“A hallmark of a healthy creative culture is that its people feel free to share ideas, opinions, and criticisms. Lack of candor, if unchecked, ultimately leads to dysfunctional environments.”
Designing for Candor
From Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (Random House, 2014), p. 60, in the chapter on honesty and candor at Pixar.
Catmull places the line between his concession that candor is hard for legitimate reasons (politicians pay for being too blunt, CEOs get dinged for being too open with shareholders, anyone might soften their words to avoid embarrassing a colleague) and the answer he is building toward: a manager can institutionalize candor by putting mechanisms in place that explicitly say it is valuable, and the rest of the chapter walks through one of Pixar’s key ones, the Braintrust. Catmull even prefers candor to honesty because honesty triggers defensiveness while candor lets people admit they sometimes hold back.