by Jonah Lehrer
The power of dissent is really about the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer — red is called pink — you start to reassess your initial assumptions. You try to understand the strange reply, which leads you to think about the problem from a new perspective. And so your comfortable associations get left behind. The imagination has been stretched by an encounter that you didn’t expect.
These experiments demonstrate the value of Pixar’s morning production meetings. When the animators and engineers sit down on those couches with their cereal bowls, they know the meeting isn’t going to be very much fun. “Nobody likes to begin their day by learning about all the stuff they got wrong the day before,” says Bobby Podesta, the lead animator on Toy Story 3. “But we know that, if you want to make the best stuff, then you’re going to have accept some tradeoffs. You’re going to have to stay late at the office. You’re going to have to deal with critiques. Your feelings might occasionally get hurt.”
Nevertheless, Pixar strives to ensure that the criticism never gets out of control, that all the mistakes don’t become too demor-alizing. This is why the team leaders at Pixar emphasize the importance of plussing, a technique that allows people to improve ideas without using harsh or judgmental language. The goal of plussing is simple: whenever work is criticized, the criticism should contain a plus, a new idea that builds on the flaws in a productive manner. “Since we spend most of our day in these group meetings, it’s really important that the meetings stay relatively cordial,” Podesta says. “It could get pretty depressing if all we did was shoot each other down. And that’s why, when we do engage in criticism, we try to make sure the criticism is mixed with a little something else, a new idea that allows us to immediately move on, to start focusing not on the mistake but on how to fix it.”
When plussing works, it’s incredibly effective at generating creative breakthroughs. The criticism feels like a surprise, and that makes everyone in the room more likely to invent a plus, a new idea that moves the movie forward. According to Podesta, many of his best fixes come after the meeting, as he continues to contemplate the morning conversation. “It might be hours later, but I’m often still thinking about what the group talked about,” he says. “Maybe I’m still a little upset because I got taken apart. Or maybe we just exposed a really tough problem, and none of the proposed fixes really worked. But it’s like I put the problem on the back burner of my brain. And then, when I’m doing something else” — Podesta can often be found at the Pixar gym — “I come up with a better solution. I suddenly know how I should animate the face, or how that scene should go. I’m still plussing.”
This is why the Pixar process is so effective: while the groups engage in critical debate, it is a debate shot through with the unexpected, with the innovative ideas that emerge from relentless dissent. “The most wonderful part of working here are the surprises,” says Lee Unkrich, a Pixar director. “Before we begin every movie, there’s always the worry that maybe we don’t have any good ideas left. Maybe all our good jokes have been used up. But then the process begins and those worries mostly disappear. The team finds a way to make it happen. Because if it was just me making this” — he points to a computer screen with a frame from Toy Story 3 — “then the movie would stink. I’m not capable of surprising myself every day with some great new idea. That kind of magic can only come from the group.”
Sometimes, the dramatic improvements unleashed by the Pixar process can startle outsiders. In August of 2002, Michael Eisner, the CEO of Disney, was given an advance screening of Finding Nemo, Pixar’s third full-length release. At the time, Disney wasn’t sure if it would renew its distribution contract with the fledgling studio. Eisner was not impressed by the film. As James Stewart recounts in DisneyWar, the CEO immediately e-mailed the Disney board: “Yesterday we saw for the second time the new Pixar movie Finding Nemo. This will be a reality check for those guys. It’s OK, but nowhere near as good as their previous films.” Eisner used the mediocrity of the movie to explain why he wanted to wait until after its release before restarting contract negotia-tions with Pixar. The creative failure would allow Disney to get a better deal.
But Eisner was wrong: Finding Nemo turned out to be a huge box-office success, grossing more than $868 million. While the rough cut was deeply imperfect, Eisner underestimated the power of Pixar’s iterative method. He didn’t realize that the studio excelled at fixing its failures, transforming a problematic draft into a polished final cut. (The director Andrew Stanton ended up restructuring the entire movie, cutting a series of flashbacks.) Ed Catmull summarizes this creative journey in typically blunt terms, describing it as the ability to go from “suck to non-suck.” The original Finding Nemo sucked. But then, after nine months of morning crit sessions, it ended up firmly in the nonsuck category, winning the 2003 Academy Award for best animated film. Disney ended up paying dearly for the negotiating delay.
It’s important not to sugarcoat the struggles of the Pixar process. Even plussing can’t prevent the occasional heated argument, and many employees complain about the grueling hours. (“At least they give us free food on the weekend,” Podesta says.) When I spent time at the studio, people answered many of my questions with references to the same traumatic experience: the making of Toy Story 2. Although the movie is more than a decade old, it remains a frequently cited parable at Pixar. Catmull, for instance, referred to the struggle of Toy Story 2 as “our defining moment. . . A lesson we should never forget.”
The problems with the film began in the fall of 1998, during the final days of story development. (Disney originally urged the studio to make the sequel a direct-to-video release, which meant it would have a smaller budget and shorter running time. However, Catmull and Lasseter concluded that the decision was a mistake. “We came to believe that having two different standards of quality was bad for our souls,” Catmull says. “You either always make the best stuff you can or you shut up shop.”) Pixar takes its stories very seriously. In fact, it often takes the studio longer to develop the narrative than to animate the movie. The process begins when the Pixar brain trust — a group composed of John Lasseter, Ed Catmull, and eight directors — hashes out the initial plot, often while sitting at a burger joint down the street. That sketch of a story is then turned into a treatment, a two-page document outlining the basic arc of the movie. Several drafts and plenty of crit sessions later, the treatment is handed over to a screenwriter. (Pixar frequently brings in outside talent to write the scripts. It’s one of the many ways they inject fresh voices into the process, ensuring the team maintains the right level of Q.) The studio doesn’t want a polished screenplay — it just wants something to get the process started. And so the script gets revised. And then revised again. Scenes are cut; scenes are added. New characters emerge to fill narrative holes. After a year of edits, the script is turned into a story reel, an elaborate sequence of storyboards. There is no animation yet, just drawn poses like in a comic book, with the lines read by Pixar employees. “The reels look very rough,” Catmull says. “But they’re an essential part of the iterative process. When you see the script as a movie, you see all the mistakes in the story. And there are always many, many mistakes.”
It’s at this point that Toy Story 2 began running into serious setbacks. Because the studio had been frantically trying to finish A Bug’s Life, its second feature film, Toy Story 2 hadn’t benefited from the usual process of plussing. Instead of interacting with the entire studio, the creative team had been largely isolated in a separate building. (The current campus was still under construction.) “The movie was going off course in a way that we had gone off course on the other movies,” remembers Unkrich. “But the problem was, we were all so busy trying to get A Bug’s Life made that we couldn’t take the time to help them fix the film, to add our critical voices to the mix.”
It wasn’t until the winter of 1998 that the brain trust was finally able to start focusing on the troubled cartoon. The first screening of
the story reels went horribly. “Everybody knew that the movie wasn’t working,” says Catmull. “Our process was broken — the story wasn’t getting better.” And so, with less than a year until the release date, the Pixar team decided to do the un-thinkable: they threw the script in the trash and started over. Tom Schumacher, an executive at Disney, was terrified. He remembers the first meeting after the screening:
John and I were sitting at the table with some of my Disney colleagues, who said, “Well, it’s okay.” And I can’t imagine anything being more crushing to John Lasseter than the expression, “Well, it’s okay.” It’s just unacceptable to him, and it’s one of his most endearing, most exasperating qualities, and probably the biggest reason for his success. So nine months before it was supposed to come out, John threw out the vast majority of the movie. Which is unheard of.
How did Pixar fix Toy Story 2? The first change was physical. Lasseter immediately moved everyone into the same space, so the engineers and storytellers and directors were all crammed into a small cluster of cubicles. He realized that the movie was missing that Pixar spark, those minor epiphanies and surprising ideas that occur when people interact in unexpected ways. “We decided that from then on we always wanted everybody in one building,” Lasseter says. “We wanted all the departments, no matter what movie they were working on, to be together.”
Lasseter then scheduled an emergency story summit in Sonoma, a two-day retreat that would give people the freedom to think about the movie in an entirely new way. (The new location turned the team into temporary outsiders.) The brain trust soon realized that the fundamental problem with Toy Story 2 — the reason the reels weren’t working — was that the plot felt too predictable. Although the story revolved around Woody’s capture by a toy collector who plans on selling him to a museum in Japan, this scenario never felt like a real possibility. “This film is coming out of Disney and Pixar,” Catmull says. “So you already know Woody’s going back to his original family in the end. And if you know the end, there’s no suspense.” Once this narrative flaw was identified, the Pixar team began fixing it. Wheezy, the broken squeaky toy, was moved to the beginning of the film; a plot twist involving the two Buzzes was dramatically expanded; “Jessie’s Song,” a sad la-ment about no longer being loved by a child, was inserted into the second act. This intense creative process took its toll, with many team members suffering from stress-related health problems. In To Infinity and Beyond, Pixar’s official history, Steve Jobs remembers the difficult first months of 1999: “We killed ourselves to make it [Toy Story 2]. It took some people a year to recover. It was tough — it was too tough, but we did it.”
Toy Story 2 wasn’t just finished on time; it went on to become one of the most successful animated films ever made. (The reviews were literally all positive. According to Rottentomatoes.com, Toy Story 2 is one of the best-reviewed movies of all time, with 146 positive reviews and 0 negative reviews.) Nevertheless, the agonizing production process remains an essential lesson for everyone at the studio. “I’ll worry about Pixar when we unlearn what we learned from Toy Story 2,” Catmull says. “Meltdowns are always painful, but they’re a sign that we’re still trying to do something difficult, that we’re still taking risks and willing to correct our mistakes. We have to be willing to throw our scripts in the trash.” Because Pixar knows that talent is not enough. Talent fails every day. And that’s why Jobs put the bathrooms in the center of the building and why the production team begins every day with a group critique. It’s why the producers think about where people sit and why the best ideas come when a story is being plussed apart. Everybody at Pixar knows that there will be many failures along the way. The long days will be filled with difficult conversations and disorienting surprises and late-night arguments. But no one ever said making a good movie was easy. “If it feels easy, then you’re doing it wrong,” Unkrich says. “We know that screwups are an essential part of what we do here. That’s why our goal is simple: We just want to screw up as quickly as possible. We want to fail fast. And then we want to fix it. Together.”
4.
Dan Wieden is cofounder of the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy, one of the most innovative and honored ad agencies in the world. Wieden’s firm has a reputation for designing unconventional campaigns, from the Levi’s commercial featuring the voice of Walt Whitman to those yellow rubber bracelets that support Lance Armstrong’s foundation. The agency created the classic Michael Jordan Nike ads and produced a Miller beer television spot directed by Errol Morris. Its employees conceived of the viral Old Spice ads on YouTube and reinvented SportsCenter with the satir-ical “This is SportsCenter” campaign.
I met Wieden at the W+K headquarters in the Pearl District of Portland, Oregon. The building is a former cold-storage factory that’s been hollowed out. This means that the interior is mostly empty space, a soaring lobby framed by thick concrete walls and weathered pine beams. Wieden gives me a tour of the building as he explains his unorthodox approach to fostering group creativity.
At first glance, the Wieden+Kennedy office can seem like a case study in creativity lite, dense with the kind of “innovation en-hancers” that fill the pages of business magazines. There’s modern art on the walls (The office feels like a gallery; every surface is covered with art. My favorite installation is a huge white canvas filled with tens of thousands of clear plastic pushpins. It’s only when you take a step back that the mural makes sense. The pushpins spell the following slogan: Fail Harder.) and the coffee room is plastered with invitations to team-building exercises, including pie-making competitions and company-sponsored trips to the museum. While Dan believes in the virtue of such events — he’s particularly proud of the bian-nual pub-crawl — he thinks they work only if the right people are present. For Dan, this is what creativity is all about: putting talented people in a room and letting them freely interact. “It really is that simple,” he says. “You need to hire the best folks and then get out of the way.”
How does Wieden find these people? How does he ensure that his office is filled with employees who will inspire one another? Wieden takes the problem of hiring so seriously that, in 2004, he decided to start his own advertising school, which he called WK12. (The name is a misnomer, since the school actually consists of thirteen people who work together for thirteen months.) There are no classes at WK12. Instead, the curriculum consists of real assignments from real clients, with the students working under the direction of seasoned Wieden+Kennedy employees. The advantage of the school, Wieden says, is that it allows him to not worry about experience — “CVs can be so misleading” — and instead focus on those intangible qualities that are essential for creativity. “What I’ve learned to look for is the individual voice,” he says. “It might be an aesthetic, or a sentence style, or a way of holding the camera. But having that unique voice is the one thing I can’t teach. I can teach someone to write copy. I can show someone how to crop a photo. But I can’t teach you how to have a voice. You either have something to say or you don’t.”
Not surprisingly, the applicants to WK12 come from every conceivable field. A recent graduating class included a struggling poet, a grad student in anthropology, a chemist, a chef, a cinema-tographer, and two novelists. (The advertisements for WK12 feature a single question: “Tired of a pointless life?”) For Wieden, the school is an important means of ushering in fresh blood, forcing the agency to incorporate new voices from new disciplines. The inexperienced students ask naive questions and come up with plenty of impractical suggestions. They turn in assignments late and can’t figure out the technical equipment. “You could look at these students, and you could easily conclude that they are wasting everyone’s time,” Wieden says. “They don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”
But that’s the point. Wieden describes the challenge of advertising as finding a way to stay original in a world of clichés, avoid-ing the bikinis in beer ads and the racing coupes in car commercials. And that’s why he’s so insistent on hiring
people who don’t know anything about advertising. “You need those weird fucks,” he says. “You need people who won’t make the same boring, predictable mistakes as the rest of us. And then, when those weirdos learn how things work and become a little less weird, then you need a new class of weird fucks. Of course, you also need some people who know what they’re doing. But if you’re in the creative business, then you have to be willing to tolerate a certain level of, you know, weirdness.” Wieden is describing the advertising version of Brian Uzzi’s research on Broadway musicals, as the constant influx of students ensures that his creative teams remain in the sweet spot of Q. And so, every year, a new class of WK12 students walks into the headquarters of Wieden+Kennedy and sets up shop in the lobby. Most of their work will be thrown away. Most of their drafts will be ignored. But their weirdness will be contagious. (David Ogilvy, one of the founding fathers of modern advertising, pursued a similar approach. When Ogilvy tested his ideas for a particular marketing campaign, he always included several pitches that he was sure would not work. “Most were, as expected, dismal failures,” Ogilvy wrote. “But the few that succeeded pointed to innovative approaches in the fickle world of advertising.”)
