Notes on Creativity, Inc

Notes on Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull

• Hierarchical structures prevent honest employee feedback, especially if directed at superiors.
• The fear of failure causes people to prefer familiar routes instead of risking changes.
  • People dislike change because they feel that new, unfamiliar things will cause them to make more mistakes.
• Leaders need to acknowledge their own shortcomings and listen to the views of their staff.
  • We tend to automatically prefer information that confirms our opinions, which makes us blind to possible alternatives. (Confirmation bias)
  • Confirmation bias makes you far more likely to listen to positive feedback and diminish negative feedback.
    • Managers can avoid this trap by acknowledging that their staff might have better ideas than them.
• Employees work harder if they feel they’re contributing to the company’s drive for excellence.
  • This requires a common goal to all pull toward.
• People are more important than ideas or processes, so assembling the perfect team is critical.
  • Creating an all-star team isn’t just about hiring the most talented people, but forging a team that works easily and freely together.
  • Teams ripe with diversity, rather than homogenous groups of similarly-minded people, tend to be more successful. This is because their differences allow them to complement and inspire each other.
• Managers need to trust the people they hire and empower them to make decisions.
  • Limiting employees’ independence can seriously hamper their creativity. Not to mention their morale. A better approach would be to give them the freedom to make necessary decisions on their own.
  • Employees are experts at what they do, and thus more apt to solve certain problems than their managers. That’s why they’re hired in the first place.
  • Since your staff should be trusted to act independently, it’s important that each new member is smart enough to be trusted with that responsibility. You can trust smart people with genuine expertise to produce the best results and quickly fix problems that arise.
  • Maybe: only hire people that are smarter than you.
• A manager’s job isn’t to avoid risk and failure but to enable the company to get back on its feet.
  • Incorporate recovery techniques into the business plan instead of trying to prevent failure altogether.
    • Pixar does this by placing value on iterative processes, as in, they accept that mistakes are part of the process and try to weed them out with each new iteration of their projects.
    • Central to this philosophy is the idea that the whole team, rather than just a single individual, is responsible for failure, so everyone works together to overcome it.
  • Failure is a critical part of the development process.
    • In order to make failure less painful, give people far more exploration and experimentation time early on in the development process. Early failures are cheap. Late failures are expensive, sometimes catastrophic.
• Companies need to consider their working environment as a tool for fostering creativity.