Creativity, Inc.

by Ed Catmull

At it's heart, Creativity, Inc. seeks to answer a vital question: In a creative business, what does it mean to manage well?

Ed Catmull is one of the co-founders of Pixar (with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter), and was president of both Pixar and Disney Animation until he retired in 2019.

The book is about what he’s learned in leading a fast-growing business that is primarily creative but that also incorporates large amounts of technology into its make-up. The book includes some of Catmull's biography and of the origins and journey of Pixar, but they are included mainly as context and as illustrations of the things he discusses.

Creativity, Inc., is a book for agency leaders who want to lead their teams towards excellence. It's a manual for those striving for businesses distinguished for originality, for a reputation for innovation, and for consistently high quality. It's a unique and indispensable guide for leading teams of creative and technical people towards those objectives.

It is about leadership in business, about how the things that are often shied away from in the workplace — honesty, candour and openness; failure, though mostly the fear of it; things that are unknown or hidden; randomness; and more — all play a central part in creativity and innovation. The book, then, is about how to embrace these things, and how to use them to take your organisation up to new heights.

Catmull discusses the ideals and the practices, the habits and techniques, that have made Pixar admired and, through the renaissance of Disney Animation, are proven to work beyond the special environment of Pixar.

The Big Idea

This is a book about business culture, about crafting the ethos of a company, the healthy philosophies that help define it and what those philosophies look like when converted into practical actions. It is especially focussed on businesses and workplaces that are comprised of creative people, and those that work in creative industries. But there is lots to learn for agencies that are creating things but would not define themselves as being in the classic 'creative sector'.

Catmull covers four stages of the growth and maturing of a business, from getting started, through protecting the new, young organisation, onto building and sustaining things after that initial rush of applied energy, and finally expanding out and testing what we know works in one context into others that are different.

Catmull describes in depth a number of principles and practices that are vital at Pixar, and he argues are essential in every creative business.

He describes multiple healthy approaches to constructive criticism — ways to enable it to happen without being destructive or damaging. He argues for healthy ways to support and respond to fear and failure, to unreal expectations (dimensions that he calls 'the hungry beast and the ugly baby'), to change and randomness in an organisation, and that leaders must accept that in complexity there are, necessarily, hidden things, that our perceptions are limited.

The big idea of the book is that in businesses, especially creative ones, change is inevitable and, ultimately, necessary. That means that the leaders of those businesses need healthy ways to respond to change, to rely on openness, but that must mean embracing candour and critical feedback for all. And all of that needs good management, in order for leaders to take their team to new heights.

Catmull's book is autobiographical in parts, portraying his own path into leading a business and starting, growing and developing Pixar. This makes the things he describes highly practical, tried and tested in the real world of Pixar, and replicable as Catmull and John Lassiter took on the rejuvenation of Disney Animation.

This is a book for anyone who needs to manage well in a creative business.

Key Points

Creativity, Inc. is structured in four parts. Each is relevant to agencies, and they relate to different stages of the agency lifecycle.

Part 1: Getting Started

This section is the most autobiographical part of the book, describing Catmull's own journey into business. He started as an academic, a computer scientist with a fascination for animation. Pixar was the end product of that, and this section describes its genesis and its founding principles.

Catmull's approach to business was shaped by his experience in academia, at (what was then called) the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, and later DARPA, when it was rolled into defence research):

ARPA’s mandate — to support smart people in a variety of areas — was carried out based on the unwavering presumption that researchers would try to do the right thing and, in ARPA’s view, overmanaging them was counterproductive. ARPA’s administrators did not hover over the shoulders of those of us working on the projects they funded, nor did they demand that our work have direct military applications. They simply trusted us to innovate.

Later experiences helped him understand the limitations of this view, but that degree of trust in competent, skilled and motivated people to get on with tackling complex problems stayed with him.

A Defining Goal — Although Toy Story was a landmark movie that put Pixar's name on the map, it had thrown up challenges in the way the company ran, issues that he was keen to understand. They had set out with commendable goals to build a sustainable creative culture — ‘one that didn’t just pay lip service to the importance of things like honesty, excellence, communication, originality, and self-assessment but really committed to them, no matter how uncomfortable that became’ — but Catmull quickly realised that wasn’t a singular assignment.

It was a day-in-day-out, full-time job. And one that I wanted to do.

Establishing Pixar's Identity — Early on, two principles were established that defined Pixar's creative and practical identity. 1) Story is King — ‘… by which we meant that we would let nothing—not the technology, not the merchandising possibilities—get in the way of our story.’ 2) Trust the Process — ‘While there are inevitably difficulties and missteps in any complex creative endeavour, you can trust that “the process” will carry you through.’

Both have needed clarification and reiteration throughout Pixar's lifetime, but they have served to orientate to the business as it has grown. In particular, both maxims create a distinctive focus when confronting difficulties — the focus is on the thing, the story, or the process, rather than on the people. That orientation has given Pixar a distinctive way to enable frank criticism — the focus is always on the problem, not the person. This was particularly true for the Pixar team as they struggled through both story and technical catastrophes as they developed Toy Story 2, and tried to achieve the same standards, to repeat the magic, as they had with their first hit.

These principles, then, gave way to some key insights:

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.

In other words:

Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.

Part 2: Protecting the New

Honesty and Candour — This is one of the key chapters in the book, so I'll describe it in a bit more detail. It's about the need for honest and clear feedback in creative endeavours, about how difficult it can be, and has a vital model for how to do it effectively.

True honesty is difficult, Catmull says. Particularly in a close working environment, sometimes it's good not to be honest, and we often hold back from what we really think. However, in a creative project, and especially when aiming for excellence, frank and forthright feedback is essential.

Telling the truth is difficult, but inside a creative company, it is the only way to ensure excellence.

Pixar created a group they call the Braintrust. It's a group that meets every few months to asses the progress of their movies.

Its premise is simple: Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid with one another.

It exists because everyone who takes on a creative endeavour gets lost at some point along the way — everyone, no matter how talented or how clear the vision. Coming to clarity, Catmull says, takes patience and candour.

The Braintrust differs from other feedback mechanisms, he says, in a several key ways.

First, its stacked full of people with a deep understanding of the creative process at hand — storytelling, in Pixar's context — and most of them have been through the process multiple times themselves.

Secondly, and crucially, the Braintrust has no authority. The director or writer does not have to implement the suggestions made by the Braintrust. After the meeting, it is up to the director to work out what to do with the feedback notes. Removing that power of demand is vital, and affects the dynamics in ways that are essential, Catmull argues.

The Braintrust is not there to solve problems, nor should it, he says. Rather, it is there with an experienced and outside view, to see what the director can't see. That doesn't stop things getting tough. But because no one is being told what to do, just shown what they can't see, discussions rarely make people defensive or lead to animosity.

The Braintrust is benevolent. It wants to help. And it has no selfish agenda.

And, on the reason why frank honesty is vital in creative tasks:

Candour isn’t cruel. It does not destroy. On the contrary, any successful feedback system is built on empathy, on the idea that we are all in this together, that we understand your pain because we’ve experienced it ourselves. The need to stroke one’s own ego, to get the credit we feel we deserve—we strive to check those impulses at the door. The Braintrust is fuelled 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.

Fear and Failure — This chapter explores the pivotal role of failure in creativity, and especially in creative businesses. Although many writers (and motivational speakers!) talk about embracing failure, particularly as an opportunity for growth, Catmull looks at it differently. The common view of failure, he suggests, is that it's a kind of necessary evil. But this is wrong-headed in creativity, he says:

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). And yet, even as I say that embracing failure is an important part of learning, I also acknowledge that acknowledging this truth is not enough. 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 recognise both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.

One of Pixar's movie directors, Andrew Stanton, has a pair of mantras that're often cited in the Braintrust — ‘fail early and fail fast’ and ‘be wrong as fast as you can.’

For Stanton, that is not so much about getting the painful-but-necessary failure stuff out of the way. It's not about accepting failure with dignity and moving on. Instead, it's embracing the deeper reality, 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 by the desire to avoid it. And, for leaders especially, this strategy—trying to avoid failure by outthinking it—dooms you to fail.

Rejecting failure and avoiding mistakes seem like the right approach, but Catmull says they're fundamentally misguided, and will have the opposite effect. Stanton's interpretation is that it's a necessary check on over-planning. Planning is certainly vital, but too much planning means there is too little progress.

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.’ As opposed to having a leader who says, ‘I’m still not sure. I’m going to look at the map a little bit more, and we’re just going to float here, and all of you stop rowing until I figure this out.’ And then weeks go by, and morale plummets, and failure becomes self-fulfilling. People begin to treat the captain with doubt and trepidation. Even if their doubts aren’t fully justified, you’ve become what they see you as because of your inability to move.”

If you want to understand your company's attitude to failure, you should examine what happens when an error is discovered. Do people shut down and turn inward, rather than come forward to untangle the problems? Is there an immediate search for the person at fault? If so, you may have a culture that shuns failure.

How, then, do you make failure into something people can face without fear?

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. You don’t run from it or pretend it doesn’t exist.

The Hungry Beast and The Ugly Baby — There are often groups, either inside a business (designers, senior management, the marketing department, etc.) that need a steady diet of new material in order to function. These are the 'hungry beast'. At the same time, though, creative ideas take time to develop, and they're usually unseemly, poorly formed, vulnerable and incomplete for a long time in their genesis — necessarily, they are the 'ugly baby' for a good while.

The beast is gluttonous, but it can often be a valuable motivator. The baby is pure and unblemished, but needy and erratic. You need them both, but they have to co-exist peacefully. In a healthy creative environment, each recognises the importance of balancing the competing tensions. Both need to be heard, but neither should win.

The Hidden — Most things in a business are hidden from the leaders, not through intent or malice, and mostly because there's no practical way you can know everything that's going on. However, Catmull says, passively accepting that can lead to problems.

Hierarchies and structured environments can contribute to information being hidden. Similarly, people 'managing up' only reveal what they think they're managers or leaders ought or need to see. That means, though, that we will draw conclusions based on incomplete pictures. It is wrong to assume that one’s limited view is better, just because you're the leader.

That means, then, that when things happen, when things you can't see combine together or suddenly pop out of the woodwork, you will be both surprised and unprepared. You will have to be reactive, rather than taking action proactively, in less stressful times.

If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand it’s natural you will be ill-prepared to lead.

Part 3: Building and Sustaining

Broadening Our View — As a business grows and adds more people to the headcount, there is an inevitable drift towards inflexibility. Catmull argues that this is a consequence of the increased complexity and interacting perspectives — perspectives or models that are competing or at odds create a kind of inertia, he says, that makes it difficult to change or respond well to challenges. As much as individuals, organisations are susceptible to biases and preconceptions, he says.

Catmull outlines a number of approaches and techniques that Pixar employ to put both individuals and the organisation as a whole into different frames of mind, to avoid preconceptions:

Dailies, or Solving Problems Together — a little like a stand-up in Agile, a daily meeting to discuss work in progress, the messy and incomplete stuff, though in a Daily notes are given and the team discuss problems that creative individuals may be having — ‘master classes in how to see and think more expansively’
Research Trips — going outside the office, outside the building, outside the company, to learn from other, often very different, contexts. Not just a field trip or excursion, these are for gaining inspiration for the work at hand, shaped by the research needs of the creative project.
The Power of Limits — controlling how much effort is put into something by assigning a useful limit to it. ‘The very concept of a limit implies that you can’t do everything you want—so we must think of smarter ways to work.’
Integrating Technology and Art — Pixar is a creative business, using technology to make art. Here, Catmull is arguing for using all the tools available to do your thing, but also that the different mindsets, art and tech (or, say, PR and tech), are strongest when combined in a dynamic interplay, changing and improving each other.
Short Experiments — Pixar's famous short films are key components in Pixar's life. They're places for new writers and directors to try things out, but they're also places to experiment with new technology or workflows. Plus, they bring people together from different disciplines or parts of the business into one intense team. They're a relatively cheap place to screw up, so perfect from trying out new stuff.
Learning to See — Catmull talks about how taking art lessons helped Pixar staff, immensely creative but not necessarily artists, to learn how to perceive like an artist, to switch off the part of the brain that jumps to conclusions, that see's 'what is there' too quickly, and look deeper at other things they've not noticed, to set their aside preconceptions and take time to examine assumptions.
Postmortems — a meeting held shortly after the completion of every movie to explore what did and didn’t work and attempt to consolidate lessons learned. They have 5 objectives: consolidate what's been learned; teach others who weren't there; don't let resentments fester; use the schedule to force reflections; 'pay it forward' into the next project.
Continuing to Learn — there's lots of learning in the early 'start-up mentality' phase of a business, but all too often that gets set aside as the business matures and the leaders get more confident. But don't neglect it! Pixar has 'Pixar University' where people can learn all kinds of things, not just related to their skills in CPD — almost anything! And it's vital, because often stuff from a completely different fields brings a dynamic new perspective. Strive to keep beginner’s mind.

Part 4: Testing What We Know

In this section of the book, Catmull talks about what happened in the wake of the merger of Pixar and Disney (technically, an acquisition by Disney, though a pretty unusual one — Steve Jobs worked hard to ensure Pixar retained its identity and distinctiveness in the process). In particular, he describes the new responsibilities that fell to him and John Lasseter as they were given the task of reviving the fortunes of Disney Animation. Was the distinct atmosphere of Pixar actually completely unique, or could it put into practice in other places? Disney Animation was their laboratory for scaling up the Pixar approach to creative business. And what would Pixar look like after the merger?

The A New Challenge chapter covers most of what Catmull and Lasseter did to turn it around Disney, impacts that resulted in great new films like Tangled and Frozen. There were several crucial changes they made that transformed Disney Animation.

In particular, they removed the 'oversight group', a managerial group that made sure progress was being made, but had a 'waterfall' project mentality and a numbers-first perspective. It was replaced with Disney Animation's own version of the Pixar's Braintrust — the people at Disney designed it for themselves, rather than just replicating what happened at Pixar — which was more agile and placed creativity and 'the story' in the paramount position.

Notes Day — the story of Pixar's giant company-wide feedback exercise, ran in March 2013. It was arranged much like an unconference, with the subjects drawn from the participants — the whole Pixar staff — rather than pre-determined by management or invited speakers.

The main difference from an unconference, though, was that ideas were gathered in advance of Notes Day, in order to make sure there was enough space allocated, similar subjects combined, popular topics not allowed to clash in the schedule, and so on. Regular work closed for a day, and instead, 1095 people discussed ‘106 topics in 171 sessions managed by 138 facilitators in 66 meeting spaces across our three buildings.’

Notes Day happened because Pixar wants to be a company that never stands still, that never rests on its successes, but continues to learn, to adapt, to grow. They continue to do so.

Insights for Agency Leaders

The book has a whole section at the end, Starting Points, about how to manage a creative culture. It's 4 pages of bullet points, a list of principles and jumping-off points for people wanting to enable and protect a healthy creative business and working environment.

For now, here are some of the important things for agency leaders to take away from Creativity, Inc.:

Put together the right team, and you'll be astonished at what you get from them.

Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. Give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better.
If you get the team right, chances are that they’ll get the ideas right.
It isn’t enough merely to be open to ideas from others. Engaging the collective brainpower of the people you work with is an active, ongoing process. As a manager, you must coax ideas out of your staff and constantly push them to contribute.
Do not discount ideas from unexpected sources. Inspiration can, and does, come from anywhere.

In creative businesses, openness, honesty and frankness are vital in the drive towards excellence.

The only real way to solve problems and collaborate effectively, especially in creative projects, is by communicating fully and openly, by not withholding or misleading.
That frankness must be directed properly, towards the creative task rather than at the people involved, for it to be helpful.
Often, though, our own fears and instincts for self-preservation often cause us to hold back from being candid.
There are many valid reasons why people aren’t candid with one another in a work environment. Your job is to search for those reasons and then address them.
There are many things you can do to enable candour — a 'Braintrust', daily stand-ups, project postmortems, notes, a Notes Day event, and so on. All reinforce the idea that it's OK to express your opinions on the things you do in order to make things better and progress towards excellence.

Failure is OK, a natural consequence of doing new stuff, and is usually a productive way of making things better.

Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.
Expecting zero failures is worse than useless, it is counterproductive. If we aren’t experiencing failure, we’re making a worse mistake: being driven by the desire to avoid it.
Trust doesn’t mean that you trust that someone won’t screw up—it means you trust them even when they do screw up.
The first conclusions we draw from our successes and failures are typically wrong. Measuring the outcome without evaluating the process is deceiving.
In a working culture based in fear and averse to failure, people avoid risk, both consciously and unconsciously. Foster a positive understanding of failure and the opposite will happen.

Protect the future, not the past.

Don’t wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often. It’ll be pretty when we get there, but it won’t be pretty along the way. And that’s as it should be.
Our job as managers in creative environments is to protect new ideas from those who don’t understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness.
The healthiest organisations are made up of departments whose agendas differ but whose goals are interdependent. If one agenda wins, we all lose.

From Words to Actions

Here’s several practical things that you can do to take the insights from Creativity, Inc. and turn them into practical actions in your working life as an agency leader.

Begin your own braintrust, to get candid feedback and practical insights for your creative projects.
Do experimental projects with small teams of people from across multiple departments, to try out new approaches, and give new leaders an opportunity to find their voice.
Have an internal unconference, your own Notes Day, where the whole team can talk about what they think is important for the company, and come up with practical things to do.

Begin Your Own Braintrust

The Braintrust is a linchpin in Pixar's creative culture, an essential feature of what makes them Pixar. It was one of the first things that Catmull and Lassiter sought to do at Disney Animation. The team at Disney built it for themselves, gave it the structures and practices that were right for them, but it was entirely inspired by Pixar's Braintrust and the people at Disney were taught how to use it by Catmull, Lassiter and other Pixar staff.

The Braintrust exists because of one essential truth.

People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process.

The Braintrust is Pixar's primary mechanism for getting candid feedback on their creative work. We quoted Catmull's summary of the Braintrust's purpose above:

Its premise is simple: Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid with one another.

At Pixar, the Braintrust meets every couple of months. Your braintrust might want to meet more less frequently, depending on the pace of your creative projects — for context, at Pixar a movie will often take several years from the first idea to the finished product, making every couple of months an appropriate interval.
The Braintrust's membership is not static, and different people join at different times. There are, though, some people whose analysis, understanding of the creative field (stories and storytelling, in Pixar's case), and intellectual and communication clarity are especially well tuned to the Braintrust environment, almost always people who've been through the process themselves. Those kinds of people are regular attendees.
A key to the discussion in the Braintrust is addressing and eliminating the fears that prevent candour and honest discussion about the creative project. As Catmull says, ‘[t]he 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.’
Key to the feedback the Braintrust gives is it is not authoritative. It is not final. It is only supposed to be suggestions made from the insights, and so it's merely advisory.
The meeting usually begins with a presentation by the creative principal or team of their work.
Then the discussion begins. Braintrust members give their honest opinions, without holding back. The creatives, directors and writers often in Pixar's case, though, have to be open to it and willing, if appropriate, to let things go that don't work. There's often heated debate, but there's a lot of laughter too.

Make Time for Short Experiments

Your creative business needs to progress. That may mean trying out new ways of doing things. It may mean trying out people from your team in new roles. It could mean trying out new people joining the team. It almost certainly means getting ideas and insights from one department or unit within your agency to interact with those of another one (or several).

A great way to do that is with short experiments. These create risks, but the risks are manageable and proportionate. If things go wrong or don't work out, the damage to the business will be insignificant at best, minor at worst, and far less impact than if they make a valuable client cross. But, if things go right, then the payoffs can be significant, giving you new skills and approaches, new leaders. And though the experiment itself is not done for its commercial value (in fact, almost definitely shouldn't be) it may well to result in innovations that give you avenues for new products or services, too.

Each short experiment should be given defined limits — time, budget, team size, etc. Limits, ‘if deployed correctly, can be a tool to force people to amend the way they are working and, sometimes, to invent another way.’ One of those limits can be in the form of the guidance given — if you know there's a particular area where the creative work needs to improve, make that the focus for the experiment. For example, a Pixar short called Geri's Game had to include a human character, because they knew that's where they needed to make improvement.

An internal unconference, your own Notes Day

Of course, you already have retreats for your whole company. You take everyone away, you do some work together and you have some fun. Most company retreats, though, are designed by the leadership team, with a clear agenda set in advance … by the leadership team … and where the voices heard are almost entirely those of the leadership team, presented from the front to the rest of the staff.

That is all very important stuff, of course — that's much needed. But it's easy to fall back on that as the format you always take.

This idea is different. The point of a company Notes Day is to work on the company together. It's a form of crowd-sourcing for you as the agency leader — your team will help you to look at all the hidden things in your business, the stuff that you never get to see, the things that, if they were to change, could make a huge difference.

On Notes Day, the topics of discussion come from the whole team. They're all focussed on the stuff that could be done to make your agency better, to improve the business, to make your projects run more smoothly, to help people learn and develop their skills, or whatever. It's all about improving your business.

Practically:

The event was not run or co-ordinated by the leadership to team or management — that responsiblity was delegated to a team, with the authority assigned to them to pull it off.
At Pixar's Notes Day, the topics were submitted in advance.
- Similar ideas were combined, and the people proposing them connected together.
- Suggestions with several topics could be split apart into single subjects.
- Levels of interest were taken later on, so that an appropriate space could be assigned to the discussion.
At a 'proper' unconference …
- the subjects are proposed on the day, as the first thing
  - similar ideas are joined together as you go along
- interest is indicated by a show of hands
- topics are taken until you run out of spaces in the slots for the day

Each session has a way of taking notes, and deciding on actions points that come out of it. Notes are then taken in by the Notes Day team, consolidated, analysed, and turned into practical actions that could be executed for real in the business.

Why not try having a Notes Day for your business, instead of a run-of-the-mill retreat?