Creativity Inc

Brief summary

This book is the story of Pixar and its founder Ed Catmull. It describes how Ed successfully created one of the most creative companies in the world. He talks about his personal goals, struggles, and learning along the way. This book is for organization leaders or for anyone who strives for originality.

What did I learn from the book?

• The best managers acknowledge that there are a lot of things that they do not know and they make room for them. They try to uncover what is unseen and understand it’s nature.
• The three important aspects of a creative environment are candor, fearlessness, and self-awareness. There are a few more aspects that will enable a creative environment in organizations: - Unhindered communication among peers, the autonomy of work, and confidence in the people we hire. - People should be able to call out problems and then work together in fixing them. Empower people to fix what’s broken. - Focus on people, people’s work habits, their talents, and their values. Support and develop good people, they will find good ideas.

Candor

• Sometimes when downsides coexist with upsides, people are reluctant to call explore the downsides for fear of being labeled complainers.
• Ideas and People: Ideas come from people. Therefore people are more important than ideas. Getting the team right (the right people and the right chemistry) is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right. If we give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If we give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.
• People should be free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. In other words, there should be a culture of candor.
• In a creative culture, when a group of people discusses something, individuals don’t have personal agendas, or they never discuss people, they only discuss the project. For this to work, there should be candor, trust, and patience among the group.
• At Pixar, they have created a group known as Braintrust for promoting a culture of candor and constructive feedback. - Usually, one person (director) presents his idea/project and everyone discusses this project giving candid constructive feedback. - Hierarchy doesn’t mean anything in these meetings. - Everyone has absolute trust in each other that whatever the feedback is, it’s about the project and there is no personal hidden agenda. - The most important thing is that the group’s responsibility is not to solve the problems. Whatever solutions the group does provide, it is up to the director to take them. There is absolutely no pressure to take up the solutions and often times feedback provided by the group. - Any feedback that is being offered is taken as an additive instead of competitive. - The group consists of peers. Even though Steve Jobs owned Pixar, he was not allowed in these meetings.
• What is constructive feedback? - It says what is wrong, what is missing, what isn’t clear, what makes no sense. - It is offered timely and does not make any demands. - It sometimes does not even include a proposed fix and if it does, it is not the final answer, only a viewpoint. - It is specific.

Fearlessness

• If we are confident about our plans, we should have the guts to champion it no matter what.
• Experimentation should be seen as a necessity and productive instead of a frustrating waste of time.
• Randomness and change are a necessity, embrace it.
• It is way easier to plan derivative work. So if we must and have to plan everything in advance, and follow that completely we are upping our chances of being unoriginal.
• A lot of bigger and smaller problems are structured similarly even if these problems are random. It is important to understand this because then we can deal with them in a similar fashion. Also, don’t take the smaller problems for granted, because sometimes they have the ability to change a whole lot more because of random events piled on top of them.
• Challenges never cease, failure can’t be avoided, and “vision” is often an illusion

Self-awareness

• Being confident about the value of our innovation is not enough. It is important to get a buy-in from the community (people) we are trying to serve.
• For all the care we put into artistry, visual polish frequently doesn’t matter if we are getting the story (product) right.
• We are not our idea and we should not identify ourselves with our idea. If we do, we will take offense when that idea is challenged or any feedback is provided.
• When feeling overwhelmed, create a list of problems and bucket them into types of problems. It can help ease down the emotion that everything is wrong at once.

• We view the world based on our own mental models. These mental models aren’t reality and everyone has different mental models. They are tools to understand the world better. We should always keep that in mind and know that other people’s mental model might be different.

• Problems with Mental Models: - Sometimes our own mental models about the world distort what we perceive so much that we fail to recognize what is in front of us. - It’s tough to separate new information from our already established mental models - Sometimes mental models limit us to deal with problems. We become inflexible. - By virtue of proximity, people have deeply intertwined mental models.
• We tend to think of logic and emotion as two distinct, mutually exclusive domains. It is often not the case. Passion is also a key part. When making decisions, we should consider logic and emotion both at the same time.
• Consolidating all the three aspects, a lot of times, it is important for us to be flexible, change our views, and approach a problem with a different frame of mind. How does Pixar do it? - Openly discuss problems in a team. Individual creativity is magnified by the people around you. - If we cut up and reassemble what we have done before, it merely gives an illusion of creativity. It is a craft without art. If we are too afraid to follow the uncharted territory and just hold on to our own mental models, it will be too tough to create something original. - Limits force us to rethink how we are working and push us to new heights of creativity. Adding limits can foster creativity. But how do we ensure that we are adding the correct limits? Ask this simple question: How do we enable our people to solve problems instead of How do we prevent our people from screwing up? - Mistakes are not just unavoidable, but valuable. - Some learnings from drawing class - Why do we draw bad initially? Because we draw things according to our mental model of the object. Our mind takes over and draws what it thinks is the best representation of an object. Our mind jumps to a conclusion. - Good artists, turn off this tendency and instead employ other tools like drawing what is not present. - Focusing on something can make it more difficult to see. We should be able to suspend (if only temporarily), the habits and impulses that obscure our vision. We should learn to ignore our biases when considering a problem statement. Don’t be constrained by what you already know. - Postmortems: Evaluate what went right and what went bad after the project - Consolidate all your learnings from the project as soon as possible before forgetting. Share the learnings with others. - Creativity involves missteps and imperfections. - For fostering creativity, we should focus on our goals, principles, and intentions and not on predicting the future before it happens.

Quotes

When it comes to creative inspiration, job titles and hierarchy are meaningless.

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

The past should be our teacher, not our master.

The best way to predict future is to invent it.

Extra

The future is not a destination — it’s a direction. It is okay to make mistakes along the way as long as we are clear on our intentions and goals

Experimentation is very important for learning (which is repeated a lot of times across various literature). Prepare yourself to test fast and fail even faster.

Introspection is very important. Self-reflection and feedback are a way to grow ourselves.

A creative environment thrives when we are ready to take risks, constructive feedback, and people have trust among each other.