Steve Jobs didn't

29 January 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

Continuing this week's break from the in-depth study of Creativity Inc is a little article about one of my heroes Steve Jobs. It's a short post by Horace Dediu from asymco.com about what Steve Jobs was and wasn't.

I hope you enjoy it: Steve Jobs didn't

Great quotes from Creativity Inc

27 January 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

Let's take a break from our in-depth study of this incredible book and just enjoy a light stroll through some of the great quotes of this book:

20 quotes on leadership

Two of those great quotes are below:

"Find and fixing problems is everybody's job. Anyone should be able to stop the production line."

"Don't wait for things to be perfect before you share them with others. Show early and show often."

Hindsight is not 20-20

22 January 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

Successful people are successful because they're good at what they do, right? We tell ourselves, "If I tried to be more like Johnny Depp, I'd be successful," or "If I could do what Bill Gates did, then I could be rich like him."

The problem with that is what Ed Catmull calls the Hidden. There are so many random events that end up causing what we are living today, that it is impossible for us to know exactly everything that contributed to our success and our failure.

Ed Catmull talks about how he missed dying as a young boy by two inches. Those two inches could have stopped Pixar from being created and all the couples who met at Pixar from meeting each other and all their kids from being born.

He talks about how there were several other things that could have stopped Pixar from happening, and that there are too many to know and understand. And since our brains can't cope with that kind of impossible randomness, we simplify.

We attribute our success to our own actions and we attribute our failures to things that we know for sure. "Success convinces us that we are doing things the right way." And then we tell ourselves that we can look back at our mistakes and since 'hindsight is 20-20' we'll be able to figure out what went wrong and learn from it.

Hindsight is not 20-20. Not even close. Our view of the past, in fact, is hardly clearer than our view of the future …. Not only that, because we think we see what happened clearly … we often aren't open to knowing more.

So what's the cure?

In a healthy, creative culture, the people in the trenches feel free to speak up and bring to light differing views that can help give us clarity.

That kind of openness is only possible in a culture that acknowledges its own blind spots.

and

The Hidden—and our acknowledgement of it—is an absolutely essential part of rooting out what impedes our progress: clinging to what works, fearing change, and deluding ourselves about our roles in our own success.

Change and Randomness

20 January 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

image found at brainpickings.org. Photograph by Deborah Coleman, Pixar

"The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs." – Ed Catmull

I don't have much to add to the brilliant words of Ed Catmull on change and randomness, so I'm going to throw a lot of good quotes at you.

Change is our friend because only from struggle does clarity emerge

The stakes are so high, and the crises that pop up can be so unpredictable that we try to exert control. The potential cost of failure appears far more damaging than that of micro-managing. But if we shun such necessary investment—tightening up controls because we fear the risk of being exposed for having made a bad bet—we become the kind of rigid thinkers and managers who impede creativity.

So if change is unavoidable, why do we try so hard to keep the status quo. As an individual who is striving for long-term creativity, don't fight the changes. Flow with them. You don't want to end up like the music industry.

If all our careful planning cannot prevent problems, then our best method of response is to enable employees at every level to own the problems and have the confidence to fix them.

Some people think of changing your mind as weakness, but:

Steve Jobs was known for changing his mind instantly in the light of new facts, and I don't know anyone who thought he was weak.

Lastly, one of the best ways to get others or yourself to accept changes is to trick them or yourself. Pete Docter, a director at Pixar, would say "This would be a big change if we were really going to do it, but just as a thought exercise, what if…" or "I'm not actually suggesting this, but go with me for a minute…"

Another trick he used was goofing off:

It can feel like a waste of time to watch YouTube videos or to tell stories of what happened last weekend, but it can actually be very productive in the long run. I've heard some people describe creativity as 'unexpected connections between unrelated concepts or ideas.' If that's at all true, you have to be in a certain mindset to make those connections. So when I sense we're getting nowhere, I just shut things down. We all go off to something else. Later, once the mood has shifted, I'll attack the problem again.

So basically, YouTube is your friend when you want to be creative. Who doesn't like that solution, right?

Hungry beast vs ugly baby

15 January 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

image by fastcompany.com

That sounds like a great novel. A hungry beast against an ugly baby … Okay maybe not.

So what is the beast and what is the baby and what does Creativity Inc. teach us about creativity with them?

The beast is the business machine. It's the fire that needs constant fueling with money-making products. It's marketing and sales and finance departments that need more stuff in the pipeline to sell and make money.

And unfortunately it's necessary.

The baby is best described in Ed Catmull's own words:

Originality is fragile. And, in its first moments, it's often far from pretty. This is why I call early mock-ups of our films "ugly babies." They are not beautiful, miniature versions of the adults they will grow up to be. They are truly ugly: awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete.

The baby is the new. It is the flash of inspiration. It is the brilliant idea you had in the shower. And it needs protection from the beast.

Ed Catmull explains that protection doesn't mean isolation or that the beast never gets fed. Balance is needed in the organization.

…the new needs protection. Business-as-usual does not. Managers do not need to work hard to protect established ideas or ways of doing business. The system is tilted to favor the incumbent. The challenger needs support to find its footing. And the protection of the new—of the future, not the past—must be a conscious effort.

So I felt like this idea didn't really apply to me because it's about not letting your need for efficiency and revenue get in the way of being creative and taking chances on ideas. I felt this only applied to businesses or maybe self-employed creatives.

But then I realized that this totally applies to me. I only write part-time, but I do write in order to sell books. And because I don't have much time to write, I try as much as possible to be efficient about my time. In that sense, I don't take risks. I only think about the deadline. I've been focusing on getting product out the door too much and I need to allow my ugly babies a good environment to grow.

I have a goal to finish and launch a book every year. This means that I really need to be efficient with my time and hurry every step of the process along. But I need to learn a few things from this part of Creativity Inc.

Making the process better, easier, and cheaper is an important aspiration, something we continually work on—but it is not the goal. Making something great is the goal.

If we let the beast win:

This kind of thinking yields predictable, unoriginal fare because it prevents the kind of organic ferment that fuels true inspiration.

So instead of making a goal to have a book out every year, I need a goal to write several great books. Changing my goal like this will be following his advice to "hold lightly to goals and firmly to intentions."

Protecting the new and balancing the beast are so important for sustainable creativity, both for a company and an individual (whether the individual seeks financial reward for his creativity or not). "Something…that is essential to creativity: a culture that protects the new."

Fail fast

13 January 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

image by Peter at cartoon-excellence.com

Failure is great, right? That's what everyone thinks, I'm sure.

Honestly, there's a huge stigma around failure. School ingrains this into our minds. Failure is bad. Failure means you are a failure as a person. If you fail, people laugh at you. If you fail, you're a loser.

In creative endeavors, this couldn't be further from the truth. "We must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future." - Ed Catmull

If you create a fearless culture (or as fearless as human nature will allow), people will be much less hesitant to explore new areas, identifying uncharted pathways and then charging down them.

 And:

This is key: When experimentation is seen as necessary and productive, not as a frustrating waste of time, people will enjoy their work—even when it is confounding them.

And:

When it comes to creative endeavors, the concept of zero failures is worse than useless. It is counterproductive. 

He goes on to describe iterative trial and error—the scientific method—and says that "experiments are fact-finding missions that, over time, inch scientists toward greater understanding."

This subject is so crucial to sustained creativity and one of the main tenets of this blog. This is how you achieve the wandering part of a disciplined wanderer. It actually gets at both parts of the equation. The iterative trial and error is the disciplined wandering that I talk about.

It's the scientific method applied to creative projects.

You have to be willing to fail. Failure is not bad. It's just a step towards success. A necessary step. In order to be consistently creative over a long period of time, you must take risks, wander down an unexplored path and find out many times that it is the wrong way to go. You can't avoid that. There's no replacement for it, no way around it. You just have to take a wrong turn over and over and over again.

In general, I have found that people who pour their energy into thinking about an approach and insisting that it is too early to act are wrong just as often as people who dive in and work quickly. The overplanners [sic] just take longer to be wrong (and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed). There's a corollary to this, as well: The more time you spend mapping out an approach, the more likely you are to get attached to it....It can be difficult to get free of it and head in a different direction. Which, more often than not, is exactly what you must do.

So go fail fast and find out that you were wrong.

Candor

08 January 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

image by jonathanfsullivan.com

Okay, our first post about the priorities—or values—of Pixar. The first value is candor. It means being open and speaking frankly.

One of the greatest things I've learned about working in a team creatively is about how important it is to speak openly with one another about your project. No matter how good or bad it is, and no matter who made it good or bad, you have to be willing to talk openly and fully about the things that aren't perfect.

(Even if it is really good, that may just get in the way of you seeing the parts that need improvement, but that's for the next post about mental models.)

Secondly, the internal feedback from the team must always follow one rule: it's not personal, it's always about the work. Ed Catmull says,

The film itself—not the filmmaker—is under the microscope .... You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.

Pixar has a meeting that they call the Briantrust which picks their movies apart several times during the production of each film. In this meeting people have to speak openly and speak their whole mind. They have to speak candidly. It's one of the reasons that Pixar movies are so great.

Okay, so this is really great advice about being candid in a team, but how does it apply to an individual's creativity. How does it apply to what we are exploring in this blog?

When you are working on your own project, you have to be completely honest with yourself about the project and its value. This might mean you'll need to step back from it from time to time to get an unbiased perspective, or you might need to elicit feedback from others. Either way you must accept the truth about your project's flaws and not take offense or get depressed.

One of the gems of this book is about accepting an ugly baby until it grows up. The book says that all of Pixar's movies have been failures and they weren't successful until they were massive failures and completely undone and redone.

Don't wait for things to be perfect to share with others. Show early and show often. It will be pretty when we get there, but it won't be pretty along the way.

Interestingly, I don't think anyone can say that Apple is rated high on the candor list. They are known for their secrecy. But don't get confused by that. While they are secretive about their products to the public, I would be willing to bet that the people in charge of making their products lay it all on the table to make sure it comes out perfect.

Creativity Inc

06 January 2015 Unknown 0 Comments

Welcome to the new year.

I thought I'd start off the year with a series of posts about Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull. This is one of the greatest books I've read about managing people in a creative endeavor.

I know lots of people have written about this book, but its ideas are so foundational or at least parallel to what we are exploring here that we have to talk about it as well. It will be fun though, because it's a great book.

I've always felt that this blog has been more of a collaborative analysis than just me speaking to 1 reader, so hopefully we can continue this collaboration and get a really good conversation going about what Ed Catmull brings to the table.

I'll also be referencing lots of things that others have said about this book. Here are links to some of the places I've heard conversations about this book:

http://5by5.tv/criticalpath/119
http://5by5.tv/criticalpath/120
http://www.esn.fm/electricshadow/14?rq=creativity%20Inc
http://www.theincomparable.com/theincomparable/197/

Let's start this conversations with a caveat about the book. It's not just for creative people or creative companies. Some will argue that all work is creative work, but also Horace Dediu says that engineers have the same struggles as the artists at Pixar.

He goes further to say that Apple and Pixar are trying to solve the same problems. He even says that this is the best book ever written about Apple. That statement is fascinating to me. We'll have to explore that tangent more in the future, especially his question about how much did Steve Jobs influence Pixar and how much does Pixar influence Apple.

So what I'm trying to say is that this book is for anyone in a creative endeavor, not just artists, not just managers. Everyone can benefit from this breakthrough in creativity.

Next post we'll talk about candor and how important that is to the creative process, but before I wrap up, I'll add one more quote from Horace Dediu. Talking about this book, he said that Pixar doesn't have a process, they have a value system—or a priorities system—and that is the secret sauce. So let's explore their priorities to inform our exploration.