Most meetings today are an overhead on our time. You could replace them with status update tools, written documents etc. You often see people at these meetings distracted by their phones or laptops; or, for remote meetings, multi-tasking while on Zoom. Not the most effective use of anyone’s time.
Meetings don’t have to be this way. If you gather the right people to focus on a specific problem, you end up with a meeting that is creative, energetic and high impact. The outcomes of these meetings propel projects forward.
The emphasis here is that you want meetings to focus on specific problems, not status updates. I like to call these Creative Meetings. A creative meeting is one where the goal is to collectively explore and understand the nature of a problem. Over the years I have organized these creative meetings for various projects at companies as large as LinkedIn and small startups. These sessions have resulted in an increase in innovation and out-of-the-box thinking from teams.
The inspiration and structure for these sessions came from, Pixar, the animation company behind some of your favorite movies like Toy Story and Finding Nemo. In his book, Creativity Inc, Pixar President Ed Catmull gives a behind the scene look at what made them successful as a creative technology company. One of the practices that stood out was the concept of the Pixar Brain Trust.
The Brain Trust was a meeting that brought together key leaders and Producers at Pixar to review progress on ongoing productions and provide honest candid feedback. Directors would present their work-in-progress and use the meeting as a tool or a consultative body. The group analyzed progress of production against Pixar’s main goal, telling a great story. Honesty and candor were essential at these meetings. People highlighted areas where the story wasn’t working. They would identify flaws and weaknesses. However, they wouldn’t prescribe specific solutions, leaving that to the Director. The meetings would instead focus on exploring and understanding the problems, what worked and what didn’t work in the story.
It is this exploration of the problem, without jumping to solutions, that deepened understanding and perspective of the people in the room and lead to innovative decisions later on.
Catmull credits the Brain Trust as the cornerstone of what made Pixar movies memorable. The Pixar leadership introduced a similar meeting at Disney Animations after they were acquired. The results on creativity was palpable, leading to hits such as Frozen, Big Hero 6 and more. A good idea works well once, but a great idea is repeatable in different contexts.
The Creative Meeting
The goal of a creative meeting is to explore and understand problems. The meeting is a success when attendees leave with a deeper understanding of the problem-space, which can then inform their contribution to the solution. Note that this is different from getting together to think through solutions. Don’t expect to solve the problem at the these meetings. That’s not the goal. The goal is to invite diverse thinkers to explore the problem. This fuels creativity that leads to greater innovation.
I had implemented these ideas for the first time at LinkedIn. I had joined a new AI team focused on modeling the LinkedIn jobs eco-system as a 2-sided marketplace between job seeker and employer. We were taking concepts from programmatic ad technologies and applying them to the jobs marketplace. These were completely new and novel ideas. There weren’t a lot of existing solutions to our problems. The problem to solution journey wasn’t a deterministic straight line. We needed to spend time thinking through and exploring the problem space and various ideas. This is where typical agile or even waterfall approaches of software development were insufficient. Existing meeting structures weren’t enough to help us innovate.
I eventually introduced a 1 hour biweekly meeting called the Idea Forum. We called it the Forum to indicate that the meeting would involve cross-functional individuals. During each session we would focus on a set of problems related to the marketplace we were building. The conversations were free-flowing. Ideas were born, refined and deeply discussed. Each attendee went away with new avenues to investigate, prototypes to build and test. The format was a tremendous success.
You can super charge the creativity and innovation in your team using creative meetings. Let’s look at how you can introduce this in your teams.
Implementing in your organization
If your team quickly gravitates toward solutions that follow existing grooves, then they are likely not spending enough time on the problem. Your team isn’t maximizing innovation because the tools and environment don’t encourage it. Introducing creative meetings that focus on exploring and understand the problem will have major positive impact here.
The following general guideline will help you set your team up for success:
- Schedule a creative meeting to include a cross functional group of attendees. For example, for the jobs marketplace at LinkedIn, we brought together relevant PMs, Dev Managers, UX Designers, Economists to get as many different perspectives in the room.
- Keep the goal of the meeting focused on problem exploration, expansion and clarification. The outcome of the meeting will be a deeper understanding and appreciation of the problem and a possible set of avenues to explore for solutions. Going with the example, the UX team may have some ideas to mockup, the engineering team might have some technical approaches to prototype etc.
- Encourage radical candor amongst the attendees. In fact candor is crucial for these meetings to work well.
- Guide the meeting by keeping the conversation flowing, letting each attendee riff on ideas from other attendees. Let the conversation go deep, but keep track of other threads and pull the group back to them to ensure a thorough coverage.
- Take detailed notes of the discussion, or record the meeting for future reference.
Further reading:
Ed Catmull on how he helped foster creative collaboration at Disney and Pixar
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