Hi ,
Today’s issue is about how the real reaction to questions or decisions might not get shared, and what that can mean for organisations.
Today at a Glance
Why agreement in a meeting can hide real disagreement
A simple practice that gets objections out before people leave
Why small, close-knit workplaces pay for this more than most
Nine months to rebuild a movie
Nine months before release, Pixar's leadership watched a screening of Toy Story 2 and reached a brutal verdict: it wasn't good enough.
The story was flat. The emotional core was missing. It was boooooring.
Disney wouldn't move the release date, so the team had one choice: rebuild the film almost entirely, from scratch, in nine months, a process that normally takes years.
They did it, and Toy Story 2 became one of the best-reviewed sequels ever made, earning nearly half a billion dollars worldwide.
But that wouldn’t have happened if Pixar didn’t have a specific kind of meeting in place. Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull had built a review process called the Braintrust, where senior creatives could tear a film apart with total honesty, because the group had zero authority to force any change.
Nobody was managing their comments for whoever held the power to greenlight or kill the project, because nobody in that particular meeting held that power.