That's the second part of Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration book overview (First part is there). It is about practices that can help to protect new ideas from bureaucracy, fear of feedback, and thinking "experienced people know best."
To support creativity and innovation, Pixar's leaders built a culture based on the following principles:
✏️ Candor. Ask people about candor not honesty, build processes that demonstrate value of the candor on all levels. Pixar uses Braintrust practice to train that:
- Regular offline meetings every 2-3 months.
- Teams present film fragments to identify issues.
- There is no gradation by official titles, everyone's opinion is important, there is no stupid or destructive feedback.
- Feedback should be focused on the problem not the person.
- Criticism is part of improving the work, not as competition.
- Create an atmosphere of trust where all member are interested in great results.
✏️ Value of Failures. Don’t fear the failure. Failure is a chance to learn. Start working, get feedback, learn, and try again. The author says that Pixar culture is unique as it doesn't just allow the people to make mistakes, but it expects them to make those mistakes.
✏️ Protect Ugly Babies. New ideas are usually not beautiful, so author called them the
ugly babies. It takes time and patience for them to grow and shine. All Pixar films started as simple, sometimes awkward ideas, going through many iterations. It's important to protect new ideas from conservatism, habits to do something by only known ways, because it leads to predictable but mediocre results, killing true inspiration. ✏️ Change and Randomness. People don't like changes because it feels unsafe or overwhelming. Asking "What if?" question helps teams imagine possibilities and break through the fear barriers. One more important note there is about rules. Rules appear by some reason, but reasons are changed over time and can be not actual anymore. Outdated rules improves bureaucracy and kill creative atmosphere.
✏️ The Hidden. True leaders accept that employees often have a deeper understanding of problems. Managers don’t need to know everything, but they must encourage open communication to get a bigger picture of what’s happening in teams. Healthy cultures encourage employees share theirs opinions, report problems, make suggestions. Otherwise leaders can be in dangerous information isolation.
To be continued....
#booknook #softskills #leadership