The Braintrust is a practice developed at Pixar. A group of experienced people meet on request to discuss, critique and advise on projects still under development inside the company, and the whole point is to help creative teams improve their work through feedback that is honest, constructive and generous.
Most organisations that copy the Pixar Braintrust copy the agenda. They gather the smart people, book the room, run the meeting, and end up with a design review wearing a friendlier name. What they miss is the harder half of the design, which concerns what Pixar deliberately keeps out of the room.
This article covers what a Braintrust is, where the idea actually comes from, the five principles that make it work, and a one hour agenda you can run a fortnight from now.
| What gets copied | What gets missed | The shift that transforms |
|---|---|---|
| The Pixar Braintrust as a meetingA Pixar Braintrust is a peer group of experienced people who review a project in development and give candid feedback. Organisations replicate the format readily, since it costs nothing but an hour and a room. | Authority stays outsideThe group holds no power to mandate changes, and the person who runs the company was kept out of the meetings by mutual agreement. The feedback carries weight precisely because none of it can be enforced. | Design by subtractionBuilding a Braintrust means deciding what to remove from the room rather than who to add to it. Take out decision rights, reporting lines and the need to be right, and candour appears without being requested. |
What a Pixar Braintrust actually is
A Braintrust is a collective intelligence meeting where peers examine a project in development and tell its owner what is working, what is missing and what feels wrong. It is a compulsory passage in front of people who have done the same job, and the person presenting keeps every decision that follows.
The practice exists because anyone deep inside a complex creative project runs a predictable set of risks, whatever their talent, passion, organisation or vision.
- Getting lost in the complexity of their own subject.
- Losing heart over the length of the work.
- Getting stuck through a simple lack of distance.
- Drowning in the number of possible ideas.
- Forgetting that the project is not for them, and that it is for an audience or a customer.
A collective intelligence meeting, not a management review
The Braintrust is a group of trusted colleagues, frequently self-organised, who meet regularly to follow the progress of live projects. It is not a team of internal consultants and it is not a governance checkpoint, because nobody in the room can require anything of anybody.
Ed Catmull, who co-founded Pixar and describes the practice in his book Creativity, Inc., uses a medical analogy. The studio is the hospital, the film is the patient, the director is the doctor in charge, and the Braintrust is a group of other clinicians consulting on a difficult case.
The stated aim of these trusted brains is to turn a bad idea into a great one through repeated passes. Every project comes back, and the improvement happens by iteration rather than by any single brilliant intervention.
The group is made up of people who are passionate about the work and who have sat in the presenting chair themselves. That second condition does most of the work, and it is the one Australian organisations drop first when they build the invitation list from the org chart.
Candour, and why that word rather than honesty
Candour means speaking to someone with sincerity and simplicity while respecting their feelings. Catmull chose the word deliberately over honesty, on the grounds that honesty carries a moral charge. Calling someone dishonest is an accusation, and that weight makes the barriers to frank speech almost impossible to discuss openly.
Candour is lighter and therefore usable. A team can admit that candour was missing from a meeting without anybody being accused of lying.
Trust has been a management topic for years. Candour is discussed far less, and it is the harder of the two to build, because it survives only where being wrong in front of colleagues carries no cost.
The Braintrust is neither revolutionary nor new
Historically a brain trust is the group of advisers around a political leader, and the term attached first to the circle around Franklin Roosevelt. Pixar recreated the practice rather than inventing it, and creative groups of this kind go back at least to the eighteenth century.
- The Junto, the leather apron club, founded in 1727 by Benjamin Franklin.
- The Inklings, who read and discussed the works in progress of writers including J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
- Disney’s Nine Old Men, the core animators who joined the studio in the 1930s and shaped its output for decades.
- The Bloomsbury Group, which brought together intellectuals, philosophers and artists including Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes.
Each member of a Braintrust takes responsibility for spotting and working through the problems their peers put on the table, helping them regain distance by analysing the project without any ulterior motive. What motivates the members is contributing to the success of the project in front of them.
The five principles of the Braintrust
Five principles hold the practice together: no hierarchy, shared ownership of ideas, members who have been through it themselves, separation between a person and their project, and candour that refuses to slide into flattery. Remove any one of them and the meeting reverts to a review.
The five principles in detail
The five sit in a deliberate order. The first two shape the room, the third shapes the guest list, and the last two shape what the person presenting is able to hear. Skipping straight to the fifth is the most common way organisations get this wrong.
1. No hierarchy | The Braintrust is peer to peer. It is not a leadership review, and every decision stays with the project owner. Participants say only what they think is not working, what is missing and what they would change. They can make suggestions, and the person whose work is being examined decides what to take and what to leave. They have followed the project from the start, so they and their team are best placed to apply a solution, whether or not the Braintrust inspired it. |
2. Shared ownership | No member of the Braintrust owns the ideas raised in it. A project is a common effort and a collective adventure, and the project owner makes their own dish out of whatever comes out of the session. Participants offer their view without calculation. They ask questions and make remarks with no aim of promoting themselves, pushing their own ideas or pleasing the boss, which principle one has already removed from the room. The best idea of the meeting is often one the project owner arrives at indirectly, and the group will sometimes correctly sense that something is wrong while naming the wrong symptom. |
3. Veterans only | Members come from the trenches. They have personally lived through what the project owner is going through, which lets them bring two things to the table. Their experience, which is the legitimacy that makes their comments listenable, since the project owner knows they are facing people who have sat where they sit. And their candour, because having been in that chair they can be sincere and empathetic at the same time. |
4. The idea first | Project owners have to separate themselves from their ideas. You are not your project, so the Braintrust is not evaluating you. This runs into a much wider question about organisational culture. From a person’s first week, they need to be brought into a culture of frank and direct work where error is accepted, and helped to build their capacity to hear comments on their project without taking them personally. Easier to write than to do, I agree. |
5. Candour without complacency | Candour and empathy do not mean going easy. Come to a Braintrust convinced that every idea is bad at the start and becomes less bad the more you work it, which is what makes iteration the engine of the whole practice. Once you accept that ideas start bad and that you are not your idea, regular iteration is what turns a bad idea into an average project and an average project into a remarkable result. The outside eye of your peers is what lets you get past your own ceiling. |
What Pixar deliberately kept out of the room
Steve Jobs never attended a Pixar Braintrust. Catmull describes it as a mutually agreed prohibition reached in 1993, on the grounds that a larger than life presence in the room would make candour harder to sustain. Jobs accepted, trusting that the story people knew narrative better than he did.
Sit with what that decision cost. The most influential person in the company agreed to stay outside the meeting where the company’s core product was shaped, permanently, for the sake of a conversational quality he could not otherwise guarantee.
This is the part almost nobody copies. Organisations replicate the meeting and keep their most senior person in it, usually with a reassurance that they are only there to listen. The room hears the reassurance and behaves accordingly.
The research supports the design. Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams, published in Administrative Science Quarterly, established that a team’s willingness to raise problems depends on shared beliefs about interpersonal risk rather than on individual courage. Removing the person who can end a career removes most of the risk.
How to set up a Braintrust
Setting up a Braintrust means creating conditions rather than following steps. The environment has to suit a collective search for excellence, and it has to fit your organisation’s culture and the personalities of the people you invite. Three decisions carry most of the outcome: who comes, what state of mind they arrive in, and how the meeting runs.
Identify the veterans
What Pixar’s Braintrust members share is craft in storytelling. The task is to gather people who have personally worked the kind of problem being examined, which makes experience and legitimacy the first criterion rather than seniority or availability.
This is where a Braintrust separates from a brainstorm. A brainstorm looks for maximum diversity of profile because it is an ideation phase where everybody is welcome. A Braintrust is an improvement and problem-solving phase, so the room needs people who can find the sore point quickly.
Experience matters for a second reason. It stops the project owner concluding that the group is detached from their reality, which is the thought that quietly ends the usefulness of any feedback session.
From experience, what works best at this stage is letting the group self-organise. The project owner is perfectly capable of assembling the people whose view they actually want, and complementary skills across the group will widen the range of what gets noticed.
Build the candour before the calendar invite
Choosing experts is only half the selection. The people invited also need the right disposition, which means gathering colleagues capable of candour and goodwill toward the work rather than simply gathering clever or experienced ones.
The people you want are iconoclasts who are not afraid of looking foolish and who want nothing beyond moving a colleague’s project forward. The project owner should be impatient to put their work in front of the group rather than dragging their feet toward it.
The group as a whole polices this. It falls to them to redirect, or remove, any member who turns up to settle scores or to push a personal agenda.
Culture shapes the room whether you intend it to or not. Run a Braintrust inside an unsuitable culture and there is a strong chance the group will do one of the following.
- Find the project brilliant without daring to critique it constructively.
- Critique the project for the pleasure of critiquing it.
- Try to claim a share of the results.
- Spend the meeting bent over a phone.
Australian workplaces present a specific version of the first risk. Informal egalitarianism sits alongside genuine conflict avoidance in a lot of teams here, which produces rooms that are friendly, first-name, and entirely unwilling to tell a colleague their project has a structural problem.
Set the rhythm and the ceiling
A Braintrust of five to seven people needs a schedule, a structure and someone to run it. Hold it regularly, every fortnight works well, and cap it at one hour, or ninety minutes at the absolute outside, so it never drifts into a social occasion. The session should move and the suggestions should come fast.
From experience, the first few sessions will be a shambles unless you have a seasoned facilitator in the room. That is normal and it is not a reason to abandon the format.
A Braintrust is a collective intelligence experience. The dynamic in the room matters more than the agenda, and a facilitator who understands that will let a productive tangent run and cut an unproductive one early.
Field note
The executive who only came to listen
A client set up a Braintrust for their product teams and asked me to facilitate the first three sessions. The executive sponsor wanted to attend. She was genuinely supportive, she promised to say nothing, and she took a seat slightly outside the circle to make the point visually.
The first session ran for fifty minutes of warm, useless agreement. In the second, she stayed away because of a diary clash, and within twelve minutes somebody said the pricing model made no sense and the room finally started working. She read the two session summaries side by side and drew the conclusion herself before I said anything. From the third session she stopped attending, and she asked instead for a two paragraph note from the project owner afterwards, written by them and covering only what they had decided to change.
Presence is not neutral, whatever the intention behind it. If you hold decision rights over the people in the room, your silence still occupies it, and the most useful contribution you can make to a Braintrust is your absence from it.
A one hour Braintrust agenda
Once the group exists and the rules are set, the meeting needs a time structure. Keep the timing rigid and hold to it, because that is what keeps the session moving, maximises the time together, and prevents side conversations on subjects the project owner never asked about. Here is a workable hour.
Minute zero: the check-in
The opening round is not for introductions, since the group already knows each other. It exists to surface the state of mind people have walked in with, and for that I use the inner weather exercise: each person reports their current conditions in one line, sunny, overcast, storm warning.
I was not a fan of this exercise at first, finding it a touch too mystical for my taste. It turns out to work extremely well in a Braintrust, because it tells everyone else that a given person’s comments may be coloured by their mood, which changes how those comments land.
Minute 10: let go
Everybody shares something that unblocked in the past week on a project or an activity, or a stupid idea they have had recently about the business or about anything else. Ten minutes is enough.
The aim here is to build an iconoclastic mood in which no member of the group is afraid to share an idea, including the odd ones. A room that has already said something silly out loud will say something useful more readily.
Minute 20: the project and the group’s response
The project owner presents their work: what has moved since the last Braintrust, the problems they hit, the obstacles they cleared, and the questions still open. They can share drawings, text or video, and thirty minutes is the right allocation for this block.
It is entirely possible that the project owner arrives with no problem at all. The group then has to question them anyway, to find out whether there is room for improvement they have stopped seeing.
Whoever can help, speaks. They advise from their own experience, offer ideas, pass on techniques, and name people worth meeting to move things along.
Minute 50: headlining
The project owner has to leave with a clear head rather than a scrambled one, and with more than a few notes scribbled in a book they will never reopen. The last ten minutes exist to convert an hour of conversation into something they can act on tomorrow.
I use a matrix the project owner fills in during those final minutes, which lets them get to work quickly on the ideas raised. This is what I call headlining, and the discipline of writing a headline forces a decision about what actually mattered.
Braintrust, brainstorm or design review, which one you actually need
Three formats get confused constantly, and each fails badly in the other two’s territory. A brainstorm generates options, a Braintrust improves work already underway, and a design review makes a decision. Choosing the wrong one wastes the session and teaches the team that feedback sessions are theatre.
Three formats compared
The clearest way to tell them apart is to ask who holds the decision at the end. In a brainstorm nobody does yet, in a Braintrust the project owner does, and in a design review the most senior person in the room does. Everything else follows from that.
| Format | Who decides afterwards | Who should be in the room | Use it when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brainstorm | Nobody yet, options stay open | Maximum diversity of profile and background | You have a blank page and need volume before judgement |
| Braintrust | The project owner, entirely | Five to seven peers who have done this work themselves | Work is underway, imperfect, and needs an outside eye that cannot overrule you |
| Design review | The most senior person present | Decision makers and the people who carry the budget | A go or no-go decision is genuinely needed |
The signals that tell you which one you are actually running
Most organisations believe they are running a Braintrust and are in fact running a design review with softer language. Four signals settle the question quickly, and none of them requires a survey.
- Someone in the room can approve or stop the project, which makes it a review whatever you call it.
- The project owner prepares to defend rather than to expose, which means the format has already failed.
- Actions leave the room assigned to people other than the project owner.
- The same person speaks first every time, which usually means everyone else is waiting to hear the acceptable position.
Check who is allowed to speak before you book the room
A Braintrust runs on questions nobody is punished for asking. Read my method for auditing who currently holds the curiosity licence in your organisation, and run the six checks before your first session.
How I can help you run a Braintrust
I facilitate first Braintrust cycles and train internal facilitators to take them over, because the format is simple to describe and difficult to hold in the first months. The work usually covers the group design, the first three sessions, and the handover.
Facilitation and internal facilitator training
The first sessions decide whether the practice survives. I run them, then hand over to someone inside the organisation who has watched the mechanics closely enough to protect them, which is the part that usually goes wrong when a team starts alone.
The handover includes the awkward conversations: who is not invited, why, and how to say so without damaging a relationship. Those conversations are the actual work.
Keynotes, workshops and creative leadership programmes
A keynote suits a leadership group that wants a creative culture and has not yet worked out what it would have to give up to get one. Workshops suit teams ready to build the practice, and they end with a scheduled first session rather than with a set of principles.
For organisations going further, I design programmes connecting these practices to enableship, the leadership of innovation, which is my own frame for the work a leader does to make other people’s contribution possible.
Conclusion: a Pixar Braintrust is built by subtraction
Every idea is bad at the start. That is the premise the whole practice rests on, and it is why a Braintrust runs in cycles rather than as an event. A bad idea becomes an average project, and an average project becomes a remarkable result, through repeated exposure to people who have been where you are.
The hard part of building one is not the invitation list. It is deciding what to take out of the room: the decision rights, the reporting lines, the ownership of ideas, and quite possibly yourself.
Book an hour, invite five people who have done the work, put a project on the table that is not finished, and leave your authority at the door. That is a Pixar Braintrust, and it costs you nothing except the thing that is hardest to give up.
Frequently asked questions about the Pixar Braintrust
What is the difference between a Braintrust and a brainstorm?
A brainstorm generates options from a blank page and wants maximum diversity in the room. A Pixar Braintrust improves work already underway and wants peers who have done that work themselves. One is an ideation phase, the other is a problem-solving phase.
How many people should be in a Braintrust?
Five to seven works best, meeting every fortnight for one hour and never beyond ninety minutes. Below five the range of experience is too narrow, and above seven people stop contributing and the session drifts toward a social occasion.
Can a manager attend a Braintrust of their own team?
Anyone holding decision rights over people in the room changes what the room says, whatever they promise. Ed Catmull kept Steve Jobs out of Pixar’s Braintrust by mutual agreement for exactly this reason. Ask for a written note from the project owner afterwards instead.
Does a Braintrust work outside creative industries?
The format transfers to any work that is complex, iterative and easy to lose perspective on, including engineering, policy, research and service design. What it requires is peers with genuine experience of the same problem, and a project owner who keeps every decision.
