If Annie had stayed in academics, would any of this have mattered? “Absolutely,” she said. “If you’re trying to decide what job to take, or whether you can afford a vacation, or how much you need to save for retirement, those are all predictions.” The same basic rules apply. The people who make the best choices are the ones who work hardest to envision various futures, to write them down and think them through, and then ask themselves, which ones do I think are most likely and why?
Anyone can learn to make better decisions. We can all train ourselves to see the small predictions we make every day. No one is right every time. But with practice, we can learn how to influence the probability that our fortune-telling comes true.
* * *
*1 Poker is a game of odds within odds. While this example provides an explanation of probabilistic thinking (and the concept of “pot odds”), it is worth noting that a full analysis of this hand is slightly more complex (and would take into account, for instance, the other players at the table). For a more nuanced analysis, please see the notes for chapter 6.
*2 Bayes’ rule, which was first postulated by the Reverend Bayes in a posthumously published 1763 manuscript, can be so computationally complex that for centuries most statisticians essentially ignored the work because they lacked tools to perform the calculations it demanded. Starting in the 1950s, however, as computers became more powerful, scientists found they could use Bayesian approaches to forecast events that were previously thought unpredictable, such as the likelihood of a war, or the odds that a drug will be broadly effective even if it has only been tested on a handful of people. Even today, though, calculating a Bayesian probability curve can, in some cases, tie up a computer for hours.
INNOVATION
How Idea Brokers and Creative Desperation Saved Disney’s Frozen
The audience starts lining up an hour before the screening room doors open. They are directors and animators, story editors and writers, all of them Disney employees, all eager to see a rough draft of the movie everyone is talking about.
As they settle into their chairs and the lights dim, two sisters appear on the screen against an icy landscape. Anna, the younger character, quickly establishes herself as bossy and uptight, obsessed with her upcoming wedding to the handsome Prince Hans and her coronation as queen. Elsa, her older sister, is jealous, evil—and cursed. Everything she touches turns to ice. She was passed over for the throne because of this power and now, as she runs away from her family to a crystal palace high in the mountains, she nurses a bitter grudge. She wants revenge.
As Anna’s wedding day approaches, Elsa plots with a snarky snowman named Olaf to claim the crown for herself. They try to kidnap Anna but their plan is foiled by the square-jawed, dashing Prince Hans. Bitter Elsa, in a rage, orders an army of snow monsters to descend upon the town and destroy it. The villagers repel the invaders, but when the smoke clears, casualties are discovered: Princess Anna’s heart has been partially frozen by her evil sister—and Prince Hans is missing.
The second half of the film follows Anna as she searches for her prince, desperately hoping that his kiss will heal her damaged heart. Meanwhile, Elsa prepares to attack again—and this time floods the village with vicious snow creatures. The monsters, however, are soon out of her control. They begin to threaten everyone, including Elsa herself. The only way to survive, Anna and Elsa realize, is for them to join forces. Through cooperation, they defeat the creatures and the sisters learn that working together is better than struggling apart. They become friends. Anna’s heart thaws. Peace returns. Everyone lives happily ever after.
The name of the movie is Frozen, and it is scheduled to be released in just eighteen months.
Normally, when a movie screening ends at Disney, there’s applause. Often, people cheer or shout. There are usually boxes of tissues inside the screening room because, at Disney, a good cry is the sign of a successful film.
This time, there is no crying. There are no cheers. The tissues go untouched. As everyone files out, they are very, very quiet.
—
After the screening ended, the film’s director, Chris Buck, and about a dozen other Disney filmmakers gathered in one of the studio’s dining rooms to discuss what they had just seen. This was a meeting of the studio’s “story trust,” a group responsible for providing feedback on films as they go through production. As the story trust prepared to discuss the latest draft of Frozen, people served themselves from a buffet of Swedish meatballs. Buck didn’t get anything to eat. “The last thing I was feeling was hungry,” he told me.
Disney’s chief creative officer, John Lasseter, kicked off the conversation. “You’ve got some great scenes here,” he said, and mentioned some of the things he particularly liked: The battles were thrilling. The dialogue between the sisters was witty. The snow monsters were terrifying. The film had a good, fast pace. “It’s an exciting movie, and the animation is going to be amazing,” he said.
And then he began listing the film’s flaws. The list was long.
“You haven’t dug deep enough,” he said after detailing a dozen problems. “There’s not enough for the audience to connect with because there’s no character to root for. Anna’s too uptight and Elsa’s too evil. I didn’t find myself liking anyone in the movie until the very end.”
When Lasseter was done speaking, the rest of the story trust chimed in, pointing out other problems: There were logical holes in the plot—why, for instance, does Anna stick with Prince Hans when he doesn’t seem like such a catch? Also, there were too many characters to keep track of. The plot twists were foreshadowed way too much. It didn’t seem believable that Elsa would kidnap her sister and then attack the town without trying something less dramatic first. Anna seemed really whiny for someone who lives in a castle, is marrying a prince, and would soon be queen. One member of the story trust—a writer named Jennifer Lee—particularly disliked Elsa’s cynical sidekick. “I f’ing hate Olaf,” she had scribbled in her notes. “Kill the snowman.”
The truth was, Buck wasn’t surprised by all the criticisms. His team had sensed the movie wasn’t working for months. The film’s screenwriter had restructured the script repeatedly, first with Anna and Elsa as strangers rather than sisters, then with Elsa, the cursed sister, assuming the throne and Anna upset at being a “spare, rather than an heir.” The songwriters on the film—a husband-and-wife team behind such Broadway hits as Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon—were exhausted from writing and discarding song after song. They said they couldn’t figure out how to make jealousy and revenge into lighthearted themes.
There were versions of the movie where the sisters were normal townspeople rather than royalty, and others where the sisters reconciled over a shared love of reindeer. In one script, they were raised apart. In another, Anna was jilted at the altar. Buck had introduced characters to explain the origins of Elsa’s curse, and had tried creating another love interest. Nothing worked. Every time he solved one problem—by making Anna more likable, for instance, or Elsa less bitter—dozens of others popped up.
“Every movie sucks at first,” said Bobby Lopez, one of Frozen’s songwriters. “But this was like a puzzle where every piece we added upset how everything else fit. And we knew time was running out.”