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

by Ed Catmull

While there was much innovation that enabled our work, we had not let the technology overwhelm our real purpose: making a great film.

This book isn’t just for Pixar people, entertainment executives, or animators. It is for anyone who wants to work in an environment that fosters creativity and problem-solving. My belief is that good leadership can help creative people stay on the path to excellence no matter what business they’re in.

The thesis of this book is that there are many blocks to creativity, but there are active steps we can take to protect the creative process. In the coming pages, I will discuss many of the steps we follow at Pixar, but the most compelling mechanisms to me are those that deal with uncertainty, instability, lack of candor, and the things we cannot 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. Moreover, successful leaders embrace the reality that their models may be wrong or incomplete. Only when we admit what we don’t know can we ever hope to learn it.

When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.

The act of hiring Alvy changed me as a manager: By ignoring my fear, I learned that the fear was groundless. Over the years, I have met people who took what seemed the safer path and were the lesser for it. By hiring Alvy, I had taken a risk, and that risk yielded the highest reward—a brilliant, committed teammate.

The bigger my staff became, the more urgent it was that I figure out how to manage them. I created a flat organizational structure, much like I’d experienced in academia, largely because I naïvely thought that if I put together a hierarchical structure—assigning a bunch of managers to report to me—I would have to spend too much time managing and not enough time on my own work. This structure—in which I entrusted everybody to drive their own projects forward, at their own pace—had its limits, but the fact is, giving a ton of freedom to highly self-motivated people enabled us to make some significant technological leaps in a short time.

The takeaway here is worth repeating: Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is easy to say you want

Inspiring managers push their people to excel. That’s what we expect them to do. But when the powerful forces that create this positive dynamic turn negative, they are hard to counteract. It’s a fine line. On any film, there are inevitable periods of extreme crunch and stress, some of which can be healthy if they don’t go on too long. But the ambitions of both managers and their teams can exacerbate each other and become unhealthy. It is a leader’s responsibility to see this, and guide it, not exploit it.

Over the years, as the Braintrust has evolved, the dynamics within the group have evolved along with it, and this has required continual attention on our part. While I attend and participate in almost all Braintrust meetings and enjoy discussing the storytelling, I see my primary role (and that of my colleague Jim Morris, who is Pixar’s general manager) as making sure that the compact upon which the meetings are based is protected and upheld. This part of our job is never done because, as it turns out, you can’t address or eliminate the blocks to candor once and for all. 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.

Let’s imagine that you just joined a Braintrust meeting for the first time and sat down in a room full of smart and experienced people to discuss a film that has just been screened. There are many good reasons to be careful about what you say, right? You want to be polite, you want to respect or defer to others, and you don’t want to embarrass yourself or come off as having all the answers. Before you speak up, no matter how self-assured you are, you will check yourself: Is this a good idea or a stupid one? How many times am I allowed to say something stupid before others begin to doubt me? Can I tell the director that his protagonist is unlikable or that his second act is incomprehensible? It’s not that you want to be dishonest or to withhold from others. At this stage, you aren’t even thinking about candor.

Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process—reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its throughline or a hollow character finds its soul.

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.

Before we get to the forces that shape that discussion, let’s take a moment to look at things from the filmmakers’ point of view. To a one, they regard these sessions as essential. 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,” he says. “I can think it’s the funniest joke in the world, but if nobody in that room laughs, I have to take it out. It hurts that they can see something you can’t.”

“The Braintrust meetings,” he says, “are where the movie is born.”

That’s because failure is painful, and our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. To disentangle the good and the bad parts of failure, we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.

“fail early and fail fast” and “be wrong as fast as you can.”

if you decide you’re in the wrong place, there is still time to head toward the right place.

There are two parts to any failure: There is the event itself, with all its attendant disappointment, confusion, and shame, and then there is our reaction to it. It is this second part that we control.

Be patient. Be authentic. And be consistent. The trust will come.

Note 2

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