Practicing Feedback the Pixar Way
A few years ago, I was tasked with serving as the coordinator for TU106, a general education course on Creativity and Communication. The objective of TU106 was to enroll students from different faculties into this shared course and help them learn how to collaborate effectively with students from different faculties for creative projects from videos to prototypes to PR/Marketing campaigns.
The first few years were a definite learning curve in helping all the teams work effectively together. Students were not always engaged with the course, and although the creative output was, at times, great from every group, the communication with many of the teams somehow ended up being very poor. In each group, some students would talk a lot, some students would speak very little, and many of groups would simply put their heads down and try to just do the assigned task rather than discuss the task with their group members to ensure they all had the same understanding and were headed in the right direction. Through the additions of individual group tutorials, discussions on team roles, and having students fill out group contracts, the teamwork got better, but the communication with each group still had a lot of room for improvement.
I gained some inspiration from an article by the New York Times on a research project done by Google on teamwork. Codenamed Project Aristotle, Google did research on hundreds of their own teams to understand what made some teams great and other teams well… not so great. Despite having well qualified and intelligent people in all of their teams, Google found that not all great teams behaved the same way. Some teams were very focused on completing the task and keeping their discussions focused, while other teams regularly got off track and also stayed well after the meeting was over to gossip and chat about various topics. Google found that the way these different teams ran their meetings didn’t matter, and that each team could be successful, but what both teams had was:
1. The right norms
2. Equal conversation-taking
3. Collective Intelligence
In essence, the best teams worked on creating the right norms within the teams that inspired each individual within the team to participate in group discussion, which led to equal conversation-taking. Through this equal conversation-taking, the collective intelligence of the group increased and led to better quality outputs from the team regardless of how they ran their meetings. Although this article was helpful from a theoretical standpoint, it didn’t really provide practical ways of developing this kind of teamwork. It became clear after incorporating this research into the course that talking about teamwork and research was not going to lead to the teams working better together.
After about two years I read another book on the topic (appropriately) titled Creativity, Inc. In the book, the author Ed Catmull who was the president of Pixar, the leader in animated films and an innovator in the animated film industry, discussed how he managed creativity.
He discussed about the “braintrust” or committee (for lack of a better word) that Pixar formed to review their work. He emphasized that the braintrust meetings were composed of different people from multiple levels of the organization (directions, managers, staff), and that these meetings were built around the concept of Candor, or each person giving their honest feedback on the work and how it should be improved. Catmull emphasized Pixar works to remove power structures from the team that ensure everyone in these meetings, regardless of their position in the company, feels they have the right to give their opinions on the creative work.
Candor is a communication style that has actually been practiced in many of the top companies such as Google, Facebook, Pixar, and Netflix. A similar concept was developed by Amy Scott called “Radical Candor,” which is the idea that communication should be about “caring personally but challenging directly.” A big emphasis in this communication style is being honest with people about how to improve the work without personally attacking someone’s character (Radical Candor). Giving insincere feedback (Ruinous Empathy), criticizing the person behind their back (Manipulative Insincerity), or giving feedback that attacks their character and doesn’t address the quality of the work (Obnoxious Aggression), are all forms of communication that can hurt team cohesion. Despite this, Scott noted that this kind of communication can be quite common in a workplace environment. Having witnessed many of these same issues in the TU106 class over the years, I decided to take the concepts of good team building and candor, and implement it through a Pixar storyboarding process activity. An example of the process can be found below:
As you all can see from the above example, the Pixar storyboarding process is not a typical pitch you may see in which one person presents, the other people listen all the way to the end, and then give their feedback on the work. The Pixar storyboarding process is similar to a conversation. The presenter presents, but the people listening can jump right in, ask questions, make suggestions, and the presenter as he is hearing the feedback, dynamically incorporates the feedback into their presentation to make the work stronger. This way of collaboration is not typically done in many work settings, and was the basis for my experiment on teamwork which was done as part of the Stanford ITS program in Thailand.
The activity is pretty straightforward. The groups of 6–8 students are divided into two different teams: Storytelling team and the feedback team. The storytelling team is tasked with presenting the storyboard to the feedback teams of other groups. The feedback teams are to listen, ask questions, and also give constructive advice on how to further improve the video. Students in both teams are able to practice communicating with “radical candor,” and then fill out a feedback and reflection form in which they review what they learned from activity and note down the type of feedback they received, whether it was radical candor, obnoxious aggression, or manipulative insincerity/ruinous empathy.
There were a few unforeseen challenges that made this experiment more difficult. First, the original plan was to do this activity as a group online. However, last minute holiday scheduling by the university led to the class having to be cancelled, and due to the mismatching schedules of the different faculties, a make-up course could not be done online. Therefore, this activity was done asynchronously, with groups working on this Pixar storyboarding activity at their own convenient times and having their own Pixar storyboarding meetings when their group members were available. The storyboarding process led to some outstanding creative work but also some interesting observations from the participating students.
In terms of what the students observed from the activity, many of the students in their feedback forms noted the process was very challenging at first and they were not comfortable with the feedback process initially. However, each group became more comfortable with the process as met with more and more of the other groups. Below are some excerpts from the reflections of the different groups on the activity:
“We felt uncomfortable at first because we did not have enough perspective and ideas on what should we focus to give the feedback to another group. We were a bit afraid to give feedbacks because we were uncertain about our comments and afraid to ask questions. But after meeting more groups, we were more comfortable because we know what criteria to use in order to give feedbacks to other groups. It’s more enjoyable because we were more familiar with the process and what type of feedbacks to give to other groups.”
“”It is like we are the audience watching movie, but the different is we get to comment them and give them ideas about their project that what we think it good or need to be considered and changed.”
“”It felt slightly different for the first and the last group we had given our feedback. For the first group we were quite nervous since we have never done anything like this before and we were not sure how should we give the feedback. However, after we gave the feedback to a few more groups we gradually were more comfortable, and it went easier. We started to know what to focus on and how to say it in a radical candor way.”
Many of the groups also noted the different feedback they encountered and this data was compiled into the chart below:
Overall, after some challenges, all the groups seemed to not only learn something from the activity in terms of giving constructive feedback and knowing how to assess the kind of feedback that they have received. The activity though, is much better suited for synchronous learning and best in person. However, doing this activity asynchronously did yield some positive results.
In summary, addressing the challenge of teamwork and cohesion requires many different elements of reflection and active learning. The Pixar Activity is one way of enabling students to collaborate on equal footing with one another, while reflecting on the type of feedback they received. There are some promising returns on this activity not just for doing creative media work, but also for enabling students to think more about how they can give feedback toe each other that the team performance can improve.
