How Pixar fosters collective creativity

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A few years ago, I had lunch with the head of a major motion picture studio, who declared that his central problem was not finding good people — it was finding good ideas. I couldn’t disagree more. His belief is rooted in a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in creating an original product.

When it comes to producing breakthroughs, both technological and artistic, Pixar’s track record is unique. Our years of research and development culminated in the release of “Toy Story” in 1995, the world’s first computer-animated feature film. In the following 13 years, we have released eight other films (”A Bug’s Life,” “Toy Story 2,” “Monsters, Inc.,” “Finding Nemo,” “The Incredibles,” “Cars,” “Ratatouille” and “WALL-E”), which also have been blockbusters. Unlike most other studios, we have never bought scripts or movie ideas from the outside. All of our stories, worlds and characters were created internally by our community of artists.

While I’m not foolish enough to predict that we will never have a flop, I don’t think our success is largely luck. Rather, I believe our adherence to a set of principles and practices for managing creative talent and risk is responsible.

What is creativity?
People tend to think of creativity as a mysterious solo act, and they typically reduce products to a single idea. However, creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems.

A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. They’re in the form of every sentence; in the performance of each line; in the design of characters, sets, and backgrounds; in the locations of the camera; in the colors, the lighting, the pacing. Every member of our 200- to 250-person production group makes suggestions. Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization. The leaders sort through a mass of ideas to find the ones that fit into a coherent whole.

SUMARIO: What’s the key to being able to recover? Talented people!

We’re in a business whose customers want to see something new every time they go to the theater. This means we as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks, which, of course, is much easier said than done. If you want to be original, you have to accept uncertainty and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to recover? Talented people! Such people are not so easy to find.

What’s equally tough, of course, is getting talented people to work effectively with one another. 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. I believe that community matters.

A peer culture
Of great importance — and something that sets us apart from other studios — is the way people at all levels support one another. Nothing exemplifies this more than our creative brain trust and our daily review process.
THE BRAIN TRUST. When a director and producer feel in need of assistance, they convene the group (and anyone else they think would be valuable) and show the current version of the work in progress. This is followed by a lively two-hour give-and-take discussion, which is all about making the movie better. There’s no ego. Nobody pulls any punches to be polite.

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; there are no mandatory notes, and 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.

THE DAILIES. This practice of working together as peers is core to our culture, and it’s not limited to our directors and producers. One example is our daily reviews, or “dailies,” a process for giving and getting constant feedback in a positive way. People show work in an incomplete state to the whole animation crew, and although the director makes decisions, everyone is encouraged to comment.

There are several benefits. First, once people get over the embarrassment of showing work still in progress, they become more creative. Second, the director or creative leads guiding the review process can communicate important points to the entire crew at the same time. Third, people learn from and inspire each other. Finally, there are no surprises at the end: When you’re done, you’re done.

Technology plus art equals magic
Getting people in different disciplines to treat one another as peers is just as important as getting people within disciplines to do so. But it’s much harder. Walt Disney understood this. He believed that when continual change, or reinvention, is the norm in an organization and technology and art are together, magical things happen. At Pixar, we believe in this swirling interplay between art and technology. We adhere to the following principles:

1. EVERYONE MUST HAVE THE FREEDOM TO COMMUNICATE WITH ANYONE. This means recognizing that the decision-making hierarchy and communication structure in organizations are two different things. Members of any department should be able to approach anyone in another department to solve problems without having to go through “proper” channels.

2. IT MUST BE SAFE FOR EVERYONE TO OFFER IDEAS. We’re constantly showing works in progress internally. We try to stagger who goes to which viewing to ensure that there are always fresh eyes, and everyone in the company, regardless of discipline or position, gets to go at some point.

3. WE MUST STAY CLOSE TO INNOVATIONS HAPPENING IN THE ACADEMIC COMMUNITY. We strongly encourage our technical artists to publish their research and participate in industry conferences. Publishing may give away ideas, but it keeps us connected with the academic community, helping us attract exceptional talent and reinforcing the belief throughout the company that people are more important than ideas.

For 20 years, I pursued a dream of making the first computer-animated film. But then I realized the most exciting thing I had ever done was to help create the unique environment that allowed that film to be made. My new goal became to build a studio that had the depth, robustness and will to keep searching for the hard truths that preserve the confluence of forces necessary to create magic. But the ultimate test is if Pixar is still producing animated films that touch world culture in a positive way long after we who founded and built Pixar are gone.

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