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Why [fill-in-the-blank] Fails?

by Paula Thornton

November 9, 2009 at 8:21 pm · Filed under IT Department

Is asking ‘why something fails’ the right question to find or solve the real problem?

Michael Krigsman reports on Information Technology (IT) project failures, a great topic deserving of attention. On his hosted phone discussions, featured speakers share their stories.

Stories are wonderful mechanisms to thread together relevant facts. They often become objects of entertainment where facts are embellished with each telling — stories morph into ‘tales’. I suggest that failure often starts with basing business design on fairytales and folklore. Ironically, the best clues for changing this, are found among people who create fairytales professionally.

Pixar Storytelling

Lurking in your own DVD collection may be a treasure of clues. In the ‘extras’ for the movie Finding Nemo, is the documentary Making Nemo.

Their story starts with a premise, shared by Writer-Director, Andrew Stanton:

“We just want to make a good movie.”

There are many examples of journeys that started with “We just want to make/deliver a good [fill-in-the-blank]. A few ‘outtakes’ might suggest why Pixar’s results are different.

Executive Producer, John Lasseter says things I’ve never heard uttered from a leader in any enterprise I’ve been in, including some responsible for design (perhaps you have):

“I always believe in research. No matter what the subject matter is, you cannot do enough research…because so much believability will come out of what’s really there.”

Software, processes, products, services: these are all all abstractions of reality. To be successful they must approximate reality, they must be believable.

John Lasseter Lasseter then mentions:

“I went to every single person early on in the film and said…”

Whait! Personal contact from an executive leader? Is that in a rulebook somewhere? Lasseter continues:

“We cannot make a movie about the underwater world without you experiencing it firsthand.”

John insists they go onsite for research, and that they all get certified in scuba diving.

Suggesting any of this to Project Managers typically results in blank stares. Let’s start here: IT fails because of its methods. The methods are flawed. Requirements gathering is not the same as immersive research.

With a foot still in research, the Pixar team explores possibilities. Stanton asked his people:

“What is it that makes you believe that it’s under water?”

Figuring out what “under water” would look like resulted in “My First Ocean”. They got believable water, but it was more like a chlorinated swimming pool than ocean water. Stanton worked with his team:

“Each of these individual aspects of being under water looked great, but we couldn’t get them all to work in concert together. I just picked a couple shots of things above water and things below water from real footage [referring to live artifacts from their research] and I said, ‘Using exactly the tools that we have created and nothing else, I want you to see how close you can mimic these actual shots.’”

The results were too good. They came back two weeks later and the animation could not be distinguished from the live images. But their goal was believability, not reality. They still needed the feeling of a make-believe world for their animated creatures to live in.

Another telling differentiator in methods comes from Bob Peterson, Co-Writer:

“It’s really important for us sortof at the head of this big pipeline — before it gets to layout and animation, and lighting — to work this thing out right. That includes the pacing of a film, that includes the emotion — making sure that people are feeling things as the movie progresses.”

Unlike other projects, they started this one with a full screenplay, written by the Director. They thought this would make the effort easier. Lee Unkrich, Co-Director says:

“But the reality is that once you put these movies up in storyboard form, a lot of things come to light that aren’t clear when you’re just reading words on a printed page.”

Let me interject briefly: Requirements are just words on a printed page — they are insufficient for success. Another critical element that Stanton points out (the inverse of ‘final’ requirements as a goal):

“The thing that finally makes it on the screen is all about rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. A good portion of the rewrite process is not done by the screenwriter at a word processor…it’s the story department.”

They have a story department? Who are these people? Stanton explains:
Pixar Storywriters With Director Stanton

“…the guys that sit in a room with you for close two years, batting out ideas, countering your ideas, drawing up story panels, putting them up on a wall, pitching things, putting things on a reel down in editorial. It’s a very maleable, messy, glorious process.

When it works, it’s amazing. The power of what you can do with a group of great minds. But at times it can be very frustrating.”

When they reached an impasse the co-writers would get in a car and drive to some destination on their schedule rather than fly (e.g. for TV interviews, etc.). Sequestered together for hours, this forced them to just “talk it out” with no other distractions. Peterson says:

“We worked a lot of good stuff out that way. When I watch the film now I remember where we were on I-5 when this idea was brought forward.”

Storyboards are followed by story reels — complete threads of a story with pieces of animation (often both digital and hand-drawn artifacts) with voiceovers, music and sound effects to approximate the complete film experience. This is the template for the movie.

Then it’s back to the drawing board for the details — LOTS of details. The sketches of the original storyboard are replaced by full-color swatches, hand-drawn with pastels, to show the color themes and inform successive levels of detail, like lighting and motion.

Animators don’t just draw characters, they develop them — drawing them from different angles, with different emotions. Sculptures are then created of the characters. Now we’re talking 2D and 3D artists who inform each other’s work. Art Director, Ricky Nierva:

“That’s really when the magic happens. Starting to see that 2D drawing come alive in 3D. I get all this amazing information from it. I start seeing it in a new way. I start turning it around. I look at it from the top and the bottom, because you never know if that’s the way they’re going to be seen in the movie.”

This project required abandoning things learned before. All of the previous Pixar movies focused predominantly on bipedal characters (i.e. 2 legs). Dealing with marine life moving through water required new frames of understanding. No matter how talented or experienced the contributors, these circumstances were different. They had to adapt their work habits to a new set of heuristics.

As more and more people become part of the production, play and contests served a critical cultural purpose: getting people together to check out each other and their work. Their production is not a phase where leadership throws the work over to the team to be led by project managers — there is continuous review/feedback of the work by the leadership.

Their work is immensely collaborative. It’s not collaborating on bringing parts together. Various specialists touch the same pieces over and over again, adding their own value in its evolution. In the end, there are no individual star performers. The star power shifts to the results of the collective effort: the movie itself.

Let’s Recap

These are the artifacts of creative, immersive work at Pixar.

Immersive Research
Premise-Challenging Questions
Multiple Leaders “Work Things Out” Together
Possibilities Created by Storytellers, Sculptors, Animators, Modelers…
Physical Reference Artifacts used for Conversations
Specialists for: Color, Shading, Photography, Motion, Sound, even a Professor of Physiology…
Plans that Change via Continuous Discovery, Continuous Design
Incredibly Collaborative Work (including inspiring leadership)
Immersive Play

Thank you Pixar, for giving the rest of us a real life example — a model — to look at from different angles, to perhaps see solutions and business in a new way. Imagine what we could accomplish if we were to fundamentally change the way we approach our work — right now!

All images from Pixar

Postscript: Tweetpeep @nenshad immediately shared this great piece from the Wall Street Journal “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity“.

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MarkNovember 9th, 2009 at 10:20 pm

Terrific post, Paula, and thanks for making it relevant to readers and for making us reflect on this approach. A friend of mine took me on a tour of Pixar’s research for Cars and it was very similar. They had traveled Route 66 and picked up various samples (dirt, souveniers, photos, etc.) to capture that believability. You’re right; thank you Pixar!

Chris YehNovember 10th, 2009 at 1:49 pm

Fantastic post, Paula. I think you’d also enjoy the Brad Bird/Thomas Keller special feature on the Ratatouille DVD–awesome stuff.

RotkapchenNovember 10th, 2009 at 3:26 pm

Chris: Thanks for the pointer. I only sat down to write this because I was organizing DVDs so now I know exactly where Ratatouille is!

Esteban KolskyNovember 11th, 2009 at 1:10 am

Oooh!

First, amazing write-up. Truly one-of-a-kind. Examining thing from a different perspective is always a very interesting model to follow when looking for better solutions (what we call post-mortem in corporate-speak – right?)

In the spirit of looking for a different POV — how about taking a different approach. I am quite certain, because I know a lot of them and read some other interviews, that if you approach any person in that team and ask them why they do what they do you will get a look as if you just asked them whether you can date their mother. Then, they will sit you down and explain to you that it is not a job, it is a passion – a lifestyle. They chose to do this because sitting in a room for 6 hours drawing fishies with pen and paper (or a computer in 3D) is what they want to do, who they are, and what they hope to do until they moment they die — and they will die with a smile.

Now, and here is the interesting perspective, find that person in an implementation project.

That is why that works, and why ours don’t. Passion projects mean you commit to doing it, you don’t look to see whether there is a review-time approaching and you have to justify your position, or whether you can do a little bit less and still get away with it and spend the weekend away from the office, or similar behaviors. True, we may never find that person in our projects — but without them the model you describe is, IMO, not possible.

Just sayin’

Paula ThorntonNovember 11th, 2009 at 8:00 am

Esteban: I’m having another movie moment. I’m in Hook during the “I believe in fairies” scene. It’s as if (as I’ve done in immersive reframing sessions some teams have given me the privilege to share with them) people need permission to BE their true selves — to unleash their own passions at work.

Let’s simply start there: I hereby give you all permission (by the wave of my fairy wand) to bring your whole selves to work and to find ways to tap your own individual passions via your daily work.

Try it. Will it be easy? Is exercising easy? This is you, exercising your total, tremendous potential.

Let me know how your experiment goes.

RandyNovember 12th, 2009 at 9:04 am

Excellent article! My company, Capgemini just standardized on iRise (http://www.irise.com/), which I think is part of the point of your article. I haven’t used it yet, but it *looks* very powerful.

Thanks,
Randy

Paula ThorntonNovember 12th, 2009 at 6:01 pm

Andy: Don’t let me burst your bubble (especially since someone has now invested in a very expensive paperweight). iRise is the antithesis of 2.0. It’s a 400pound sledgehammer for putting nails in the wall.

This is where there’s good design, and then there’s meaningful design. iRise is an enterprise-class tool where enterprise-class is not relevant. Another measure of it’s applicability or qualification as 2.0-relevant is what I call the Google-training-metric. How much training do you need for Google-search? iRise takes a week. That’s just to learn the tool — then you need to figure out what standards you want to apply for your own environment so that they’re repeatable and you’re not reinventing everything from scratch with each project.

No — iRise is not relevant here. While I absolutely respect them for what they have done, and I’m typically keen on enterprise plans, the only time iRise would make sense is if you were automating an entire enterprise — ALL of it — that’s writing your own version of SAP and the like — then it would be worth the investment.