Greg McKeown:
Welcome everyone. I’m your host, Greg McKeown, and I am here with you on this journey to learn. In today’s episode, I have the absolute honor of having a conversation with Ed Catmull. He’s the co-founder of Pixar. All of the hits that you think of when you think of Pixar’s Studio and how it also went on to revolutionize Disney’s Studio is the work of Ed Catmull and his immediate team.
He’s marking the 10th anniversary of a book he wrote called Creativity Inc., which gives you a firsthand account of how people really work together and communicate together in order to produce brilliant creative outcomes. He also worked with Steve Jobs longer than any other person, more than 25 years in all, and saw the transformation of his leadership from a visionary iconoclast into someone capable of transforming not just Pixar, not just Disney, but also Apple.
This is part one of a conversation that I’ve been looking forward to and enjoyed immensely. Let’s get to it.
Thank you to everyone who has subscribed to this podcast, and if you are not one of those people, subscribe right now, pause, subscribe, and then make it easy on yourself to get new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.
Ed Catmull, welcome to the podcast.
Ed Catmull:
Thank you very much.
Greg McKeown:
I want to start at the end, literally the end of this marvelous book, Creativity Inc. Of course, it’s 10-year anniversary, a classic for all of those years, and at the end of the book, you write an afterward, it’s called the Steve We Knew. You’re referring, of course, to Steve Jobs, who you worked with for 25, 26 years, probably longer than anybody else in a professional setting, a close setting for that long. You have a unique perspective to offer. I wonder if you could just share a few thoughts as to why you wrote that essay and your thoughts about it in general.
Ed Catmull:
Well, the reason I wrote it is there were perceptions that Steve, the premise early years, and the perceptions are the kinds of things you might write about or make movies about and so forth, but they actually capture the arc of his life, and there’s a reason why they don’t capture it.
Frankly, Steve went through some significant changes and growth in his life, and when he did that, the people who were with him stayed with him for the rest of his life, and so when things started to be written about Steve or people talked about him, those of us who knew him were not about to talk about him or psychoanalyze him while he was still alive. He was our friend. That part of his story was missing, and it really bothered me that people had these misconceptions about Steve and how he thought, and how he worked because it was very remarkable and didn’t match up with the things that were talked about from his early part of his life.
Greg McKeown:
There’s this appalling media coverage of Steve that paints him through the lens of his earliest version, the least mature, the least visionary, really, certainly, certainly not the Steve that people did the very best work of their lives for, but they never outgrew the story. He outgrew it, but they didn’t outgrow it, and those that know him best, I’ve worked with quite a few of them, and it’s almost unrecognizable the version that was emphasized and the version they experienced that seemed as I was reading this essay to be your experience, your thoughts.
Ed Catmull:
Yes. Well, the first thing was that I met Steve and knew him when he did have some of those characteristics that people read about, and I did experience some of them, and I wondered at the time would he actually grow out of those? Would he get better empathy? Would he be able to listen better? To be honest, I didn’t know at the beginning.
Greg McKeown:
Right.
Ed Catmull:
It was a background question and when he formed two companies basically after he left Apple, one of them he formed immediately, which was Next, and the other was a year later when he acquired Pixar from Lucas Films, so with Next, he was basically in the same kind of business that he’d been in before and trying to do something that was a lot better and over the years at next you could say when it came to the software, he made some brilliant decisions, brought in some brilliant people, and it ultimately led to the thing that Apple wanted. It was the reason that Apple bought Next was because of that software. When it came to the hardware decisions, they were questionable. Some were good, some not so good, but he learned in the process and with his business decisions; some of them, well, a few were good, and there were some fairly large mistakes, but the thing about Steve, which I was watching was that as he was going through this, he was really learning. He was taking big lessons from the things that weren’t working, and as he went through this, you can begin to see a change because he was incorporating the experiences, including the things that didn’t work into the way he thought, and I think just as important was understanding why he may have made the mistake and how he could think about relationships in the future. That was the Next side.
Now on the Pixar side, he acquired us, and it was interesting because we didn’t really have much of a business, perfectly honest. It wasn’t just high risk in a VC kind of view, but it was because he believed that graphics was going to become important at some point in the future. Now that distinguishes him from other people. He’s not thinking about how do I turn this into a great business? I mean, yes, he wanted us to succeed and to figure out how to make money because we were the most costly investment he ever made in his life. It was definitely a challenge, but he did it because he was looking far off in the future. That’s pretty unusual, so that was the beginning of our relationship with him.
Greg McKeown:
There are so many things that you wrote, and I think I just want to even capture some of the precise language that you used because it really, I thought, was well done.
You said, “While many of the anecdotes people repeat about his behavior as a young executive are probably accurate, the overall portrait is way off the mark. The reality is Steve changed profoundly in the years that I knew him.”
I want to talk in a moment about how he changed, but if I’m reading the narrative right, the underlying narrative, I think that you feel you may have helped to mentor him in these particular leadership gaps. Maybe that’s beyond what you’re trying to say, but I think that he learned from Pixar and from getting married and his family a very different version of leadership than he had before. I wonder if you could share your reaction and thoughts to that.
Ed Catmull:
I would never call myself a mentor to Steve. I do feel like the style that we had was very different in the way we interacted with him than other people did.
Greg McKeown:
In what way?
Ed Catmull:
Well, the one thing was he did know and appreciate on the technology of computer graphics that the group that we had assembled over the years at Pixar was the best in the world. This was the world, the world-class group. What I could see is Steve was always respectful of the knowledge that others had, and he didn’t assume that he knew more than other people did. I’ve seen this in case after case. He didn’t come in as a know-it-all. He had a strong personality. Yes, he could articulate himself very well and express his view. He never pretended to know what others didn’t, and he knew that this was an unusual group. He also knew that we had a different approach. This is something I started back at New York Tech and continued out at Lucas film, which was we published everything we did. Now, Steve is known to be secretive, but at New York Tech, we published everything, and there was a logic to it, and that the logic was, I believe that if you connect deeply with your community peers on the outside, you get a better view of the world and you get the best people because people want to come to that kind of environment.
Then I went to Lucas Film, and George was fine with it because that was his goal, was to actually change the industry, and then Steve bought Pixar, and we again published everything we ever did. Steve never challenged that. He’s known to be secretive but never questioned that decision because he understood that we were doing something different, and so that was one stylistic thing where I could see, okay, that’s a different way of working.
The other one was that with Steve, I never had an argument with him. I disagreed frequently, but my style of disagreeing was a different style for him, and the only reason we could get away with it was because everybody was so damn smart there. I don’t argue with people, so if we disagreed, then and I could not think as fast as he could, and I’m not nearly as articulate, I can’t even say any sentence without making some mistake; never been able to. So to try to argue with somebody is actually counterproductive for me. But the thing was I was always honest with him, so I would say what I think, but I couldn’t necessarily make the best argument for it, so I would say, let me get back to you, and then I would wait maybe a week to come up with the next sentence, and then I would bring it up, and he would usually shoot it down right away. Let me get back to you.
These discussions might go on for weeks and sometimes a month, and there’d be one of three outcomes, about equally likely. One-third of them was where I would say, oh, I see what you’re saying. You’re right. I see the discussion. The other third of the time, he would say, oh, I see what you’re saying, and that’s the end of the discussion, but the other third, we didn’t reach a conclusion. I just did what I wanted, and he was okay with that because we had discussed it, so it was just a different style,
Greg McKeown:
But what’s so striking to me about it is that you seem to have figured out a way to, plus all the good things he was bringing and neutralize some of the things that made him tricky in the early days for some people to work with him. It seems like your style, and maybe the style of the Pixar team as a whole just helped, I don’t know the right phrase, but kind of filter. It was like a filtering for Steve somehow that it helped him to become better and helped Pixar to become better and created this success cycle. Am I reading that right? How am I getting it wrong?
Ed Catmull:
It is right, but it’s based on something which I did see early on with him was that whenever you saw something, or you realized he was wrong, he would change on a dime that is deep down inside, right? At the very beginning, he always knew there was no percentage in being wrong, so as soon as he got the fact that he was wrong, he wouldn’t hang on anymore. That’s not a normal characteristic.
Greg McKeown:
There’s no percentage of being wrong. It’s a really nice turn to phrase that, but you’re right; it’s not what people normally do. I’ve seen, and I’m sure I’ve participated in arguments myself, in which you fight for the thing that you want to be right rather than to get it right, which seems to have been quite a distinctive thing for Steve that he wanted to get it right more than he wanted to be, right.
Ed Catmull:
And yes, and that principle, it is so incredibly important, and it led to a number of things at Apple and all the way through the rest of his life, which turned out to be fundamental, and people still don’t get about him, is that he will argue a point. He’s extremely articulate about arguing the point, and he does come up with a viewpoint right away, but as soon as he realizes that it’s the wrong way, he doesn’t hang onto it. That has nothing to do with him being right. He’s actually getting to the right place, and that distinction between putting out something and then proving it right as made between that and actually getting to the truth, getting to the right thing is a very important one, and it was fundamental at the way we made our film, and Steve really got that. He appreciated that and the way we work and the way the directors work, and he said at one point, if he ever dies, he’d like to come back as a Pixar director because the basic principle is you put out something new, you don’t know if it’s going to work. You are trying to make it work, but you need to have mechanisms around you to get to the right place. And since you don’t know how do you interact with the people, how do you get other people in there who are going to both commit and let go when it’s wrong? Now, this is, it’s almost like I’m getting abstract here, but…
Greg McKeown:
No, I love this specific idea, so please continue.
Ed Catmull:
So if you come up with, let’s say, an idea for something, whether it’s a product or a film, then what we want in a leader or a director is a strong commitment to make this work, but you’ve got input coming in from other people. It can be viewers, customers, or partners who see things in a different way, and they might disagree with you. You’re demonstrating the commitment, and everybody needs that commitment, and then as soon as you realize you’re wrong, boom, you switch. So what does it mean to be both committed and, at the same time, being able to acknowledge when it doesn’t work? I don’t even call it really being wrong, not matter of being wrong. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Let it go and move on. That’s a hard thing for people to do.
Greg McKeown:
Carry on.
Ed Catmull:
Well, what are the mechanisms that any company puts together in order to get to the point where people can do that well and think that a lot of cases, they don’t put the right processes in place? They understood the concept and his way of doing it, and Apple was very different than it was at Pixar. But the concept, how do you get people around you to challenge and drive you to get the right thing, and then how do you let go when actually you discover they’ve seen something you haven’t seen?
Greg McKeown:
Well, and it’s that particular thing that rapid letting go that seems to be a particular strength for Steve and seems to be this connective tissue between him and then all the directors at Pixar because it’s the same strength you write about it. How does somebody listening to this develop that ability to let go on a dime to immediately let go of the thing that is wrong or the thing that isn’t working, or the thing that’s less correct than something that they have now learned?
Ed Catmull:
Well, I know in the case of Pixar, we had one mechanism for doing it. It’s actually a series of mechanisms to get there, and Steve had a very different style in running Apple, and when he interacted with Pixar, we had a way for him to use his style at Pixar, not in the making of the movies. He had an unexpected and unusual role with the films. But in terms of the way he works, the best example I can think of is that Pixar was a public company for 10 years, and during that 10 years, Steve fired two members of the board of directors, and the reason he fired them was they never disagreed with him. And he said, “If they don’t disagree with me, then they aren’t really bringing any value to the company.”
Now, this is a subtle but important concept is he wants people around who know it isn’t just their argumentative, which isn’t what he means. What he means is they have a viewpoint, they can express it, and then when you are discussing it, maybe even what may appear to be arguing, it’s really not. It’s like different viewpoints colliding, trying to get to the truth of the underlying matter. And when you’ve got a group that knows how to push back and appreciates that with anybody willing to let go of something because their ego isn’t on the line, truth is on the line. And if you put that in place, you end up with a very robust group. And the way that Steve would do it was the kind of people he assembled and the way they would disagree with him because the people around him knew how to disagree, and they did disagree.
At Pixar, we had a different style of doing that. But if you think about what thing, which the issue, of course, is when he went back to Apple, then everything became very secretive again because Apple’s a secretive organization. But if you look at the emergence of the iPhone, a beautiful example. So Apple had gone through this incredible growth and its resurgence because of its laptop, or excuse me, its desktop computers, then its laptops and portable. But Steve said, okay, we’re reaching the limits of how that business can grow. So we’ll need to switch to a different, not just to new technology, but a different business model.
So he went back to his team, and he thought the next set was to go with the iPad. His team didn’t agree, and after these disagreements, he realized they were right, and so they came out with the phone instead.
Okay, now there’s another set of disagreements that went on, and that was should the app store or should the apps be open or closed? Steve wanted them to be closed, and as you know, when the phone came out, it was announced as being closed and basically Apple control. Within a few months, they realized they were wrong, and three or four months in and they started working on the Apple Store.
The real point was you had these disagreements, he prevailed in one, you realize they’re right, and the other, he’s still the CEO, he still has to make a decision, but he had people around who were basically expressing different viewpoints while they’re trying to figure out the truth. Now, for the people who didn’t agree on any of those, were they fired because they disagreed? No.
Greg McKeown:
Right.
Ed Catmull:
That was their value, and he knew that. So he could go through those changes with the group of people who would have lively and intense discussion. I wasn’t in those meetings. I was only on the board of directors at Pixar, and also know that the people at Apple say that he was probably more relaxed and a little different at Pixar than he was at Apple. And I’m not saying he was the same everywhere. His heart was in that market starting at Apple, and I knew this all these years we were with him. That’s where his real heart is. That’s what he really cares about deep down inside. But I watched him at Pixar and how he worked, and his role with us was actually the protector, and it was actually great that Steve Jobs is your protector.
Greg McKeown:
Yeah, I’m sure.
Ed Catmull:
But also, it was protection and challenging,
Greg McKeown:
Challenging internally but then having loyalty externally.
Ed Catmull:
Yes, that’s right. But as our chairman, CEO of Pixar, he’s the one that dealt with the outside world. He’s the one that negotiated with Disney, but inside, he didn’t tell us how to do things. Now I make this comparison with the Brain Trust, to the Brain Trust with a different mechanism for getting the truth.
Greg McKeown:
For those that don’t know what the Brain Trust is. Can you just share a little bit about that unique creation at Pixar?
Ed Catmull:
Yes. So it happened almost by accident. So we first started off and our first few films, besides having some remarkably creative people together working on these films, we got some pushback from Disney. So mainly at the beginning with Tom Schumacher, who later went to New York to be over with the theatric. So Tom was very good at giving a stride, but we recognized there was value in Tom’s pushing back. He had a vested interest in our success. He gave good notes, didn’t tell us what to do, but there was some value to us in having that external thing. And he wasn’t lost in our film.
So we started to do better, and Disney started to go downhill, and he had moved back to New York. As I mentioned, Tom moved to New York, and we realized, and Andrew and Dan had realized we were going to lose this external force because if your only decision-making is internal, you can get lost in your own thinking, you can get caught up in it. And there’s a whole variety of complex human, many emotions that are involved in making these projects. But the result is you can get lost in it.
Greg McKeown:
And just before going further, I want to hear now the further development of it, but just to pause on that moment, I think about all of the people who, when they go to the White House, suddenly and immediately can get disconnected from what everyone else is actually dealing with in the real world because of this sort of theme that you’re describing. And I think that’s just an example writ large of a phenomenon where leaders get out of touch with the people they’re supposed to lead because of the fact that they are now the leader. It’s a cycle that I think is really challenging to not fall into. It’s the default pattern. And it sounds like the brain trust was a part of the antidote to that problem. What am I getting wrong?
Ed Catmull:
No, that’s exactly right. It’s the thing that most people don’t understand is that it’s one thing to look at it from the outside or even work side by side with it, but when you’ve got the mantle, it alters your perception of reality, not what you thought. And so many companies, this happens where people have got a notion of what they should do as a leader or the notion of what it means to be right or give advice to people or tell them what to do, and a lot of damage happens. They get the concept of what the job is wrong. So now we’re making the film. In this case, we did value somebody from the outside telling us when we were screwing up. It didn’t mean they were right either, but if they told us that that was valuable.
Greg McKeown:
Well, it makes you pause; it makes you think you have to get out of your own head and not be stuck in your own head. And I think that’s an error for everybody. But with leaders, it’s easier, perhaps, to do in some ways, and the costs are higher if you make that mistake, carry on.
Ed Catmull:
So with this notion, and I think it’s one of the reasons Pixar had such an incredibly long run is people understood that issue of getting lost in what you’re doing applies all over the place and at a different level. So initially, the thought was, okay, as we have new directors developing, who’s going to provide them that feedback? So the idea was that the original group of directors who worked so well together would do that, and Stan, who is the one who directed Finding Nemo and Wall-E, he said, well, that group will do it. And he called it the Brain Trust.
So the next step, okay, here’s the interesting part – that didn’t work. That is because they were in the building, they also got lost in the film. So serving the role as the outside force to correct things didn’t work. But internally, it was an incredibly powerful problem-solving group.
So we began to develop the rules of engagements. How does this group work together? And we figured four or five things that were critical, that were important, so I can come back to what those were and why it was so important. But when it came to the outside force, what we did was we had Steve Jobs be that force. And I asked Steve, I would like you not to come to the Brain Trust meeting. And he didn’t. He was curious about it. He would like to have.
Greg McKeown:
You set a boundary with Steve Jobs and lived to tell the tale, Ed. It was an impressive decision in and of itself.
Ed Catmull:
Steve was so smart. He could understand the reason because one of the things that’s a rule in this meeting and what made it so powerful was that we kept power out of the room, could not tell the director how to solve the problem and nobody in there could do it. And so this was a problem-solving session. We were raising issues and suggestions to be made, but the director did not have to take anything from that film, and we worked very hard to preserve that.
Now, the truth is there were some people who did have power, and their personal ability to sleep and articulate was so strong that it was power, and it was powerful for those people. The rule was they had to shut the hell up for the first 10 to 15 minutes. The reason was that if a powerful person starts speaking, they’ve never set the tone for the conversation or for the discussion.
Greg McKeown:
They framed the discussion. They framed what can be discussed and what can’t be and what opinions one needs to have, and so on, right from the beginning.
Ed Catmull:
Yes. So the principle is if you enter a discussion after it’s going, that’s a different animal entirely, and they understood that enter because now you can respond as other things are coming up, and the relationship is sort of set in the right way. Now, having said that, Steve was so articulate and powerful that he couldn’t have come in at any time in a meeting, and he knew that, but he’s extremely self-aware. It wouldn’t have worked. It’s not a matter of even if he were to sit and bite his tongue for 20 minutes when he spoke, all head stepped over. But we did have board of directors meetings, and we would show the film to the board of directors. That’s when Steve would see the film. So every time we had one of these screenings now to somebody who is articulate, then he would always call me the morning of, and he would say, “Ed, how’s it going?”
And I would say, “It’s actually going pretty well.”
“Good to hear that.” The end of discussion. Really short.
Or I might say, “We have problems.”
He’d say, “Good to know.” End of discussion.
I never told Steve what to think because we needed him to be spontaneous, be fresh. All he knew was based upon my reaction, other people, we were having a serious problem. So then he would watch the movie, we would come into the board of directors meeting, and he would start by saying, he said, “I am not a filmmaker, so you can’t ignore anything I say.”
And he actually meant that he’s not a filmmaker and they could ignore what he said because he wasn’t experienced with what he did. He would say these really articulate things, and he could say them so acutely and so beautifully that it felt like a gut punch. The outside force.
Now, the interesting phenomenon that I watched is that a lot of the directors said they heard Steve say things and observed things that they had never heard before. Now, what was interesting about it is I made all the meetings. I’ve heard everybody talk. There was never anything that Steve ever commented on ever that had not been said by some of the other filmmakers.
Greg McKeown:
Oh, that’s really interesting.
Ed Catmull:
Because if people are good and they work with each other, and they like each other, they also learn how to dismiss or not hear each other, but you couldn’t dismiss Steve. But in addition, because Steve, by this time, had become really empathetic and very tuned into what people were thinking. He could see if his comments were rattling the director, and so at the end, he’d say, let’s go for a walk, and he’d go for a walk around our building. So that’s not the Steve that people normally think of.
Greg McKeown:
He became a much better reader of people. This is, I think, what part of the theme you’re saying with him and his journey that he could read the room, read the sometimes even very nuanced things in people. That’s not the description of a tyrant as occasionally can be presented in media.
Now, tell me, you referenced three or four things, rules that the Brain Trust developed, internal dynamics, something like that, and you said you could come back to. Can you share more about that? What were those rules for the human dynamic?
Ed Catmull:
First of all, we are recognizing that if you’re doing something new and you’re presenting it to colleagues who are very good at what they do, that for anybody really, you feel a little bit vulnerable. It’s like you’re kind of exposing something because, at this point, with any of these projects, they’re not really working right. And you know that, so it’s not working and you’re presenting it to other people who are very good. That means people, in general, can feel a little vulnerable, and they’re putting themselves out. If you recognize that, then one of the issues is how do you keep the power under the room?
The second one is that the room and the people in the room cannot tell them what to do, can tell the director or the creative team with the director how to solve the problem.
They can say, this is a problem, and there needs to be some way to address it, and you can’t ignore it, but we’re not going to tell you how to solve it. And frankly, with a lot of problems, the thing at the moment you think is a problem is actually because of something else. Like with storytelling, you set things up, or if they’re not set up, the symptom may not be the problem that you just have something else you have to pick.
So the other one is one really has to be candid. You can’t hold things.
Greg McKeown:
Can I come back to that second point that you were making there because I want to clarify something. So when they’re in the meeting when you say you can’t tell someone how to solve it, were they not brainstorming possible solutions at all, or was it really all about problem finding and identifying those problems with them? Help me understand how clear or strict that rule was.
Ed Catmull:
Oh, no, it was, they were definitely offering ideas and suggestions.
Greg McKeown:
So there’s constant brainstorming around what problems they see. They’re participating in both, but they’re not in control of the selection or the execution of those solutions.
Ed Catmull:
That’s right. You’re not mandating anything,
And then you’ll start to riff on something, and you might go down a thing, and in general, actually, there’s also a fair amount of laughing in these problems, and then sometimes the ideas go too crazy. Then you sort of pull it back to center, but you are trying to make it so that the environment is free-flowing. You’ll move from problem to problem; you’ll raise issues, and offer suggestions that will spark things. You get discussion, you’re seeing something and all of a sudden click, things start to come together, and that’s the way it should be.
What you’re really trying to do is check that and allow it to happen. If you mandate something, then essentially, people will come in in a little defensive posture. It’s like you don’t want the defensive posture, and so the whole purpose is to get rid of it. You’re enabling people to listen, and you basically get everybody to listen to throw things out, and you throw out an idea. It may not work. And ideally, we don’t always hit the ideal, frankly, but if you throw something out and it doesn’t really work, if you don’t cling to it, then if it doesn’t work, you don’t feel deflated. If it doesn’t work, it’s okay. If your idea gets accepted, you don’t feel puffed up because, oh, I said something, and they took it. Either one of those is not the right position to be in.
Greg McKeown:
Right. You said a few interesting things there, and I don’t want to move on to sort of the next area. Number three before we’ve just double-clicked on this. The subtitle to Creativity Inc. Is about overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration. And it seems to me that I don’t want to move on to the next area, number three, before we’ve just double-clicked on this, a really central leadership necessity is what you just said, what everybody’s heard but is so rarely achieved where you get everyone to listen to everyone else. That seems to connect the dots between Steve’s journey from where he was before. So visionary and opinionated but not a great listener to the point he became a very powerful listener and produced systems and habits and culture that insisted that people were listening to each other and people had to hear each other. That’s a thread, and I wonder how central you find this to be a part of Pixar’s success? That creating the mechanisms that help people listen to each other one of many things or a central thing?
Ed Catmull:
No, I would say one of many. There are other things that we need to also get right. These particular meetings were only held once per screening, and we might have seven or eight screenings per film, and there are other things that took place around this. So the Brain Trust, while it started off as a group of people, turned into a way of running meetings, which either took place after the screening or on a two-day offsite. With that, I’d say, okay, this is how we work now. I mean, sometimes you had to make hard decisions, but we didn’t make the hard decisions in those meetings, and frankly, we tried to avoid making the hard decision about a film in the window before and after the film. And the reason was we didn’t want to get overloaded with people being afraid of what might happen. That room had to feel like this is a place that they’re safe.
You can listen and throw things out, and it was all okay. Sometimes, frankly, there were disasters on film. We didn’t make them part of the Brain Trust. It was a separate thing. And then there were separate issues about how do we actually get passion lined up and what we did to make that work. What’s the qualifications that we look for? What were the things we look for in a director? How we encourage that, how their creativity. So it was like any company; there isn’t a single bullet. There’s a bunch of things you’ve got to put, but this is a critical one because this is about getting to something which is going to work and allowing yourself to change when it doesn’t. Doing something new and creative, a lot of what you do doesn’t work.
Greg McKeown:
Move us onto number three, the candid. Why being candid with each other matters so much.
Ed Catmull:
Well, there are times when people have felt like that something was not good at all, and they didn’t want to embarrass somebody or things of that sort. So there’s human psychological things that are going on. The rule is you really need to say what you think. You don’t need to say it harshly or badly. I mean, you wouldn’t say this sucks. You don’t do that, but you can say, this doesn’t work and give your reasons what you think it. You got to say what you think. And I’ve been to those veins where people don’t say what they think, and there are a variety of reasons why people may not be forthcoming with it. And sometimes you’re reading the body language. Sometimes it’s like, what’s going on? And actually, that is my job. I mean, it’s fun to give notes on the film, but it wasn’t my job.
My job was to look at the dynamics of the room. And the thing about the dynamics of the room is that it doesn’t mean that I can mind read because I can’t. I can look for clues. If I can see clues, then we may have to, I’ll go check afterward. And I would say that most of the time, as evidenced by the film, the process worked very well, but there were times when it went off the rail, and others might say it went off the rails too, in which case we may reconvene. But in that case, we’d reconvene with a smaller group because, as you know, you have a bigger group. The dynamics within it change.
Greg McKeown:
What was the size of the bigger group and the smaller group?
Ed Catmull:
Well, a smaller group might be, say 10 to 12 people, and the big one might be, say, 25 people.
Greg McKeown:
25 is quite a lot to have in a room where you are trying to just give feedback and have a discussion about what’s working, and what’s not. I can see the need for the smaller group when that’s required.
Ed Catmull:
If things are going moderately well, we’ll use a bigger group because we’re also trying to expose other people and train other people for what it means to anticipate in a group that’s run well, so they have more confidence in it, and they realize that nobody’s being attacked. If you experience this, then you’re better prepared when you’re up to do this. But if you’re in a real tricky problem, then you’ve got to go down to this smaller core group to do it because, at that point, it’s actually a matter of exposing people to a serious problem that needs to be solved.
Greg McKeown:
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