1: Pixar is the animation studio behind some of the most beloved movies of recent times, including Toy Story, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, and Monsters Inc., to name but a few.
One of the secrets behind the studio’s unprecedented string of successes is something called the BrainTrust.
According to Pixar co-founder and former president Ed Catmull, “The BrainTrust is the most important thing we do by far,” he says in Daniel Coyle‘s book, The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups.
“The meeting brings the film’s director together with a handful of the studio’s veteran directors and producers, all of whom watch the latest version of the movie and offer their candid opinion.”
These meetings don’t happen by accident. They are scheduled at least five times, at regular intervals, during a film’s production.
2: The key ingredients? Completely candid feedback and a willingness to be vulnerable.
“From a distance,” Daniel writes, “the BrainTrust appears to be a routine huddle.
“Up close, it’s more like a painful medical procedure—specifically, a dissection that spotlights, names, and analyzes the film’s flaws in breathtaking detail.”
Pixar’s BrainTrust meetings are similar in tone to the Navy SEAL’s After Action Reviews, which we explored yesterday.
“They consist of a steady stream of here’s-the-bad-news notifications accompanied by a few big, scary questions,” Daniel writes.
3: When we watch high-performance teams in action, we see moments of intense cooperation. The group moves and thinks as one. At times, there is beauty in what they do.
Other times, however, we see the opposite.
“Sprinkled amid the smoothness and fluency are moments that don’t feel so beautiful,” notes Daniel.
“These moments are clunky, awkward, and full of hard questions,” he writes. “They contain pulses of profound tension, as people deal with hard feedback and struggle together to figure out what is going on.”
Pixar’s BrainTrust meetings are not intended to be fun.
“It is where directors are told that their characters lack heart, their storylines are confusing, and their jokes fall flat,” Daniel notes.
But the BrainTrust is also where the movies come to life.
“Participants spend most of the time in a state of brow-furrowing struggle as they grapple with the fact that the movie, at the moment, isn’t working,” Daniel observes.
“All our movies suck at first,” says Ed, Pixar’s co-founder. “The BrainTrust is where we figure out why they suck, and it’s also where they start to not suck.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Does my team engage in meetings like Pixar’s BrainTrust of the Navy SEALS’ After Action Reviews?
Action: Experiment and hold one of these meetings around a big project I am working on.
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