Pixar Notes Day
Just go ahead and jump right to the end of Creativity, Inc. It’s worth it.
In the last chapter of the book, Ed Catmull details a remarkable intervention that he and the executive team enacted once the ~1200-person organization no longer behaved as the 45-person shop it remained in all their minds.
I don’t want to steal any of his thunder, so I won’t deprive you of the joy of discovering for yourself some of the exceptional tactics and rigor the team employed to create the kind of emotional safety required for such a day.
Instead, I just wanted to call attention to the funnel, as it’s something that comes up a lot in innovation work. As Linus Pauling famously quipped, “To get a good idea, you need a lot of ideas.” Easy enough for a two-time Nobel Prize-winner to say off-handedly. What most folks fail to appreciate is the scale of the funnel required to ultimately deliver meaningful business impact. How many ideas is “a lot”?
Case in point: Pixar’s “Notes Day”
When Catmull and team announced their desire to hear from the organization about where there were problems — whether cultural, procedural, or production…ary(?) — little did they appreciate the deluge that would follow. 4,000 emails came in, highlighting over 1,000 unique problems / challenges / opportunities. The team narrowed this down to 293 potential discussion topics (selected according to the criteria, “Can you imagine 20 people talking about this topic for an hour?”), and then managers whittled the list further, down to 120 topics.
Ultimately, over the course of a single day (enabled by meticulous planning and thoughtful pre-program correspondence) 1,059 employees “discussed 106 topics in 171 sessions managed by 138 facilitators in 66 meeting spaces across Pixar’s three buildings.”
If you had to venture a guess as to the volume of material generated by these discussions, what would you say?
The output: “We immediately implemented 4 ideas, committed to 5 more, and earmarked another dozen or so for continued development.”
On the one hand, one might feel surprised: “You had over 1000 people working for a full day and only came up with ~20 viable concepts?!?!” But that belies a lack of understanding of the percentages we’re dealing with when it comes to innovation. Anyone who does this kind of work is likely astounded: “They were able to generate 20 potentially meaningful concepts in a single day of work?!?!” I myself fall into the astounded camp.
Well worth reading the chapter from the book to see how they set up this terrific engine of opportunity.
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