Iteration at Pixar

Pixar pres­i­dent Ed Cat­mull, in a speech to Stanford’s busi­ness school, talks about shar­ing work even (espe­cially) when it’s incomplete:

In the process of mak­ing the film, we reviewed the mate­r­ial every day. Now, this is counter-intuitive for a lot of people. […]

Sup­pose you come in, and you’ve got to put together ani­ma­tion or draw­ings and show it to a famous, world-class ani­ma­tor. Well, you don’t want to show some­thing which is weak or poor. So you want to hold off until you get it to be right.

The trick is actu­ally to stop that behav­ior. We show it every day—when it’s incom­plete. If every­body does it, every day, then you get over the embar­rass­ment. And when you get over the embar­rass­ment, you’re more creative.

It’s not obvi­ous to peo­ple, but start­ing down that path helped every­thing that we did. Show it in its incom­plete form. There’s another advan­tage to that. When you’re done… you’re done.

By that last bit, he means that if you haven’t been shar­ing your work every day, even (espe­cially) when it’s incom­plete, then when you get to the point where you say, “Whew, fin­ished! Take a look at this,” it’s an illusion—your work is still just beginning.

It’s iter­a­tion! And seri­ously: it applies to every­thing.

5 Responses

Liz Gebhardt says:
January 5, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Thanks for point­ing out this video and for dis­till­ing the essence of the “iter­a­tion” mes­sage in your post. Pixar clearly has some unique and valu­able approaches to their work that any­one can learn from. Ear­lier this year I found a video of Randy Nel­son (of Pixar U) talk­ing about the ques­tion of “how do you hire for jobs not done before?” and relat­ing this to the topic of inno­v­a­tive com­pa­nies. If you are inter­ested, my post here on that with the video: http://www.thinkingoutloud.com/eg_ventures/2009/04/what-predicts-the-ability-to-innovate.html
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Saheli says:
January 6, 2010 at 1:58 am
This reminds me of that most awe­some Zefrank The Show–the bit about the platter.
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Iteration: nothing is ever finished – show the client early | Business Documents UK says:
January 6, 2010 at 5:23 am
[…] read a fan­tas­tic post today by Pixar pres­i­dent Ed Cat­mull about noth­ing ever being fin­ished. In most of the projects we are involved in now, an agile iter­a­tive approach is being adopted […]
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Weekly links | USiT says:
January 12, 2010 at 6:28 pm
[…] great quote about the impor­tance of fre­quent reviews of cre­ative work as it pro­gresses from Pixar pres­i­dent Ed Cat­mull, speak­ing at Stanford’s business […]
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Week 1562 > Robin Sloan says:
January 17, 2010 at 12:04 pm
[…] stuff that still sucks, and at this point I think it’s a true strength. (See: Ed Cat­mull on shar­ing stuff that sucks […]
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