How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity by Ed Catmull

Ed Cutmell

Most of us have a perception that creative ideas have more significance than people but in this article Ed Catmull who is the president of Pixar and Disney Animation studios. According to him everyone has a very different perspective of creativity which emphasizes more on the initial idea rather than the risk that will come in producing it.

In film making and many other kinds of complex product development, creativity involves a large number of people from different discipline working effectively together to solve a great many inherently unforeseeable problems. According to Catmull its in three parts the first one is to have a project leader who will have the authority for product development secondly to have a culture and processes that will allow the people to open up and discuss their work and lastly is to support each other as peers and eliminate the natural obstacles that is dividing them.

What Is Creativity?

In a movie there are thousands of creative ideas in .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, and the pacing. But for all this creativity only one person is not responsible every single member of the crew contributes towards one big idea. So there is no particular phase for creativity it should be there on every phase not only on artistic side but technical side too. The leader must combine couple of ideas to find one combined idea that will support story this process is though a bit scary because no one is sure enough that where will they end up. But being scared is not bad because if someone is not scared means that job is not done properly because in this business the customers wants to see something new every time they go to the theater so which means that doing something out of the box is really important. So they encourage unexpected ideas though they don’t know what will be the end result but since their business to come up with something which is not obvious, so it’s all about taking somebody’s vision and take a chance.

So basically in this article the core is that successful organization faces two challenges the first one is to bring new people one a single track but for them it was not a major problem because they were already had an open culture this was been adopted by us so that newcomers less threatening. Several prominent outsiders who have had a big impact on them (in terms of the exciting ideas they introduced and the strong people they attracted) were readily accepted. They include Brad Bird, who directed The Incredibles and Ratatouille; Jim Morris, who headed Industrial Light & Magic for years before joining Pixar as the producer of WALL·E and executive vice president of production; and Richard Hollander, a former executive of the special-effects studio Rhythm & Hues, who is leading an effort to improve our production processes.

The bigger issue for them has been getting young new hires to come up with new ideas and speak up they wanted to change the perspective of people who always assumed that if they are successful doesn’t means they are always right.

So in the end Catmull is searching for the problems in the Pixar’s culture and according to him is that they have a perception that clear values, constant communication, routine postmortems, and the regular injection of outsiders who will challenge the status quo are necessary but not enough to stay on the bar.So for this Catmull comes to the orientation sessions for all new hires, where he talks about the mistakes Pixar has made so people don’t assume that just because the company is successful, everything it does is right.

Link for the article
https://hbr.org/2008/09/how-pixar-fosters-collective-creativity