Be Less Zombie

36Be More Human

Original ideas rarely emerge from mechanistic bureaucracy. Serious innovators work with their people's humanity, not against it.

Every one of our films, when we start off, they suck…our job is to take it from something that sucks to something that doesn't suck. That's the hard part.

Ed Catmull, founder of Pixar, in Creativity, Inc.

For most organisations, the journey of creativity is hugely inconvenient.

We like instant solutions. We want cordon bleu but expect it out of the microwave in 60 seconds.

Often the hardest innovation truth for leaders to grapple with is that big ideas aren't born ready. They're born ugly.

And for more big ideas to show up, they need deliberate, persistent incubation and iteration. But it's unpredictable, and that's an inconvenience to a corporate machine built for repeatable certainty.

Ugly Pixar babies Frozen and Toy Story 3 evolved into $1 billion+ box office hits (not to mention the merchandising revenues). But each one was a long, deliberate and necessarily messy pursuit of greatness.

And what's true for Pixar is true universally: if you want higher order creativity, you can't escape the ugly duckling journey. It takes time and there are rarely shortcuts.

But there's more.

Human Creative Performance

For human beings to create beautiful and original swans, certain things need to be true.

Whilst great innovators deliberately create ...