ARTICLE
Creativity Inc
CULTURE & COMMUNICATIONS - MARCH 2026
Pixar has made 28 feature films. The majority have been critically and commercially successful by any measure applied to the genre. That consistency across more than three decades, under changing technology, changing market conditions, and the pressure of being acquired by Disney, is not the product of hiring the most talented people in animation. Ed Catmull, Pixar's co-founder and president from 1986 to 2018, is explicit on this point: it is the product of a management system specifically designed to make honest feedback structurally possible, failure intellectually safe, and creative risk organisationally sustainable. His 2014 book Creativity Inc is the clearest account of how that system was built and why most organisations fail to build anything like it.
What It Is
Catmull's central argument is that the enemy of creative excellence is the conditions that prevent honest assessment of ideas already in development. Every Pixar film started poorly. The initial version of every story was, in Catmull's words, not good. The system's job was not to prevent bad starts but to create the conditions under which bad starts could be identified early, spoken about honestly, and transformed into something exceptional.
The primary mechanism Catmull designed for this purpose is the Braintrust: a group of directors, writers, and storytellers that meets every few months to review films in development. The Braintrust has no authority to mandate changes. The director does not have to follow any specific suggestion. What the group does have is the obligation to be completely honest and the freedom to say anything without institutional consequence.
Why It Matters Now
Creative organisations almost universally struggle with honest internal feedback. The combination of hierarchy, investment, and social pressure produces a consistent pattern: problems are identified late, addressed partially, and allowed to compound until they become expensive to fix.
Catmull identified this pattern at Pixar and spent thirty years building systems specifically designed to interrupt it. The systems are not about being nice or being cruel. They are about making honesty structurally routine rather than personally exceptional, which is the only condition under which it actually functions.
Case Evidence
Toy Story 2 is the case study Catmull returns to most directly. The film was heading toward a release that would have been a serious failure. A Braintrust session identified the fundamental problem with the story's emotional core. The entire film was substantially reworked in the final nine months of production. It became one of the most critically acclaimed films of the original Pixar era.
Inside Out required a comparable intervention. Director Pete Docter screened early scenes for the Braintrust. Brad Bird told him directly that the audience needed more emotional investment. Andrew Stanton identified the film's core theme more precisely than the director had at that stage. Docter did not have to act on either note. He chose to. The result was an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Catmull also convinced Steve Jobs not to attend Braintrust meetings. Jobs' strong presence and the institutional weight he carried would have altered the dynamics of the group, making honest dissent more difficult. The decision to exclude the most powerful person in the room in order to protect the quality of feedback is one of the most precise illustrations of what Catmull understood about how creative culture actually works.
How It Works
STEP 01
Identify the current mechanism through which creative work receives honest feedback and assess whether that mechanism is structurally independent of hierarchy.
STEP 02
Assemble a peer group whose qualification for feedback is creative experience, not seniority or organisational authority.
STEP 03
Establish explicitly that the group has no power to mandate changes; feedback is input to the creative lead's judgment, not instruction.
STEP 04
Schedule sessions at regular intervals during development, not at the end when the investment is too large to reconsider fundamental directions.
STEP 05
Protect the mechanism from institutional pressure by keeping it separate from performance management and client-facing processes.
Industry Application
Most creative agencies have replaced the Braintrust with the internal review: a meeting where senior people look at work before it goes to the client and make changes. The internal review is not the Braintrust. It has authority, it is hierarchical, and it happens too late. It produces polish, not transformation.
A team that knows its work will be reviewed by peers who are qualified to assess it and empowered to say anything will produce bolder starting positions, surface problems earlier, and arrive at stronger final work. The mechanism is not pleasant. Catmull is direct: candour that is comfortable is not candour.
Financial Dimension
Pixar's financial performance across its 28 films includes a worldwide gross exceeding 17 billion dollars. The mechanism that produced this consistency required no significant financial investment. It required a structural commitment: the decision to make honest feedback routinely possible and to protect that mechanism against the institutional forces that would erode it. For creative businesses, the return is visible in rework rates, client revision cycles, and the ratio of projects that land without fundamental revision.
Where the Market Fails
Creative agencies typically conflate approval with quality. If the work passes the internal review and the client approves it, it is considered good. The Braintrust model operates on a different premise: the question is not whether the work passes but whether it is the best the team was capable of producing. Most internal review processes cannot answer that question because they are designed to generate approval, not genuine assessment.
Diagnostic Questions
QUESTION 01:
In the last major creative project, was there a point at which the fundamental direction of the work was questioned honestly by people with no institutional interest in defending it?
QUESTION 02:
Does the most senior person in the team's creative review process receive the same quality of honest feedback that junior team members receive?
QUESTION 03:
Is there a mechanism that separates the generation of feedback from the authority to mandate changes?
Practitioner Reference
"Candor could not be more crucial to our creative process. Why? Because early on, all of our movies suck. The good news is that we believe that is always going to be so, and we are happy to make that the baseline expectation." Ed Catmull, Creativity Inc, Random House, 2014
Key Takeaways
01
Creative excellence is a management problem before it is a talent problem; the system that allows honest feedback to function is the precondition for exceptional work.
02
The Braintrust works because it separates the authority to give feedback from the authority to mandate changes.
03
Honest feedback becomes structurally routine only when the most senior person in the room is as subject to it as the most junior.
04
The internal review that happens too late, with hierarchical authority, produces polish rather than transformation.
05
The financial return on a culture of candour is visible in rework rates and the ratio of projects that land without fundamental revision.
What This Means for DON'T WASTE I Partnerships
Under Company Culture and Internal Communications, the Creativity Inc framework informs how DWI assesses the feedback architecture inside creative organisations. The diagnostic question is whether honest creative assessment is structurally possible or whether it depends on exceptional individual courage. The consultancy work builds the mechanisms that make candour routine and protect those mechanisms from hierarchical pressure.
Closing
The team that cannot tell itself the truth early will tell the client the truth late. That order of operations is always more expensive.
Sources
Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace, Creativity Inc, Random House (2014) Inside the Pixar Braintrust, Fast Company: fastcompany.com/3027135/inside-the-pixar-braintrust How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity, Harvard Business Review (2008): hbr.org Pixar's Culture by Design, Global Coach Group: globalcoachgroup.com/pixars-culture-by-design