Chaos, Change & Creativity at Pixar!
Visual summary for "Creativity Inc " part 8
Hello, regular readers and newcomers!
What you are about to read is a summary of the book "Creativity Inc." by Ed Catmull, illustrated with short animations.
We are now at Chapter 8. If you missed previous chapters, you can catch up by reading:
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In the last chapter, we left Pixar in a relatively stable position, having reaffirmed its focus on excellence over efficiency. However, troubles are now knocking at the door, as the company is about to undergo its biggest change to date…
Chapter 8 - Change and Randomness
After 20 years as its own corporation, Pixar was bought by Disney! Imagine the fear of the employees, everything could be about to change.
Ed Catmull, attempting to calm worries, made a mistake: claiming that nothing would change!
Unless you are a rock, change is happening constantly (around us, in our body, in our personal and work life etc...).
We organize all those moving parts into somewhat stable systems, but at the core, life is instability... Sooner or later change will come wreak the peace!
Catmull compares our fear of change to a game of musical chairs:
✒️"We cling as long as possible to the perceived 'safe' place that we already know, refusing to loosen our grip until we feel sure another safe place awaits."
The Pixar team would need Ed to remind them multiple times that they will have to go through changes, not due to the merger with Disney, but because changes are expected as the company scales and adapts.
❓What about you - are you playing musical chairs?
The Complex & The Complicated
Another significant danger, according to Catmull, is attempting to avoid randomness and oversimplify the "Complex."
The “Complicated” can be mapped. It has a lot of interactions between elements, but you could ultimately draw a pretty accurate “Cause and Effects” diagram.
The “Complex” however, is more like a living organism, the interactions between elements are more obscure, and randomness plays a big role.
✒ “Not everything is simple, and to try to force it to be is to misrepresent reality”
By acknowledging the role of randomness, we can continuously adapt to unfolding realities and benefit from the unexpected insights generated by colliding ideas, people interactions, and random events.
BIG & small Problems
So we have a complex world with frequent changes and random events throwing us off course. How do we manage all this?
Some people address problems differently based on their magnitude. While this might seem reasonable, there's a problem with this approach:
Small unresolved problems can become BIG!
Tiny problems are not fundamentally different from large ones—much like a branch is not essentially different from a tree
Ed Catmull proposes that we use the same mindset confronting the small & big issues.
Giving individuals and teams the freedom to find ways to solve their small (or big) issues makes the all group more resilient to random events.
An example from the book illustrates this perfectly:
When Pixar was working on "Toy Story 2", somebody inadvertently pressed a command that basically deleted almost ALL their work... A BIG BIG problem.
And their backup tool had failed as well...
Fortunately, one woman saved the day:
She had needed to solve a small problem: Being able to work from home, and started to do regular backup on her personal machine.
We can never predict when randomness will throw us a curveball, but we can become adept at taking ownership of the problems around us!
That’s it for today!
I’m Lud Toussaint, I’m passionate about the power of visual thinking and how creativity make work more fun and innovative!
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Also looking forward for your feedback in the comments 🙂,
Did this spark some ideas?
What’s a biggest challenge in your opinion: Change, Randomness or Complexity ?
Chapter 9 is available below 👇
For me the biggest challenge has been randomness. Change at a constant pace makes it predictable and well prepared. In randomness I find madness. May be there’s some method to handle that madness too.