Notes Day

Posted on August 8, 2024 by David Hopkins

My third post on the lessons I’m learning from the amazing Creativity Inc book from Ed Catmull focuses on what Pixar came to know as ‘Notes Day’.

In short, Pixar had grown from 45 employees to over 1,200, and along the way, the culture of what started Pixar and how they worked (see Braintrust and Fail Fast, Fail Early) was becoming more difficult to see and feel. Not everyone who joined later understood the culture, very few had any notion of how it formed, or why.

The difficulty was that Pixar was losing itself to growth, that a siloed mentality existed where a transparent and open-door culture had previously existed. Historical success has bred a culture where the pressure of failure was higher than the learning that can come from it. Where everyone had a voice and was encouraged to use it had slowly been replaced by a hierarchical, typically business top-down culture. How do you get it back? How can you do this where everyone feels it, understands it, and has ownership of the change?

How, we all wonderered, could we maintain Pixar’s sense of intensity and playfullness, beating back the creeping consveratism that often accompanies success while also getting leaner and more nimble?

…

“You just give people the time, and they come up with the ideas … that’s the beauty of it: It comes from them.”

…

I believe that no creative company should ever stop evolving, and this would be our latest attempt to avoid stagnation. We wanted to explore issues big and small – to give candid notes to ourselves about the workings of the compaby, much like we would ive notes on a movie in a braintrust meeting. So it made sense, as we began to make the idea a reality, to invoke our shorthand term for candid feedback: notes.

Notes Day.

A day was declared when everyone was in the office … and no work to be done. Everyone one. No work! The whole business, from seniors and C-suite to the catering and estates. A clear goal for the day was determined and communicated – it was not a call to find out how teams could work harder, do more overtime, or work with fewer resources. It was about efficiencies, improvements, culture, wellbeing, ownership, responsibilities, technology, communication, clarity, and everything in between. Clarity of direction, and clarity of process. Whatever the business needed to discuss where it felt it was losing to growth or competition.

From an initial 4,000 email suggestions on what the day should dedicate time to solving, the list was whittled down to 120 common themes (nothing was ignored, no matter how big or small, stock or ‘way out there’) with facilitators and runners volunteering from across the whole business.

If you want the details on how the day was run, facilitated, etc, then read the book. What impressed me was the way the feedback was given and how the day was set up. We all know it’s not enough to ask a workshop attendee ‘How was it’ or ‘What did you learn’, you need to formulate and direct the thought process for pre-and post-workshop activity. This is how Pixar handled feedback … with ‘exit forms’.

Red forms were for proposals, blue forms were for brainstorms, and yellow forms were for something we called ‘best practices’ – ideas that were not action items per se but principles about how we should bahave as a company. The forms were simple and specific: each session got it’s own set, tailored specifically to the topic at hand, that asked a specific question. For example, the session called ‘returning to a good-ideas-come-from-anywhere culture’ had blue exit forms topped with the header: “Imagine it’s 2017. We’ve broken down barriers so that people feel safe to speak up. Senior employees are open to new processed. What did we do to achieve this success?” … What “benefits to Pixar” would these ideas bring? And what would be the “next steps” to make them a reality? Finally, there was space provided to specify “who is the best audience for this idea?” and “who should pitch this idea?”

Key to everything at Pixar and Notes Day is about the ownership of the idea, the openness at all levels and all employees to engage without prejudice in the process, to honour the outcome, and to learn from each other.

Creatively, this is dynamite.

… forms filled out by Notes Day participants weren’t shy about asking “who should pitch this proposal?” That was by design – we wanted the best ideas to be pushed forwrard, not to languish. So in the weeks after Notes Day, all those who’d volunteered to be ‘idea advocates’ were called in to work with Tom and his team to hone their pitches. Then, they began making them to me, John, and our general manager, Jim Morris – and together we immediately began moving to implement the ones that made sense.

Right there! Demonstrating that Notes Day had a valuable and tangible outcome, that the ideas that improved wellbeing, changed processes, updated technology, removed barriers, etc were seriously considered and implemented. Of course, some were easier than others – the ones that could be done quickly or easily were done just as much as the ones that required long-term investment and resources.

What made Notes Day work? Ed talks about the following three factors: