THE PIXAR WAY

Creativity, Failure, Fast Learning, & Psychological Safety

Welcome to our latest episode of 2-Rep Tuesday, where we bring a question (Rep #1) and an insight (Rep #2) from the world of high-performance to get your wheels turning.

 🎯 Question

At Pixar, the standard is excellence. The priority is collective creativity.

How do these co-exist?

🎯 Insight

Pixar CEO, Ed Catmull, believes creative ideas are central to innovation and ultimately success in the movie industry. Creativity unfolds when people from different disciplines work effectively together to generate ideas and solve problems. He believes management’s job is to create the conditions. 

Here’s how:

1. Prioritizes a sense of community

2. Make it safe to tell the truth and to ask for help - Pixar has a Brain Trust of senior leaders to give feedback on new ideas and initiatives 

3. Grant freedom to offer new ideas and communicate across departments 

4. Strategically inject outsiders to challenge the status quo 

5. Encourages risk-taking by building internal capacity to recover when failures occur and learn from mistakes - Pixar calls them post-mortem

6. Encourage staying on the leading edge of the industry

Ratatouille is about a French rat who aspires to be a chef. Talk about an unexpected idea!

If you’re ready to foster both excellence and creativity within your athletic organization, THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE PROJECT can help you get there.

Who are we?

We are THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE PROJECT, a division of The PICTOR Group, created to bring fresh eyes and modern strategies to optimize health, performance and winning in elite sport. We leverage complex systems and human-centered design to advance integration and alignment from the inside out. On our team, we have global leaders in medical, performance and sport science.

Set up a 15 minute phone call with THE HIGH-PERFORMANCE PROJECT director Teena Murray to learn how we can partner with you to make data-driven improvements to athlete health and performance.

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