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

by Ed Catmull

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.

“You can and should make your own solution group,” Andrew Stanton says, adding that on each of his own films, he has made a point of doing this on a smaller scale, separate from the official Braintrust.

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).

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

And, for leaders especially, this strategy—trying to avoid failure by out-thinking it—dooms you to fail. 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.’

Is the question being asked: Whose fault was this? If so, your culture is one that vilifies failure.

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.

The reasoning behind this is simple: Experiments are fact-finding missions that, over time, inch scientists toward greater understanding.

That means any outcome is a good outcome, because it yields new information.

The overplanners just take longer to be wrong (and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed).

We learned better how to balance new ideas with old ideas, and we learned that we had made a mistake in not getting very explicit buy-in from all of Pixar’s leaders about the nature of what we were trying to do.

But any failure at a creative company is a failure of many, not one. If you’re a leader of a company that has faltered, any misstep that occurs is yours as well. Moreover, if you don’t use what’s gone wrong to educate yourself and your colleagues, then you’ll have missed an opportunity.

Do we become introspective, or do we bury our heads in the sand? Do we make it safe for others to acknowledge and learn from problems, or do we shut down discussion by looking for people to blame?

Given these realities, managers typically want two things: (1) for everything to be tightly controlled, and (2) to appear to be in control.

But when control is the goal, it can negatively affect other parts of your culture.

Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t. Leaders must demonstrate their trustworthiness, over time, through their actions—and the best way to do that is by responding well to failure.

I believe this is the wrong instinct. A manager’s default mode should not be secrecy. What is needed is a thoughtful consideration of the cost of secrecy weighed against the risks.

To confide in employees is to give them a sense of ownership over the information.

Your employees are smart; that’s why you hired them. So treat them that way.

I knew many presidents of other companies and had a good idea of their personality characteristics. They were aggressive and extremely confident. Knowing that I didn’t share many of those traits, again I felt like a fraud. In truth, I was afraid of failure.

The trick is to forget our models about what we “should” be. A better measure of our success is to look at the people on our team and see how they are working together.

Rather than trying to prevent all errors, we should assume, as is almost always the case, that our people’s intentions are good and that they want to solve problems. Give them responsibility, let the mistakes happen, and let people fix them.

Originality is fragile. And, in its first moments, it’s often far from pretty. This is why I call early mock-ups of our films “ugly babies.”