Teaming at disney animation

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Professor Amy C. Edmondson, Senior Fellow David L. Ager, independent researcher Emily Harburg, and Research Associate Natalie Bartlett prepared this case. It was reviewed and approved before publication by a company designate. Funding for the development of this case was provided by Harvard Business School and not by the company. HBS cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management. Copyright © 2014, 2015 President and Fellows of Harvard College. To order copies or request permission to reproduce materials, call 1-800-545- 7685, write Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA 02163, or go to www.hbsp.harvard.edu. This publication may not be digitized, photocopied, or otherwise reproduced, posted, or transmitted, without the permission of Harvard Business School.

A M Y C . E D M O N D S O N

D A V I D L . A G E R

E M I L Y H A R B U R G

N A T A L I E B A R T L E T T

Teaming at Disney Animation

Disney Animation produces entertaining films enjoyed worldwide and also happens to be a first-class Studio for technological advancement. Producing animation is a fantastically complicated blend of art and science and it requires many coordinated experiments to create. We view all of the 900 Artists, Engineers, and Scientists in our studio as filmmakers and each has a creative part to play in the process.

— Andy Hendrickson, Chief Technology Officer, Disney Animation

Jonathan Geibel, Director of Systems at Walt Disney Animation Studios (hereafter referred to as Disney Animation), walked through the workspace occupied by the group he had been tasked to lead. Geibel knew he was part of a creative and magical environment. The Disney studio had created more than 53 feature animated films in over three-quarters of a century—beginning with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 through to Frozen, released in November 2013 and awarded the Oscar for Best Animated Feature in March 2014, the first Academy Award in that category for Walt Disney Animation Studios. In late March 2014, Frozen became the highest-grossing animated feature, worldwide, of all time. There was a period in the history of the 90-year-old studio, not so many years ago (and prior to John Lasseter and Ed Catmull’s leadership), when Disney Animation had become more structured and hierarchical, and it wasn’t always easy to work across departments to innovate. Yet the work, which involved both high-tech computer animation and creative storytelling, was more cross-disciplinary and dynamic than ever. Geibel wondered what he and Ron Johnson, whom he hired and teamed up with to re-envision the Systems group within Disney Animation, could do to improve the flow and the efficiency of the organization’s increasingly technical and creative work. Geibel and Johnson had already made dramatic changes in the work structure and in the physical space to promote the effective teamwork that was so essential to producing compelling, engaging, animated films. Now it was time to figure out how well the changes were working and what further changes, if any, were necessary.

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Background

The magic of Disney Animation had enchanted audiences for decades. Roy and Walt Disney founded the company in 1923 in Burbank, California, creating Walt Disney Animation Studios (known then as “The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio”). Initially, the company produced animated short films and, in 1937, released the first full-length animated Hollywood feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. With Walt Disney’s legendary talents as a storyteller and innovator, Disney Animation continued to revolutionize feature film, from Fantasia, Pinocchio, and Dumbo to Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and The Jungle Book. In the late 1980s, a new generation of filmmakers, who had been inspired by the studios’ earlier films, created such classics as The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty & the Beast, and The Lion King in a period often considered a renaissance for the studio. (Exhibit 1 shows Walt Disney participating in an early storyboarding meeting.)

When Disney acquired Pixar in 2006, CEO Bob Iger asked Pixar President Ed Catmull and Pixar Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter to also take on leadership of Disney Animation. In 2007, as part of their changes to their studio, Andy Hendrickson was hired as chief technology officer (CTO). Under the guidance of Catmull and Lasseter and Disney Animation General Manager Andrew Millstein, Hendrickson was tasked to transform the science of animation at Disney. The first step was to find the right people to innovate a new culture.

In 2010, Hendrickson recruited Jonathan Geibel to join the team as the Director of Systems at Disney Animation. Geibel had worked at Disney for 10 years, and had extensive experience on technical teams as a Senior Systems Engineer and a Production Engineering Lead. Geibel expressed interest in testing out new ways of working in his group, inspired by the vision set by the new leaders. As he recalled, “[Catmull and Lasseter] came in and set up a new culture where leadership was trusted; people felt trusted and empowered. They also promoted ‘failing quickly’—the idea that there are both successes and failures when striving to innovate and the best thing is to try and have your mistakes and learn from them early in the process. This new leadership sparked changes like our new teaming structure.” Geibel set out to restructure his team by flattening the hierarchy. He envisioned a dynamic organization with the agility of a startup company, breaking down traditional silos, empowering engineers, and supporting experimentation.

Later that year, Geibel promoted Ron Johnson, who had worked at Disney Animation since 2007 as a Senior Systems Engineer, to Manager of Systems. Geibel and Johnson had spoken frequently about management, and they shared similar beliefs about the operation and leadership of technical teams. As Geibel explained, “We had both gone between being engineers and being managers of engineers several times throughout our careers, and that back and forth allowed for a lot of learning and perspective.”

Walt Disney Animation Studios

Animation—the technique of creating the illusion of movement from static figures—had a long history. One of the first entirely animated films, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, appeared in 1906,

directed by James Blackton, who was considered the father of American animation.1 Since those early days, animation technique had been dramatically transformed, with Disney Animation being one of the leading innovators of this transformative process.

An animated feature at Disney began with stories that would resonate with audiences. Visual breakdowns of story sequences were created. These “storyboards” illustrated the visual message, emotion, and approximate timing of a scene in a form that was roughly described as a “comic book”

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depiction of the film. The sequences were pitched, debated, and refined until the story was clear and the next phase of image production began.

In hand-drawn animation, frames were drawn to depict the characters, props, and backgrounds of a scene. Artists called animators created the look of substance and form, the appearance of cinematic lighting, and the perspective of camera. Animators created slight variations of those drawings, which were different from still-life paintings, to represent visual snapshots of a scene over time. Using the multiplane camera, which was a Disney innovation, the drawings were then recorded in successive frames of film. After developing, the film was projected onto a screen at the rate of 24 frames per second, giving the illusion of movement and bringing the characters to life.

In the hand-drawn style of animation, there were many stages of the process as the drawings were refined. Rough animation used pencils and tracing paper to block out the character movement and timing. Animators often flipped between multiple drawings to gauge motion. In the early years of hand-drawn animation, “in-betweening” and cleanup animation came next, where the rough pencil sketches of major character poses were “filled in” with additional drawings to smooth transitions between poses, and the rough pencil sketches were finalized with clean ink lines. The final ink lines were painted onto transparent plastic “cels” that allowed for the subsequent step of painting in color. Pinocchio, an example of this process, was created by a team that consisted of over 750 individuals, each with a unique contribution.2

In the late 1980s, Disney Animation began to utilize computing to assist in the creation of animation using the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS). CAPS allowed the hand- drawn animation to be created as individual “pieces,” which were managed by the computer as

unique layers.3 Those pieces would be assembled, or composited, into a single image using the repeatability and precision of a computer. CAPS brought Disney to the forefront of hand-drawn technique, advancing from the multiplane camera with a digital computer equivalent, for unprecedented levels of complexity depicted in the films. The Rescuers Down Under, released in 1990, was the first animated feature to be made with CAPS.

In 2014, when Disney Animation created a film using computer animation, production started with artists creating models built using computer-Aided Design (CAD) systems that were cousins to similar systems used in architecture and engineering. Those models were then applied to a mathematical model skeleton. Animators breathed performance into character by animating the model to move the animated figure in a scene.

Computer simulation had become omnipresent in animated features, creating such character items as hair and cloth. For example, one of the most challenging aspects encountered in the making of the film Tangled was ensuring that Rapunzel’s hair appeared natural and real. This required much back-and-forth iteration between artists and technical engineers in order to develop tools that could accurately represent the flow and movement of hair.

The current frontier used simulation to create cinematic lighting. The physics of photon transport and responses to light energy by materials were captured in a mathematical model that Disney used to represent the world of an animated feature. Artists used digital virtual equivalents of real stage lights and theatrical techniques that mimicked the real world to create cinematic lighting. Additionally, cameras were represented in digital scenes with realistically simulated parameters. Every nuance was computer simulated, including lens distortion, chromatic aberration, and depth of field. All of this simulation required an extraordinary amount of computing capability.

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By 2013, Disney Animation contained a 30,000-core computer cluster for simulation and lighting, 6 petabytes of data storage, a 1.5 megawatt data center, and over 1,800 Macintosh and Linux workstations. Driving all of this capability were 900 highly skilled artists, engineers, and scientists telling stories through words, music, and images with the most technologically advanced tools in the world.

Disney Animation Systems Group Structure (prior to 2010)

After Disney’s acquisition of Pixar in 2006, Catmull and Lasseter, along with Millstein, assumed responsibility to lead Disney Animation. By 2014, Disney Animation comprised several departments. The Technology department was headed by Hendrickson and included both Software and Systems departments.

Prior to 2010, the 50-person Systems department was organized in traditional units, each consisting of 15–20 technical staff. (Exhibit 2 illustrates a traditional team structure in the Systems group.) Managers coordinated projects from their upstairs offices. Meetings were held one-on-one with group members, and every few weeks the entire group met in a formal conference room. Final technical decisions were often made by managers and implemented by group members. Individuals were hired for a specific role or promoted from within. Top-down reorganizations were occasionally made to accommodate changing technologies. At the time of these shifts, individuals were often reassigned into new groups, reporting to a new manager.

Once individuals were assigned to groups, task boundaries were clearly drawn. Geibel reflected:

In the past, we rarely saw resources (budget or people) flow between silos, even when it was obvious that moving resources to other areas was in the best interest of the studio. The studio environment is highly dynamic and changes rapidly, and our organizational structure was getting in the way of our ability to react to the changes. After observing the situation for a few years, it became obvious why this was happening. Managers were being judged by how effective their silos were performing. If a manager gave away resources to another silo, they would have fewer resources to accomplish their goals. This caused a mind-set for managers to hoard and protect these resources throughout the year. The competition for resources became extremely apparent during budget season when managers would fight with one another to obtain the most resources they could for the goals they set out for the upcoming years.

It wasn’t just managers who felt the boundaries between groups. Jim Bette, a systems engineer, explained, “It was very siloed, as in ‘this is our space, that is yours.’” Manager Matt Schnittker added, “It felt like giving was a bad thing. You wanted to protect your domain and hold onto your resources.”

Changes in Structure and Workspace

Geibel and Johnson began the transformation of the Systems group by seeking ideas from various sources to guide their approach. For example, they were influenced by the work dynamic typical in startup companies and management concepts such as the Matrix Model. Wary of large, sweeping reorganizations that changed too many variables at the same time, they created their own approach to transform the group. Geibel outlined the change process that Johnson and he finally adopted:

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Our approach to change is based on principles of the scientific method. Organizational changes are done methodically, with the intent to evolve over time. We study and discuss current problems that exist in the organization. We make one change at a time so that we know what worked, what did not work, with learning being at the center. We observe how it affects the system, we gauge its impact, we learn, we generate another theory, and debate the results. If something works, we do more of it. If something does not work, we learn from it and try something different. Everyone is involved in the process, not just management. Our technical staff members are contributing just as many ideas as the management team. We try to ensure critical thinking is happening at all levels. If you think a process could be made better, we encourage people to speak up, offer new ideas, run experiments, and share the results. The same art of experimentation and problem solving that happens on technical problems is now being applied to evolving the way we organize ourselves and build teams.

One of the first theories they tested was the use of small autonomous teams to break the formation of previously established groups, with each team focused on a particular specialty. The teams would be responsible for specific tasks or problems that arose in the studio, for example, networking and technical support. There were many questions related to size, structure, and composition. Geibel, together with Johnson, engaged in a series of experiments. For example, Geibel explained:

We set up a weekly hour-long leads meeting, which we intentionally made optional so each week we’d have a different number of people in the room. Some of the most interesting moments happened during meetings where people would stagger in at different times. We noticed in the jump from six to seven participants the quality of the discussions dropped dramatically and often people would go silent. We saw that happen over and over and came up with the idea not to have more than six people in the room when we were having a working meeting.

Geibel concluded that their organization should consist of small, autonomous teams of two to six people, and began by selectively assigning employees to various “specialty” teams.

Shortly thereafter, Geibel and Johnson observed that employees were confused about who was coordinating the work and how to allocate their time. This led them to define clear roles for team members. Each team would consist of a lead and several primary members, and occasionally would also comprise a few secondary members. (Exhibit 3 presents a sample team and role assignment grid.)

Team Leads

The teams would be headed by a team lead, someone who had been identified as a technical subject-matter expert and who had demonstrated a strong vision for the area. Geibel created a two- page lead doctrine, shown in Exhibit 4, outlining expectations for those in a lead role. He explained:

We’re not going to be rewarding them for sitting in an office and dictating orders. The lead is not administrative in nature. They’re doing the work alongside of everyone else and leading by example. Hopefully 80% of their job is doing the work and 20% is establishing a vision and evangelizing their ideas to key stakeholders across the studio. The goals of the leads were to be transparent with their ideas and to be open to feedback from their peers and management. It is not mandatory to execute on any or every piece of feedback, regardless of the source; it’s up to the lead and the team to decide which ideas are best to move forward on.

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Bert Faerstain, a member of the Media Engineering Team and team lead of the Displays Working Group, explained:

I head up the displays working group for the studio. I have substantial background and interest in this area and many of my coworkers already knew that this was my hobby for years. I research this world in my spare time outside of work, so it’s my passion and they knew this. My team and I are tasked with continually advancing our display standards for the studio, while weighing options to balance our requirements, the direction technology is headed, and overall value.

Catmull had inspired the idea of having team leads through his “director-driven studio” model, where an individual was in charge of the story, pitching to peers for voluntary feedback that their teams would sort through to look for new ideas to help propel their films forward. Storytelling was in the hands of the filmmakers themselves.

Whenever new technologies would emerge that required the formation of a new team, Geibel or Johnson would approach the broader group with the opportunity to lead the new team. They would then look for the person who had the most compelling vision and whom they felt could effectively drive a team forward, regardless of his or her current title. Titles played very little role in deciding team leads. Geibel and Johnson wanted to generate the best ideas and to execute on them.

The creation of the team lead position offered technical individuals the opportunity to move up within the company. Technical team leads enjoyed the same status and compensation as the traditional “personnel” managers. Engineer Jim Bette described how this change affected his career growth motivation:

Now I feel like you don’t have to be in management to move up—you’re all more on the same playing field; it’s more based on what you bring to the table. You don’t have to be a manager; you can be a technical lead, and technical leads are now considered the top of the organization. This has freed up a lot for the managers—managers can maintain people’s career growth, handle reviews, and make sure people have what they need.

Primary and Secondary Team Members

Employees could also be assigned as primary or secondary members to specific teams. Every employee played a primary role on one team and had the option of playing secondary roles for any number of teams. Employees were expected to focus most of their time and effort on their primary team and help out, when needed, on those teams to which they had been assigned as secondary members. As Johnson explained:

Secondary players helped us to tap into peoples’ other skills and passions across the organization. We wanted to enable everyone to utilize all of their skills, whether it was a specific technical skill or a soft skill. Sometimes we’d add a secondary player to a team simply because they asked good questions and got the team thinking differently. Other times people were brought onto teams because of their attention to detail or project management abilities. Whatever the various teams needed, we could often find someone with a specific skill somewhere in the organization to augment the teams with. People seem to want to have secondary roles and to help other teams, which is great, but it is always expected that your primary team is where your first responsibility lies.

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In the previous structure, team members worked only in the areas supervised by their managers. As Geibel explained:

We had network engineers who had a passion for software development. We had Windows systems administrators who also happened to have skills in database administration. We had a systems engineer who also had a passion for mobile software development. In the old organization we would have had to pick one of these skills and now we can leverage all of them. It’s very motivating for our staff to know that they can contribute to and be a part of so many different areas across the organization.

To avoid problems found in matrix organizations, such as employees feeling conflicted about demands among competing managers, the use of primary and secondary designations established expectations that held employees accountable first to their primary team. Team leads understood these expectations, and never battled over the time of an engineer who might be playing a secondary role on the team but was primary on another team. Team members liked the opportunity to manage their own time across multiple teams and pick areas they were passionate about.

Geibel and Johnson spent considerable time on team membership issues, but this did not guarantee performance. Geibel explained, “One year, a new team member joined a very high- performing team, where everyone knew each other very well. By adding this team member, the work dynamics on the team changed drastically. I provided a great deal of feedback to the individual, and made sure we allowed enough time to try and make the personalities gel, but we eventually had to pull them off the team.” Johnson reflected on the decision to pull the person off the team: “You have to be very creative in these moments not to punish that person. It’s all about finding the right fit. With new people coming in, we move them around and find the most effective place for them.”

Other Structural Changes

Geibel and Johnson applied the same teaming structure to their own management team, creating a small six-person management group made up of a diverse set of managers who were passionate about engineering and business operations and who trusted and respected each other. Because the team leads were responsible for creating a vision and running day-to-day operations for their areas, the managers were able to focus on career and team coaching and technology investment strategies.

Managers were expected to lead by example and spend at least 20% of their time being hands-on. Geibel and Johnson found that the best way to earn the respect of employees was by working alongside them. This also helped ensure a connection to what was happening “on the floor.” The management team also acted like a venture capital firm, deciding which technologies merited investment of both dollars and staff time, and setting expectations for each team, so as to align team goals with the broader direction of the studio and the vision of the CTO.

Geibel and Johnson proceeded to experiment with other aspects of the team, such as the location of team members. Geibel described an early experiment:

We created a small team with a specific scope and selected a few people to be on the team. We relocated their workspaces so that they were proximate to one another. Suddenly, conversations were flowing; people were more engaged and more focused on the topic. . . . Everyone heard what was going on in real time and they began to engage in ad hoc brainstorming sessions together. Permanent whiteboards were used to help in the exchange of ideas, and most formal meetings were abandoned since communication happened organically.

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Shortly thereafter, Geibel and Johnson started to reconfigure the entire workspace for the Systems department so that teams were collocated. Casual meeting spaces were embedded in technical areas so that teams never had to schedule or relocate to formal conference rooms to engage in discussions. Geibel asserted:

Conference rooms don’t work for most meetings or discussions. When there’s a large formal conference table, there’s a psychological effect that happens. People are programmed to walk in and stay quiet in these rooms and listen to the person sitting at the head of the table. They shut down. With enough reinforcement we can probably get over that, but it’s going to take a long time so we don’t use conference rooms for anything.

Patrick Danford, the lead of the Media Engineering team, described how the changes had affected the work of his group: “When you are all sitting together, that works really well. . . . E-mail is not the best way to get information when it needs to happen fast.”

Geibel described the behavioral changes in the group after changing the office setup:

Collocating individuals allowed ideas to flow each day through ad hoc meetings. Individuals would often brainstorm, pause, and walk over to a whiteboard for further development rather than needing to arrange a specific time and space to meet. With high priority and chaotic work, physical proximity was key.

Geibel and Johnson also wanted to improve the communication to the managers in the group. They decided to give up their offices, which were located away from their staff. They moved to workspaces in the center of the Systems area. Since they no longer had offices with doors, they decided to convert one of the former offices into a shared meeting area where they could conduct confidential meetings and one-on-ones with their staff.

The new structure enabled Geibel and Johnson to conduct frequent walkabouts to tour the office and check in on teams, and it enabled communication to happen in real time. If something was going on, they would know about it immediately. Decisions began to happen in real time; all forms of formal status reports, update meetings, and formal communication channels were no longer required to keep everyone up to date.

Teams changed dynamically as the needs of the studio changed, without requiring a traditional top-down reorganization. As new technologies emerged, Geibel would announce the prospect for a new team within the Systems department. He would look for the staff that had the best ideas and strongest vision for how to integrate the new technology. Often this person would become team lead. Over time, resources were reallocated to the areas where they were most needed and away from older technologies. Frequent opportunities to move forward onto newer and more exciting projects meant that employees would rarely hold onto or protect resources assigned to soon-to-be-obsolete technologies.

The use of short-term teams was not uncommon. Teams created on the fly were often formed around a specific problem. For example, the studio unexpectedly hired 200 additional artists. Geibel announced that the Systems department needed to temporarily increase the staffing on its frontline technical support team to accommodate the sudden increase in demand for their services. Within hours, he had a multitude of volunteers, each of whom had already talked with their own team leads to postpone other projects. The technical support team was doubled in size within 24 hours. As Geibel reflected, “We had senior-level engineers jumping in for a few months to handle frontline

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calls. We’ve strived to create an organization that is less title-centric and more collaborative in nature. If there’s a team that needs help and you have the necessary skills to assist, then we highly encourage everyone jumping in and supporting each other.” Yet, when they had first implemented the small autonomous team concept, Johnson looked at the new organization with concern, “Did we just build 14 new silos?”

Team Meetings

Geibel and Johnson’s goal in instituting small teams had been to foster informal communication. Working groups met only as needed, although some teams had established a regular standing meeting every second week, lasting no more than one hour. Meetings were generally focused on solving problems or meeting with key stakeholders or (internal) customers from other parts of the studio. Often, it was not possible to address all items in a single meeting. As Johnson explained, “There’s more work than can possibly get done . . . and that’s okay as long as we identify the high- impact issues and prioritize them appropriately.” The team decided its own prioritization of items. Occasionally, the upcoming release of a film could bump items higher. As Faerstain explained:

The team is generally in agreement about what we need to tackle. We really challenge one another in order to reach agreement. We keep discussing it and hitting it until there is agreement. If there is no progress, we shelve it or figure out a way to bring more data back to the next meeting, at which time we will adjudicate what we should do. This, though, is very rare.

At the conclusion of the meeting, the team was often left with a list of tasks that required action. Individuals within the team volunteered to own specific items from the list. Faerstain explained, “It is valued when someone grabs something and runs with it.” (Exhibit 5 shows a meeting in the Systems Department.)

Additionally, Geibel conducted a Systems staff meeting every other week. He used the meeting to, among other things, broadcast all major events within the studio. This was an open forum to ask about and discuss the major projects occurring in the studio at large and a forum where teams could update everyone on their major projects and milestones that had been met. (Exhibit 6 presents a picture of the Systems Department at Disney Animation.)

A New Approach to Communication

Aside from meetings, Geibel and Johnson thought all work should be accessible to any team member. They asked each team to create a yearly road map for their goals. The road maps were broadcasted to the entire Systems team. Anyone who disagreed could talk to that team lead. Additionally, Geibel and Johnson created a master calendar to show major milestones throughout the year. This calendar was situated on two large whiteboards in a main hallway. Each team used different colored Post-it notes to show major events. If something changed, team members would walk out to the main hallway, remove the Post-it note, and replace it with a new one.

Marc Jordan, an engineer in the technology group, commented:

It’s a very collaborative environment and I feel empowered that I can make decisions that will impact the studio. I also feel that it is my personal responsibility to make sure the right people are consulted and the right communication takes place. This is personally what I have always really wanted. . . . The sense of empowerment coupled with the sense of responsibility to make things happen.

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Geibel also looked to change the way they communicated with their customers, also referred to as clients, who included the production and post-production groups. Jordan commented:

The personalities of the technical folks are very different from those working on the show: the artists. Not only that, but our areas of expertise are very different, so how you influence them and they you, how well you communicate what is important and make sure you are getting heard on the other side is critical to your success.

Although they acknowledged these “technical” differences, Geibel and Johnson had to interact with these client groups using the same informal approach they had implemented in their own teams. In addition to collaborating in hallways and on an ad hoc basis, e-mail and texting were frequent methods of communication, allowing team leads to manage direct contact with the client to which they had been assigned. Berenice Robinson, the vice president of Post-Production, recalled that while working on the mixing stage, she would text the visual effects supervisor to make sure she had the right shot. She stated, “It is the immediate response that I can get for communication to save me time and money.”

Geibel and Johnson frequently approached customers’ desks to engage in conversations about technology. Hank Driskill, Technical Supervisor for Production, referred to this as a “social engineering exercise” that linked the artists to those in charge of running the machines. He described, “You could pick up the phone and call, rather than sending an e-mail to a system.” Geibel tried to bring this information to his clients right away to set technological expectations. Jordan commented:

If you aren’t afraid to be honest about a bug or a feature that is going to take three weeks to happen, this serves to build trust. They trust us enough to tell us their issues and they trust that we won’t freak out. On the flip side, if we say there’s an issue, it is incumbent upon us to figure out how to solve the problem. We can’t say we aren’t meeting the solution too many times; that won’t work. You need to deliver on the promises you make.

Not everyone thought full transparency was a good idea. Geibel reported:

There was one moment where a team member thought we were being too transparent to our customers. He thought we should create two e-mail lists, one for the customer, one for us. This was a moment that we all sat there and rethought, “Is this wrong? Are we going to alienate customers if they see all the problems we are working on? Ultimately, we chose open communication.”

Changes in Work Process

Geibel had introduced a work process to his teams that was based on the approach that film artists used. This process, referred to as “dailies,” required artists to show their ongoing work product to directors or peers. This “creative refinement” process had long been practiced in the motion picture industry, where demonstrations and showings were king. Geibel described a recent screening of a segment of an animated film to illustrate how the process worked:

All kinds of people were invited to sit in and take notes on the film and share their creative notes with the “owner.” It is up to the owner to decide what to do with the notes. There is fearlessness in giving notes. It was interesting the first time we invited technology folks to the screening. We thought we would get a bunch of notes about the technical aspects of the film. Instead, these folks wrote about their level of engagement

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with the characters, the effectiveness of the story arc, and the realness of the relationships between the characters in the film.

Hendrickson commented on the process, “There is only so much theorizing that can be done. You need to build, draw, make . . . and we expect it to be less than 100% the first time. If something comes out 100% right the first time, you aren’t trying hard enough.” The approach had received widespread acceptance throughout the team. It was not uncommon for a group of “techies” to be found presenting software enhancements to a group of artists, with the latter providing comments and feedback, sometimes of a very technical nature.

Experimentation

Teams were expected to generate multiple ideas and test different approaches to address a problem or exploit an opportunity. As one team member explained, “Geibel or Johnson might respond to a new idea by saying ‘Well, that’s a good idea, go make that happen!’”

Hendrickson, the CTO, explained:

The only time you fail is when you don’t try! There is a grand series of different experiments we run every day. Many organizations undertake R&D but rarely conduct organizational experiments. We feel today’s workforce wants something different from the strict hierarchies of the 1960s office worker. We view the team dynamic as an organizational experiment. We try something. Did we achieve the expected outcome? What did we learn from it? Let’s move on organizationally. It’s all about trying experiments. What did you predict? What happened? How will you fix it? What will you do next?

When I came here, things were very rigid. There was lots of blaming going on. I think about making great technology as my success factor. Problem solving brings me . . . us . . . happiness. My art is keeping the lab and experimentation and balancing these against deadlines.

Experimentation by one group of employees led to the creation of Coda, an in-house queuing system for managing render-compute jobs for artists. Jordan explained that, when in need of a new queuing system, someone asked, “How hard would it be to write our own system?” The team decided to give it a try. Geibel and Johnson were onboard, encouraging the formation of a Coda team. The team began by holding informal gatherings with four to five people, brainstorming how the new system should work. With an idea, one team member would then mock it up. Jordan remarked:

The members of the team were very comfortable with each other. It was not uncommon for someone out of the blue to say, “I have an idea. Let’s meet.” Next thing you knew, three or four people were sitting on couches in a common space, marking up whiteboards. We spoke our minds. No one’s ideas were dismissed. People could say anything, regardless of how stupid they thought their idea was. Even if you were called on your idea, you didn’t take it personally. We trusted one another and knew that the comment was not personal but was intended to help the team make progress on an issue.

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The physical proximity of Coda team members proved to aid in the experimentation process as well as to create the real-time, informal communication found in startup companies. If someone overheard a conversation and had something to contribute, he or she might join in part of the conversation and then go back to work. As Jordan explained, “I might walk across the hall to talk to Scott about something in Coda I am looking at, Kevin in between might overhear me and stick his head in to contribute to what is going on or he might yell something out the door. It helps that we are physically proximate; otherwise you would not know what is happening.”

Geibel and Johnson found themselves frequently reminding team members that failure simply meant that one had unexpected results. As engineer Michael McClure explained, “I think we’re transparent enough that if there’s a failure, [Geibel and Johnson] want to investigate and dig into this. They want to look into it and they think it’s almost cool. Maybe we catch failures early and minds are changed?” Therefore, they encouraged learning new ideas that resulted in unexpected results and reporting failures in order to catch mistakes early. As Johnson avowed, “All failures have a silver lining somewhere. If we failed, we have learned something new.”

Taking a Backseat

Geibel and Johnson tried to interfere with teams as little as possible. One employee noted:

There is trust that we will grab on to interesting projects to get involved in, and by our interest we will want to do a good job without being told we have to do it. This allows them to “oversee” us individually, without having to get into the nuts and bolts of what it is we are doing—which is somewhat a waste of their time; there is no need for them to have to know how or what we do, as long as the needs of the community are being met. Of course, there is technical know-how on both their parts, so they are familiar with the work going on, but they don’t have to know it all.

Geibel, Johnson, and the rest of the Systems Management Team met each week to discuss how they thought each team was operating. If something was not working well or a team was not delivering on its goals, the management team discussed the situation. Then, the manager of the lead of the team stepped in to fix the problem, working with the lead to brainstorm how to do this.

Johnson described the approach:

When a team is failing to perform, our goal is to quickly identify the root cause of the dysfunction. This requires trial and error. Sometimes we change one element of the system, such as moving one person off the team and substituting someone in their place. Sometimes this works. When it doesn’t, we will continue to make changes to the team until the root cause has been identified and the team is functioning at a high level.

McClure remarked, from the perspective of employees, “Shuffling goes on periodically. It’s not earth shattering when it does. It’s not about blowing up teams, but it is about [Johnson] and [Geibel] spending time studying what everyone in the team is good at, what they are passionate about, and trying to match skill set of the job to the skill set of the person.”

Getting the teams to work effectively took a lot of Geibel’s and Johnson’s time and effort. Sometimes it required well-honed conversational skills and patience. Johnson recalled:

One time there was a team member who seemed really frustrated, and other team members seemed to be taking it personally. [Geibel] asked the team member, “How are you feeling?” and he ended up saying that he hadn’t been sleeping because his child

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was staying up all night. It was helpful to know what was going on, because we can all be quick to internalize negative emotions and take it as our fault, when it might be a totally disconnected reason.

A Work in Progress

Geibel hoped to instill a culture in which technical teams had total autonomy, so long as their work got done. In the initial experiments, team members were instructed to choose their hours, attire, office arrangements, project management methodologies, team meeting structure, and more. Despite these instructions, some engineers continued to ask for permission to make changes such as moving desks around in the office. He might respond by saying, “What do you think? What is best for your team? What is best for your customers?” Geibel commented on the difficulty of instilling autonomy:

We’ve built teams where technical leads don’t have to ask for permission to change the way they are running their teams. We placed them in their roles because we felt they were the experts in their area and best suited to understanding what’s best for their customers. We’re still working on people thinking that way spontaneously. The culture is ingrained in everybody because the average tenure is 15–40 years. If you’ve worked in a top-down organization for that long, it’s going to take a while to adapt to a new culture where everyone is expected to challenge the status quo and where there’s an expectation that critical thinking is happening at all levels.

Geibel and Johnson continued to experiment with approaches to communication. One idea was to build an internal Twitter-like communication tool, where each team could “tweet” certain problems or solutions. Johnson explained the idea:

One of the problems we encounter is how to foster cross-team learning. Playing off of current social media concepts, we came up with an idea to create an internal micro- blogging or tweeting system. Whenever an engineer has an idea, an “aha” moment, they could “tweet” about it internally and other people can follow their favorite topics and comment in real time.

Another idea was to host forums with interview-style sessions, where experts asked and answered questions. Geibel wanted to pursue this idea as a method of exploring broader topics and engaging larger audiences without charging leads with the task of creating complex, formal presentations.

Johnson also proposed a remodel of individual offices into group workspaces. Conversations with employees had generated both positive and negative reactions. Some saw this as a method for increased sharing, communication, and collaboration, while others saw it as a loss of personal space, the loss of the ability to “hide” when feeling annoyed, and the loss of the ability to shut out noise, especially when trying to think carefully about the solution to a complex problem. Many predicted that employees would begin to wear headphones in the office as a result. In keeping with the scientific method, Geibel and Johnson ran one experiment to eliminate the walls and offices in one eight-person engineering pod, finding that the benefits far outweighed the drawbacks. Yet, they were unsure of whether this approach was appropriate for every team. Geibel explained:

In an ideal scenario, we would use different office space layouts to optimize what’s best for each team or individual, instead of using office space as a status symbol. In traditional organizations, people with higher titles would get larger private offices and

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others might be placed in cubicles. Instead, we’d like to remove the status element. If someone is an extreme introvert and is highly sensitive to noise, then maybe that employee gets a private office so we are getting the most out of them. We also try not to separate management from employees. In our opinion, managers of all levels should be central to where the most activity is taking place and not hidden away in a remote private office.

Additionally, the management team engaged in interesting debates on measuring success, hoping to remove metrics that might produce “wrong behaviors.” Geibel stated, “Our focus is highly relationship driven instead of data or metrics driven. We try to measure success by the strength of our relationships with key customers and stakeholders, which we measure on a day-to-day basis by walking around and being present.” Geibel and Johnson encountered this issue when working with the Technical Support Group, where the number of tickets (reports based on a particular issue) measured success. This encouraged employees to fulfill tickets that took little time and effort, and avoid larger, more complicated issues.

Finally, Johnson and Geibel had talked to each other about the possibility of eliminating position titles within the group, just as they had eliminated the traditional hierarchy. Geibel explained:

The world is based on titles and hierarchy. With our new organization, we’ve started to break down those walls. When we build new teams, we staff them with the people with the best ideas, regardless of their titles. We never want our staff to feel limited by what their title is. We want to unleash the full potential of every employee, allowing them to apply their skills in every way possible without bounds, and our new organization provides the flexibility to do just this. We also don’t want people to undervalue or overvalue ideas based on the title of the person with the idea.

Titles were useful for publicly recognizing employees who had done great work, or for motivating employees based on salary levels. At the same time, people could box themselves in with titles. Geibel said, “People tend to be motivated by having great people to work with, challenging problems to work on, and being given the ability to do that, and feeling like we value what they contribute. That’s really what motivates most of the people that work on their team. Now how do we come up with a compensation package for that? It’s all relative.” Geibel added, “Emotionally, this could represent a very big win, but it could be one of the dumbest decisions I’ve made in a long time.”

How could Geibel and Johnson instill autonomy in the new teams? Would employees accept working in a shared environment? How would they measure success? What should they do about titles? Ready for their next walk around to the various teams, Geibel and Johnson looked out from their central location within the dynamic office environment they had created, glanced back at their full Post-it note calendar on the wall, and considered the impact of the recent and impending changes of their teaming model on Disney Animation’s performance.

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Exhibit 1 Walter Elias Disney in a Storyboard Meeting for Grasshopper and the Ants (1933)

(L to R) Webb Smith, Ted Sears, (?), Walter Elias Disney, Pinto Colvig, Bill Cottrell (obstructed), and Albert Hurter.

Source: Walt Disney Company.

Exhibit 2 Traditional Teaming Structure

Source: Walt Disney Company.

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Exhibit 3 New Teaming Structure

Source: Walt Disney Company.

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Teaming at Disney Animation 615-023

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Exhibit 4 The Lead Doctrine

Systems Lead Role Expectations, v1.3.0

TIME COMMITMENT: The below responsibilities should only account for at most 20% of the lead’s time.

General ▪ Responsible for the ultimate success of the team ▪ Responsible for the day-to-day operation of the team ▪ Primary team members should be getting direction from their leads on a day-to-day basis ▪ Responsible for building the right team with the right players ▪ Responsible for building the right teaming area ▪ Responsible for coordinating team hours & schedules, including vacation time and coordinating

coverage for outages ▪ Responsible for maintaining the list of projects, tasks and core responsibilities of the team as well as

who owns what ▪ Responsible for pitching and defending budget items within the Systems organization as well as

tracking spends throughout the year for their area ▪ Responsible for rallying the troops and taking ownership of large issues in real-time ▪ Expected to not be yes-people ▪ Expected to challenge the norm. If you don’t like a policy or procedure, or think something could

be done better, challenge it, no matter whose policy it is. ▪ Expected to not become a status monger ▪ Expected to have a strong opinion for topics within their area and be able to voice and defend their

opinions in group forums ▪ Expected to share information transparently and openly

Awareness ▪ Team members: leads should have a thorough understanding of what each primary member of

their teams are focused on every day. ▪ Top problems: leads should have a thorough understanding of the top issues in their team day-to-

day ▪ Major projects: leads should have a thorough understanding of where their top projects stand day-

to-day

Technical Ability ▪ Expected to be an expert in the disciplines owned by the team ▪ Expected to stay on top of industry trends for their area ▪ Responsible for the development of short-term and long-term technical roadmaps for their area ▪ Makes final technical decision if team does not reach consensus ▪ Engages and drives technical debates

Evangelism/External Communication ▪ Ensure customers and key stakeholders are kept in the loop on all projects and team direction,

especially during major changes in technical direction ▪ Evangelizes team philosophies and strategic technical direction to key partners in the studio ▪ Connect with peer technologists outside of Disney to share technical innovations and complex

problems ▪ Work with management team to negotiate getting the resources you need to be successful and to

assist with removing obstacles for the team

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615-023 Teaming at Disney Animation

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Team Meetings/Internal Communication

▪ Drives team meetings, selects pertinent topics to discuss ▪ Ensures that all team members have had a chance to voice their opinions on critical subject matters,

especially during large strategic decisions ▪ Ensures new and incoming projects/tasks are talked about ▪ Ensures meetings stay focused on helping each other solve current technical issues or talking about

the future and upcoming projects ▪ Ensures that meetings do not become a forum for generic status updates ▪ Maintains calendar of major milestones over the next 12-months ▪ Prioritizes projects/tasks and communicates to customers when projects are put on hold due to

lack of resources. Best Practices

Engineering: ensuring that basic engineering practices are being followed

▪ Finding root cause, using scientific method, etc. ▪ Making the call to leave the studio in a broken state for the sake of problem solving to find the

root cause of an issue

Project Management: ensuring that our core project management philosophies are being met

▪ Gather requirements, talk to users, build a matrix of options, evangelize and debate, build milestones, execute plan

Questions that Leads should be asking themselves and constantly evaluating

▪ For each Service or product: o Are we supporting the product well? o Do we speak intelligently about it? o Do we have a good short-term and long-term roadmap? o Are we keeping up with or leading the industry? o Do we have good coverage for the service?

▪ For current projects or large tasks: o Is there a clear owner? o Are we making progress? o Do we have a good strategy? o Does the team have a good balance between talking about future ideas, engineering new

solutions and handling support/maintenance tasks?

What a lead is not directly responsible for (although welcome to participate, if desired):

o Personnel issues

o Final yearly reviews (may provide input for manager)

o Promotions/Titles (may provide input for manager)

o Formal budget presentations

o Career management

o Executive briefings

o Organizational structures

Source: Walt Disney Company.

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Teaming at Disney Animation 615-023

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Exhibit 5 Teaming in the Systems Department (2013)

Source: Walt Disney Company.

Exhibit 6 The Systems Department (2013)

Source: Walt Disney Company.

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615-023 Teaming at Disney Animation

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Endnotes

1 Howard Beckerman, Animation: The Whole Story (New York: Allworth Press, 2003), p. 16.

2 Carnegie Mellon University, “Animation,” Carnegie Mellon University Website, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jkh/462_s07/19_keyframing.pdf, accessed December 2013.

3 Animation World Network, “Producing Animation: The 3G CGI Production Process,” Animation World Network Website, http://www.awn.com/animationworld/producing-animation-3d-cgi-production-process, accessed December 2013.

This document is authorized for use only by DACHUAN LIN (493954953@QQ.COM). Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright. Please contact customerservice@harvardbusiness.org or 800-988-0886 for additional copies.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jkh/462_s07/19_keyframing.pdf

http://www.awn.com/animationworld/producing-animation-3d-cgi-production-process

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