Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools on how to tell better stories and grow your audiences’ attention.
Hello!
In 1995, Ed Catmull achieved a life long dream. His career had taken him from pioneering computer graphics research at the University of Utah in the 1970s (alongside a stellar cohort that included future founders of Adobe and Netscape) to realising his dream of making a full length completely computer animated film. The critical and commercial success of Toy Story was a huge achievement, but it left him feeling surprisingly lost:
“For twenty years, my life had been defined by the goal of making the first computer graphics movie. Now that that goal has been reached, I had what I can only describe as a hollow, lost feeling. As a manager, I felt a troubling lack of purpose. Now what?”
Pixar was heralded as one of the most creative companies in the world, with a culture of collaboration between technologists and artists that was unrivalled anywhere in Hollywood. Inspired by his investor and mentor Steve Jobs, Catmull had worked hard to create a space that encouraged open conversation, challenge and inspiration across the whole organisation. He had made himself accessible, walking the offices and making sure everyone at Pixar felt they had a voice. He was at the top of his game as a creative manager, and was eager to move the team on to their next project - A Bug’s Life.
But when they regrouped their teams for this new project, he realised he’d missed something really important. There was friction in the teams at Pixar, and he had completely failed to notice it.
Before we get to Ed Catmull’s insight, we’ve love your help with our survey on where friction lies in your creative workflow. It is multiple choice, and should take you about 5-10mins to fill out (If you want to add more detail to your answers that’d be great, but you don’t have to!). Here’s the link - please share it with your networks if you can!
https://forms.gle/ju8b8oxuvTUYegSg9
Thank you for your help with the research! If you’d like to talk to us about solving your creative workflow friction, hit reply and we’ll set up a call.
He thought the feeling of achievement and success from making Toy Story was shared across the whole of Pixar, but as they started their second film, he was shocked to hear the production management teams were reluctant to work on the new project. Their experience of the first film was very different from the technical and artistic teams:
“If there was one thing we prided ourselves on at Pixar, it was making sure that Pixar’s artists and technical people treated each other as equals, and I had assumed that that same mutual respect would be afforded to those who managed the productions. I had assumed wrong. Sure enough, when I checked with the artists and technical staff, they did believe that production managers were second-class and that they impeded–not facilitated–good filmmaking by overcontrolling the process, by micromanaging […] Not a single production manager had dropped by to express frustration or make a suggestion in the five years we worked on Toy Story. Why was that?”
Catmull realised that the collaborative culture Pixar had built to make extraordinary creative and technical achievements had hidden a source of friction that came out when the teams were assembled again. He found that the production managers were inspired by Pixar’s leadership, and felt their work was meaningful, so they had put up with the friction they experienced as ‘second-class’ citizens in order to make the project work. But when it came to doing it again, that friction re-surfaced.
This story is a great example of one of the biggest challenges we have as creative leaders - we don’t always see the friction in our creative workflows. Sometimes the friction is at a level of the organisation that we don’t spend time in, sometimes there isn’t good enough communication routines to let people raise issues about friction, and sometimes the friction is passed along the supply chain to agencies and outside organisations. We often make decisions without realising where it might create friction elsewhere in the organisation. We can’t erase all friction, but we should do a much better job of seeing it.
Catmull realised this, and this gave him a new sense of purpose for the next stage of Pixar:
For me, this discovery was bracing. Being on the lookout for problems, I realized, was not the same as seeing problems. This would the idea-the challenge-around which I would build my new sense of purpose.
Five things we can learn from Pixar about seeing creative friction:
1- Teams will hide friction to get the work done - it’s only when you start the next project that the friction will surface
2- Your role as a creative leader is to see the friction - you need to get out and listen to as many people as possible to hear about what causes them friction
3 - Power structures make friction invisible - if the people experiencing the friction feel like they are second class citizens, they will find it impossible to raise their concerns
4 - Friction will always get you in the end - you might be able to ride through friction for a one-off project, but it will come back to bite you the next time
5 - Solving friction is a creative process - friction is inevitable, so you shouldn’t be scared of it. Ed Catmull made seeing and solving friction his new goal as a creative leader Pixar, and it led to one of the greatest periods of creative success from any Hollywood studio.
Here’s a link to Ed Catmull’s book. If you work as a creative leader (and if you read this newsletter, you do!) I highly recommend it:
And why we’re talking about creative leadership, our new podcast Creative Crush, in which B2B CMOs share the creative work that inspires them, is going from strength to strength, so give it a listen and let me know if you would like to appear on a future episode:
In the meantime, please help out by filling our our survey on where your creative workflow friction is - we’ll be publishing the results in the autumn:
Thanks for reading!
Matt
