Collaborating

Course Purpose

Marketing 2 students will work with Marketing 1 teams and the client to ensure Marketing 1 students effectively meet the needs of the client. This will require a great deal of effective communication and partnership between the teams and client.

Collaboration is the action of working with someone to create something.

Simply put, collaboration is you doing something with someone else to create something of value. This is an insanely fascinating definition because most of what we call collaboration is people getting together to talk. I do not want you to be confused any longer. A collaborative effort needs to produce.

Pixar was started with a number of goals in mind but as important as any was Ed Catmull's desire to create a truly collaborative culture. The idea that sticks out to me the most of all his amazing work is the Braintrust. You heard that right. The braintrust impresses me more than producing 12 box office #1 hits out of the same studio.

The term "braintrust" entered the Pixar lexicon as an official term during the development of Toy Story 2. The film had epically crashed in development and was in desperate need of help to ever see the light of day. The focus by the participants of the braintrust was always singly on the development of the film at hand, nothing else. The participants will argue, sometimes heatedly, but always about the project and how to make it great. For the braintrust to work, there must be trust and mutual respect among everyone in the group.

To understand what the Braintrust does and why it is so central to Pixar, you have to start with a basic truth: People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things - in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence. This seems to be a major uniqueness of created being vs. the creator of beings. We simply cannot see the complete picture. While we may at one time have a great perspective on a movie or brand, at some point we will lose this it. It is inevitable, people become overwhelmed at times.

How does the creating being then gain perspective? This is the role of the braintrust (an intentionally developed collaborative group). Each member of the braintrust has two key qualifications:

1. A deep understanding of their craft and have experienced the process themselves.
2. No authority. The feedback is a meant to guide the empowered person to make better decisions. The braintrust is not meant to make any decisions.

The goal of the braintrust is not to solve any problems. The goal is help the owner of the problem think through potential ideas that can be tested and challenged.

Pete Doctor - The Untitled Pixar Movie That Takes You Inside Your Mind

Pete and his team had already spent months working through where the film would go and what viewers would ultimately find. Pete stated the film was seeking to get inside the mind, specifically focusing on emotions. At this time, the five key emotions had been developed: Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust, and Sadness.

After months of planning and a 10 minute walk though of the major scenes, the braintrust felt consensus that a pivotal scene was lacking. An argument between two characters about why certain memories fade while other burn bright forever was simple too minor to sufficiently connect the audience to the profound ideas the film was attempting to tackle.

The conversation broke down further as another member of the braintrust stated that the rules of the emotional world needed further development. His feeling was that a conflict existed in the structure of the rules by which the emotions were allowed to act. This would be confusing to the viewer and violate some pretty core storytelling rules.

After some more guiding thoughts, one of the key speakers finished with this. "Pete, the thing I want to give you is a huge round of applause for is: This is a frickin' big idea to try to make a movie about. I've said to you on previous films, 'you are trying to do a triple back flip into a gale force wind and you are mad at yourself for not sticking the landing. It is amazing you are alive.' What you are doing with this film is the same. So you deserve a huge round of applause."

Here is the beauty of this conversation.

1. Pete wanted to hear the hard stuff because he knew it would make the film better.
2. Other people spoke truthfully, with love to ensure Pete achieved his goal of a great film
3. Other people ensure Pete left feeling emboldened to keep up the good work

Step one: find your own individual creative potential.

Step two: build the exponentially large creative potential of the team.

In Creative Confidence, Tim Kelley and David Kelley say there are five keys to developing great creative collaboration:

• Bring a sense of humor
• Build on the energy of others
• Minimize hierarchy (do not allow any one person to take over)
• Value team trust
• Defer judgement - to get the party started

I would add one thing here, have a system for communicating to ensure everyone knows what is going on in the project even if they miss a meeting (class).

The point is this, exchanging ideas within a group of people who trust one another - without fear of judgment or failure - can feel electric. Ideas tend to take on a life of their own in this environment. People build on comments and the results will always lead to a better version of the solution. Tim and David Kelley say, "The whole is always much better than the sum of the parts ."

• Take Time to Communicate Strengths to the Group - Let people develop skills on their own time. When people are working together they need to use their better skillsets to feel comfortable working with new people.
• Get Personal - People need to be comfortable being humans. If the whole self is not engaged, then unknown parts of the group will be left behind. Unfortunately, these could be rather large parts of the group.
• Keep People Together, But Not Leave Space for Movement - People need the ability to talk but freedom to have the space to think. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced six-cent-mihaly) has provided a great deal of research into this area. He says people work there best in what he calls a state of flow - effortless concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time, of themselves, or their problems." Flow requires two forms of effort: concentration on the task and the deliberate control of attention. In a state of flow, maintaining focused attention on these absorbing activities requires no exertion of self-control, thereby freeing resources to be directed to the task at hand. Why do I say all this? Groups of people, without focus, will easily get in the way of flow taking place. Even in collaboration, we must protect the individual contributor.
• Limit the outside noise of other groups.

This is a bit of a niche subject area but I have learned a great deal over the years while working (at WCA and with marketing clients). What does it take for a group to build collaborative creativity?

• Broad executive support (leadership from the people with power) that empowers the group.
  • If you do not have this, do not try to be creative beyond the capacity of your clearly defined role.
• Limit the number of resources (financial, time, etc.) needed up front to encourage organizational support
• Use the core principles and values the company has already stated. Keep the creative innovation within the clearly defined parameters of the company.
• Start with the easy wins, which are likely smaller in scale and in new areas for the organization.
• Understand that cultural change takes time.

The bottom line is this, to build a culture of collaborative innovation, you need support from both the top and the bottom. An initiative, no matter how obviously good it is, started from below is unlikely to survive if the the leaders aren't on board. But a mandate from the top alone, will not incite passionate action either in a culture lacking a prior culture of innovation. People at every level need to understand how to influence culture and cultivate change.

Questions

• What are the qualification of being in the braintrust? How could we mirror those in marketing?
• How can you embolden marketing students to embrace constructive criticism and engage the process more fully in the face of hard conversations?
• Explain to me in detail one more principle of collaboration you believe in.
• Explain the limitations of creative collaboration in larger organizations.

Sources

• Creative Confidence by Tom Kelley and David Kelley
• Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull
• Inside the Pixar Braintrust