Embracing the bad on the journey to good

As Catmull candidly admits, “…early on, all of our movies suck.”⁴ In other words, it would have been easy to make Toy Story a movie about the secret life of toys that was sappy and boring. But the creative process, innately iterative, relies on feedback that is truly honest. If the people in the Braintrust room had murmured words of polite praise for early screenings rather than feeling safe enough to candidly say what they felt was wrong, missing, or unclear or made no sense, chances are that Toy Story and Toy Story 2 would not have soared into the cinematic stratosphere.

Pixar's Braintrust has rules. First, feedback must be constructive – and about the project, not the person. Similarly, the filmmaker cannot be defensive or take criticism personally and must be ready to hear the truth. Second, the comments are suggestions, not prescriptions. There are no mandates, top-down or otherwise; the director is ultimately the one responsible for the movie and can take or leave solutions offered. Third, candid feedback is not a “gotcha” but must come from a place of empathy. It helps that the directors have often already gone through the process themselves. Praise and appreciation, especially for the director's vision and ambition, are doled out in heaping measures. Catmull, again: “The Braintrust is benevolent. It wants to help. And it has no selfish agenda.”⁵ The Braintrust, seen as a neutral and free-floating “it” rather than as a fearsome “them,” is perceived as more than the sum of its individual members. When people feel psychologically safe enough to contribute insight, opinion, or suggestion, the knowledge in the room thereby increases exponentially. This is because individual observations and suggestions build on each other, taking new shape and creating new value, especially compared to what happens when individual feedback is collected separately.

Braintrusts – groups of people with a shared agenda who offer candid feedback to their peers – are subject to individual personalities and chemistries. In other words, they can easily go off the rails if the process isn't well led. To be effective, managers have to monitor dynamics continually over time. It helps enormously if people respect each other's expertise and trust each other's opinions. Pixar director Andrew Stanton offers advice for how to choose people for an effective feedback group. They must, he says, “make you think smarter and put lots of solutions on the table in a short amount of time.”⁶ Stanton's point about having people around who make us “think smarter” gets to the heart of why psychological safety is essential to innovation and progress. We can only think smarter if others in the room speak their minds.

Sadly, a caveat is necessary here. In late 2017, Ed Catmull's co-founder and Pixar's chief creative officer, John Lasseter, stepped down for behavioral misconduct and apologized in an email to “anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of an unwanted hug or any other gesture they felt crossed the line in any way, shape or form.”⁷ Complaints by individual Pixar employees about Lasseter's harassment soon followed. Lasseter's behavior and consequent outing, part of the MeToo movement, which I will discuss in Chapter 6, underscores the fragile and temporal nature of psychological safety. Unwanted physical attention easily undermines hard-earned trust.

The Braintrust resembles what the academic community calls peer review – a process by which other experts in the field read and offer constructive criticism on a colleague's article draft or book in-progress. This can be invaluable input for improvement, and it's almost always the case that a published article is vastly better than the original submitted manuscript. However, academic peer review also can be competitive and unfriendly – especially when anonymous – and these are attributes that the Braintrust, at its best, defiantly lacks. Pixar's method also resembles “art crits” (critiques), in which a group of art students, usually led by a professor or professional artist, offers candid critical comments on one another's work. Although art crits – like any group process – can veer into a domain of low psychological safety when the honesty becomes destructive and is not accompanied by empathic support,⁸ this is not necessarily The case; peer feedback is valuable enough for young artists to self-organize.⁹ Imagine if the ill-fated Volkswagen diesel engine had been subject to a braintrust of engineers who could have offered candid feedback on its feasibility rather than a secretive group who worked in fear of failure. Things might have turned out quite differently.

Freedom to Fail

Failure is another ingredient Catmull cites as crucial to Pixar's exponential numbers at the box office. That might sound odd, in that the last thing Pixar wants is a box office flop. But avoiding that outcome is understood to be dependent on embracing failure earlier in the creative journey. The Braintrust views risk and failure as a necessary part of the creative process. In its early stages a film will “suck” according to Catmull. Stanton compares the process of moviemaking to that of learning to ride a bicycle; no one learns how to pedal gracefully without falling over a few times.¹⁰ Catmull believes that without the freedom to fail people “will seek instead to repeat something safe that's been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative.”¹¹ As in so many other contexts, experimentation and its inevitable trial-and-error process are necessary to innovation.

Catmull is honest and human in acknowledging that failure hurts. Embracing failure is far easier to say than to actually put into practice! “To disentangle the good and bad parts of failure,” he says, “we have to recognize both the reality of the pain and the benefit of the resulting growth.”¹² He points out that it's not enough to simply accept failure when it happens and move on, more or less hoping to avoid it going forward. We need to understand failure not as something to fear or try to avoid, but as a natural part of learning and exploration. Just as learning to ride a bike entails the physical discomfort of skinned knees or bruised elbows, creating a stunningly original movie requires the psychological pain of failure. Moreover, trying to avoid the pain of failure in learning will lead to far worse pain. Catmull: “for leaders especially, this strategy – trying to avoid failure by outthinking it – dooms you to fail.”¹³

Failure can, of course, be costly, and Pixar is strategic in seeking to have failures occur early in the process by, for example, allowing directors to spend years in the development phase, which involves expenditures of salaries but limits excess production costs. How do you know when failure isn't productive? When is it better to cut losses and give up? According to Catmull, when a project isn't working out, the only reason Pixar will fire a director is if the director has clearly lost the confidence of his or her team or has received constructive feedback in a Braintrust meeting and refused to act on it for a prolonged period. In this way, Pixar tries to institutionalize what Catmull calls “uncouple[ing] fear and failure”¹⁴ by creating an environment where psychological safety is high enough that a “making mistakes doesn't strike terror into employees' hearts.” Of course, Pixar is not alone in embracing candor and failure. In fact, it's likely that any successful creative endeavor does this, either implicitly or explicitly. The enormously successful (and controversial) Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates, one of the world's largest hedge funds, provides another example.

Transparency Libraries

Radical transparency and extreme candor go hand in hand at Bridgewater. There's even a prohibition on talking about people who are not present and thus cannot learn from what's being said. Managers are not supposed to talk about their supervisees if the person is not in the room. In Dalio's words, “If you talk behind people's backs at Bridgewater you are called a slimy weasel.”²⁰ A tally of ongoing assessment statistics for each employee are kept on “baseball cards,” publicly available to everyone in the firm, and used by managers for making decisions around compensation, incentives, promotions, and firing. No one at the firm, including Dalio, can hide behind opacity. A “transparency library” containing videos of every executive meeting, is available for viewing in case employees want to see how policies or initiatives were discussed.

Dalio's views on the need for error and smart failures as a part of the learning process are consistent with what we know about how growth and innovation occur. He believes that “our society's ‘mistakephobia’ is crippling”²¹ because, beginning in elementary school, we are taught to seek the right answer instead of learning to learn from mistakes as a pathway to innovative and independent thinking. Early on, he says he “learned that everyone makes mistakes and has weaknesses and that one of the most important things that differentiates people is their approach to handling them.” For that reason, at Bridgewater, “it is okay to makes mistakes, but unacceptable not to identify, analyze, and learn from them.”²²

Productive Conflict

Candor, transparency, and learning from error – a psychological safety triad – are emphasized in Dalio's Principles as scaffolding for both his life and his company. To that list we can add conflict resolution, an important input to innovation and good decision-making for which psychological safety is sorely needed. Conflict, in the Bridgewater culture, is conducted in the service of finding “what is true and what to do about it.”²³ It involves having task-based conversations about who will do what, as well as exchanging alternate points of view and overcoming differences or misunderstandings. Recognizing the innate human tendency to treat a conflict as a contest, Dalio offers up advice, such as, “don't try to ‘win’ the argument. Finding out that you are wrong is even more valuable than being right, because you are learning.”²⁴ It's important to know when to move on from a disagreement and not spend too much time on trivial details. He concedes that “open-minded disagreements” are frequent at Bridgewater, and, naturally, people sometimes do get angry. (Not surprisingly, new employees at Bridgewater have a high attrition rate; the culture is not for everybody). Managers are advised to “enforce the logic of conversations” when people's emotions get too hot to handle; this is best done by remaining “calm and analytical in listening to others' points of view.”²⁵

Dalio distinguishes between three categories of conversation – debate, discussion, and teaching – and advises that managers evaluate explicitly which method of discourse is most appropriate for the issue at hand. Discussion, according to Dalio, is an open exploration of ideas and possibilities and involves people with varying levels of experience and authority in the organization. In a discussion, everyone is encouraged to ask questions, offer opinions, and make suggestions. All views are welcomed and considered. Debate, however, takes place between “approximate equals,” and teaching takes place between people with “different levels of understanding.” While the boundaries between debate, discussion, and teaching may often be fluid in a fearless organization – communications may combine all three categories – these three categories offer useful ways of thinking about and structuring how to speak to one another in a psychologically safe environment.

We see here that explicit hierarchy and psychological safety are not mutually exclusive in a fearless organization. While the Bridgewater environment is clearly one where people must get used to speaking up often and openly, speaking up coexists with a hierarchy that is based in part on individual track records. But decision-making is not by consensus. Like Pixar's Brainstrusts, open debate's purpose is to provide the lead decision-maker with alternative perspectives to help him or her figure out the best outcome. And in a culture that likely preselects for opinionated, self-assured personalities, Dalio warns against arrogance. “Ask yourself whether you have earned the right to have an opinion,” he says.²⁶ Such a right is earned through successful track records and proven responsibility. Dalio compares this to skiing down a difficult slope; if you can't successfully manage such a feat, you shouldn't tell others how to do it.²⁷ For their part, managers must distinguish between opinions that have the most merit – because they draw on a person's experience – and those that are merely conjecture.

Although a leader nearing the end of a successful career, Dalio tempers the dangers of over-confidence by including among his own most valued principles “the power of knowing how to deal with not knowing.”²⁸ He attributes his success in part to having recognized and adhered to this principle, because its power has enabled him to ask questions, seek advice, and find the best answers to difficult questions. Surprisingly, this hard-driving financier shares a belief in not knowing with a soft-spoken designer of women's fashion, Eileen Fisher, who otherwise bears very little resemblance to Dalio.

Humble Listening

Fisher calls herself a natural listener, which helps to make “not knowing” a positive trait. When first setting up her company, she found the combination of these two traits to be an advantage. As she says, “when you don't know and you're really listening intently, people want to help you. They want to share.”³² Evidently, she's managed to maintain the vulnerability and receptivity of her original “I don't know,” even as she's become a seasoned leader of an enduring brand in the fashion industry. One of the outcomes of managing by not knowing is, as Fisher says, that “people feel safe to explore their own ideas instead of feeling like they just need to do what you tell them to do.”³³

Eileen Fisher clothing is structured along simple lines and fluid designs. The same could be said for the way the company conducts its meetings. People sit in a circle, with the intention of de-emphasizing hierarchies and instead encouraging what's called “a leader in every chair.”³⁴ To create the mindfulness and focus conducive to an environment where everyone collaborates and contributes, meetings begin with a minute of silence. Sometimes an object, such as a gourd, is passed from person to person; the idea is the person is allowed and expected to speak when the object is in hand.³⁵ The point is that Fisher, like the other leaders discussed in this chapter, has institutionalized very specific processes that help create psychological safety.

Among the things that Fisher does know is what it's like to feel unsafe to speak up. In school she felt that speaking up meant risking criticism, humiliation, and embarrassment; consequently, it was, she felt, “safer to say nothing than to figure out what you think and what you want to say.”³⁶ Perhaps that's partly why she's so consciously and carefully created an environment where employees feel safe speaking their minds. Fisher, again: “My inclination is to ask questions, to get the right people in the conversation and let everyone have a voice. The collective and collaborative process produces a lot of energy – it's the source of creativity and innovation.”³⁷ Interestingly, Fisher, as a clothing designer, is not looking for “right answers” but for the multiplicity of voices that produce a collaborative process and creative energy. She's framing success as a certain kind of energy rather than an immediate result.

Permission to Care

When Fisher describes how projects and initiatives come about in her organization, she emphasizes encouraging employees to be passionate and giving them “permission to care.”³⁸ For example, an assistant, Amy Hall, rose in the company to become Director of Social Consciousness by following her passion for how the company was running its factories and treating its factory workers, eventually becoming involved in setting standards for how factories operate worldwide. In 2013, at a four-day off-site company sustainability conference, the staff made a commitment to produce only environmentally sustainable clothing by the year 2020. Although the idea had not originally come from Fisher, she wanted to lend her support and realized the importance of simply saying, “yes.” Although she doesn't call herself a CEO, she realized that “saying yes gives people permission” to go forward.³⁹

Like any company, Eileen Fisher has had to change and grow. Fisher rejected offers to become a public company, as well as an offer to sell to Liz Claiborne, a larger women's clothing company, because she didn't feel that they were passionate enough about her company's clothing and vision. Instead, in 2005, Fisher decided to pass part of the company ownership to her employees. In 2009, the brand underwent a major change in its marketing and product lines to appeal to younger women in addition to the loyal customer base that had aged along with Fisher. More recently, Fisher sees empowering women and girls as part of the company mission, and to that end she has founded the Eileen Fisher Leadership Institute. The company also gives grants to women entrepreneurs and to nonprofits that foster leadership in women and girls.⁴⁰

As it turns out, Fisher does know. As she says, “I've learned over time that I actually have a lot to say, particularly around issues like sustainability and business as a movement. My voice matters.”⁴¹ It may be that Fisher herself is the last to know the strength of her own voice. For as the president of Macy's North, Frank Gazetta, said about the seasonal product lines with which he stocks his stores, “the voice of Eileen is always there.”⁴²

Ultimately, Eileen's voice has been widely heard (and seen) in the fashion industry because she was willing to take risks, willing to fail. In any creative industry, failure is a fact of life. Most design ideas never come to fruition. Similarly, most film footage hits the cutting room floor, and many financial bets will fail before you hit a winner. Indeed, more and more people in leading companies around the world are embracing the notion of failing well to succeed sooner. But as appealing and logical as the idea of learning from failure may be, the truth is no one really wants to fail.

Make It Safe to Fail

The company was Google X, an invention and innovation lab that operates as an independent entity within Google's parent company, Alphabet. The mission of X, as it's come to be called, is to launch “moonshot” technologies that will make the world a better place.⁴⁴ The explicit goal is to develop and commercialize radical, world-changing solutions to big problems, to produce the kind of breakthroughs that could eventually become as big as the next Google.⁴⁵ Intelligent failure is especially integral to success at X, and for this reason we can learn a lot about what makes it work and the mindsets that leaders encourage to make failure acceptable in their organizations.

Although the idea of rewarding people for failing may seem to create a problematic incentive, if we look closely enough we can see its business logic, especially for a research organization that pursues big, audacious ideas. Astro Teller, CEO at X – or “Captain of Moonshots,” to be precise – believes that it's a superior economic strategy to reward people for killing unpromising projects than it is to let unworkable ideas languish in purgatory for years and soak up resources.⁴⁶ In other words, you have to fail at many attempts before coming up with a success. X considers over 100 ideas for moonshots each year, in areas ranging from clean energy to sustainable farming to artificial intelligence. However, only a handful of these ideas become projects with full-time staff working on them.⁴⁷

Teller explained in his 2016 TED talk why and how X “make[s] it safe to fail.”

You cannot yell at people and force them to fail fast. People resist. They worry. “What will happen to me if I fail? Will people laugh at me? Will I be fired?…The only way to get people to work on big, risky things – audacious ideas – and have them run at all the hardest parts of the problem first is if you make that the path of least resistance for them. We work hard at X to make it safe to fail. Teams kill their ideas as soon as the evidence is on the table because they're rewarded for it. They get applause from their peers. Hugs and high fives from their manager, me in particular. They get promoted for it. We have bonused every single person on teams that ended their projects, from teams as small as two to teams of more than 30.⁴⁸

Teller highlights how unpleasant it feels for us to fail, especially at work. It's natural to worry what other people will think and about losing our job. That's why, unless a leader expressly and actively makes it psychologically safe to do so, people will seek to avoid failure.

Rapid Evaluation

Just as vital as creating a psychologically safe environment for smart failure is constructing a specific process for handling failure. Teller and X pursue the mission through a process of disciplined experimentation. Just as scientists seek to find evidence that rejects their hypotheses, the company seeks to find evidence that its most optimistic and idealistic ideas will not work so it can kill off these ideas sooner rather than later and move onto other ones.⁴⁹ Project proposals can come from anyone inside or outside the company. To make sure that X only works on the most promising ideas, the company has a “Rapid Evaluation” team that processes proposals, vets ideas, and promotes only those that seem achievable. This team, which consists of a combination of senior managers and inventors, first runs a pre-mortem, trying to come up with as many reasons as possible why the idea could fail.⁵⁰ “Rapid Eval,” as the team is known, considers the problem's scale, feasibility, and technological risks. During this iterative stage, issues are questioned, changed, and refined by engaging in candid conversation that's not unlike Pixar's Braintrust.

Very few ideas make it past this Rapid Eval stage.⁵¹ If an idea is deemed promising, its team must develop a crude prototype, ideally in a few days. X has a “Design Kitchen” in one of its buildings equipped with tools and materials to create such physical prototypes.⁵² If Rapid Eval is convinced by the prototype, it runs the idea by a second business group called “Foundry,” which asks, “Should this solution exist? Is there a business case to be made for the proposed solution? If we can build it, will people actually use it?”

The company honors smart failures in other ways, too. Prototypes that never made it past the Foundry stage, and thus were dropped, are showcased in the Palo Alto office.⁵³ Since November 2016, X has held an annual celebration to hear testimonials about failed projects. (Failed relationships and personal tragedies are also welcomed.) Failed prototypes are placed on a small altar, and people say a few words about what the project meant to them. Employees feel that this ritual helps remove some of the emotional baggage they still carry from investing themselves into something that never came to be.⁵⁴

Failing to Fail Is the Real Failure

For X, then, failing is not taboo. In fact, as Teller told BBC News in 2014, “real failure is trying something, learning it doesn't work, then continuing to do it anyway.”⁵⁵ Real failure is defined as not learning, or not taking enough risks to fall flat on your face. Teller and X embrace failure so much that they don't talk about succeeding on their projects at all; instead, they speak of “failing to fail.”⁵⁶ Successful failure is an art. It helps if you can fail at the right time and for the right reasons. In Chapter 7, we'll see other ways organizations make use of and institutionalize failure.

Asking for Input

Bob Chapman tells the story of setting up a machine shop in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Ten divisional presidents first spent a week on how to improve the process of getting spare parts orders entered, completed, and shipped to customers. Analyses were run and reports generated, only to realize that the plan wasn't going to work in practice. Another leadership team met, spent another week analyzing and projecting, this time also looking at how manufacturing space might be laid out. Still, no one felt confident enough to proceed. Finally, a third improvement event was held, this time with two senior leaders and ten people who were actually going to do the work: forklift drivers, assemblers, pickers, packers, and clerical staff. Now, suddenly, the way forward was clear. In Chapman's telling:

They [the workers] took cardboard cutouts onto the floor of the factory and measured what they would need to bring different carts and forklifts through. They could see the different clearance issues and recognized that work from one area often flowed to another. Lighter parts would be easier to carry a farther distance. They looked at how many steps it took, how safe it was to have a forklift in an area, or whether it could come around the outside in a safer configuration.⁶⁴

This is a prime example of asking people for input and of the benefits of doing so. Even better than to, for example, open an online portal to invite employee suggestions is to invite the responsible parties to the meeting! In Dalio's terms, it's the forklift operators themselves who have earned the “right to have an opinion” on whether or not there's enough clearance for their trucks to pass through an area. Contrast Barry-Wehmiller's approach with the factory fellow from Chapter 2 who had an idea for improvement and could point to no good reason for not offering it up. Had he been given a seat at the table, chances are that management could have benefitted from his idea.

Chapman reports that the solution the assembly workers devised was still in place five years later. They were, he says, “able to share to improve the process and create a meaningful, lasting, and more human process for everybody in that organization.”⁶⁵ What's important to note is just how much it can take on the part of everyone involved to create a fearless organization. Top management had to spend considerable time and have the good sense to recognize that its ideas would not succeed. Factory workers had to be explicitly involved in the process of designing process. I don't mean to imply that working in a fearless organization takes more effort or a tremendously difficult undertaking. It doesn't. But initially, when we've been entrenched in fear and its attendant mental frameworks, it's not always obvious. Barry-Wehmiller leaders are superb practitioners of an essential psychological safety building practice I call Inviting Participation, to be discussed in Chapter 7.