Archive for: April, 2014

Ed Catmull’s thoughts for managing a creative culture

Pixar's Ed Catmull Creativity Inc.

From Ed Catmull’s Creativity Inc., 28 ideas on how Pixar engineers and sustains a creative culture.

A culture of innovation is a culture of creativity, enthusiasm and daring. Not a place where efficiency reigns and where mistakes are to be avoided. It also needs constant nurturing, it isn’t a “set-it-and-forget-it program” that consultants come in and help you create.

Last week I reviewed Ed Catmull’s fantastic book Creativity Inc., where I mentioned a few key ideas that stood out for me. Of course, I only mentioned the ones that I thought were interesting, but the last chapter of the book is a sort of summary of how Pixar engineers and sustains creativity.

Here then are some firestarter ideas for you to chew on straight out of Mr. Catmull’s book:

  • Always try to hire people who are smarter than you. Always take a chance on better, even if it seems like a potential threat.
  • If there are people in your organization who feel they are not free to suggest ideas, you lose. Do not discount ideas from unexpected sources. Inspiration can, and does, come from anywhere.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Likewise, if someone disagrees with you, there is a reason. Our first job is to understand the reasoning behind their conclusions.
  • Further, if there is fear in an organization , there is a reason for it— our job is (a) to find what’s causing it, (b) to understand it, and (c) to try to root it out.
  • There is nothing quite as effective, when it comes to shutting down alternative viewpoints, as being convinced you are right.
  • In general, people are hesitant to say things that might rock the boat. Braintrust meetings, dailies, postmortems, and Notes Day are all efforts to reinforce the idea that it is okay to express yourself. All are mechanisms of self-assessment that seek to uncover what’s real.
  • If there is more truth in the hallways than in meetings, you have a problem.
  • Many managers feel that if they are not notified about problems before others are or if they are surprised in a meeting, then that is a sign of disrespect. Get over it.
  • Careful “messaging” to downplay problems makes you appear to be lying, deluded, ignorant, or uncaring. Sharing problems is an act of inclusion that makes employees feel invested in the larger enterprise.
  • The first conclusions we draw from our successes and failures are typically wrong. Measuring the outcome without evaluating the process is deceiving.
  • Do not fall for the illusion that by preventing errors, you won’t have errors to fix. The truth is, the cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them.
  • Change and uncertainty are part of life. Our job is not to resist them but to build the capability to recover when unexpected events occur. If you don’t always try to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead.
  • Similarly, it is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.
  • Failure isn’t a necessary evil. In fact, it isn’t evil at all. It is a necessary consequence of doing something new.
  • 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 people ultimately responsible for implementing a plan must be empowered to make decisions when things go wrong, even before getting approval. Finding and fixing problems is everybody’s job. Anyone should be able to stop the production line.
  • The desire for everything to run smoothly is a false goal— it leads to measuring people by the mistakes they make rather than by their ability to solve problems.
  •  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.
  • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody.
  • Be wary of making too many rules. Rules can simplify life for managers, but they can be demeaning to the 95 percent who behave well. Don’t create rules to rein in the other 5 percent— address abuses of common sense individually. This is more work but ultimately healthier.
  • Imposing limits can encourage a creative response. Excellent work can emerge from uncomfortable or seemingly untenable circumstances.
  • Engaging with exceptionally hard problems forces us to think differently.
  • An organization, as a whole, is more conservative and resistant to change than the individuals who comprise it. Do not assume that general agreement will lead to change— it takes substantial energy to move a group, even when all are on board.
  • The healthiest organizations are made up of departments whose agendas differ but whose goals are interdependent. If one agenda wins, we all lose.
  • 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. Protect the future, not the past.
  • New crises are not always lamentable— they test and demonstrate a company’s values. The process of problem-solving often bonds people together and keeps the culture in the present.
  • Excellence, quality, and good should be earned words, attributed by others to us, not proclaimed by us about ourselves.
  • Do not accidentally make stability a goal. Balance is more important than stability.
  • Don’t confuse the process with the goal. Working on our processes to make them better, easier, and more efficient is an indispensable activity and something we should continually work on— but it is not the goal. Making the product great is the goal.
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Why some good ideas spread slowly

Why some good ideas spread slowly

The main challenge for any innovator is idea adoption. So, it’s important to understand both how ideas spread and what motivates people to adopt those ideas. So, how does an innovation spread?

For the first clue, last week I published a post where I referenced Alex Pentland’s work on how ideas spread. He rightfully says that the key ingredients necessary to accelerate innovation in any environment are engagement and diversity.

If you are seriously considering building a culture of innovation, I encourage you to read about Alex Pentland’s research on how ideas spread in organizational and urban environments; it’s huge. Tim Kastelle has a great perspective on what it means for organizational design going forward.

Great! But, if you intentionally design your organization to always be innovating does that mean that all ideas will spread fast no matter where they start? Actually, as Scott Berkun insightfully says “the default state of an idea is non-adoption. Even in cultures where innovation is expected.

That means everything happens slowly…

To understand why, I direct your attention to a fascinating article Atul Gawande wrote last year in the New Yorker about why some good ideas spread slowly:

Practice frame shifting to spot untapped innovation opportunities

drawing on the right side of the brainPerception separates the innovator from the imitator. To see anew, learn to set aside preconceptions by exploring new perspectives.

How might we shift our perspective and explore what we might be missing? This is a common question I ask myself all the time because I want to overcome our human tendency to bring our preconceived notions with us whenever we are attacking a problem; therefore limiting our view of potential alternatives.

How do we overcome that?

Innovation is more a matter of attitude and perspective than process. I’ve written previously that there are four ways we can discover new insights. Insights are unexpected shifts in the way we understand how things work, and one way to get insights is by shifting our frame.

Ed Catmull makes a poignant point in his book, Creativity Inc., that Pixar has avoided stagnation because they’ve created mechanisms that force them to constantly fight their own mental models, and put Pixar’s collective heads in a different frame of mind.

The most innovative leaders are reframers, and unleash innovation in their organizations by asking new questions, and/or immerse themselves in the environment they wish to understand. I’ve written extensively about asking better questions to get better answers, here I’ll extend on that to include immersion.

But first…

Creativity Inc.: what it takes to build and sustain a culture of excellence

I just finished reading the book Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull, this is my review…

Unlike books written by consultants about how wonderful the companies they study are, and how they have reverse engineered their formula for success into repeatable soundbites, Creativity Inc. was written by someone who was in the trenches; from the beginning. Written by Ed Catmull, co-founder and President of Pixar, Creativity Inc. is a first hand tell-all about what enables Pixar to do its thing: successfully turn original ideas into blockbusters, one after another.

Mr. Catmull’s motivation for writing this book stemmed from a simple question: why do successful companies fail?

What are the key ingredients necessary to accelerate innovation in any environment?

In any environment, what are the key ingredients necessary to accelerate innovation?

MIT’s Andy Pentland says the best decision-making environment for good ideas to spread is one with high levels of both “engagement” and “exploration.

Via the NY Times:

The best decision-making environment, Mr. Pentland says, is one with high levels of both “engagement” and “exploration.” Engagement is a measure of how often people in a group communicate with each other, sharing social knowledge. Exploration is a measure of seeking out new ideas and new people.

New doesn’t equal innovation

misunderstanding innovation

Misunderstanding innovation

Just because something is new doesn’t mean it should be touted as an innovation.

What’s an innovation and what isn’t?

Normally, people believe that just because they’ve never seen or heard about something that it’s new, and therefore innovative. In their heads, because it’s new, it also means that it will succeed. Of course, it doesn’t work out that way. It is this type of misunderstanding, and others such as innovation only being about technology, that creates all types of headaches for those of us who help others innovate…

Innovation is a buzzword, but to some of us who use the word know that it holds value. We can tell you what is and isn’t an innovation. More than anything, we can tell you what isn’t: a new color, a change in your fonts, a new flavor, more horsepower, more processor speed, bigger screen, more pixels, etc.

Last year there was article on the WSJ where the parent company of Pop-Tarts laid claim that they had innovated because they had created a new flavor of Pop-Tarts. And now, Domino’s Pizza claims that one of its new products is innovative: breaded chicken crust.

These are examples of something new being mistaken for an innovation…

So, how do we distinguish new from innovation?

Failure isn’t the goal, it is a means for innovation

innovation at google x

Last week I wrote about how you can ask yourself one question to innovate how you innovate: What can we learn from ___company___ about __challenge__?

I then posted some ideas from Amazon and Google that help them drive innovation, which you can use for inspiration. Well, here’s another idea you can use to get you thinking, and it may sound like a cliche but it is really the principle that sets any innovative company apart from non-innovative ones: reward failure.