Rachel: You know that corporate mantra, "Don't bring me problems, bring me solutions"? It’s on posters in half the offices in the world. Justine: Oh yeah, it’s right next to the one with the eagle soaring, captioned "Excellence." It’s the corporate equivalent of "Live, Laugh, Love." Rachel: Exactly. Well, it turns out that might be one of the most destructive pieces of advice for a creative company. In fact, at Pixar, your job is to find the problems. Justine: Wait, really? That's the opposite of every management seminar ever. The goal is always to seem like you have everything under control, that you’re a problem-solver, not a problem-finder. Rachel: And that’s the philosophy at the heart of Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, by Ed Catmull, the co-founder of Pixar, written with Amy Wallace. Justine: And Catmull is such a fascinating figure for this. He's not a film school guy; he's a PhD computer scientist who grew up idolizing Walt Disney. He's this perfect, almost accidental, blend of art and technology. Rachel: Precisely. And the book is widely seen as a manual for creative leadership, even getting nominated for major business book awards. It really unpacks the "how" behind Pixar's magic, and a huge part of that starts with completely reinventing the idea of feedback.

Justine: Okay, feedback. The word alone gives me anxiety. It usually means you’re about to get a compliment sandwich that’s really just two stale pieces of bread with a giant slice of criticism in the middle. Rachel: Right? Because feedback is almost always tied to power. Your boss gives you feedback, and your performance review hangs in the balance. But Pixar created a system to deliberately break that connection. They call it the Braintrust. Justine: The Braintrust. It sounds like a superhero team for nerds. What is it? Rachel: It’s a group of their most experienced directors and storytellers—people like Andrew Stanton, who did Finding Nemo and WALL-E, and Pete Docter, who did Up and Inside Out. When a director is stuck on a film, they convene the Braintrust. They screen the movie, and the group gives brutally honest, candid feedback. Justine: Okay, but that sounds terrifying for a director. You're showing your flawed, half-finished 'ugly baby' of a movie to a room full of Oscar-winners. How do you prevent it from just being a brutal takedown that crushes the director's spirit? Rachel: This is the genius of it. The Braintrust operates on two unbreakable rules. First, the Braintrust is made up of fellow filmmakers, not executives. They’ve all been in the director’s chair, so there’s empathy. Second, and this is the most important part: the Braintrust has no authority. Justine: No authority? What does that even mean? Rachel: It means they can say whatever they want—that the main character is unlikable, that the ending makes no sense, that the whole second act is boring—but they cannot tell the director what to do. The director is free to use the notes or completely ignore them. The final decision is always theirs. It decouples the feedback from any power dynamic. Justine: Whoa. So it’s all advice, no mandates. That changes everything. It’s not a judgment from on high; it’s a diagnosis from a team of specialists. Rachel: Exactly. A perfect example is from the making of The Incredibles. There's a scene where Mr. Incredible gets caught by his wife, Elastigirl, after a night of secret superhero moonlighting. In early screenings, the Braintrust’s feedback was consistent: the scene felt wrong. They said Mr. Incredible came across as a bully, that he seemed to be intimidating his wife. Justine: I can see that. He's this huge, powerful guy, and she's confronting him. The power imbalance is visible. Rachel: Right. And the director, Brad Bird, was really frustrated. He reread the script and thought, "The dialogue is perfect! This is exactly what they would say to each other." He felt the Braintrust was wrong about the solution, which was to change the dialogue. Justine: So did he just ignore the note? Rachel: No, and this is the key. He realized the Braintrust might be wrong about the solution, but they were right about the problem. The problem wasn't the words; it was the feeling of intimidation. So he came up with his own solution. He re-animated the scene so that when Elastigirl confronts her husband, she physically stretches, leaning over him, making herself bigger and more powerful in the frame. He didn't change a single word of dialogue. Justine: Wow! And it completely solves the problem. She meets his power with her own. So they're diagnosing the disease, not prescribing the medicine. The director is still the doctor. That makes so much more sense. It’s about empowering them, not overriding them. Rachel: Precisely. It’s all built on Catmull’s core belief that to make candor work, you have to separate the idea from the person. The Braintrust is there to attack the film's problems, not the director. They have a saying: "You are not your idea." If you identify too closely with your ideas, you'll take offense when they're challenged. Justine: That’s a lesson that applies way beyond filmmaking. It’s about being able to hear criticism of your work without feeling like it’s a criticism of you. That’s a creative superpower. Rachel: And it’s a power that’s essential for protecting those new, fragile ideas in the first place.

Justine: Which brings us to my favorite metaphor in the entire book. It’s so vivid. The battle between "The Hungry Beast" and "The Ugly Baby." Rachel: It’s brilliant, isn't it? Catmull says every successful organization has a Beast. The Beast is the giant, complex, resource-hungry machine of the company. It needs to be fed constantly with new products, new content, new sales—whatever it is the company does. The Beast loves predictability and efficiency. Justine: And the Ugly Baby is... the new idea? The one that's kinda weird, unformed, and not very pretty yet? Rachel: Exactly. It’s the first draft of a script, the weird prototype, the unproven concept. It's fragile, awkward, and its potential is hidden. And the problem is that the Beast is always starving, and it finds Ugly Babies to be a very inefficient, risky meal. So, it often starves them of resources or, worse, tries to force them to grow up too fast. Justine: This is so relatable. It's like every creative person I know who has a day job. The 'Beast' is the 9-to-5 that pays the bills, and the 'Ugly Baby' is that novel or screenplay they've been trying to write for five years. The Beast almost always wins. Rachel: It does. And Catmull saw this happen at Disney. After the massive success of The Lion King in the mid-90s, Disney Animation became a huge Beast. It had expanded, hired tons of people, and it needed to be fed. The result? A string of direct-to-video sequels and films that felt less inspired. They were feeding the Beast with safe, predictable content, but they were starving the new, original 'Ugly Babies' of the time and care they needed. Justine: That's the classic sequel trap! It's so much safer to feed the Beast something it already knows it likes. So how did Pixar avoid this? They make sequels too, but they’re usually great. Rachel: They learned that their primary job was to create a safe nursery for the Ugly Babies. And the best example is the story of Toy Story 2. It was originally planned as a cheap, direct-to-video sequel. It was going to be made by Pixar’s “B-team” while the “A-team” worked on A Bug’s Life. Justine: A B-team at Pixar? That just feels wrong. Rachel: It felt wrong to them, too. The crew working on it felt like second-class citizens, and they realized that this "good enough" attitude was toxic. It was poisoning their culture of excellence. The idea was an easy meal for the Beast, but it was hurting the whole ecosystem. Justine: So what did they do? Rachel: John Lasseter and the leadership team made a radical choice. They went to Disney and said, "Toy Story 2 has to be a theatrical feature film, made to the same standard as the original." They chose to protect the baby's potential, even though it meant throwing out months of work and starting a brutal, nine-month production crunch to remake the entire film from scratch. Justine: That’s an incredible risk. They chose the hard path to protect the quality. Rachel: They chose to protect the culture. Catmull says their most important discovery was this: "Quality is the best business plan." You don't feed the Beast for the sake of feeding it. You focus on making the Ugly Baby beautiful, and the Beast will be fed as a result. It’s a complete reversal of the typical corporate mindset.

Justine: That Toy Story 2 story is just insane. And it almost didn't happen at all, right? I heard they accidentally deleted the entire movie at one point. Rachel: They did! Which brings us to the final, and maybe most important, pillar of their culture: making it safe to fail. About a year into production, an employee working on the film’s files accidentally ran a deletion command. Over the next few hours, they watched in horror as 90% of the film vanished, asset by asset. Justine: My stomach just dropped hearing that. That’s every creative person’s worst nightmare. What was Catmull’s first move? Firing someone? Rachel: His first move wasn't to ask, "Who did this?" It was to ask, "How do we recover?" They immediately gathered the team to solve the problem, not to assign blame. The focus was entirely on recovery. Justine: And the recovery is a movie-worthy story in itself! The supervising technical director, Galyn Susman, had been working from home because she’d just had a baby. And she had a backup of the entire film on her personal computer. Rachel: It’s an amazing detail. The team literally wrapped her computer in blankets, buckled it into a car seat, and drove it back to the studio like a precious, life-saving artifact. It saved the film. But the lesson Catmull took from it was profound. He realized management's job isn't to prevent risk; it's to build the company's ability to recover when the inevitable failure happens. Justine: Okay, 'fail fast' sounds great on a motivational poster, but what about the real cost? That wasn't a cheap 'learning opportunity,' that was a potential hundred-million-dollar catastrophe. How do you actually make that safe? Rachel: By reframing failure as an investment. Andrew Stanton, the director of Finding Nemo, has a mantra he repeats constantly: "Be wrong as fast as you can." He compares it to learning to ride a bike; you can’t learn without falling. The goal is to get a bike that’s low to the ground so the falls don’t hurt as much. Justine: So the short films and the early story development, those are the low-to-the-ground bikes. Rachel: Exactly. In fact, they’ve gotten to the point where they get worried if a film isn't a problem child early on. A smooth process is a red flag. It suggests they aren't trying anything new or original. It means they're not taking enough risks. Justine: So the lack of failure is actually the biggest sign of impending failure. That's so beautifully counter-intuitive. It turns the whole idea of corporate safety on its head. Rachel: It does. Because they know that what they're doing is creating what Catmull calls "The Unmade Future." The movie doesn't exist yet. There's no right path to find; they are forging the path with every choice they make. And that process is inherently messy, uncertain, and full of failure.

Rachel: And when you put it all together—the candor of the Braintrust, protecting the Ugly Baby from the Beast, and making failure a feature, not a bug—you see that Pixar's success isn't about a magic formula. It's about building a system that is constantly self-correcting and resilient to the forces that naturally kill creativity. Justine: It feels like the real 'unseen force' that Catmull talks about in the title is, at its core, fear. Fear of speaking up to your boss, fear of championing a weird new idea, and most of all, fear of failure. And Pixar's whole model seems to be this elaborate, brilliant, and very human system for rooting out fear. Rachel: That's the perfect takeaway. It's an architecture of trust. They've engineered an environment where the political and emotional cost of being honest, of trying something new, of making a mistake, is as low as it can possibly be. Justine: Which is the opposite of most workplaces, where the cost of a mistake can be your job, and the cost of speaking up can be your reputation. Rachel: So for everyone listening, maybe the question to ask this week isn't "How can we avoid problems?" but "What's one problem we're all aware of but too afraid to talk about?" Justine: And how can we create a mini-Braintrust—even just with one trusted colleague—to start that conversation safely? I love that. It makes these huge ideas feel actionable. Let us know what you think and how you've seen these forces at play in your own work. Rachel: This is Aibrary, signing off.