Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small

Caption notes

Looking back on Toy Story, Ed Catmull describes Pixar’s practice of showing unfinished work every day. He says that when everyone shows work in progress, it becomes easier to talk about what is going wrong. A successful film can also hide problems in how people work together. He recalls production managers feeling undervalued and the team responding by separating reporting lines from everyday communication, so colleagues could talk directly across levels. He uses these experiences to explain what it means to keep crises small: look for problems while the work can still change, and make the difficult adjustments before release.