True Inspiration from Pixar. Part 3: Broadening the View

That's the third part of Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration book overview (Other parts: 1, 2).

Throughout the book the author shares his management ideas and principles. There is one though that I find very interesting from practical point if view. He says that people who live or work together tend to become closer and share similar mental models and behavior patterns (event if those models are wrong). That fact can be used to build right team culture and create atmosphere of creativity and innovation.

Practical tools to improve collaboration within the team or company:
✏️ Daily Meetings. Daily information exchange and team work analysis improves overall team productivity.
✏️ Research Trips. All our mental models are wrong, we need regularly clean our believes and get rid of cliches. Pixar sends their employees to the locations that are relevant to the topics of the movies they are working on (e.g. real student campus for Monster University movie to get better understanding of students life and environment).
✏️ Power of Restrictions. Limited resources help to focus on important things, improve decision making and optimize internal processes.
✏️ Technology and Art Integration. New tech tools should be actively used to automate the routine, freeing up time for more important and creative tasks.
✏️ Short Experiments. Perform short experiments to prove new ideas.
✏️ Train the Vision. Pixar offers drawing courses to all employees, because drawing improves observation skills, stimulates the right side of the brain activity that is responsible for human creativity.
✏️ Dissection. It's very similar to Agile retrospective. After a film release, teams collect their lessons learnt, aggregate good experience and discuss the mistakes. The author suggest the following practice: ask everyone to list 5 things they'd do again and 5 they wouldn’t.
✏️ Continuous Education. Pixar encourages constant learning across fields. Pixar University has classes for drawing, dancing, acting skills and others. Employees from different departments attend classes together, establishing connections outside of work roles. One more important idea behind the practice: if you do something that you don't usually do at work you keep your brain healthy.

The main message from the author to the leaders: people are the most valuable part of any company🫶. Invest time and effort in your teams, help them reveal their potential, trust your colleagues, and avoid trying to control everything, delegate. Encourage openness and trust, create a safe environment within your organization. It’s hard, ongoing work, but it's the only way to build and maintain a creative culture.

I grew up on Pixar movies, and I still go to the cinema for every new release. It was really interesting to read how it's organized inside. Surprisingly, film making is very similar to software development: like any project it has budget and resource restrictions, it starts from MVP, then there is set of iterations and experiments to build the product, teams have daily syncups, some standard project processes, multiple "release candidate", deadlines and, of course, restrospectives. So suggested practices and ideas are also applicable for our daily routine to improve creativity and collaboration.

#booknook #softskills #leadership