“Now, go tell the team,” said Lasseter.
In June 2013, a few months before the movie was set to open, the Frozen team flew to a theater in Arizona to conduct a test screening. What appeared on the screen was completely different from what had been shown in the Disney screening room fifteen months earlier. Anna, the younger sister, was now bubbly, optimistic, and lonely. Elsa was loving but scared of her own powers and tortured by the memory of accidentally injuring her sister when they were young. Elsa runs away to an ice castle, intending to live far from humanity—but she inadvertently plunges her kingdom into an endless winter and partially freezes Anna’s heart.
Anna begins searching for a prince in the hope that his true love’s kiss will melt the ice in her chest. But the man she finds—Prince Hans—turns out to be intent on taking the throne for himself. Prince Hans imprisons Elsa and abandons the slowly freezing Anna, intent on killing both sisters so he can seize the crown.
Elsa escapes from her cell and, near the end of the movie, is running across the frozen fjords, fleeing the corrupt prince. Anna is growing weaker as the ice inside her chest consumes her heart. A blizzard swirls around the sisters and Hans as they all find one another on the frozen sea. Anna is almost dead from the chill inside her body. Hans raises his sword, ready to slay Elsa and put the throne within his reach. As Hans’s blade falls, however, Anna steps in front of the blow. Her body turns to ice just as the sword descends, and it strikes her frozen body rather than her sister. By sacrificing herself, Anna has saved Elsa—and this act of devotion, this genuine demonstration of true love, finally melts Anna’s chest. She returns to life, and Elsa, released from the anxiety that she’ll hurt the people she loves, can now direct her powers to defeat the evil Hans. She knows now how to end the kingdom’s winter. The sisters, united, are powerful enough to overcome their enemies and their self-doubts. Hans is expelled, spring returns, and love defeats fear.
All the elements of a traditional Disney plot were included. There were princesses and ball gowns, a handsome prince, a wisecracking sidekick, and a stream of upbeat songs. But throughout the film, those elements had been disturbed, just enough, to let something new and different emerge. Prince Hans wasn’t charming—he was the villain. The princesses weren’t helpless; instead, they saved each other. True love didn’t arrive in a rescue—rather, it came from siblings learning to embrace their own strengths.
“When did this movie get so good?” Kristen Anderson-Lopez whispered to Peter Del Vecho as the screening ended. Frozen would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature of 2014. “Let It Go” would win the Academy Award for best original song. The film would become the top-grossing animated movie of all time.
Creativity can’t be reduced to a formula. At its core, it needs novelty, surprise, and other elements that cannot be planned in advance to seem fresh and new. There is no checklist that, if followed, delivers innovation on demand.
But the creative process is different. We can create the conditions that help creativity to flourish. We know, for example, that innovation becomes more likely when old ideas are mixed in new ways. We know the odds of success go up when brokers—people with fresh, different perspectives, who have seen ideas in a variety of settings—draw on the diversity within their heads. We know that, sometimes, a little disturbance can help jolt us out of the ruts that even the most creative thinkers fall into, as long as those shake-ups are the right size.
If you want to become a broker and increase the productivity of your own creative process, there are three things that can help: First, be sensitive to your own experiences. Pay attention to how things make you think and feel. That’s how we distinguish clichés from true insights. As Steve Jobs put it, the best designers are those who “have thought more about their experiences than other people.” Similarly, the Disney process asks filmmakers to look inward, to think about their own emotions and experiences until they find answers that make imaginary characters come alive. Jerry Robbins pushed his West Side Story collaborators to put their own aspirations and emotions on the stage. Look to your own life as creative fodder, and broker your own experiences into the wider world.
Second, recognize that the panic and stress you feel as you try to create isn’t a sign that everything is falling apart. Rather, it’s the condition that helps make us flexible enough to seize something new. Creative desperation can be critical; anxiety is what often pushes us to see old ideas in new ways. The path out of that turmoil is to look at what you know, to reinspect conventions you’ve seen work and try to apply them to fresh problems. The creative pain should be embraced.
Finally, remember that the relief accompanying a creative breakthrough, while sweet, can also blind us to seeing alternatives. It is critical to maintain some distance from what we create. Without self-criticism, without tension, one idea can quickly crowd out competitors. But we can regain that critical distance by forcing ourselves to critique what we’ve already done, by making ourselves look at it from a completely different perspective, by changing the power dynamics in the room or giving new authority to someone who didn’t have it before. Disturbances are essential, and we retain clear eyes by embracing destruction and upheaval, as long as we’re sensitive to making the disturbance the right size.
There’s an idea that runs through these three lessons: The creative process is, in fact, a process, something that can be broken down and explained. That’s important, because it means that anyone can become more creative; we can all become innovation brokers. We all have experiences and tools, disturbances and tensions that can make us into brokers—if, that is, we’re willing to embrace that desperation and upheaval and try to see our old ideas in new ways.
“Creativity is just problem solving,” Ed Catmull told me. “Once people see it as problem solving, it stops seeming like magic, because it’s not. Brokers are just people who pay more attention to what problems look like and how they’ve been solved before. People who are most creative are the ones who have learned that feeling scared is a good sign. We just have to learn how to trust ourselves enough to let the creativity out.”
ABSORBING DATA
Turning Information into Knowledge in Cincinnati’s Public Schools
Students were settling into their seats as the PA system crackled to life inside South Avondale Elementary School.
“This is Principal Macon,” a voice said. “I am declaring a Hot Pencil Drill. Please prepare yourselves, prepare your worksheets, and we will begin in five, four, three, two…”