Creativity Inc. –– Ed Catmull

Author: Ed Catmull

Date Started: [[May 4th, 2021]]

Date Finished: [[May 31st, 2021]]

Type: Kindle + Physical

The leaders of these big companies seemed so focused on the competition that they never developed any deep introspection about other destructive forces that were at work.

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.

If viewers sense not just movement but intention –– or put another way, emotion –– then the animator has done his or her job.

This tension between the individual's personal contribution and the leverage of the group is a dynamic that exists in all creative environments.

"We were young, driven by the sense that we were inventing the field from scratch –– and that was exciting beyond words. For the first time, I saw a way to simultaneously create art and develop a technical understanding of how to create a new kind of imagery."

"We didn't know what was impossible"

Always take a chance on better, even if it seems threatening.

The benefit of transparency was not immediately felt (and notably, when we decided upon it, we weren't even counting on a payoff; it just seemed like the right thing to do). But the relationships and connections we formed, over time, proved far more valuable than we could have imagined, fueling our technical innovation and our understanding of creativity in general.

When Ed went for his interview at Lucasfilm, they asked him who else they should be considering for the job, and Ed didn't hesitate to rattle off the names of several people doing impressive work in those technical areas.

• "My willingness to do this reflected my world-view, forged in academia, that any hard problem should have many good minds simultaneously trying to solve it."

Lucasfilm created a community that embraced films and computers but didn't give preference to one over the other.

• "The resulting environment felt as protected as an academic institution –– an idea that would stay with me and help shape what I would later try to build at Pixar."

But as challenging as that problem proved to be, it paled in comparison to the bigger, and eternal impediment to our progress: the human resistance to change.

This was my first encounter with a phenomenon I would notice again and again, throughout my career: For all the care you put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn't matter if you are getting the story right.

On catchy phrases like "Dare to fail" or "Follow people and people will follow you", or other such non-advices:

• "When people hear it, they nod their heads in agreement as if a great truth has been presented, not realizing that they have been diverted from addressing the far harder problem: deciding what is is that they should be focusing on."
• Merely repeating ideas means nothing. You must act –– and think –– accordingly.

Computer animation: this was where our true passion resided, and the only option left was to go after it with everything we had.

• After that: "Once that goal had been reached, I had what I can only describe as a hollow, lost feeling.

When downsides coexist with upsides as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what's bugging them for fear of being labeled complainers.

Being on the lookout for problems, I realized, was not the same as seeing problems. This would be the idea - the challenge - around which I would build my new sense of purpose.

Going forward, anyone should be able to talk to anyone else, at any level, at any time, without fear of reprimand. Communication would no longer have to go through hierarchical channels.

People > Ideas

• 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 a something better.
  • It is better to focus on how a team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it.

Too many of us think of ideas as being singular, as if they float in the ether, fully formed and independent of the people who wrestle with them. Ideas though are not singular. They are forged through thousands of decisions made by dozens of people.

• [[Steal Like an Artist - Austin Kleon]] When artists merely cut up and reassemble what has come before, it gives the illusion of creativity, but it is merely craft without art.

Find, develop and support good people, and they in turn will find, develop and own good ideas.

A motivated, workaholic workforce, pulling together to make a deadline, could destroy itself if unchecked.

• #comment This is the case with individuals, too, not just teams.

They key is not to let trust, our faith, lull us into the abdication of personal responsibility.

"The process either makes you or unmakes you" –– while it gives the process power, it implies that we have an active role to play in it as well. It's certainly a better phrase than "trust the process".

Candor

• You cannot address the obstacles to candor until people feel free to say that they exist (and using the word honestly only makes it harder to talk about those barriers).
• A hallmark of healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. Lack of candor, if unchecked, ultimately leads to dysfunctional environments.
• 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.

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 through-line or a hollow character finds its soul.

Start with a basic truth: people who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process.

• In order to create, you must internalize and almost become that project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence.
• But it is confusing. The details converge to obscure the whole, and that makes it difficult to move forward substantially in any direction.

"Part of the suffering involves giving up control," John says. "I can think it's the funniest joke in the world, but if nobody in the room laughs, I have to take it out. It hurts that they can see something that you cant."

If you're faced with two hills, and you're unsure which one to attack, Andrew says, the right course of action is to hurry up and choose. If you find out it's the wrong hill, turn around and attack the other one.

They key is to look at the viewpoints being offered, in any successful feedback group, as additive, not competitive.

On 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 make demands; it doesn't even have to include a proposed fix. But if it does, that fix is offered only to illustrate a potential solution, not to prescribe an answer.
• Most of all though, a good note is specific.

Even the most experienced Braintrust members can't help people who don't understand its philosophies, who refuse to hear criticism without getting defensive, or who don't have the talent to digest feedback, reset and start again.

Seek out people who are willing to level with you, and when you find them, hold them close.

Fear and failure

• 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.
• 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 by the desire to avoid it.
• "In general 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 as often as people who dive in and work quickly. The over-planners just take longer to be wrong (and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed) There's a corollary to this: The more time you spend mapping out an approach, the more likely you are to get attached to it. The nonworking idea gets worn into your brain, like a rut in the mud. It can be difficult to get free of it and head in a different direction."
• "That required decision-making, not just abstract discussion."
• To be a truly creative company, you must start things that might fail.
• [[Sunk cost theory]] - how many errors are too many?
• But any failure at a creative company is a failure of many, not one. If you're a leader of a company that has faltered, any misstep that occurs is yours as well. Moreover if you don't use what's gone wrong to educate yourself and your colleagues, then you have missed an opportunity.
• 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 the second part that we control.
• How do we get people to reframe the way they think about the process and the risks?
• In many organizations, managers tend to err on the side of secrecy, of keeping things hidden from employers. A managers default mode should not be secrecy.
  • To confide in employees is to give them a sense of ownership over the information. The result, is that they are less likely to leak whatever it is that you've confided
• Management's job is not to prevent risk, but to build the ability to recover.

Originality is fragile. And in its first moments, is often far from pretty.

• Part of our job is to protect the new from people who don't understand that in order for greatness to emerge, there must be phases of not-so-greatness.

Making the process better, easier and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on –– but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal.

The key is to view conflict as essential, because that's how we know the best ideas will be tested and survive.

With certain jobs, there isn't any other way to learn than by doing –– by putting yourself in the unstable place and then feeling your way.

Negative feedback may be fun, but it is far less brave than endorsing something unproven and providing room for it to grow.

They system is titled to favor the incumbent. The challenger needs support to find its footing. And protection of the new –– of the future, not the past –– must be a conscious effort.

"But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends."

Change and randomness

• Fear of change –– innate, stubborn, and resistant to reason –– is a powerful force.
• Rather than fear randomness, I believe we can make choices to see it for what it is and to let it work for us. The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs.
• Having a finite list of problems is much better than having an illogical feeling that everything is wrong.
• Approach big and small problems with the same set of values and emotions.
• Creativity = unexpected connections between unrelated concepts or ideas.
• It is our nature to attach great significance to the patterns we witness, we ignore the things we cannot see and make deductions and predictions accordingly.
• [[Fooled by Randomness - Nasim Taleb]] - randomness plays a key role in a company's success, not just its leaders making shrewd decisions.
  • There is no way to account for all of the factors involved in any given success. When we learn more, we have to revise what we think.
• Our desire for simplicity misleads us when it comes to randomness. Not everything is simple and to try to force it to be is to misrepresent reality.
• Evolution has built a mechanism to keep us safe from threats - we've been hardwired to fear the unknown. When it comes to creativity, the unknown is not our enemy.
• [[Stochastic Self-similarity]] - stochastic means random or chance, self-similarity means that a lot of things look the same when viewed at different levels of magnification.
  • When you begin to grasp that big and little problems are structured similarly, it helps you maintain a calmer perspective.
  • If all our careful planning cannot prevent problems, we want to enable people at every level to have the confidence to fix those problems.
  • A culture that allows everyone to stop the assembly line, regardless of their position, maximizes the creativity and engagement of people who want to help. We must meet unexpected problems with unexpected responses.
    • The key is also to create a response structure that matches the problem structure.
• The existence of luck reminds us that our actions are less repeatable.

If you don’t try to uncover what is unseen and understand it’s nature, you will be ill prepared to lead. #leadership

An unsuccessful hierarchy is when people equate their line in the pecking order to that of their own value.

To be truly humble, leaders must first understand how many of the factors that shape their lives and businesses are - and will always be - out of sight. #leadership

The past should be our teachers, not our masters.

"There is a kind of symmetry between looking forward and backward, though we seldom think of it that way. We know that in plotting our next move, we are selecting paths into the future, analyzing the best available information and deciding on a route forward. But we are usually unaware that when we look back in time, our penchant for pattern-making leads us to be selective about which memories have meaning.

[[mental-models]]

• When humans see things that challenge our mental models, we tend not just to resist them but to ignore them.
• [[confirmation bias]]
• A flawed mental model, constructed in response to a single event, had taken hold. Once a model of how we should work gets in our head, it is difficult to change.
• The allure of safety and predictability is strong, but achieving true balance means engaging in activities where the outcomes are unpredictable and the payoffs are not yet apparent. The most creative people are willing to work in the shadow of uncertainty.
• Candor, safety, research, self-assessment, and protecting the new are mechanisms we can use to confront the unknown, and to keep the chaos and fear to a minimum. The can help us uncover hidden problems and enable us to address them.

Broadening our view

• Just as individuals have biases and jump to conclusions because of the lens through which they view the world, organizations perceive the world through what they already know how to do.

The power of limits

• Limits we impose internally, if deployed correctly, can be a tool to force people to amend the way they are working, and, sometimes, to invent another way.
• Rule of thumb: Any time we impose limits or procedures, we should ask how they will aid in enabling people to respond creatively. If they won’t, then the proposals are ill suited to the task at hand.

Reasons for postmortems

• Consolidate what’s been learned (before you forget it): Postmortems are a rare opportunity to do analysis that wasn't possible in the heat of the project.
• Teach others who weren’t there
• Don’t let resentments fester: Providing a forum to express frustrations in a respectful manner helps people let go of misunderstandings and screw ups, and move on.
• Use the schedule to force reflection: The scheduling of a postmortem alone forces self-reflection. The time spent preparing for the meeting is as valuable as the meeting itself.
• Pay it forward: A good postmortem arms people with the right questions to ask going forward.

[[law of subverting successful approaches]]: once you've hit on something that works, don't expect it to work again, because people will know how to manipulate it a second time.

[[notes on teaching]]

• Somewhere along the line, fifth-graders had realized that their drawings did not look realistic and they became self-conscious and tentative. The fear of judgement was hindering their creativity.
• Korean Zen: to have a "not know mind" - you are open to the new, just as children are.
• Japanese Zen: "beginner's mind"

The problem with contracts:

• If someone had a problem with the company, they didn't complain because they were under contract.
• If someone didn't perform well, there was no point confronting them about it, their contract just wouldn't be renewed, which might be the first time they heard they needed to improve.
• The system is an endless cycle and discouraged day-to-day communication.

Creative people must accept that challenges never ease, failure can't be avoided and "vision" is often an illusion. But they must always feel safe to speak their minds.

• Unleashing creativity means that we loosen the controls, accept the risk, trust our colleagues and pay attention to anything that creates fear.

[[storytelling]] - the power of narrative and performance. Steve Jobs understood that every time he got on the stage.

• He understood the value of science and law but also understood that complex systems respond in nonlinear, unpredictable ways. Creativity at its best, surprises us all.

When you distill a complex idea into a "t-shirt" slogan, you give the illusion of understanding, and in the process of sapping the idea of its power. You end up with something easy to say, but not connected to behaviour.

• The trick is to think of each statement as a starting point, as a prompt towards deeper inquiry, and not as a conclusion.

Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to think differently.

A company’s communication structure shouldn’t mirror it’s organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.

If there are people in your organization who feel they are not free to suggest ideas, you lose.

There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right.

Be wary of making too many rules. Rules can simplify life for managers, but can be demeaning to the 95% who behave well. Address abuses of common sense individually.

[[Balance is more important than stability]]