What made Notes Day work? To me, it boils down to three factors. First, there was a clear and focused goal. This wasn’t a free-for-all but a wide-ranging discussion (organized around topics suggested not by Human Resources or by Pixar’s executives, but by the company’s employees) aimed at addressing a specific reality: the need to cut our costs by 10 percent. While the discussion topics were allowed - even encouraged - to stray into areas that might seem only vaguely related to this goal, the fact that it was there was key. It provided a framework - and it kept us from falling into confusion.

Second, this was an idea championed by those at the highest levels of the company. Had the enormous task of making Notes Day a reality been shunted off on someone who didn’t have the clout to throw muscle behind it - and not entrusted to Tom, who in turn recruited the most organized people in the company to help him - it would have been an entirely different experience. Employees wouldn’t have bought into the idea because they’d sense that management hadn’t, either. And that would have rendered Notes Day moot.

Third, and relatedly, Notes Day was led from within. Many companies hire outside consulting firms to organize their all-staff retreats, and I understand why: Doing them well is a monumental, enormously time-consuming undertaking. But that our own people made Notes Day happen was, I believe, key to its success. Not only did they drive the discussion in meaningful ways, but their involvement also paid its own dividends. Seeing themselves engage and cooperate, steering the agenda toward something that could make a real difference, they remembered why they worked at Pixar. Their commitment was contagious. Notes Day wasn’t an end point but a beginning - a way of making room for our employees to step forward and think about their role in our company’s future. I said before that problems are easy to identify, but finding the source of those problems is extraordinarily difficult. Notes brought problems to the surface - but we still had the hard work in front of us. Notes Day didn’t solve anything all by itself. But it shifted our culture - repaired it, even - in ways that will make us better as we go forward.

Good Riddance Reviews

Methods for Finding Subtraction Targets

• Identify “stupid stuff.” Lisa Bodell, CEO of FutureThink, asks, “If you could kill all the rules that frustrate you or slow down your efficiency, what would they be?” A similar spirit propelled the Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff effort at Hawaii Pacific Health. Dr. Melinda Ashton asked healthcare workers to nominate anything in the electronic patient records system that “was poorly designed, unnecessary, or just plain stupid”—which generated 188 subtraction targets.

• Figure out the value and cost of your meetings. In their Meeting Reset, sixty Asana employees rated each of their standing meetings. They identified more than five hundred meetings that were of low value. And don’t forget the time that people spend getting ready for meetings. Bain, the management consulting firm, calculated that one company devoted three hundred thousand hours a year preparing for a weekly executive team meeting.

• Measure the burdens imposed by performance measurement. Are you spending so much time evaluating one another that you don’t have time to do your work? Deloitte’s leaders were appalled after they “tallied the number of hours the organization was spending on performance management— and found that completing the forms, holding the meetings, and creating the ratings consumed close to two million hours a year.”

• Catalog sources of email overload. The average employee spends 28 percent of their time dealing with emails. Is this true at your company (or is it worse)? Review the number, length, recipients, and timing of the emails that people send and receive. What can you subtract? Perhaps an email policy like that used at the consulting firm Vynamic will help. They call it zzzMail, as in catching some z’s: “team members are to refrain from sending emails to other team members between 10pm and 6am Monday through Friday, all day Saturday and Sunday, and all Vynamic holidays. In urgent matters, a call or text is preferred over email.”

• Observe and interview users. To identify unnecessary and confusing questions in a benefits form completed by more than two million Michigan residents each year, Civilla researchers conducted over 250 hours of interviews with residents and civil servants—and observed them as they filled out and explained the form. Civilla identified dozens of obstacles that jeopardized residents’ ability to get benefits.

• Build a journey map. Diagram the stages that customers or clients travel through as they try to get information, obtain services, or buy products from an organization—and how they, and employees, feel along the way. Our students Elizabeth Woodson and Saul Gurdus used interviews and observations to map the slow and bewildering process imposed on families of disabled children who sought services from the Golden Gate Regional Center, a social services agency in the San Francisco area. They identified numerous bottlenecks that marred clients’ journeys—especially botched handoffs between silos.

• Try a perfectionism audit. In The Systems Bible, John Gall proposed the Perfectionist’s Paradox: in complex systems, “striving for perfection is a serious imperfection.” Pressures for perfection cause needless effort and delay, interfere with learning from imperfect prototypes, and provoke despair. Many things that are worth doing—or are required by others—aren’t worth doing well. Or, as Gall preaches, ought to be done poorly. In that spirit, ask people to identify tasks where the standards are too narrow or too high, or that are enforced with too much zeal.

What Wiseman noticed that day can be seen as a vital element of TPS: a deeply ingrained belief that problem-solving is a team sport. Failures are opportunities for improvement. Competent professionals are expected to successfully execute most of their tasks, so successes are not seen as worthy of colleagues’ valuable time. Hence the “puzzled” look on Mr. Cho’s face. Puzzlement occurred because an expected behavior (share your problems so we can work on them together) didn’t happen, while an unexpected one (bragging) did. What I love most about this story is that Wiseman’s boasting would not have raised an eyebrow in 99 percent of work environments I’ve studied. We are socialized to share accomplishments and good news in front of the boss. Nothing puzzling about it! The most impressive result of TPS in my view is that the system normalizes failure—bad news, requests for help, and problems alike. It creates a community of scientists. Not incidentally, the essence of failing well is thinking like a scientist.

I carried my bug book with me all the time, making notes when I’d notice things about the bug named Jim. Then, one day, I had a turning point in discovering my encodings. I was asked to research, learn, and teach the team about networked personal computing and its strategic implications for HP. I became enthralled with researching and trying to understand something big and new. And even more, I found myself entranced with the challenge of how to convert my understanding into digestible concepts. I’d started to discover an encoding that would animate me for the rest of my life: the ability to take a mass of information and make sense of it, to go from “chaos to concept.” Then came the day of epiphany, when I got to share my learnings with our internal team. I discovered that I had a peculiar capability for packaging and teaching concepts to other people in ways that would stick.

I seem to have at least as much energy at 67 as I had at 37, perhaps even more. I need less sleep. I feel on the balls of my feet, tilted forward. I can't wait to get up before 5 a.m. and throw myself into each day. The inner fire burns brighter than ever. There are multiple elements that feed into this, including the sheer good luck of health to this point in my life. But now I see that one huge element has to do with this very project being an invigorating fusion of Extend Out/Circle Back. By taking on an entirely new subject at this stage of life, shifting from studying what makes great companies tick to studying people and what makes their lives tick, I’m clearly extending out. At the same time, I’m also circling back, returning to encoded operating modes I discovered years ago, particularly my penchant for doing big research projects, going from chaos to concept, and then writing and teaching what I learn. I’m incredibly energized by discovering entirely new elements of myself in doing this project and by how the study itself has changed me in such profound ways. I’m equally energized by circling back to activate and reactivate interests and encodings I’d discovered long ago.