With the launch of Toy Story 4, Pixar has now created over 20 films that have earned over $100m. But beyond the box office, what’s great about all the Toy Story movies, just as with The Incredibles and Inside Out, is that we find brilliant stories at the heart of these films.1)
Pixar’s many movie successes are connected with one of the essential questions of leadership. How do we make something go from good to great?
Inside One Of The World’s Most Creative Companies
The magic way Pixar solves this question is through the Brainstrust.
The Brainstrust is a collection of people who get together and critique a film as it moves through the creative process. They do this in order to make the film better. Just how they do this is what makes it so interesting.2)
Pixar’s Brainstrust is different from most feedback mechanisms that exist in many companies in two ways. First, Brainstrust meetings prize feedback that comes from those people who have lived through similar creative processes. In other words, hands-on experience, the kind that grows from living and breathing all aspects of storytelling, is held in high regard. Second, there is no authority or hierarchy in a Brainstrust meeting.
These two conditions upturn a dynamic that exists in many companies; where hierarchy and authority often prevail and, in so doing, bias a conversation.
In a Brainstrust meeting, ideas grounded in experience, with the most dramatic value to a film’s storyline, have the greatest opportunity not only to be said, but also heard. Not because of who says them but because they’re great ideas.
There’s an ingredient of Brainstrust meetings which is essential to their success. This ingredient is candor. Candor, by definition, is the quality of ‘being open and honest’.
How Candor Helps Product Design
Candor does not come easy. It is not transparency, direct feedback or talking straight. Candor is more than these things. This is perhaps why it is so hard to create.
In the Pixar setting, candor implies feedback that is given without contemplation of hierarchy, in a way that genuinely has a common interest, which is the success of a film. Feedback is not there to serve the individual; it is there to create a better product. To allow candor to flourish, people must literally check their ego at the door.
As the success of Pixar has grown, so too has the Brainstrust. Pixar has paid particular care to protect the ethos of this group in spite of the company’s growth.
While the Brainstrust started out as only a handful of people, its “ranks have grown to include…directors, writers, and heads of story – whose only requirement is that they display a knack for storytelling. The one thing that has never changed is the demand for candor.”3)
Preserving this important group is not that different from what startups go through as they scale.
Most startups begin with a story of how a single or multiple founders have a vision to create something different. The challenge many startups face is how to maintain the consistency of this original vision or purpose as the company undergoes rapid growth.
When we look at the Brainstrust, we see some of the principles that make it successful can be found in other successful companies and their teams.
Where Else We See Candor In Great Design
Sir Jonathan Ive is the Chief Designer at Apple. He’s also about to leave the company. After nearly 30 years, he’s had an enormous impact on how Apple designs its products.
Ive led the Industrial Design Group (IDG), a team of around 20 people responsible for shaping new products. This small, secretive group, created many of Apple’s most successful designs and achieved what it has taken other companies thousands of designers to do. While many publications have hypothesized about the inner workings of this team, my favorite account is told by Leander Kahney.
According to Kahney, before the IDG moved to electronic processes for designs, the team would gather around a table to critique work for the latest product. To do this they would use Cachet notebooks from Daler Rowney to sketch and brainstorm together.
The sketchbooks gave the designers a vehicle to express and capture their ideas, so these could be easily shared amongst the group. 4)As Kahney tells it:
“A lot of sketching happens in these sessions. At the end of the brainstorm, Ive will sometimes instruct everyone around the table to copy their sketchbooks and give the pages to the lead designer on the project under discussion. Afterward, Ive will sit with the lead designer and carefully go through all the pages.”5)
When we imagine what it might have been like to be at these sessions, sitting with the designers, sketching and working toward the single-minded pursuit of a new device, we’re quickly reminded of Pixar’s Brainstrust. We can imagine the lead designers scanning through the sketchbooks of their teams. This, in itself, is a way to promote candor and remove hierarchy, where the sketches themselves act as the voice of ideas.
Like with Pixar’s Braintrust which focuses on creating the highest quality story, the IDG focuses on creating the very best products.
Amidst all other possible distractions, Ive appears to have had this as an enduring goal through his career. He has said often “our goal and what gets us excited is to try to make great products.” 6)
Many companies set goals. What is different about Ive’s approach is to instill a greater purpose within his team that reflects a sense of care, focus and respect for people, achieved through great design.
This is the equivalent of Pixar’s Brainstrust carefully contemplating how a storyline will be interpreted and celebrated by their audiences.
The outcome of this might be a financial success for the companies the Brainstrust and the IDG represent. But this is not the primary goal. The first intent is to create a great product that serves people, which in turn is financially successful.
When speaking at London’s Design Museum, Ive told the audience, “If you expect me to buy something where all I can sense is carelessness, actually I think that is personally offensive…It’s offensive culturally, because it shows a disregard for our fellow human.”7)
How We Can Apply These Principles
We can learn from the Brainstrust and IDG in our own work and life. Here are some guiding principles we can apply today.
- Create feedback and critiquing sessions to review initiatives and product creation processes.
- Ensure these sessions are attended by those people who are involved in product creation (this is not necessarily the most senior, but rather those people who have experience at all levels of creation).
- Create an environment during critique sessions that removes hierarchy and promotes openness. Remember, the only way to do this is to create a setting where people have the space to express their opinions, without fear of consequence.
- Focus the team on the single goal of making the product or process better. Pixar focuses on making the film better. The IDG focuses on creating great products. What is the enduring purpose your team is looking to fulfill?
- Concentrate critiquing sessions on improving the product that is being created. It is easy to fall into the trap of improving the peeves of the day. Pixar’s Brainstrust is so successful because sessions are focused on improving the film under discussion.
- Repeat this regularly. People may not engage in the process until the third or fourth attempt. They want to see the process is there to stay before they’ll trust it. This is the challenge, to commit consistently to this practice, so everyone trusts the process and invests in it to create better products.
What do you think? Please consider sharing your thoughts using the comments area below.
References
