—a hidden problem. From that day on, I resolved to bring as many hidden problems as possible to light, a process that would require what might seem like an uncommon commitment to self-assessment.

I believe the deeper issue is that the leaders of these companies were not attuned to the fact that there were problems they could not see. And because they weren’t aware of these blind spots, they assumed that the problems didn’t exist. Which brings us to one of my core management beliefs: If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.

It simply doesn’t occur to them that after they get promoted to a leadership position, no one is going to come out and say, “Now that you are a manager, I can no longer be as candid with you.” Instead, many new leaders assume, wrongly, that their access to information is unchanged.

Here’s what turns a successful hierarchy into one that impedes progress: when too many people begin, subconsciously, to equate their own value and that of others with where they fall in the pecking order. Thus, they focus their energies on managing upward while treating people beneath them on the organizational chart poorly. The people I have seen do this seem to be acting on animal instinct, unaware of what they are doing.

If we can agree that it’s hard, if not impossible, to get a complete picture of what is going on at any given time in any given company, it becomes even harder when you are successful. That’s because success convinces us that we are doing things the right way.

The better approach, I believe, is to accept that we can’t understand every facet of a complex environment and to focus, instead, on techniques to deal with combining different viewpoints. If we start with the attitude that different viewpoints are additive rather than competitive, we become more effective because our ideas or decisions are honed and tempered by that discourse.

“We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there,” as Mark Twain once said, “lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.”

During the intensive research phase of the film, Pete was surprised to hear from a neuroscientist that only about 40 percent of what we think we “see” comes in through our eyes. “The rest is made up from memory or patterns that we recognize from past experience,”

If my wife and I had been traveling with just Dick or just Anne, he or she almost certainly would have responded appropriately, but because they were together, their combined model was more complex—and more limiting—than either of their models would have been on its own.

And just as individuals have biases and jump to conclusions because of the lens through which they view the world, organizations perceive the world through what they already know how to do.

While they had hoped to convey the sense of their movie idea by displaying examples from other films, every single board was based on these iconic references, with the unintended result that everything presented felt terribly derivative. In one way, this made sense—every director gets into this business because they love movies; it is inevitable that references to other movies often pop up when talking about filmmaking. (At Pixar, we joke that only one mention of Star Wars is allowed per meeting.) References to movies, both good and bad, are part of the vocabulary of talking about filmmaking. And yet if you rely too much on the references to what came before, you doom your film to being derivative. Brad Bird noticed a similar phenomenon when he was studying at the California Institute of the Arts. He remembers a group of students that simply aped the animation of the masters, an approach he dubbed “Frankensteining.” “They’d have a character do the kind of walk that animator Milt Kahl did for Medusa in The Rescuers,” he says. “And then they’d have her wave her hands like Frank Thomas had Fauna do in Sleeping Beauty. And so on.… ”

When filmmakers, industrial designers, software designers, or people in any other creative profession merely cut up and reassemble what has come before, it gives the illusion of creativity, but it is craft without art. Craft is what we are expected to know; art is the unexpected use of our craft.

In any business, it’s important to do your homework, but the point I’m making goes beyond merely getting the facts straight. Research trips challenge our preconceived notions and keep clichés at bay. They fuel inspiration. They are, I believe, what keeps us creating rather than copying.

But because of the way production unfolded, our people had to work on scenes without knowing the context for them—so they overbuilt them just to be safe. To make things worse, our standards of excellence are extremely high, leading them to conclude that more is always more. How, then, do you fix the “beautifully shaded penny” problem without telling people, in effect, to care less or to be less excellent?

The very concept of a limit implies that you can’t do everything you want—so we must think of smarter ways to work. Let’s be honest: Many of us don’t make this kind of adjustment until we are required to. Limits force us to rethink how we are working and push us to new heights of creativity.

In any creative endeavor, there is a long list of features and effects that you want to include to nudge it toward greatness—a very long list. At some point, though, you realize it is impossible to do everything on the list. So you set a deadline, which then forces a priority-based reordering of the list, followed by the difficult discussion of what, on this list, is absolutely necessary—or if the project is even feasible at all. You don’t want to have this discussion too soon, because at the outset, you don’t know what you are doing. If you wait too long, however, you run out of time or resources.

Luckily, Brad had a producer, John Walker, who came up with a system (in collaboration with a department manager, Laura Reynolds) that would help the crew see what was possible given the available resources. John’s system consisted of popsicle sticks stuck to a wall with Velcro. Each stick represented a person-week, which, as I’ve said, is the amount of work a single animator could accomplish in a week’s time. A bunch of sticks would be lined up next to a particular character for easy reference. A glance at the wall would tell you: If you use that many popsicle sticks on Elastigirl, you’ll have less to spend on Jack-Jack. And so on. “Brad would come to me and say: ‘We’ve got to have this done today,’ ” John recalls. “And I could point to the wall and say, ‘Well, you need another stick, then. Where are you going to take the stick from? Because we only have so many.

The solution we implemented may have been obvious, but here’s something that wasn’t: It could never have come from the people in the oversight group, because that would have required them to recognize and admit that their group’s existence was unnecessary. They were not in a position to challenge the preconception that their group was based on. In addition, the solution could never have been suggested by the leadership we replaced, either, because

decisions. I believe, however, that you should not be required to justify everything. We must always leave the door open for the unexpected.

When the release date finally rolls around, everyone is ready to move on to something new. But we are not done yet. At Pixar, there is one more essential phase of the process: the postmortem. A postmortem is a meeting held shortly after the completion of every movie in which we explore what did and didn’t work and attempt to consolidate lessons learned. Companies, like individuals, do not become exceptional by believing they are exceptional but by understanding the ways in which they aren’t exceptional.

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.

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

One technique I’ve used to soften the process is to ask everyone in the room to make two lists: the top five things that they would do again and the top five things that they wouldn’t do again.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is a maxim that is taught and believed by many in both the business and education sectors. But in fact, the phrase is ridiculous—something said by people who are unaware of how much is hidden.

We begin life, as children, being open to the ideas of others because we need to be open to learn. Most of what children encounter, after all, are things they’ve never seen before. The child has no choice but to embrace the new. If this openness is so wonderful, however, why do we lose it as we grow up?

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.

If you are mindful, you are able to focus on the problem at hand without getting caught up in plans or processes.

We had to start by assuming that they’d inherited bad practices and that it was our job to reteach them.

film. I liked this guy’s moxie and his willingness to push back, but I told him that if he were to continue at Disney, he needed to figure out why, in fact, Disney was not on the one-yard line, not about to score, and not about to fix its own problems.

Earning trust takes time; there’s no shortcut to understanding that we really do rise and fall together. Without vigilant coaching—pulling people aside who didn’t speak their minds in a particular meeting, say, or encouraging those who seem eternally hesitant to jump into the fray—our progress could have easily stalled.

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.

The document, while providing great comfort to Pixar employees, prompted several complaints from the Disney Studios human resources department. The complaints boiled down to the fact that they didn’t care for the exceptionalism that our carefully guarded policies implied. My response to this stemmed less from a loyalty to Pixar than from my commitment to a larger idea: 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.

John often said that the problem at Disney Animation was never lack of talent, it was that years of stifling working conditions had made people lose their creative compasses.

Notes Day was a success in part because it was based on the idea that fixing things is an ongoing, incremental process. Creative people must accept that challenges never cease, failure can’t be avoided, and “vision” is often an illusion. But they must also feel safe—always—to speak their minds. Notes Day was a reminder that collaboration, determination, and candor never fail to lift us up.