From Suck to Not-Suck

Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar and ran it for decades, put a sentence in his book Creativity, Inc. that I think about more than almost anything else written about organizations: early on, all of our movies suck, and our job is to make them go from suck to not-suck.

He meant it as a working principle, not a joke. Pixar's Braintrust, a standing group of directors, writers, and story people who watch each other's unfinished films and say what isn't working, only functions because the first version of every movie is assumed to be bad and no one in the room is embarrassed by that. The candor is not the culture's decoration. It is the mechanism. Each round of notes makes the next version a little less bad, and after enough rounds something exists that nobody could have planned.

I recognize that shape from the small-experiment loops I teach pastors and leaders: launch the smallest honest version of an idea, watch what actually happens, let what you learned change the next attempt. The loop itself is simple. What almost no organization I've worked with can supply is the room, a place where a first attempt is allowed to be visibly unfinished, where someone can say "this isn't working" without it becoming a verdict on a person.

That is the part AI makes both easier and harder. Easier, because a first version now costs an afternoon instead of a quarter. Harder, because when a polished draft appears in seconds, it is tempting to skip the honest evaluation and simply ship it.

From Dancing in the Wind: An Adaptive Leadership Framework in the Age of AI.

How honestly can the first version of anything be criticized in your organization, and by whom?