The Plus Principle: Why Adding Not Subtracting is the Key to Exceptional Teams
Sully is one of Monstropolis’ top scarers. His tall, blue, horned and furry appearance elicits blood-curdling screams from children. Those screams then feed into the Monstropolis power grid and keep the city humming. In our world, what is more terrifying is that each one of Sully’s three million hairs had to be animated. Pixar Animation Studios created Sully, who is the protagonist in the studio’s blockbuster hit Monster’s Inc. Each second of the 96 minute animated feature film is composed of 24 frames. Sully’s hair is only one piece of an intricate puzzle of characters and sets. A legion of supercomputers renders each of those 138,240 frames to create what viewers experience in theatres. That successful end result relies not only on complex software but also on the artful critique between humans. Pixar’s teamwork practices transform critique-giving and receiving from the monster in your closet to a beloved creative friend.
Hundreds of people make thousands of decisions to create each Pixar feature film. There is never a perfect first draft. Rather, Pixar implements a daily routine that requires everyone to give and receive frank feedback that improves ideas over time. Ed Catmull, former president of Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, explains:
“The director and the other creative leaders of a production do not come up with all the ideas on their own; rather, every single member of the 200- to 250-person production group makes suggestions.”
That is a mountain of suggestion-making and suggestion-taking. It might seem like that amount of critique would impact morale negatively. The key is how Pixar workers give their feedback.
It is a style called “plussing” — you can only give a critique if you follow it up with a helpful suggestion. You can’t point out a mistake and leave it at that. Rather, you are part of the creative process. Plussing, or as we call it the Plus Principle, exists within a structured framework where folks on the team operate under clear expectations. The critique-giver and the critique-receiver both know the feedback process is for the good of the project. Everyone participates and everyone communicates. This type of relationship is built on trust, respect and also the minimal presence of power dynamics.
For example, Catmull explains that Pixar has structured critique sessions called dailies. Every day, people from across the myriad teams meet to review the previous day’s animation slides. This method was inspired by the animation process review sessions at Disney and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Lucasfilm’s special-effects company. Walt Disney, Catmull explains, believed this continual reinvention and change is a key to creating movie magic. During the dailies, “[p]eople show work in an incomplete state to the whole animation crew, and although the director makes decisions, everyone is encouraged to comment,” says Catmull. Employees don’t work for months on a project and then present a never-before-critiqued draft. The dailies require review of what was done over the previous day. This means people can learn from each other each day and apply their new learning immediately. It’s a more efficient process because mistakes are corrected early on.
Because commenters are viewed as peers instead of decision-makers, there is minimal power imbalance. The quality of the work is paramount rather than office politics. Catmull found that when he tried to export this feedback system to their technical teams, it didn’t work at first. He realized that the failure was rooted in the reviewer groups having a bit of authority. To counteract this impact, Catmull told the group “This is purely peers giving feedback to each other,” then the process began to work again. It became safe to tell the truth. This safety is one of the keys to Pixar’s success, says Catmull. It is important to create a framework that cultivates open communication.
Pixar found that when healthy feedback wasn’t happening, the quality of their movies deteriorated. For example, the studio went into production for Toy Story 2 at the same time as they were making A Bug’s Life. Catmull explains:
“We had enough technical leaders to start a second production, but all of our proven creative leaders…were working on A Bug’s Life. So we had to form a new creative team of people who had never headed a movie production.”
That new team was originally supposed to be creating Toy Story 2 as a direct to TV movie, but over time Pixar wanted to upgrade the film to the studio’s high standards. However, the original team was not set up with the normal Pixar structure to ensure their success. For example, the team was siloed in its own building, away from the other Pixar folks working on A Bug’s Life.
Karen Paik writes in To Infinity and Beyond! The Story of Pixar Animation Studios that this physical separation “had fractured the company’s sense of community and solidarity.” Toy Story 2’s “creative and production teams were experiencing internal conflict, and the personnel changes made to address the problems seemed to have little effect,” writes Paik. This turmoil and isolation from experienced employees meant plussing didn’t happen as it had throughout Pixar’s previous films. It wasn’t that the team’s problems were anything new to Pixar, it was that the feedback systems were not functioning to course correct. Paik quotes Lee Unkrich, who became the co-director of Toy Story 2:
“The movie was going off course in a way that we had gone off course on the other movies. But the problem was, we were all so busy trying to get A Bug’s Life made that we couldn’t take the time to wrap our heads around the problems they were dealing with, and try to help them fix them.”
Once A Bug’s Life was finished, leadership brought all hands on deck to rescue Toy Story 2, and Pixar’s reputation. Leadership reunited the beleaguered team with the rest of the staff and together they reworked the story anew. With the feedback structure in place, Toy Story 2 was a blockbuster success. The film grossed over $497 million at the box office and has a 100% score from critics on the review site Rotten Tomatoes.
If you are accustomed to giving a critique and your contribution ending there, the Plus Principle process might feel awkward at first. However, when employed in a safe framework, plussing spreads the creative load amongst all team members. Everyone has a stake in pointing out mistakes and fixing them together.
