By Jack Ferraro, PMP

In 1995, Pixar Animation Studios released their first blockbuster, Toy Story. As the first ever full-length computer animated film, it represented a breakthrough for the industry and signaled a bright future for the company. In the thirteen years since then, Pixar has enjoyed eight more huge successes – most recently this summer’s hit, Wall E.

Pixar’s creative genius has remained strong over a remarkable period of time. How have they managed to keep their films from becoming tired or predictable? The answer lies in the studio’s self-described peer-driven approach to the generation and development of creative ideas. Pixar’s president, Ed Catmull, describes the process in his recent HBR article as one in which makes it “safe for people to share unfinished work with peers, who provide candid feedback.” (“How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity,” by Ed Catmull. Harvard Business Review, September, 2008.) In contrast to typical management techniques that try to reduce risk as far as possible and provide for communication along “proper channels,” Catmull presents five daring steps to creative success from within:

  1. Empower people to generate ideas. Instead of seeing creativity as a “mysterious solo act,” it is far more advantageous to see it as the result of free correspondence and collaboration across artificial boundaries. Why limit ideas to one department?
  2. Create a culture of peers in which raw, unfinished work is acceptable. This keeps potential for improvement at a maximum and ideas fresh and ready for collaboration.
  3. Keep communication unrestricted. If things don’t have to wait until the meeting, or until the manager has been told, hallways and chance encounters can become a birthplace for ideas and an asset to the entire project.
  4. Encourage learning, and grow your people in multiple skills. This helps everyone understand and appreciate what various departments and divisions are doing. Additionally, people can see how their work fits into the project as a whole, giving their work more value.
  5. Use post-mortems to discuss both the positive and the negative aspects of the project. By not focusing solely on what went wrong, you end up with a more honest discussion about the project as a whole.

Obviously, these methods have worked for Pixar, but can they work for other companies, and for projects whose outputs are not artistic in nature? Is creativity really that big of an issue for the majority of us who aren’t making movies? Yes. The reality is that projects are in and of themselves creative processes, no matter the form of the end deliverable. PMI even defines them as such – temporary undertakings that create something new or do something that’s never been done before. So even if project managers are not making a film or engaging in something creative in the artistic sense, they are definitely bringing people together, united by a common vision, in pursuit of an end that does not yet exist, and will not exist, unless they create it.

Project managers, as the ones who set the tone for collaboration and communication on their projects, have a lot of responsibility for the creativity of their teams. If the failure of an idea is linked to an individual, team members are unlikely to think boldly and unconventionally. Likewise, if work areas are strictly divided, individuals are less likely to consider how their work affects the project as a whole, and the overall focus remains narrow and linear. The problem that remains is   that of risk management; how are we to keep risk under control while encouraging as much creativity as possible. Catmull’s perspective is striking: “Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur.” That is to say, risk management shouldn’t be about preventing leaps of faith, but about taking care of their consequences. Ask yourself right now: what am I doing to encourage leaps of faith by my team,, while planning for the potential consequences?

For strategic project leaders, the ability to foster creativity is a critical skill, and not the easiest one to acquire. No project is completed because of a single idea, but because of the intersection of a multitude of ideas; the more ideas you can bring together, the greater your chances of success.

About Our Guest Author: Jack Ferraro, PMP is the founder of MyProjectAdvisor®. He is a consultant, trainer, and mentor for project managers and teams seeking to excel at strategic project management.  Jack is the author of the ground-breaking project management leadership book, The Strategic Project Leader: Mastering Service-Based Project Leadership, published in 2007 which also contains a section written by Roberta Hill.