Protect the Braintrust

Re-reading Ed Catmull’s landmark Creativity, Inc. in preparation for our upcoming interview, I was struck afresh by this insight:

“Candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all our movies suck… Pixar Animation Studios films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so—to go, as I say, ‘from suck to not-suck…’

“This idea—that all the movies we now think of as brilliant were, at one time, terrible—is a hard concept for many to grasp…

“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 throughline or a hollow character finds its soul.”
— Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and former President of Walt Disney Animation Studios

This fantastic insight begs the question, how does one promote both candor and vulnerability, when the creative process is inherently embarrassing? One of the mechanisms they leverage at Pixar is called “The Braintrust.” It reminded me a lot of Ben Franklin’s Junto.

I’m more and more persuaded that such gatherings are an indispensable tool for individuals and teams seeking to drive fresh thinking in their own unique context. But to make the most of a Braintrust, it’s critical to get the rules right. I recommend science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s guidelines for what he calls “cerebration sessions,” first reported in the lovely piece he wrote for the MIT Technology Review.

The passage below is Asimov’s; all underlines are my emphasis:

“First and foremost, there must be ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness. The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome. The individuals must, therefore, have the feeling that the others won’t object.

If a single individual present is unsympathetic to the foolishness that would be bound to go on at such a session, the others would freeze. The unsympathetic individual may be a gold mine of information, but the harm he does will more than compensate for that. It seems necessary to me, then, that all people at a session be willing to sound foolish and listen to others sound foolish.

If a single individual present has a much greater reputation than the others, or is more articulate, or has a distinctly more commanding personality, he may well take over the conference and reduce the rest to little more than passive obedience. The individual may himself be extremely useful, but he might as well be put to work solo, for he is neutralizing the rest.

The optimum number of the group would probably not be very high. I should guess that no more than five would be wanted. A larger group might have a larger total supply of information, but there would be the tension of waiting to speak, which can be very frustrating. It would probably be better to have a number of sessions at which the people attending would vary, rather than one session including them all. (This would involve a certain repetition, but even repetition is not in itself undesirable. It is not what people say at these conferences, but what they inspire in each other later on.)

For best purposes, there should be a feeling of informality. joviality, the use of first names, joking, relaxed kidding are, I think, of the essence—not in themselves, but because they encourage a willingness to be involved in the folly of creativeness. For this purpose I think a meeting in someone’s home or over a dinner table at some restaurant is perhaps more useful than one in a conference room.”

“Joking?” you might think. Even Michael Dell endorses a little fun…

Related: Paint & Pipette Presents: Ed Catmull
Related: Form A Junto
Related: Have Fun

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