Chapter 18

• Jurisdiction: United States

Chapter 18

Braintrust Review

A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. Lack of candor, if unchecked, ultimately leads to dysfunctional environments.

—Ed Catmull, from Creativity, Inc.

Overview

In the book Creativity, Inc., Ed Catmull discusses Pixar’s “Braintrust,” a group of storytellers inside Pixar who periodically assemble during the production of a film to provide candid and sometimes rough feedback to a director about the film. Catmull is a co-founder of Pixar, honored with five Academy Awards for his work there. Pixar is likely the most successful motion picture company in history, beginning with Toy Story in 1995 and continuing with over a dozen other number-one box office hits. Catmull credits Pixar’s success, in large part, to Pixar’s Braintrust process. This chapter discusses four principles adapted from that process and applies them to the complex case to improve the team’s chances of accomplishing the mission.

What’s Pixar’s Braintrust?

Most people agree that obtaining honest feedback concerning a creative project—like a film in production or a complex case heading for an important court hearing or trial—is a worthy pursuit. However, fear and self-preservation instincts hold most of us back from soliciting and obtaining candid feedback. Catmull writes that, to address this reality, we need to free ourselves from “honesty’s baggage.”⁶¹ Honesty, which may be restrained, must be replaced with candor. Candor suggests a lack of reserve. From the quotation at the beginning of this chapter you can see that Catmull considers lack of candor a cause of dysfunctional environments.⁶²

The way Pixar drives its film production teams to embrace candor is through the Braintrust, a process Pixar uses to “push us toward excellence and root out mediocrity.”⁶³ The Braintrust meets every few months to assess a film in production. The premise of the Braintrust is this: “Put smart, passionate people in a room together, charge them with identifying and solving problems and encourage them to be candid with one another.”⁶⁴

The Pixar Braintrust took form during the making of Toy Story 2, which Catmull characterized as a “broken film.” After several Braintrust meetings, the film was released in 1999 and went to number one at the box office, generating over $500 million.

Principle No. 1: Recognize the Basic Truths About a Complex Case

Lawyers working on a complex case will, at some point, lose their perspective and often their objectivity. They tend to focus not just on the trees but on the tree roots, losing their ability to see the big picture. According to Catmull, this is natural: “People who work on complicated, creative projects become lost at some point in the process.”⁶⁵ When this inevitably occurs, it is not all bad—Catmull characterizes this “near fusing” of the director and the film as an essential part of emergence. Yet it does hinder perspective: “Where once...