Creativity, Inc. (book by Catmull)

Creativity, Inc.

Ed Catmull

Creativity Inc

 

Pixar is a company that started as a computer hardware maker, morphed into an animation/movie studio and eventually reinvigorated animation in movies. Ed Catmull was one of the founders of Pixar and has been its chief executive for its entire existence. From an essentially non-existent industry, 3D computer animated films have become a billion dollar business with much of the innovation coming through Pixar’s development and application of graphic technologies. Catmull’s own background is computer sciences and he was responsible for some early developments in graphic animation, but his role as executive at Pixar had forced him to consider how creativity must be managed to create a sustainable culture. In particular, he became concerned with the large number of companies that followed initial success with failure. Why did innovative forward-looking companies become weak followers whose products no longer appealed to customers?

 

It is tempting to think that Pixar is a special case because it involves movie making, but it probably describes the dilemmas faced by any organization hoping to use the creativity of its people to produce something that will stand up to the strains of the market. Catmull concluded that leaders of those companies became obsessed with their competition and did not pay attention to the negative forces inside their own organizations, especially the forces created by management that impeded the organization’s ability to be innovative and strive for excellence. What was causing smart people to make decisions that sent their companies off the rails? His conclusion was that our people are talented and want to contribute….without meaning to, our company is stifling that talent in myriad unseen ways.*

 

This book summarizes Catmull’s conclusions about how to remove that stifling influence and maintain a focus on innovative excellence. To do that, managers must accept that the dominant force on an organization is uncertainty. The world is in constant flux, there is more going on that anyone can possibly understand, so all decisions have a good chance of being wrong. In accepting that nobody can have all the information required to be right (and that maybe that information can’t exist), managers must accept that they will be taking risks. They must encourage their employees to take risks. And to enable their employees to take those risks, they must remove anything that creates fear.

 

The forces that stifle people tend to develop slowly. It is usually not a single action that suppresses an organization and the suppression is almost never the result of intention. It is an accident that goes uncorrected and unnoticed for a long time. Though not an example of fear’s evolution, Catmull describes the evolution of a meeting that movie producers had every week. This meeting took place in a room with a long table and there might be 30 people in the room, most around the table and some sitting outside. It could be hard to hear one another, so the leaders began to make an effort to sit near each other to be heard more easily. Over time, each leader tended to sit in a particular place. Then name tags were placed at those places to reserve their seat. Other attendees then sorted themselves out in a hierarchy. The meeting rules stated that everybody was equal in speaking at this meeting, but that is not what the seating arrangements said. Why were we blind to this? Because the seating arrangements and place cards were designed for the convenience of the leaders….Sincerely believing that we were in an inclusive meeting, we saw nothing amiss because we didn’t feel excluded. Many problems develop this way. The problem was discovered when the meeting had to be moved to another room, a square room and seating was not organized. Participation was better, insights were better, communication was better, and this is what they had thought they had been getting – until they saw that they were not. Leaders rarely set out to suppress their employee’s initiative or creativity. They would say that such an outcome is undesired. But if there is not a constant vigilance to prevent it from occurring, it is probably inevitable. Catmull’s study led him to Edward Deming’s work on quality as expressed in Toyota. While Toyota is a hierarchical organization, to be sure, it was guided by a central democratic tenet: You don’t have to ask permission to take responsibility.

 

It is a cliché that organizations depend on their people, but that does not make it less true. One of the constant challenges was how to identify and organize peoples into effective teams. One of the early lessons was that it paid to get the best people. 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….Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. It is not enough to get brilliant people; they must also work well together. This requires that they learn to “play” together. Good people working well together outperform the best individuals and getting the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea. Almost nobody thinks about this assertion. Catmull gives talks and asks audiences which is more important people or ideas – and only one person has ever pointed out that ideas come from people so they are obviously more important. It follows that what needs protection is people - not ideas. Ideas come and go, but it is the people creating the ideas that need support. Pixar has many sayings that express the idea that people come first, but actions sometimes seemed inconsistent with the sayings. So the sayings lost their meaning. For example, Pixar wanted to decrease the time and cost of producing movies. They found that many movies went down dead ends that wasted months and millions. They began to create processes to streamline the effort. After a while, the results seemed to be lower quality; people were asked to trust the process, so they became passive – it was up to the process to restore quality. Eventually it became obvious that it was more important to trust the people than to follow the process; “the process” has no agenda and doesn’t have taste. It is just a tool….We needed to take more responsibility and ownership of our own work, our need for self-discipline, and our goals. One of the things that managers need to take responsibility for is the willingness of their people to try things, to make mistakes, and figure out the solutions to recover from those mistakes.

 

The book has an extended discussion of the role of candor and feedback. Summarized, it is OK to criticize the product, but not the person. This is far easier said than done, because it is hard for the recipient to hear the criticism and not personalize it. This takes practice and cultural support. One of the ways Pixar organized feedback was through a weekly meeting of the “Braintrust”. These were the creative leaders of the company who met to discuss a movie’s development and feedback was essential because of this reality…People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of creative things – in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while….But it is also confusing. Where once a movie’s writer/director had perspective, he or she loses it. The Braintrust has a more neutral perspective and can see flaws in the effort. Because almost all of the Braintrust are or have been directors, they appreciate the dilemmas involved and some of the possible solutions. Generally, this group does not solve problems when problems are found; solutions are the team’s job. One of the more important aspects of this experience might even be called self-feedback. The Braintrust meeting might be the first place that a story is expressed out loud and hearing it as spoken word sometime reveals weaknesses without anybody needing to say a thing. Part of the reason that feedback is so important is that Pixar does not believe that they will get the story right the first time. Creativity has to start somewhere and no amount of preparation will make the beginning right. But from that point feedback, reiteration and creative problem solving lead to a quality product. Though the members of the Braintrust are senior leaders in the organization, this group does not have authority over the project. The director of a movie is not obligated to follow the guidance from this group – it is not a “stage gate” committee with go/no go decision rights. The Braintrust’s notes…are intended to bring the true causes of problems to the surface – not to demand a specific remedy. This leads back to the mindset that the director must learn to bring to the meeting. You are not your idea…you must enable yourself…to focus on the problem, not yourself…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.

 

Some of the feedback is given oral during meetings and some appears in “notes”. Commonly the group senses problems but can’t diagnose them. Often the Braintrust views short segments of draft animation and detects a problem, which is recorded in the notes. In one example, a problem was detected and expressed as a dialog problem. But the next time the work was discussed, the problem was gone. When asked, the director responded that the dialog was identical, but the size of a character’s image was changed. The solution was not obviously related to the feedback, yet only arose because of it. The team found the right solution to a problem that they had not seen until the feedback. 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 proposed solution, not to prescribe an answer. Developing the trust to provide candid feedback requires time and attention; leaders need to insure that people are protected from criticism – but not the work. Catmull comments that you don’t want to be at the company where there is more candor in the hallways than in the rooms...

 

Trust helps eliminate the fear of criticism, but another fear that inhibits creativity is fear of failure.  Failure is painful and everybody tries hard to avoid it. We need to think about failure differently. I’m not the first to say that failure…can be an opportunity for learning. But the way that 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 which there would be no originality)….because failure is painful… our feelings about this pain tend to screw up our understanding of its worth. People talk about failing fast or failing early – to get it over with. People also try to put protections in place in order to minimize the pain. You might even think that the key is to accept the failure with dignity and move on. The better, more subtle interpretation is that failure is a manifestation of learning and exploration. If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: you are being driven to avoid it. And for leaders…trying to avoid failure by outthinking it – dooms you to fail. This avoidance may be conscious, but is more likely to be unconscious. You don’t know when you are avoiding failure, so one of the reasons to “seek” failure is to be sure that you are pushing the boundaries. This is the role of experimentation. Experiments include a chances for failure and opportunities to learn. Business organizations try to prevent failure in their innovative efforts through extensive planning. Catmull says you’re deluding yourself if you think that meticulous planning will prevent failure. 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. Intensive planning may delay the realization that you are on the wrong track and make it harder for people to let go of that track. Elsewhere the book makes it quite clear that movie making involves enormous planning – but that planning does not control the innovative processes themselves. One of the way that leaders decrease the fear of failure in an organization is by reacting to failures “well”. In the same way that problems in a movie must be discussed, other failures must be discussed. There is a tendency for managers to keep secrets – sometimes to protect employees and sometimes because they can. Both display a distrust of employees. Protection implies that employees are not mature enough to handle the truth. Other secret keeping can imply that employees are basically untrustworthy. Your employees are smart; that’s why you hired them. So treat them that way. They know when you deliver a message that has bene heavily massaged. When managers explain what their plan is without giving reasons for it, people wonder what the “real” agenda is. There may be no hidden agenda, but you’ve succeeded in implying that there is one. Discussing the thought processes behind solutions aims the focus on the solutions….When we are honest, people know it.

 

Success turns out to be a root cause of a significant source of anxiety. If you have had a string of success, nobody wants to break the string and have a failure. In addition, organizations expect to repeat the success with greater ease. Catmull calls this “feeding the beast”; feeding the beast seems to become the main activity of the organization. The strong for better-faster is present in almost every organization, but the result is lower quality, greater fear, and lowered standards. New ideas are “weak” and the need to feed the beast makes it easy for people to kill “untried” ideas. In movies, it is easier to make a sequel than a new movie. This observation is not a criticism of the people, but the system. People are totally aware of the compromises they are making but don’t see the way to resist the pressure which comes from everywhere. Frequently, the people in charge of the Beast are the most organized people in the company – people wired to make things happen on track and on budget….When those people and their interests become too powerful – when there is not sufficient push-back to protect new ideas – things go wrong. The Beast takes over. The drive for efficiency, rigor, and certainty is a good that matches the good represented by experimentation, learning and unpredictability. An organization hoping for innovation must maintain a balance. Catmull emphasizes that this is a dynamic kind of balance – not a static balance. He uses the metaphor of a balance board¹ where there is a constant need for adjustment to maintain balance. He goes on to say that one way to promote balance is to hold lightly to goals and firmly to intentions…It means that we must be open to having our goals change as we learn new information…As long as our intentions – our values – remain constant, our goals can shift as needed.

 

Sustaining innovation is hard. As the foregoing describes, there is uncertainty about what works, pressures to be safe and maintain a record of success. Planning probably won’t help with this uncertainty much and probably harms it. What is to be done? Although a cliché, the answer is to trust in the people in your organization. Empower them to find and apply solutions. Insure that they know that the problems are theirs to solve. There is an anecdote about the movie Toy Story 2. The movie was stored on a server. Somehow a command was entered that ordered the computer to erase the data. Though the file was huge and the order immediately countered, 90% of the movie was lost. After the initial panic, everybody calmed down realizing that they would restore the movie from the back-up. Except that they soon found out that the back-up system had recently failed. In a few minutes, they had lost 30 person-years of work and the young company was at risk. At this point, one of the team remembered that she had downloaded a copy of the movie to her home computer weekly to work on during the end of her maternity leave and she had never disabled the backup when she returned to work. A few hours later, the data was restored, repairs to the back-up were expedited, “deletion” commands were “blocked” and everybody sighed. But Catmull says the real moral of the story was that nobody worried about the person who mistakenly sent the command to erase the file. If you are going to eliminate fear of mistakes, you must follow through. Somebody made a serious mistake, but finding and punishing that person would send the wrong message. By focusing on the problem and not the person, people in the organization learn to focus on solving the problem and not protecting themselves. Catmull also thinks that this makes people more likely to identify and prevent problems, or solve problems before they become big problems. They simply take action without waiting for permission.

 

Managers of organizations like to think that they understand what is happening in their organizations. Similarly, people in an organization think they understand what is going on in their customers’ worlds. Both are illusions because much is hidden from sight. Within an organization, people hide problems from managers – often on the grounds that they should have a solution before exposing the problem, don’t understand the problem fully themselves or because the problem will cause discomfort to people in the organization. Managers often lack important information. But I believe the deeper issue is that the leaders of these companies [referring to Silicon Graphics, Toyota] 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. The book contains an extended discussion about the problems associated with self-awareness, but the solution is not so much that managers need to spend more time listening and asking questions. There is not enough time to learn everything that is hidden. The key is to know that you don’t know everything and to assume that there are important things that you do not know. It is natural to think that when things are going well, it is because of the proper decisions that are being made. Good self-awareness requires that you acknowledge that there may be no link between positive outcomes and your actions; lots of good outcomes are happy accidents. Some bad outcomes have nothing to do with your decisions either.

 

An interesting example of the problem of understanding hidden forces comes from the idea of hindsight. People use the phrase “hindsight is 20-20” to indicate that we can look back at events and make perfect sense of them. Things that we unclear before an event are clear afterwards. The problem is, the phrase is dead wrong. Hindsight is not 20-20. Not even close. Our view of the past…is hardly clearer than our view of the future. When we look backwards, we are quite selective about which facts to pay attention to. We make connections between random events that were not related. During research for a movie on the brain, a neuroscientist told the team that about 40% 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”… We impose our experience on our senses and distort our ability to see what is really there.

 

The hidden part of the world is very important for creative people and organizations. People and organizations crave certainty which can only come when you understand and can predict the world. But due to numerous barriers to understanding the world, we can’t know or predict events. We can’t even accurately describe the past. This means that our craving for certainty will be frustrated. But if you think about it further, striving for creativity has another issue. We do not tend to think about predictable outcomes as being creative. The inability to predict an outcome might even be diagnostic of creativity. Creativity is a hidden domain. Catmull even declines to define creativity on the grounds that a bad definition just creates another barrier. Candor, safety, research, self-assessment, and protecting the new are all mechanisms we can use to confront the unknown and to keep the chaos and fear to a minimum. These concepts don’t necessarily make anything easier…

 

One of the later chapters in the book is titled “The Unmade Future”. The focus of the chapter is the myth that creative results spring fully formed into consciousness. Catmull’s experience does not match this. None of the creative people he worked with conceived of the final form in the first instance. In my experience, creative people discover and realize their vision over time and through dedicated, protracted struggle. In that way, creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint. Many people want to know how it is going to turn out – when and what the final product will look like. Catmull says this is impossible because, I can’t envision how our technical future will unfold, because it doesn’t exist yet. He is referring specifically to the future of computer animation – a field in which he quite knowledgeable, but the observation is widely applicable. This is a challenge for organizations attempting to control their risks. That uncertainty can make us uncomfortable. We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where. This means that people and organizations that want creative output need to live right at the boundary between known and unknown. We can’t just visit, we must stay there. Developing good mental models of this experience helps people cope with the uncertainty, inevitable failures, and new ideas that occur here. Catmull describes the mental models of a number of colleagues to demonstrate the variety of approaches that seem to succeed, and concludes that there is no “right” one. The job of mental models is big. The uncreated is a vast, empty space. This emptiness is so scary that most hold on to what they know, making minor adjustments to what they understand, unable to move on to something unknown. To enter that place of fear, and to fill the empty space, we need all the help we can get.

 

One of the ways that Pixar worked to make the hidden visible was by offering drawing class. Though some people at Pixar had art backgrounds, most did not. The drawing class forced the students to learn to see what was really there – and what was not there. One exercise involved drawing the space around a chair. [Rather than draw the chair itself, draw the space around the chair (the inside of this drawing is the chair).] This course instilled a number of valuable behaviors. First, people had to stop jumping to conclusions and actually pay attention to what was really there. Second, they had to show their imperfect work to their classmates – so “mistakes” were immediately visible. Third, they had to offer feedback on drawings immediately – providing practice in feedback on the work, not the person.  

 

Another way that Pixar tried to make the hidden visible was through postmortems. Postmortems served five functions. First, the team tries to identify what they has really learned and why it is useful. Second, the discussion helps people who worked on other parts of the project to understand what was learned. Third, the discussion allows lingering bad feelings to be aired. Many of the things that go wrong are interpersonal and they need to be acknowledged and resolved. Fourth, the postmortem forces people to reflect on the experience in ways that they might not during the rush to complete the project. Finally, the team can make recommendations for teams in the future. Even though future projects will face different issues, they can start the project with a series of questions primed by experience. Though postmortems have these benefits, people still resist them and find ways to diminish their utility. The number one piece of advice that Catmull offers is to constantly change the format. The postmortem is more effective when people have not developed a script to “explain” things. Despite all of the discussion about feedback at Pixar, people are reluctant to criticize each other. Holding back does not advance the five functions. One trick is to ask participants to come with two lists. One lists the five things that should be repeated and the other the five things that they wouldn’t do again. This helped balance positive and negative feedback. People opened up more as a result.

 

Postmortems at Pixar involve a lot of data. There are many processes that can be measured, things like rework, production rates and so on. This data is an important part of the postmortem and has the value of being neutral. For more analytical personalities, data is very comforting. It is possible to give data too much power. Not all important things are subject to being measured quantitatively. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is a maxim that is taught and believed by many….But in fact, the phrase is ridiculous – something said by people who are unaware of how much is hidden. A large portion of what we manage can’t be measured, and not realizing this has unintended consequences.

 

From the beginning of the book, Catmull describes that his greatest concern was that maintaining Pixar’s creative excellence would be challenged by success. After years of successes, they became concerned that they had lost their edge. They organized an event that they called “Notes Day” which resembled a Braintrust meeting about a movie, except that the subject was Pixar. The book describes the process of organizing the day and how it engaged the organization in planning and participating. I won’t summarize all of that, but employees were prepared for the one-day event in a series of meetings and communications. Though the leaders chose the overall topic, the employees suggested the actual session topics. An approach was developed that included work within regular work groups and sessions to “force” cross-functional interaction. “Exit” forms were created for people to complete at the end of each session (each person completed one) to capture each person’s ideas. In the end, 1059 people participated in 170 sessions covering 106 topics. Some topics had multiple sessions; some topics had large groups and some had small groups. The day was focused on an important topic. The effort was led by people in a position to take action and it was led from within the organization. While the framework was set up by leadership, the specific agenda and content was driven by the employees. Organizing this day was probably complicated and time-consuming, but it allowed the whole organization to participate in setting direction. It was an embodiment of the idea that good ideas can come from anywhere.

 

The final section of the book is titled “Starting points: Thoughts for managing a creative culture” in which Catmull repeats his main thoughts. Many have been amply addressed, but a few received less direct attention in the book and this summary. Here are a few of these thoughts.

• Sharing problems is an act of inclusion that makes employees feel invested in the larger enterprise.
• The truth is, the cost of preventing error is often greater than the cost of foxing them.
• Trust doesn’t mean that you trust that someone won’t screw up – it means that you trust them even when they do screw up.
• Be wary of making too many rules. Rules can simplify life for managers, but they can be demeaning to the 95 percent who behave well. Don’t create rules to rein in the other 5 percent.
• An organization, as a whole, is more conservative and resistant to change than the individuals who comprise it. Do not assume that general agreement will lead to change – it takes substantial energy to move a group, even when all are on board.
• Excellence, quality, and good should be earned words, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves.

 

 

¹A balance board is a board placed on top of a cylinder so that it is a bit like a see-saw. The goal is to stand on the board so that both feet are off the ground and this requires a constant adjustment to keep from tipping one way or another.

 

Observations and comment:

• A continuous theme of the book is the importance of “mistakes” for Pixar. The context of this seems to be strongly associated with the perspective that when people are pushing the boundaries, it is hard to know what will and won’t work. These attempts to do things is how Pixar does amazing things, but most of the things they try don’t work. It takes a strong culture to support people who “fail” as often as they “succeed”.
• Many years ago, I did some downhill skiing. I was never very good, but remember being told that if you did not occasionally fall down – you were not trying hard enough to ski. But I was no daredevil. The very first run down a kid’s hill (I was a kid) started and ended with falls. I do not remember whether I figured this out or someone told me, but I knew that when I got in trouble – my solution was to fall down as fast as possible. I put this to use on the first run on the bunny hill and my first run on an intermediate hill. Falling in a timely manner saved a ski class from being wiped out by my out-of-control self. The very last time I skied nearly 10 years later involved two falls. Both times, I was knocked over by another skier. This is not because I was so good, but I was careful to put myself in positions that (I thought) I could control. One of these falls was at the start of my last downhill run ever. Except for the outrage at having my careful effort undone by a clumsy skier, I was unhurt. But the real message is that avoidance doesn’t really work. The first time out, I did not have the skill to avoid falls and I fell plenty. The last time out, I had the skill to avoid falls and still fell. Falling happens – sometimes it is part of the solution.
• Catmull’s background is science and engineering. The field pays more attention to randomness than most fields. One of the more interesting sections discusses the role of randomness. We don’t intuitively understand randomness. Even when we are forced to think about it, we think about wrongly. And one of the wrong ideas we have is that we can somehow control or eliminate randomness. Central to our problems with randomness is that we do not have a way to discuss randomness conceptually. When we can find a pattern in events, we create a category and remember the pattern. We deal with randomness differently; we just ignore random events or we make up a (false) story to make the random event part of a process. Although this may be difficult to achieve, the real trick is to accept that many things are random – they have no “meaning”. There may be no cause-and-effect to find and use. But once we create the story about “why” things happened, we create  simplistic rules to prevent a recurrence. There are lots of books, articles and manager talks that complain about complexity and seek simplicity instead. Catmull dismisses this. I believe that the inappropriate application of simple rules and models onto complex mechanisms causes damage – to whatever project is at hand and even to the company as a whole. The simple explanation is so desirable that it is often embraced even when it’s completely inappropriate. So what…? In creative endeavors we must face the unknown…if we shut out reality in the interest of keeping things simple – we will not excel.
• There is something interesting about the discussion of trust in this book. Part of it seems to be a sort of conscious acceptance of what others do, part an acceptance that your rank does not mean that you know better, and part trusting that you have hired the right people. Catmull mentions that one of the management thinkers that influenced him was W. Edwards Deming. Uniquely for his time, Deming thought that managers were mistaken in their ideas about motivating and leading people. It was Deming’s position that most people were competent; their output was a consequence of the systems they worked within – not their own skills and diligence. When people are in a good system, you can trust them to do the job. When the system is flawed, there is no point in blaming the people. I think Catmull sees his role as creating the system that allows people to do their best and then trusting himself to allow them to do their best. If there is second-guessing to be done, it is about the systems.
• What interests me is the number of people who believe they have the ability to drive the train and who think this is a power position – that driving the train is the way to shape their companies’ futures. The truth is, it’s not. Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track. When I read this quote, I am struck by the role of “scout” or “surveyor” as the contrast to the driver. People in the scout/surveyor roles must have mental models that sustain them when looking at landscapes that their colleagues have not seen and to choose between many possible paths to lead the organization towards. I can personally relate to this. I was in a training course years ago and the facilitators covered a wall in paper to have us draw ourselves as an expression of who we thought we were. You should imagine a kind of stick figure standing on a cliff looking at a valley below him (inspired by a painting like those of the Hudson River School) and expressing this unexplored land ahead. The facilitator interpreted my drawing as one of suicidal despair. And maybe that illustrates the differences between facing people who want to create new things and people who want to create safety. Creation for some in an unexplored world of beauty and discovery, but for others it is a world of uncertainty and despair. Becoming a creative organization then requires replacement of mental models involving despair with models involving trial, error and resilience.

 

*text in italics is directly quoted from the book