What Film Companies Can Learn From Pixar About Fostering Organizational Creativity

The Creativity Dash

The idea that creativity is natural and innate is widely accepted, but it is also believed that in certain environments and circumstances, creativity is nurtured differently from others. As a result, some people are deemed more creative than others, and some companies said to be better at fostering creativity than others. LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman in his book 'The Startup of You' believes that all humans are born creative and entrepreneurial and dismisses the common belief that some people are more naturally capable of developing creative ideas than others. In creative industries, creativity is even more crucial and is absolutely central to film companies in particular. One company that has managed to differentiate itself through its creativity over a long period of time is Pixar, an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California, that is a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, owned by The Walt Disney Company.

Pixar, the first studio to produce a computer-animated feature film when they released ‘Toy Story’ in 1995, was started by perceived industry outsiders rather than filmmakers as it would be expected. A group of brilliant computer scientists and engineers had managed to create breakthrough technologies in computer graphics, acquired patronage of investors over decades of development, and hired talented animators even before becoming a filmmaking studio. When it finally became one, their big goal became making an animated feature film, which was an impossible dream when their journey began. A sustained period of success came later, and today the cultural relevance and consistent reflexivity of Pixar’s film products in conjunction with the stylistic continuity of the studio’s computer animation has contributed to building an iconic, profitable brand. Although Pixar founders initially thought that their job was only going to be the creation of animated films, they came to realise that their focus needed to be helping creative people at Pixar do their best work. So how did they do this? How did they shape the future of Pixar as we know it today? This article focuses on their story and draws lessons on how a company’s structure and organization, as well as the individuals that work there, can play a key role in fostering creativity.

The Success of Pixar

The one main reason that Pixar is considered successful is its film output. Pixar has released hugely successful films over the years, to a point where audiences are driven to cinemas to watch films just on the basis of its attachment to Pixar. Their films have connected with audiences and gained a cult following, seeping through popular culture and even transforming the world of computer animation. It is impressive enough that the rise of Pixar is largely due to the intersection of computer science and film, of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, but it is even more impressive that their unofficial cinematic universe has been consistently popular and their organization culture curiously effective.

Around the world of Pixar in California, there are other behemoths like Google, Twitter, Facebook, Wells Fargo, Visa, Chevron and other world-famous organizations. The might of Hollywood is also an influence in the operations of Pixar, but they have built a reputation for capitalizing on Hollywood’s storytelling expertise without inheriting any of its reliance on formula. Edwin Catmull, a Pixar co-founder, has spoken on their endeavours to harness the brainpower of their pool of computer science PhDs without producing dry, unmagical products. Pixar has also been known for its ability to balance the pressures of box-office performance and widespread merchandising with the primary mission of simply telling a good story. Catmull has often spoken against moving too far in either of these directions, preferring to do their business in the middle ‘where the extremes collide.’ Pixar’s balance is largely based on a meticulous structuring of their organization and the people who work in it as well as the culture they are building in their operations.

Creative Talent in Creative Organizations

From a broad perspective, talent refers to a unique natural skill that enables one to perform a certain task. It could be the sum of a person’s abilities, such as their intrinsic gifts, skills, knowledge, experience, judgment, attitude, character and drive, as well as their ability to learn and grow. Angus Finney talks about this in his book, 'The International Film Business' and says that creative talent in business frames of reference results in the creation of intellectual property rights. It makes sense therefore, that ambitious organizations focus on attracting and retaining the ‘best’ talent and the most promising individuals.

It’s not always about attracting though, as most good companies are started by immensely talented and creative people who then focus on having a talent management strategy. Author Andrés Hatum, however, suggests that having a talent management strategy in place does not necessarily lead to increased organizational creativity. Hatum offers three dimensions of talent that support creativity in organizations: collaborative talent, heterogenous/diverse talent and entrepreneurial talent. Collaborative talent refers to individuals with high ability to work with others. Heterogenous talent refers to people with and from diverse backgrounds who enhance cognitive diversity. Entrepreneurial talent entails the entrepreneurial people and attitudes that can turn creative ideas into viable products. Employment of all three leads to a constant flow of organizational creativity through individuals.

The success of Pixar, for example, has been easily attributed to the role played by its management team, beginning from Steve Jobs who bought what became Pixar from Lucasfilm when it was just a computer division. Ed Catmull and John Lasseter (both co-founders) are also indispensable individuals in Pixar’s history. Jobs’ entrepreneurial talent was crucial to the early growth of Pixar, with Catmull especially finding him a useful figure to learn from. The collaboration of diversely experienced people was hugely influential on how the story of Pixar turned out. It can be argued, though, that Pixar has been heavily dependent on individual talent as it has not yet been tested by a prolonged absence of any of its founders. Robert Bruce Shaw (Extreme Teams) supports this notion and believes that this reliance on individual talent is a rare success story because most large and complex firms require more than their leaders can provide, no matter how talented or charismatic the leaders may be. Shaw further correctly states that the key factor in a leader’s success, which is the area of his or her greatest leverage, is the ability to staff and support teams that a firm needs to grow. The challenge of building a creative organization is to build this team made up of Hatum’s three types of talent, and to be able to leverage all three.

The Building of Creative Teams

From its foundations, Pixar has benefited from individuals who were able to build good teams. The coming together of creative minds which were passionate about computer graphics was elaborate. In the 1970s, millionaire Alexandre Schure had assembled a team on Long Island, USA that included Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, relentless dreamers who could see a future filled with three-dimension cartoons. Filmmaker George Lucas was also assembling a team for film visual effects and he soon lured Smith and Catmull to join him. While they were working on film and technology, John Lasseter, who was an animator at Disney shared their vision and later joined them. When Steve Jobs bought the division, he retained 40 employees, rightly believing they were crucial for the success of the newly formed company. They built a team with very high creative standards beginning with their work in the making of ‘Toy Story’, and a group of highly committed, sometimes ‘overmotivated’ individuals who wanted to do whatever it took to produce great films. However, while individual talent was significant to their growth, the Pixar leadership was convinced that great films required more than talented and committed people.

Given that animation films take longer to produce, are more complex and arguably require much more innovation, long term success has largely depended on how the team members will bring the best out of each other and create something beyond their individual capabilities. But as Finney notes, creative people are incredibly difficult to manage, and the common assumption that people will naturally bond when they are brought together into a team is unlikely with the stubborn and strong-willed personalities of creative people. This brings into perspective Pixar’s approach to finding those who can work together in the intense and sometimes ambiguous environment of filmmaking. For Pixar, a great team is more desirable than a great idea, because a great idea can be diminished by a mediocre team while a bad idea can be fixed, thrown away or replaced by a great team. The ‘team-first’ approach to creative success contrasts with Hollywood’s dominant ‘idea first’ approach and is a risky strategy that demands intense building of an enabling environment that brings every member into the creative mood. Shaw appreciates the primary regard for team coherence but points out that this approach most likely undermines a team’s creativity than enhances it.

Finney suggests that the key to successful creative management of creative people is the ability to develop trust, and long-lasting bonds. This focus on trust and teamwork is certainly not unique to Pixar. Multiple award-winning Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar and his organization, El Deseo, have shown extreme commitment to team building as a way of generating a constant flow of creativity. Almodovar’s high regard to creative talent has allowed him to benefit from other people’s contributions in an organization based on flexibility and trust. Like Pixar, Almodovar’s strategy was first to identify trusted talented people who could work with him and with one another before finding roles for them in the organization. Pedro’s brother, Agustin, runs El Deseo with him.

Where classic Hollywood approaches have been to employ people and resources on a temporary basis, Almodovar took the path of building a close-knit family with whom he could interact repeatedly, build trust and familiarity, hiring the heart and training the brain. Instead of finding people for particular jobs, they focused on finding jobs for particular people.

While in both organizations there’s a desire to have both the leadership and followers to be a source of creative ideas, Pixar’s approach has resulted more in a delegation of creative responsibilities, while El Deseo benefits by giving the people whose roles are more creativity-intense the freedom to experiment knowing there’s a good support team.

The Role of an Enabling Organization Structure and Culture

A number of environmental factors promote creativity in an organization according to Harvard's Teresa Amabile. Amabile says that factors such as operational autonomy, challenging goals, recognition for good performance and a sense of urgency increase creativity among employees. Managers who are enthusiastic about new ideas are good role models and those with good communication skills are associated with increased creativity. Organizational structure plays a key role in nurturing individual talent and bringing the best out of team members. Various business commentators have written that there may be only a modest correspondence between the creative potential of employees and teams and the actual productivity of an organization. In order to increase the degree of innovation in an organization, it is important that creativity and novel perspectives are constantly being considered. Many corporations have gone to a team culture with an associated flat managerial structure to achieve this.

Pixar’s Organizational Structure and Approach to Work

As mentioned above, Pixar’s early years consisted of a tightly knit group of 40 people who came over together from Lucasfilm. They were non-conventional employees with an anti-corporate work culture which created a highly productive and laid-back fun workplace. They focused on hiring people who were better than those who were already on the team, yet no one was higher than the other. Today, Pixar’s flow of information is made possible through a flat organizational structure, as opposed to a hierarchical structure, which eliminates all layers of management, so there is no separation between executives and staff members. The flat model is highly effective in motivating team members to put in their best effort, but it demands extreme energy levels and commitment from everyone. The responsibility of finding and fixing problems is assigned to everyone at every level without alienation of some team members.

The Pixar organizational structure is made up of three parallel groups – technology development, creative development and production. Open communication between these groups and the entire Pixar system has worked well, especially with the absence of hierarchy.

Investment in an experimental mindset combined with a constant sense of urgency is also something that Pixar has focused on. It is the creative struggle that produces good stories, rather than those that come too easily. Pixar believes that when experimentation is seen as necessary and productive, and not as a frustrating waste of time, people will enjoy their work even if it is confounding them. What stands out from an experimental mindset is the ability to create a wide diversity of outcomes. It is probably a by-product of the collaboration between computer scientists and artists but embracing experimentation has inculcated a keen focus on learning and kept Pixar teams coming up with new ideas.

The Pixar University is also at the centre of Pixar’s workplace agenda. This professional development program puts as much emphasis on employee education as it does on company training, and it has a curriculum that pushes Pixar’s employees to try new things. The university doesn’t only offer information. Employees have been able to gain morale, spirit and communication. Pixar University is an example of how an organization can innovate ways to provide a constant flow of new ideas and experiences and has enriched the individual minds of the people at Pixar. The kind of unconventional thinking behind Pixar University is helping the studio in its quest to achieve ambitious goals it has laid out and makes Pixar a more attractive place to work. This is not how Hollywood or many film studios do it.

Pixar’s Braintrust and Feedback Culture

Ed Catmull believes that a hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions and criticisms. Pixar’s organization structure incorporates a brain trust, a tiny group made up mostly of senior leaders connected to the company that give intensely candid critiques of films in progress. While this group is part of a carefully adhered to practice of giving feedback, they have no formal authority to mandate changes in a film despite their seniority. Catmull reveals that the company’s decision making is better when they draw on the collective knowledge and unvarnished opinions of the group, and that candour is the key to effective collaboration. The commitment to establish working groups, departments and a company that embraces candour led Pixar to establish the brain trust. What Amabile proposes about operational autonomy is further enhanced by Catmull and his team by adding mechanisms that explicitly value the practice and communication of that autonomy.

The Braintrust meets every few months or so to assess each movie that Pixar is making. Catmull says about it: “Its premise is simple: Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems, and encourage them to be candid. The brain trust is not foolproof, but when we get it right, the results are phenomenal.”

The brain trust developed organically out of the rare working relationship among the five men who led and edited the production of ‘Toy Story’ – John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Joe Ranft. According to Catmull, this quintet has given Pixar a solid model of a highly functional working group from Pixar’s earliest days. Its ranks have grown over the years into a fluid group that includes a variety of people whose only requirement is that they display a knack for storytelling and candour. The need for candour in the creative process is not overemphasized by Catmull. First drafts of films always need a second glance and some intense reworking until, in Catmull’s terms, ‘a flawed story finds its through-line or a hollow character finds its soul’.

Pixar tries to create an environment where people want to hear each other’s notes, even when those notes are challenging, and where everyone has vested interest in one another’s success. Finney lists an inability to listen to and ignoring people’s input as a key obstruction to creativity. People who take on complicated creative projects are prone to get lost at some point in the process, and filmmakers’ passion may blind them to their movie’s inevitable problems. Offering and listening to counsel regularly through the brain trust is crucial, and it helps more because the brain trust only offers suggestions with no power to mandate solutions.

Catmull proposes this approach for organisations to foster creativity. Every creative person, he says, can draft into service those around them who exhibit the right mixture of intelligence, insight and grace. Teamwork should be particularly important when the tasks involve collaborative knowledge work. The filmmaker or manager’s best inoculation against an environment that has more candour in the hallway than in the rooms where fundamental ideas or policies are being discussed is to seek out people who are willing to level with them, and when they are found, to be held close.

It is evident from Pixar that creativity transcends job titles and company hierarchies, and that building a culture which values its people is more important than focusing on milking creativity out of employees. Catmull’s management reveals that creativity isn’t a solitary endeavour either, and the way an organization is set up contributes significantly to the production and exploitation of creative ideas. The best creative ideas at Pixar have been the work of entire teams, even though the originators have had significant autonomy. Everyone is empowered to contribute and the management makes an effort to find people who can work with the ones already available. Pixar’s critical feedback enhances rather than stifle creativity. The cultivation of candour, trust and transparency has evidently fuelled critical and creative thinking and produced high-quality films such as ‘Inside Out’. Ideas become great when they are challenged and tested. Catmull advises creative people not to be too invested in their ideas, to allow for feedback and criticism. Development of teams that trust each other also allows everyone to be vulnerable enough to share their ideas and thoughts.

In 2018, Ed Catmull announced that he due to retire after a ground-breaking five-decade career. The presence of many creative people around Pixar especially through the Braintrust has placed the studio on good ground to cope with his retirement. Catmull has often spoken of his desire to create a sustainable creative culture that will survive after Pixar’s founders are long gone. The longevity of key people at the helm of Pixar has been significant to its creative flow. This is even clearer when compared to Disney, which seemed to run out of ideas as soon as Walt Disney wasn’t there anymore. Once the leadership has developed a team and created the right environment for creativity to flourish, it is not guaranteed that the same team sticking to the same blueprint will achieve good results over time. The internal growth of an organization depends on its adaptability to the external environment, which means that adaptable leaders are key in order to correctly anticipate, interpret and respond to changing conditions. In the case of Pixar’s management, Catmull and Lasseter have been mainstays since its beginning. The coherence that they provide to the team means that they are able to tweak the composition of the team now and then to bring fresh people and ideas, without compromising the organization’s continuity.