When you imagine the inner workings of any consistently creative team, you envision certain elements that seem to be requirements. You picture open floor plans, relaxed dress codes, pool tables, free food, and smiling, happy people everywhere. If you picture their collaboration, you imagine those teams being as happy creating as they are when playing pool. You picture teams that get along throughout the process. We assume that creative people thrive in fun, playful atmospheres and that they must therefore need playful interactions. This is the Cohesive Myth—the notion that the most creative ideas and products come from teams that suspend criticism and focus on consensus. The Cohesive Myth leads us to focus on team building, on making sure every person on the team works smoothly with everyone else. An excessive focus on cohesiveness, however, can actually dampen a team's creativity. It can narrow down options and cause those with a unique perspective to censor themselves rather than risk not being seen as part of the team. This myth is prevalent within a lot of organizations, but often the most creative teams, and most innovative companies, aren't focused on getting along all the time. While the exterior of these teams might seem as pleasant as we envisioned, their inner workings can sometimes pull creative insight from the opposite of cohesiveness: conflict.

The headquarters of Pixar Animation Studios, for example, make it look like the happiest and most cohesive place to work in the world. The company's sixteen-acre campus in Emeryville, California, has won architectural awards and has been featured in magazines and books for the beauty and intelligence of its design. When entering through the main doors, you're struck first by the sheer size of the atrium. The football field–sized room is a blend of glass windows, exposed brick, and riveted steel beams. The atrium's ceiling, two stories tall, is vaulted glass and steel, with bridges across the vast expanse and walkways along the walls of the second story. The atrium itself serves as the central hub for the entire building. It is home to the mailboxes, the café, the main bathrooms, and even a six-hundred-seat theater. Conference rooms line the side walls of the atrium, with glass, garage-door-style retractable walls for when the rooms aren't in use. The beauty of the campus shouldn't come as a surprise, given that the man who obsessed over the design and construction of the campus was Steve Jobs.

Pixar got its start not as a movie studio but as a computer hardware company. The roots of the company can be traced back to when George Lucas hired a team of computer animators (though that term was hardly used at the time) in the 1980s as part of a new computer division within Lucasfilm, though the relationships go back further. Lucas was interested in using computers to enhance cinematic special effects, or at least make them cheaper to produce. The idea that a computer could be used to make an entire feature film hadn't yet occurred to Lucas, but it had occurred to those he had hired. At the helm of this division was the trio of Ed Catmull, Alvy Ray Smith, and John Lasseter, all of whom were bent on using computers not just for special effects but to produce an entire movie. They even created a few short films to demonstrate their skills.

Despite their enthusiasm for making a feature film, Lucas only utilized the team once for the brief animation of a distant planet in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. Lucas, going through a costly divorce and tired of funding the expensive computer hardware, eventually soured on the idea of owning a computer division and sold the entire unit to Steve Jobs for $5 million (plus another $5 million in capital investments). Jobs was interested more in selling the hardware Pixar could design than in the short films Catmull, Smith, and Lasseter kept pushing to produce. However, he saw these films as an opportunity to demonstrate the power of Pixar's machines, so he kept funding them. Eventually, Tin Toy—a short film directed by Lasseter about a small metal toy trying to escape the destructive path of a young baby—achieved critical success and even won an Oscar. The success put Pixar in talks with the Walt Disney Company, who distributed Pixar's first full-length feature film, Toy Story.

Toy Story's breakthrough success began a hot streak of blockbuster feature films that continues to this day. The success of its sequel, Toy Story 2, funded the inspirational corporate campus envisioned by Steve Jobs. Jobs hired architect Peter Bohlin (who had also helped Jobs design the Apple Stores), and the two collaborated on a movie studio built like no other. Traditionally, movie studios sprawl out as wide as their campuses will allow, with separate buildings for each major function. Instead, Jobs wanted one building to house all employees. Jobs's theory was that a design scheme that steered employees toward a large central hub would result in large-scale collaboration. Jobs firmly believed that collaboration fueled the outstanding creative work Pixar sought and that chance encounters were the fuel for collaboration. The atrium is so large precisely because it is designed to be the home for these chance encounters. The mailboxes, bathrooms, game room, and conference rooms are all centrally located to force individuals from different divisions, with offices in different locations, to interact, share their work, and benefit from those discussions. The building was designed around Jobs's theory that chance encounters would prove to be serendipitous and help fuel collaboration and enhance quality. “Steve's theory worked from day one,” Lasseter later recalled to Jobs's biographer.¹ “I kept running into people I hadn't seen for months. I've never been in a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.”

The Pixar team's collaborative creativity isn't just evidenced in their films; it can be seen in how they've transformed all areas of the Pixar headquarters. There are larger-than-life representations of Pixar characters scattered around the campus, including a gigantic replica of the company's signature character, Luxo Jr., an animated lamp from one of Pixar's first short films, just outside the building. Many of the individual offices have been arranged in a U shape, with a central gathering area in the middle that encourages unplanned discussions on a smaller scale than those in the grand atrium. Some of the individual offices aren't traditional offices at all. Instead, they resemble playhouses or tiki huts, whatever the offices' owners choose as a theme. Perhaps the most creative of all these examples is the Lucky 7 Lounge, a speakeasy hidden behind the bookcase of an animator's otherwise nondescript office. The lounge wasn't part of Jobs's original plan. Instead, it was created after animator Andrew Gordon's chance discovery of a small access door on the back wall of his office that led to a low corridor meant to provide access to the heating and air conditioning units. The animator and his colleagues transformed the bonus space with mood lighting, a full bar, and even custom-printed napkins.

From the eccentric offices to the smiling employees playing foosball or Ping-Pong, it's easy to see that the Pixar team members enjoy being around each other and collaborating on projects of all sizes, whether award-winning movies or hidden cocktail lounges. There is an energy to the campus that is felt around the atrium and in the chatter of employees all over the main building, now named the Steve Jobs Building in honor of its creator. It's impossible to resist extracting lessons about creative work teams and collaboration after seeing the Pixar campus. Pixar employees work together; they have fun together. Walking around the campus, it's hard to imagine employees fighting. Yet fight they do. For many of the animators at Pixar, conflict and debate are just part of their morning routine. It may be the happiest place to work in the world, but during these debates it can seem far from the most cohesive.

The animators, directors, and computer scientists at Pixar start many of their workdays inside a small screening room just off the main atrium where project teams gather for meetings, known as “dailies,” to review their work from the previous day.² Those inside the screening room are given free rein to criticize and challenge every aspect of the animated frame. Nothing is left unexamined. No detail is too small to critique, and no one is prohibited from challenging someone else's work. Everything from the angle of the lighting to the timing of certain sound effects is brought up, discussed, and debated. Frame by frame, the Pixar team fights over the details before settling on how to improve the frame. Beyond just the dailies, Pixar filmmakers also attend quarterly meetings to review their work. “They present ‘the film’ to other filmmakers,” explains Pixar president Ed Catmull, “and they'll go through and they will tear the film apart.”³ Given that it takes twenty-four animated frames to complete a second of movie footage, this can be a laborious process. But while “shredding” each frame can be draining, the Pixar teams know that the process is vital to their ability to release quality films again and again. The more debate around each frame, the higher the end quality of the film.

Pixar values friction so much that it is built into how teams are formed. After the success of Finding Nemo, Pixar's leadership worried that their company might be getting a little too comfortable with its creative process. They brought in director Brad Bird as a member of the team. Before joining Pixar, Bird had worked with Warner Brothers on The Iron Giant, a traditional animation film that won critical acclaim but was also a failure at the box office. Pixar executives wanted Bird's first project with them to be different from their usual film offerings. They wanted to use Bird's entrance to create some productive friction at Pixar. “So I said, ‘Give us the black sheep,’” Bird recalls. “‘I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody's listening to.’”⁴ Bird recruited a team of malcontents for a new film that most believed couldn't be created inside the budget and technology constraints that existed. Bird's black sheep brought considerable friction to the process of making films, but it paid off. Pixar's The Incredibles was an instant hit at the box office and added two more Academy Awards to the company's trophy case. “We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and changed the way a number of things are done around here,” Bird says. “For less money per minute than was spent on the previous film, Finding Nemo, we did a movie that had three times the number of sets and had everything that was hard to do.”

It's easy to look at Pixar, or any creative team, and see its cohesiveness and friendly workplace as the reason for its success. From that perspective, the morning shredding sessions and hiring of malcontents may seem counterintuitive to the creative process and like a drastic contrast from the open, laid-back feeling of Pixar's main atrium. But just below the surface of many outstanding creative teams, you'll find that their process relies on structured conflict, not cohesion.

It's difficult to trace the Cohesive Myth back to its origins, but most cite brainstorming's creator Alex Osborn with popularizing the myth. Recall from Chapter Eight that Osborn's brainstorming is much more rigid than what most people have probably experienced. In Applied Imagination, Osborn wrote guidelines for facilitators and specific rules that must be observed for a brainstorming session to yield maximum creativity.⁵ Chief among these rules is the idea of suspending criticism. It was Osborn's belief that criticism and conflict stifled creativity by triggering people to withhold their ideas for fear of criticism. So in order to get a team to generate large quantities of great ideas, he believed that teams needed everyone to share his or her ideas in a stream-of-consciousness fashion, holding nothing back from the group. If people withheld their ideas, then the entire brainstorming process would be subverted.

Although it most certainly existed before him, after the publication of Osborn's book, the pursuit of cohesiveness in creative teams truly began. Leagues of creativity theorists tried to validate his theories by conducting studies and building models in support of harmony and cohesion. Some of these theorists supported ideas similar to Osborn's concept of evaluation apprehension. Others believed that creative ideas developed deep inside the human brain, claiming that as we get older and more “sophisticated,” our more advanced thought processes self-monitor our creative ideas and eliminate them in the presence of criticism and conflict. This theory appears to explain why children, uninhibited by self-monitoring, appear to be inherently creative, yet as they grow older and their actions are evaluated, most of them lose interest in creative pursuits. Logically then, if we want to recapture our creative thought process, we need to build an environment that emphasizes harmony, suspends judgment, and prevents conflict, the assumption being that such an environment would allow individuals to cease their self-monitoring and tap into their childlike creative process. However, a growing body of research supports the opposite conclusion. It could be that the conflict, evaluation, and confrontation brought about by expressing and debating differing viewpoints drive teams to an overall more creative output.

Perhaps the most famous study in support of the idea that conflict enhances creativity is an experiment that was led by Charlan Nemeth, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Nemeth and her team wanted to explore the role of conflict in generating and producing creative ideas.⁶ They assembled participants into three separate experimental conditions (minimal, brainstorming, and debate) and formed them into teams within those conditions. Each team was tasked with generating ideas for the same challenge: how to reduce traffic congestion in the San Francisco Bay Area. The “minimal” teams were given no further instructions and told to develop as many ideas as possible. The “brainstorming” teams were given the traditional set of brainstorming rules: generate as many ideas as possible, defer judgment on all ideas, generate wild ideas, and build upon each other's ideas. Paramount among those rules was the notion that all judgment should be suspended and no idea criticized or debated. The “debate” teams were given a set of rules similar to the brainstorming teams but with one important difference. Instead of deferring judgment, they were told to debate and criticize others' ideas as they were generated.

When the results were calculated, the winners were clear. Although teams in the brainstorming condition did generate more ideas than the teams given minimal instructions, it was the teams in the debate condition that outperformed the rest, producing an average of 25 percent more ideas than the other two conditions in the same period of time. Even after the teams had disbanded, the influence of debate on the generation of ideas continued. In follow-up interviews with each subject, researchers asked the participants if they had any more ideas for solving the traffic problem. Each participant from the minimal and brainstorming conditions did have one or two more ideas, but participants in the debate condition gave an average of seven additional ideas per person.

Nemeth and her team considered that the study might have been a fluke or even a decidedly American phenomenon. To rule out these possibilities, they reran the experiment in Paris using the exact same methods and instructions, except that teams were asked to resolve the traffic problem for Paris, not San Francisco. The results were the same. Teams that utilized conflict in their process consistently outperformed teams that focused on cohesion. In a summary of the study's results, Nemeth challenges the conventional wisdom of suppressing debate: “Our findings show that it does not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.”⁷

Conflict and criticism aren't just useful for generating ideas. They may even be useful for elaborating on individual ideas and weaving them together into a comprehensive whole. In a 1981 study conducted by Nancy Lowry and David Johnson, both psychologists at the University of Minnesota at the time, groups of fifth- and sixth-grade elementary schoolchildren were separated into teams and tasked with researching and writing a group report.⁸ Half the teams were told to work together but to avoid conflict and compromise when agreement wasn't possible. The other half were instructed to listen to everyone's ideas but to be critical of the ones they didn't agree with. In the end, the students who were instructed to fight over their ideas produced a report with more in-depth research and a more logical presentation of the rationale behind their own ideas. They also displayed a greater ability to weave the ideas of many students together so that the end result was stronger and more comprehensive, showing that even at an early age, individuals are able to learn how to use constructive conflict when working together and allow that conflict to create a better end product.

The power of debate for improving the end result is something Alfred Sloan discovered on his own. The long-time chairman and CEO of General Motors once interjected during an important meeting by asking, “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here?”⁹ Sloan then waited as each member of the assembled committee nodded in agreement. Sloan continued, “Then, I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what this decision is about.” Sloan knew that his team stood little chance of developing creative solutions to their problems unless he allowed for, and encouraged, disagreement.

The rationale behind Sloan's actions is supported by empirical research which shows that when ideas aren't yet fully formed, criticism and constructive conflict are vital to testing and strengthening the value of those ideas. “Constant argument can mean there is a competition to develop and test as many ideas as possible, that there is wide variation in knowledge and perspectives,” explains Robert Sutton, professor of management science at Stanford University.¹⁰ Conflict is an indicator that diverse viewpoints are being considered and that the competition for ideas is still ongoing. During this competition, ideas are strengthened through further research, longer consideration, or the blending of different ideas into one that is stronger. In contrast, when everyone in a group always agrees, it can indicate that the group doesn't have very many ideas, or that they value agreement more than quality suggestions. When teams always agree, they don't push their ideas as far as they can; so overly cohesive teams rarely produce outstandingly creative works, whereas teams that seek to improve their ideas through debate are far more likely to generate innovative ideas.

But fighting for the sake of fighting isn't likely to prove very effective either. It has to be the right kind of fight, and it has to be over something worth fighting for. There are two types of conflict: “interpersonal” or “emotional” conflict and “task” or “intellectual” conflict. In interpersonal conflict, people don't fight over the merits of the ideas; they fight over personal conflicts, power struggles, or even just a general dislike for each other. Rather than pushing ideas to become better, these conflicts are often toxic and can be destructive to individuals and teams. Task conflict, however, is notably more productive because it is limited to the facts and merits around an idea. People fight over which ideas are best, based not on their personal opinions but on the value of each suggestion. Feelings are spared because the structure of the fight keeps it focused on producing a better end result, not just winning or losing. However, limiting the conflict within a debate to task conflict alone is difficult. Groups that debate can often find that their arguments get personal. Conflict is good, but keeping that conflict good isn't easy. Teams that can walk that fine line, however, can bring out innovative insights from everyone on board.

Evernote, a cloud-based software company, owes its existence to such task-focused conflict. Evernote is an online note-taking program launched in 2008. Though the company's Redwood City, California, offices now bustle with laughter, things didn't exactly start that way. CEO Phil Libin says that the company was born out of conflict. Evernote began as two separate companies both looking to create a way for people to store information and recall it on demand, what is now referred to as a memory “extension.” A serial entrepreneur, Libin had assembled his original team under the company name Ribbon but almost immediately learned of another team of mostly Russian programmers who called their project Evernote.¹¹ The Russian coders had already made significant progress on Libin's idea, so Libin proposed a merger. Rather than fight each other in the industry, the two companies joined forces and fought each other inside the same walls. “Evernote was created in this unusual way: two startups with similar visions but different personalities and backgrounds,” Libin recalls.¹² “Immediately, we had a conflict of ideas, but that's what made it strong: Only the best ideas survive.” The two teams kept their conflict focused on the overall mission of creating a product that simply and easily allows people to save notes and retrieve them from a variety of platforms like their phone, tablet, or computer. Even today, when conflict arises, it's usually in the service of Evernote's larger mission and not the smaller mission of individual interests.

In the 1970s at Xerox PARC, regularly scheduled arguments were routine.¹³ The company that gave birth to the personal computer staged formal discussions designed to train their people on how to fight properly over ideas and not egos. PARC held weekly meetings they called “Dealer” (from a popular book of the time titled Beat the Dealer). Before each meeting, one person, known as “the dealer,” was selected as the speaker. The speaker would present his idea and then try to defend it against a room of engineers and scientists determined to prove him wrong. Such debates helped improve products under development and sometimes resulted in wholly new ideas for future pursuit. The facilitators of the Dealer meetings were careful to make sure that only intellectual criticism of the merit of an idea received attention and consideration. Those in the audience or at the podium were never allowed to personally criticize their colleagues or bring their colleagues' character or personality into play. Bob Taylor, a former manager at PARC, said of their meetings, “If someone tried to push their personality rather than their argument, they'd find that it wouldn't work.”¹⁴ Inside these debates, Taylor taught his people the difference between what he called Class 1 disagreements, in which neither party understood the other party's true position, and Class 2 disagreements, in which each side could articulate the other's stance.¹⁵ Class 1 disagreements were always discouraged, but Class 2 disagreements were allowed, as they often resulted in a higher quality of ideas. Taylor's model removed the personal friction from debates and taught individuals to use conflict as a means to find common, often higher, ground.

The teams at Pixar rely on their own method to keep their daily sessions focused on intellectual conflict and to avoid personal bickering. They call that method “plussing.”¹⁶ Whenever an idea is challenged or an animated frame criticized, that criticism must always contain a suggestion about how to improve the work—a plus. Suppose a team of animators and directors has assembled one morning to examine a few frames of footage in which one character smiles at another. If one animator challenges the type of smile the character gives, perhaps saying it looks inauthentic or as though the character is smiling but not legitimately happy, then she must also add suggestions for how that facial expression can be tweaked to be more authentic—perhaps tightening the sides of the character's eyes as the smile grows from frame to frame. Different animators and directors use different language when they plus their criticism. Some provide a specific suggestion; others might preface their suggestions with a “what if” such as, “What if his eyebrows arched as he smiled?” Regardless of the style used, the result of plussing is always the same: it gives the criticized animator a new direction or something new to work with. The animators and directors on the receiving end of the plussing don't necessarily have to accept and incorporate the feedback, but plussing provides a method to share criticisms in a way that makes it more likely that they will. Just as the criticism groups in Nemeth's traffic study challenged each other and produced more ideas because of that, teams at Pixar challenge potential problems with a film and then plus their criticism, beginning the process of generating ideas for improvement. When animators leave the meetings, they can implement the ideas from plussing, or, as Nemeth's study suggests, they might come up with more ideas on the way back from the meeting and choose to implement those. In addition, plussing keeps the atmosphere inside the screening room positive and focuses the attention on the frame in question, not the animator who produced it.

Without plussing, their morning crit sessions could get pretty negative and emotionally draining. “You always want to present your ideas in a constructive manner and be respectful of the other animator's feelings,” says Victor Navone, an animator at Pixar since 2000.¹⁷ Animation is a labor-intensive process in and of itself, with long days spent producing less than a second of film. Knowing that the next morning your work will get torn apart and that then you'll be back at the drawing board (or computer) trying to repair the frames leaves little to look forward to. Ed Catmull explains, “And it's very important for that dynamic to work … [T]here needs to be the feeling they are all helping each other and the director wants that help.”¹⁸

With plussing, the meetings are imbued with a positive tone and a direct connection between criticism and newer or better ideas for the work. Plussing doesn't ease all of the tension, however. It's always difficult to watch as your work is analyzed and criticized down to the smallest detail. But when that criticism is part of a larger end goal like an award-winning new film, it is a little easier to process. Pixar's dailies still feel like a fight, but they feel like the healthy, respectful fights that keep creative teams churning out quality work consistently.

It's easy to look at the output of a group like Pixar or Evernote and make assumptions about its creative process. The Cohesive Myth leads us to the assumption that if we want to be as creative as Pixar or make innovative products like Evernote, we need to build teams that are happy and playful all the time. Although the folks at both companies certainly enjoy their work and their teams, they also understand that conflict, not cohesion, can drive their creative process. When we focus too much on making our teams cohesive, we give up the creative boost that comes from having to defend an idea. We lose the ability to strengthen the idea through criticism. If instead we learn how to fight properly, how to use conflict to enhance our creative potential, then our teams and our organizations stand a better chance of generating consistently great ideas.

2. Ed Catmull, “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity,” Harvard Business Review 86, no. 9 (2008): 65–72.

3. Ed Catmull, interview with Martin Giles, the Innovation Summit, March 23–24, 2010, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.

4. Quoted in Andy Boynton, Bill Fischer, and William Bole, The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make Them Happen (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011), 109.

5. Alex Osborn, Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Problem Solving (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957).

6. Charlan Nemeth and others, “The Liberating Role of Conflict in Group Creativity: A Study in Two Countries,” European Journal of Social Psychology 34 (2004): 365–374.

8. Nancy Lowry and David W. Johnson, “Effects of Controversy on Epistemic Curiosity, Achievement, and Attitudes,” Journal of Social Psychology 115 (1981): 31–43.

9. Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive (New York: HarperBusiness, 2006), 148.

10. Robert Sutton, Weird Ideas That Work: 11½ Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation (New York: Free Press, 2002), 85.

11. David Freeman, “Say Hello to Your New Brain,” Inc. 33, no. 10 (2012): 72–78.

15. Warren Bennis, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 122.

16. Peter Sims, Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries (New York: Free Press, 2011).