Imagine: How Creativity Works (20 page)

And it’s not just the atrium; the atmosphere of interaction is evident all across the campus. When I visited the studio, during the final, frantic days of production on Toy Story 3, it seemed as if every common space echoed with conversation. There was, as Jobs predicted, plenty of chatter inside the bathroom (I eavesdropped on two animators talking about the dirt on Lotso the Bear’s fur while washing their hands at the sink.), but there were also crowds talking in the coffee bar about the Randy Newman soundtrack, and large groups sharing jokes over plates of Thai curry at the Luxo Café. I saw people collaborating in the art gallery and listened to animators talk shop while sitting in their Barcaloungers. (In the evenings, the social activity transitions to the bars — there are eleven drinking holes on the Pixar campus.) And then there’s Pixar University, a collection of 110 different classes, from creative writing to comic improv, that are offered to all employees. The classes are filled with a diverse group of students, so John Lasseter might learn how to juggle in the atrium alongside a security guard. The Latin crest of Pixar University says it all: Alienus Non Diutius, which means “alone no longer.”

The sociologist Ray Oldenburg referred to such gathering spots as “third places,” which he defined as any interactive environment that is neither the home (the first place) nor the office (the second place). These shared areas have played an outsize role in the history of new ideas, from the coffeehouses of eighteenth-century England where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modernist Paris frequented by Picasso and Gertrude Stein. The virtue of these third places, Oldenburg says, is that they bring together a diversity of talent, allowing people to freely interact while ingesting some caffeine or alcohol. What makes the Pixar studios so unique is that these spaces have become part of the office itself. There are cubicles and desktops, of course, but there are also whiskey lounges and espresso bars. The end result is a workplace filled with the clutter of human voices, the soundtrack of an effective third place.

While such interactions might seem incidental and inefficient — the kind of casual encounters that detract from productivity — Pixar takes them extremely seriously. The studio knows that the small talk of employees isn’t a waste of time, and that those random conversations are a constant source of good ideas. This is because Pixar has internalized one of the most important lessons of group creativity, which is that the most innovative teams are a mixture of the familiar and the unexpected, just like those Broadway artists making West Side Story. (The company 3M and Google both promote a similar ethos by emphasizing horizontal interactions.) Although most people at Pixar work in tight-knit teams, the culture of the studio encourages them to chat with colleagues working on completely unrelated projects. “We think a lot about the geography of where people are sitting and how the offices are laid out,” Anderson says. “Part of my job [as a producer] is to make sure everyone is smooshing together. If I don’t see lots of smooshing, I get worried.” If Anderson knows that an animator will be working on a technical aspect of the film, she’ll place him at the end of a corridor filled with computer scientists. If a writer is struggling with a scene involving a certain character, then Anderson will make sure the writer bumps into the animators drawing that same character. “The assumption is that a few of those random talks in the hallway are going to be really useful,” she says. “Most of them won’t be, of course. They’ll just be talking about their kids or football or whatever. But every once in a while that random conversation is going to lead to a breakthrough.”

In order to understand the wisdom of Pixar’s office design, it helps to know about the research of Tom Allen, a professor of organization studies at MIT. In the early seventies, Allen began studying the interaction of engineers in several large corporate laboratories. After several years of tracking their conversations — counting all those exchanges in the hallways and coffee room — he came up with the Allen curve, which describes the likelihood that any two people in the same office will communicate. The curve is steep; according to Allen, a person is ten times more likely to communicate with a colleague who sits at a neighboring desk than with someone who sits more than fifty meters away.

It’s not particularly surprising, of course, that we make small talk with those who are nearby. But Allen also discovered something unexpected about all these office conversations. After analyzing the workplace data, he realized that the highest-performing employees — those with the most useful new ideas — were the ones who consistently engaged in the most interactions. “High performers consulted with anywhere from four to nine organizational colleagues [on a given project], whereas low performers contacted one or two colleagues at most,” Allen wrote in his 1984 treatise Managing the Flow of Technology. “This suggests that increasing the number of colleagues with whom an employee consults contributes independently to performance.” The key word in that sentence is independently. According to Allen’s data, office conversations are so powerful that simply increasing their quantity can dramatically increase creative production; people have more new ideas when they talk with more people. This suggests that the most important place in every office is not the boardroom, or the lab, or the library. It’s the coffee machine.

A similar lesson emerges from a recent study led by Brian Uzzi, the sociologist who measured the Q of Broadway musicals. In 2009, Uzzi got access to a vast trove of data from a large hedge fund, giving him a complete record of every instant message sent by every trader over an eighteen-month period. The first thing Uzzi and his collaborators discovered was that these traders sent out an astonishing number of messages. They amassed more than two million exchanges, with the average trader engaging in sixteen different IM conversations at the same time.

What Uzzi wanted to know was how this constant stream of information affected the financial performance of the traders. He was particularly interested in the flurry of messages that occurred whenever a new financial report was released. “What you often see is [that] some new information comes over the Bloomberg terminal, and there’s this sudden spike in communication,” Uzzi says. “What’s happening is that everyone is trying to figure out what the news means. Is it good news? What’s it going to do to the stock?” Uzzi refers to this as the disambiguation process, since the traders are trying to make sense of the unclear information. They’re asking one another questions and benefiting from the diverse thoughts of colleagues. “There’s a big incentive to figure this stuff out fast,” he says. “The faster you are, the more money you make.”

By comparing the messaging habits of the traders, Uzzi was able to document the power of these electronic interactions. He discovered that Tom Allen was right: the best traders were the most connected, and people who carried on more IM conversations and sent more messages also made more money. (While typical traders generated profits on only 55 percent of their trades, those who were extremely plugged in profited on more than 70 percent of their stock trades.) “These are the guys who get embedded in multiple chats,” Uzzi says. “They’re just sucking up information from everybody else, like a vacuum. And when they start to trade, they don’t go silent. They don’t stop talking. They IM even more.” In contrast, the least successful traders tended to engage in the fewest electronic chats. They also stopped exchanging messages right before making an investment decision. Says Uzzi, “They’d get cut off from the conversation. And this meant that they weren’t able to make sense of what was happening.”

Uzzi compares these financial conversations to the creative process. “The act of investing is like solving a difficult puzzle,” he says. “These traders are trying to connect the dots. And if you look at these IM exchanges [in the hedge fund], what you frequently find is that they lead to a good idea, a successful trade. Because the traders are listening to their network, they manage to accomplish what they could never have done by themselves.” While all the instant messages might seem like a distraction — a classic example of multitasking run amok — Uzzi argues that they’re an essential element of success. “If I had to choose between a trader who was a little smarter or one who was a little better connected, I’d definitely go for the connections,” Uzzi says. “Those conversations count for a lot.”

Pixar tries to maximize such conversations. The studio knows that an office in which everyone is interacting is the most effective at generating new ideas, as people chat at the bathroom sink and exchange theories while waiting in line for lattes. “The secret of Pixar from the start has been its emphasis on teamwork, this belief that you can learn a lot from your coworkers,” says Alvy Ray Smith. “Ed and I were really determined to create a kind of mutual admiration society, so that the techies thought the artists were geniuses, and the artists thought the techies were magicians. We wanted people to want to learn from each other. That’s always when the best stuff happens: when someone tells you something you didn’t already know.”

The computer scientist Christopher Langton once observed that innovative systems constantly veer toward the “edge of chaos,” to those environments that are neither fully predictable nor fully anarchic. We need structure or everything falls apart. (The classic demonstration of a space without structure is the “nonterritorial office” developed by the ad agency TBWA Chiat/Day. In 1993, the company decided to do away with every tradition of the corporate office. Employees were no longer given fixed desks or cubicles or computers. Instead, they were encouraged to assemble with their colleagues based on the task at hand; the model was the college campus, in which students were free to work anywhere and everywhere. (Time magazine hailed the Chiat/Day office as the “ forerunner of employment in the information age.”) The reality of the new space, however, failed to live up to the hype. Although the freeform interior was designed to encourage interaction, it actually derailed it. Because there were no offices, people couldn’t find one another. Productivity plummeted. The couches with the nicest views became the subject of petty turf wars; fistfights broke out over meeting spaces. By 1995, it had become clear that the new Chiat/Day model was broken. The walls were reinstalled.) But we also need spaces that surprise us. Because it is the exchanges we don’t expect, with the people we just met, that will change the way we think about everything.

3.

Every day at the Pixar studio begins the same way: A few dozen animators and computer scientists gather in a small screening room filled with comfy velour couches. They eat Lucky Charms and Cap’n Crunch and drink organic coffee. Then the team begins analyzing the few seconds of film produced the day before, ruthlessly shredding each frame. (There are twenty-four frames per second.) No detail is too small to tear apart: I sat in on a meeting in which the Toy Story 3 team spent thirty minutes discussing the reflective properties of the plastic lights underneath the wings of Buzz Lightyear. After that, an editor criticized the precise starting point of a Randy Newman song. The music began when Woody entered the scene, but he argued that it should start a few seconds later, when Woody began running. Someone else disagreed, and a lively debate ensued. Both alternatives were tested. (It’s not uncommon for a Pixar scene to go through more than three hundred iterations.) The team discussed the motivations of the character and the emotional connotations of the clarinet solo. By the time the meeting was over, it was almost lunch.

These crit sessions are modeled on the early production meetings at Lucasfilm, when Alvy Ray Smith, John Lasseter, and Ed Catmull would meet with the animators to review their work. At first, the meetings were necessary because nobody knew what he was doing — computer animation remained a hypothetical. But Lasseter soon realized that the meetings were incredibly efficient, since everybody was able to learn from the mistakes of everybody else. Furthermore, the crit sessions distributed responsibility across the entire group, so that the entire team felt responsible for catching mistakes. “This was a lesson I took away from the Toyota manufacturing process,” Catmull says. “In their car factories, everybody had a duty to find errors. Even the lowly guys on the assembly line could pull the red cord and stop the line if they saw a problem. It wasn’t just the job of the guys in charge. It was a group process. And so what happened at Toyota was a massive amount of incremental improvement. People on the assembly line constantly suggested lots of little fixes, and all those little fixes had a way of adding up to a quality product. That model was very influential for me as we set about figuring out how to structure the Pixar meetings. I wanted people to know that if a mistake slips through the production process, if we don’t fix something that can be fixed, then it’s everybody’s fault. We all screwed up. We all failed to pull the red cord.”

The harsh atmosphere of Pixar’s morning meetings — the emphasis on finding imperfections and mistakes — may at first seem to contradict one of the basic rules of group creativity, which is to always be positive. In the late 1940s, Alex Osborn, a founding partner of the advertising firm BBDO, came up with a catchy term for what he considered the ideal form of group creativity: brainstorming. In a series of bestselling books, Osborn outlined the basic principles of a successful brainstorming session, which he said could double the creative output of a group. The most important principle, he said, was the absence of criticism. According to Osborn, if people were worried about negative feedback, if they were concerned that their new ideas might get ridiculed by the group, then the brainstorming process would fail. “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud,” Osborn wrote in Your Creative Power. “In order to increase our imaginative potential, we should focus only on quantity. Quality will come later.”

Brainstorming is the most popular creativity technique of all time. It’s used in advertising offices and design firms, the classroom and the boardroom. When people want to extract the best ideas from a group, they obey Osborn’s instructions; criticism is censored, and the most “freewheeling” associations are encouraged. The underlying assumption is simple: if people are scared of saying the wrong things, they’ll end up saying nothing at all.