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How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity, Ed Catmull

A reading which aided my learning greatly during the course of this module was an article written in 2008 by Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar. This reading was based on creativity and although written about Pixar, is applicable to all businesses and industries.
Prior to reading this paper, my beliefs were such that the creativity arises from individuals and not from those working in groups. This belief arose from my knowledge on the subject of “groupthink”, where team members make decisions based on consensus rather than selecting the best ideas.
Ed Catmull stresses however, that “creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems.” (Catmull, 2008) The author also underlines that it is more important to invest in good people rather than good ideas through explaining that, “creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems.” (Catmull, 2008)
This idea is highlighted in the IDEO video where we see individuals from a variety of backgrounds, including Psychology and Biology working together to solve complex problems, in an innovative and creative way. This concept is further emphasised in the Hargadon et al. paper where, the authors suggest that Thomas Edison should be seen as a collective noun as “Edison is in reality a collective noun and means the work of many men”. (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006)
Catmull also underlines it is more important to invest in good people rather than good ideas through explaining that “if you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they’ll screw it up. But if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they’ll make it work.” (Catmull, 2008)

Pixar encourage their people to ask for help from their colleagues and to seek feedback so as to prevent failures. This is done through “dailies” and the company “creative brain trust”.  Like IDEO, the company accept and encourage failure and have post-mortems to discuss what went well and didn’t go well in each project.

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