Pixar U on Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age

We're at week four with our MindGamers, pictured right. Just passing the point where individual competitiveness starts to yield to trust - to actual curiosity and openness to the ideas of your team-mates. A great time to post the above from Pixar University on Improvisational Collaboration (via George Lucas' Edutopia.org). As always, examples from one industry, like Randy Nelson's, have application in others. That is, if you let them, if you don't insist that ideas must come from you (or your industry) before you'll give them grace inside your head.

Actually, that's a goofy conundrum for all ages, eh? -- I want to succeed, but on my terms, earning full credit. But I also want a safety net--blame insurance or cover--if I fail. The default position is not to try, because pain of failure, be it embarrassment, proven mediocrity or just choking, can seem that much more real and fear inducing than the far-off chance of success and its benefits. And that's kids and grownups. Hmm. Elizabeth Gilbert has some very cool thoughts on that part too. From TED...



Pretty good stuff. You de-mythologize and depressurize the "Creative Genius" or auteur trap by going back to the mythic root of the idea and the word. A "Genius" was what they called the Daemon whispering in your ear, not you, the creator. Saying "I admire your 'Genius'" was like saying "I admire your muse, 'Clio.'" You were just the channel, as cool and lucrative as that might have been.

As much as creative types (such as me from time to time) bemoan the John Wayne-ism or Jack-Welch-as-Oracle worship of the Business set, there's quite parallel types in action on the creative side of the fence: the tortured artiste of singular vision, the enfant terrible.