Manage Communication and Coordination to Achieve Synergy

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Organizations that rely on design and creative problem solving need to manage communication and coordination to achieve synergy.

Manage Communication and Coordination to Achieve Synergy

“We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
Sir Winston Churchill

The italicized text is a condensed summary of the first four pages of the first chapter of  “Creativity Inc.”  by Ed Catmull. Catmull describes some barriers to team communication and coordination that were inadvertently established early in Pixar’s infrastructure and practices that over time became serious impediments to the free flow of ideas and insights. This meant that Pixar, which relied on collaborative design and creative problem solving to flourish was not gaining the full benefits of the synergy of talent they had assembled.

Creativity Inc: Manage Communication and Coordination to Achieve SynergyFor thirteen years we had a long skinny table in the large conference room at Pixar, it had been chosen by a designer Steve Jobs liked: it was elegant but it impeded our work.

We held meetings about our movies around that table. Thirty of us would face off in two long lines, often with more people seated along the walls. Everyone was so spread out that it was difficult to communicate. For those unlucky enough to be seated at the far ends, ideas didn’t flow because it was nearly impossible to make eye contact without craning your neck.
Because it was important that the director and producer of the film in question hear everyone, they were placed at the center of the table along with Pixar’s creative leaders and a handful of our most experienced directors, producers, and writers. To ensure that these people were always seated together, someone began making place cards.
I believe that job titles and hierarchy are meaningless when it comes to creative inspiration. But we had unwittingly allowed the table and place cards to send a different message. The closer you were seated to the middle of the table, the more important you must be.
Those farther away were less likely to speak up because their distance from the heart of the conversation made participating feel intrusive. If the table was crowded, as it often was, still more people would sit in chairs around the edges of the room, creating a third tier of participants:  those at the center,  those at the ends, and those not at the table.
Without intending to, we’d created an obstacle that discouraged people from jumping in. But those of us in the center saw nothing amiss because the meeting was collaborative for us. But everyone else saw an established a pecking order and assumed that had been our intent as leaders.  Who were they to complain?
This passage outlines a common problem startups face as they scale: communication and collaboration methods that work fine for a team of 4-6 don’t scale to teams of 30-60. And yet, to harness the full creative power of the larger organization, you need to adapt your infrastructure and practices to work effectively at scale. It’s also beneficial to delegate key aspects of a project to smaller teams, but at key points in the development of a new product or joint creative undertaking, you need to open up the conversation to a larger group.

the full creative power of the extraordinary team they had brought together.

Then we happened to have a meeting in a smaller room with a square table and the interplay was better, the exchange of ideas more free-flowing, the eye contact automatic. Every person sitting at that table, no matter their job title, felt free to speak up.

John Lasseter and I realized that, sitting in our comfortable middle seats at the long, skinny table, we had utterly failed to recognize that we were behaving contrary to that basic tenet. Over time, we’d fallen into a trap. Even though we were conscious that a room’s dynamics are critical to any good discussion, even though we believed that we were constantly on the lookout for problems, our vantage point blinded us to what was right before our eyes.

Even after all these years, I’m often surprised to find problems that have existed right in front of me, in plain sight. For me, the key to solving these problems is finding ways to see what’s working and what isn’t, which sounds a lot simpler than it is. ”

I admire Catmull’s candor in acknowledging that uncomfortable moment when the senior executives realized, in effect, that King Arthur was on to something when he seated his knights at a round table. I have seen other executives, faced with the need to admit that they have allowed their organization to persist in practices that no longer make sense, recoil and double down on “the way we’ve always done it.” They save face in the short run but doom their team or organization to ineffectiveness and ultimately irrelevance.

There are a number of challenges that Catmull needs to address to achieve his desire for effective creative collaboration that spans multiple levels of the organization’s hierarchy, that encourages cross-functional communication, and leverages the insights of newcomers while honoring the experience of long-time employees. At some level being able to sit in the center of the table with your seat guaranteed by a place card provides a certain amount of status. It can be painful to be challenged by lower-level employees who have less experience in the industry and less tenure in the company.

Communication and coordination problems occur at multiple levels and time scales in an organization. A dysfunctional meeting is, in many ways, easier to detect.  After one meeting in the room with a square table, Catmull and his leadership team realize they need to make changes immediately.
Other problems, in particular the need for new coordination mechanisms and communication channels that don’t add unnecessary delay and bureaucracy, can be harder to spot. As Catmull observes, “I’m often surprised to find problems that have existed right in front of me, in plain sight. For me, the key to solving these problems is finding ways to see what’s working and what isn’t, which sounds a lot simpler than it is.” It can be hard to see what’s right in front of you. We move like fish in water, unaware we are wet.

Key Takeaways

Every communication channel has it’s own strengths and weaknesses. Effective teams and organizations learn to rely on a mix of written forms of varying lengths and levels of formality, data at different levels of granularity, stories, presentations, recorded audio and video, and conversation. Pay attention to what the different modes of communication you rely on and their benefits and drawbacks.

Decisions need to made before they are overtaken by events. This imposes deadlines and the need for input from knowledgeable and affected parties. This tends to bias important urgent decisions toward synchronous meetings.

To determine what’s working and what’s not, you need a mix of measurement and intuition and a willingness to gather input from a wide range of sources. You have to be open to input and accept criticism and bad news gracefully or you will find yourself encased in a bubble happy talk that may bear little relation to the facts on the ground. One of the more pernicious side effects of the leaders taking the best seats, protected by place cards, is that it communicated they wanted the folks on the periphery to listen but not to speak up.

Communication problems in a design organization manifest in the products or projects it delivers. If different sub-teams find it difficult to communicate, for whatever reason, and their work product must mesh, there will be problems.

“The basic thesis of this article is that organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. We have seen that this fact has important implications for the management of system design. Primarily, we have found a criterion for the structuring of design organizations: a design effort should be organized according to the need for communication.”

In “How do Committees Invent” Melvin Conway’s observed what come to be known as “Conway’s Law.”

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