Pixar's Principles

[nancylebov]

From Mekong Insight:

Talent is rare. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. It must be safe to tell the truth. We must constantly challenge all of our assumptions and search for the flaws that could destroy our culture.

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What’s equally tough, of course, is getting talented people to work effectively with one another. That takes trust and respect, which we as managers can’t mandate; they must be earned over time. What we can do is construct an environment that nurtures trusting and respectful relationships and unleashes everyone’s creativity. If we get that right, the result is a vibrant community where talented people are loyal to one another and their collective work, everyone feels that they are part of something extraordinary, and their passion and accomplishments make the community a magnet for talented people coming out of schools or working at other places. I know what I’m describing is the antithesis of the free-agency practices that prevail in the movie industry, but that’s the point: I believe that community matters.

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During this incubation stage, you can’t judge teams by the material they’re producing because it’s so rough-there are many problems and open questions. But you can assess whether the teams’ social dynamics are healthy and whether the teams are solving problems and making progress.

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This group consists of John and our eight directors (Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird, Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Brenda Chapman, Lee Unkrich, Gary Rydstrom, and Brad Lewis). When a director and producer feel in need of assistance, they convene the group (and anyone else they think would be valuable) and show the current version of the work in progress. This is followed by a lively two-hour give-and-take discussion, which is all about making the movie better. There’s no ego. Nobody pulls any punches to be polite. This works because all the participants have come to trust and respect one another. They know it’s far better to learn about problems from colleagues when there’s still time to fix them than from the audience after it’s too late. The problem-solving powers of this group are immense and inspirational to watch.

After a session, it’s up to the director of the movie and his or her team to decide what to do with the advice; there are no mandatory notes, and the brain trust has no authority. This dynamic is crucial. It liberates the trust members, so they can give their unvarnished expert opinions, and it liberates the director to seek help and fully consider the advice. It took us a while to learn this. When we tried to export the brain trust model to our technical area, we found at first that it didn’t work. Eventually, I realized why: We had given these other review groups some authority. As soon as we said, “This is purely peers giving feedback to each other,” the dynamic changed, and the effectiveness of the review sessions dramatically improved.

This is as pure an example of the SNAFU principle-- Communication is only possible between equals-- as I've seen. As you can tell by the name, the usual evidence of the principle is disaster caused by people who'd rather have hierarchy than communication.

However, it's clear that the challenge is having just enough of the right sort of hierarchy-- managers have enough authority to protect non-hierarchical communication.

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[Daily reviews] People’s overwhelming desire to make sure their work is “good” before they show it to others increases the possibility that their finished version won’t be what the director wants.

Link thanks to gwern at Less Wrong.

Comments

[caper_est]

Fascinating: thanks.

On this:

However, it's clear that the challenge is having just enough of the right sort of hierarchy-- managers have enough authority to protect non-hierarchical communication.

I wonder how clear that really is, and how constant it will remain.

As a snapshot in time, it's as clear as you like. But I'd expect the amount of authority the manager would require to depend heavily on the culture - the more hierarchical the default assumptions, the more authority the manager would need to protect against them. Whereas in more of a peer culture, the participants would be doing a lot of that work for themselves.

If this is true, a successful antihierarchical manager would need progressively less authority as their work matured. If this is false, it should be very enlightening to discover why and how!

[andrewducker]

Thanks - that was fascinating!

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Have you seen this on the performance of gender and safety on oil rigs?

...do you know ratmmjess? He has lots of interesting stuff to say.

[terriwells.livejournal.com]

Wow, nice. The quote at the end elicited an "awwwwww" from me.

[ckd]

That is incredible. Thanks for linking to it!

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

This is a great interview with Ed Catmull.

So great I snagged a bunch of quotes from it when it was published a few years ago. I'm a little surprised to see the site above failing to give credit to the original publisher (apparently Harvard Press, now behind a paywall)...