Pixar’s Principles to Foster Creativity
Nov 1 2008
How can an organization foster creativity? Can an organization develop an approach that increases its chances of success over time, and even enables it to export its approach to other organizations?
Ed Catmull, a cofounder of Pixar and the president of both Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, explores these questions in September’s Harvard Business Review.
He cites Pixar’s incredible history of box office success (specifically, nine blockbuster films in a row, starting with 1995’s Toy Story) and describes Pixar’s approach and principles to creativity that has contributed to that success.
Several of Catmull’s points reinforced those made by Tim Brown in his article on design thinking (which I wrote about it in June). These include:
- Putting together a team of people who come from a variety of backgrounds, work well together, and who “solve problems and make progress”.
- Having a clear, unifying vision with clear ownership: Catmull writes, “We believe the creative vision propelling each movie comes from one or two people”.
- Providing support to leaders: Catmull describes meetings where directors can leverage a “creative brain trust” to get feedback and new ideas: “When a director and producer feel in need of assistance, they convene the group … and show the current version of the work in progress. This is followed by a lively two-hour give-and-take discussion … After a session, it’s up to the director of the movie and his or her team to decide what to do with the advice … the brain trust has no authority. This dynamic is crucial. It liberates the trust members, so they can give their unvarnished expert opinions, and it liberates the director to seek help and fully consider the advice.”
- Leveraging the expertise, experience, and enthusiasm of the entire team, “giving them all the information they need to do the job right without telling them how to do it. Each person on a film should be given creative ownership of even the smallest task.”
- Having clear standards: “Everything we touch needs to be excellent … there has to be one quality bar for every film we produce.”
- Building a community: “That takes trust and respect, which we as managers can’t mandate; they must be earned over time. What we can do is construct an environment that nurtures trusting and respectful relationships and unleashes everyone’s creativity. If we get that right, the result is a vibrant community where talented people are loyal to one another and their collective work, everyone feels that they are part of something extraordinary, and their passion and accomplishments make the community a magnet.”
- Ensuring rapid iteration as a method to learn and improve (not finalize). “In the early stage of making a movie, we draw storyboards … and then edit them together with dialogue and temporary music … The first versions are very rough, but they give a sense of what the problems are … We then iterate, and each version typically gets better and better.”
- Enabling everyone to communicate with anyone: “The most efficient way to deal with numerous problems is to trust people to work out the difficulties directly with each other without having to check for permission.”
- Making it safe for everyone to offer ideas.
- Conducting post-mortems: To make these useful, he recommends asking “each group to list the top five things they would do again and the top five things they wouldn’t do. The balance between the positive and the negative helps make it a safer environment.”
Catmull notes that one test of these principles is whether they can be transferred to another organization to achieve similar results. If movie revenue is one measure of success, we’ll find out soon: Bolt, the first movie from Disney Animation Studios since Disney’s acquisition of Pixar, opens November 21, 2008.
– Jeff
Pixar sign photo by Thomas Hawk. Some rights reserved.
