There are many reasons why Pixar movies are great (*). The characters are well defined. The story lines keep you engaged. The design and the music add gorgeous detail and atmosphere. It’s hard to imagine that early on, each of these movies “sucks“.
If ideas are important, create a mechanism that says they are important.
When they create a new movie at Pixar, the early stages are familiar. They start with a vague idea that is just vaguely interesting. So far, it’s exactly the same as the development of any product in any organisation. But then, Pixar takes a different route than most teams:
“We dare to attempt these stories, but we don’t get them right on the first pass. This is as it should be. Creativity has to start somewhere, and we are true believers in the power of bracing, candid feedback and the iterative process–reworking, reworking, and reworking again, until a flawed story finds its through line or a hollow character finds its soul.”
To get the product right, Pixar uses the power of its creators. More people have more ideas that improve the product. But everybody has limitations. Some are timid, intimidated or they think they may look stupid. Some may become overwhelmed by all those ideas and can’t see the forest through the trees. Pixar has a process to overcome these hurdles. They allow everybody to be candid with a mechanism that says it’s important to be candid.
At Pixar, every movie is assessed by the Braintrust. In this meeting, several good storytellers discuss the ideas of a movie. They do not discuss people, but they discuss every way in which the movie develops the ideas. The Braintrust’s role is advisory. All of this stimulates free discussion of what’s important: the quality of the product. It’s a forum for free discussion about what works and what doesn’t.
You can and should make your own solution group.
The article at FastCompany makes my life easy with its ending:
‘”You can and should make your own solution group,” says Andrew, who has made a point of doing this on a smaller scale, separate from the official Braintrust, on each of his films. “Here are the qualifications: The people you choose must (a) make you think smarter and (b) put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time. I don’t care who it is, the janitor or the intern or one of your most-trusted lieutenants: If they can help you do that, they should be at the table.”‘
Go ahead and do it. Engage the best at your organisation to challenge everybody else on their roadmaps or their product ideas. Make sure the discussion is open and focused on the topic. And make sure that you listen to that open feedback, too. It’s different to how normal product development works, but looking at Pixar, it sure works well!
(*) My son would kill me if he knew how much I hated the first Pixar movies. He lives and breathes Cars, being only briefly distracted by Spiderman from time to time.