Private Sector Lesson 3: Co-Creation as Strategy & Purpose (Pixar, Nike & Levi’s)
by Yvonna Cázares
This excerpt is from a chapter in my forthcoming book, Mirrored Engagement, which explores how government can adopt private-sector trust-building practices to strengthen civic engagement and community partnership. Rather than share or post a 133-page segment, I’ve decided that over the coming weeks, I’ll be breaking down this chapter into digestible posts, each highlighting a different private-sector lesson government can learn. In this brief (and less photo-heavy) third installment, I touch on co-creation examples from different companies and the tradeoffs of not co-creating with residents in the public sector.
There’s a difference between asking for feedback and actually letting people shape a plan, program, or service. Co-creation is not a survey. It’s not a comment box. And in the private sector, it’s become a strategy for innovation and market survival, as well as a commitment to continuous product or service improvement.
One of my main professional growth spurts was learning how to receive feedback from teammates and supervisors without getting defensive or bruising my ego. Through many projects, I learned (sometimes the tough way) that being vulnerable enough to ask for help and feedback ultimately makes our processes and programs better!
At Pixar, they built a Braintrust that wasn’t just about creating a feedback loop; it institutionalized vulnerability. Across the organization, feedback was invited and welcomed when directors showed rough cuts to peers and expected nothing short of brutal honesty to get to the heart of what needed to change for the magic of storytelling.
No hierarchy. No ego. Just feedback meets action. And that’s why their films work. Because they’re shaped by many, not just one.
When Tom Hanks appeared on Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show and confirmed he was working on a fifth Toy Story movie, I wondered how did this story (and others from Pixar) become so enduring?
Co-Creation Example: Pixar’s Braintrust
After Toy Story came out in 1995, followed by a A Bug’s Life, and Toy Story 2, Ed Catmull created Pixar’s “Braintrust” to encourage “constructive dissent” and place “creative excellence over ego,” leading to films like Monster’s, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Wall-E, Inside Out, Coco (Burstan, 2025).
Pixar’s creative process depended on candid feedback from writers, technologists, and artists — not just executives. This culture of trust and co-creation has led to consistent box-office success.
“It’s a creative brain trust: It’s not a place where I make movies — it’s a place where a group of people make movies,” Catmull said. The Braintrust “leads to a continuous exchange of ideas and fosters a collective sense of responsibility on all their projects.”
Co-Creation as Commitment Example: Nike Improving Worker Conditions with Workers and Supervisors
If you have yet to create a Braintrust, or you don’t have the capacity to, not to worry, just turn to others around you as your informal advisers. Just like FDR’s original Brain Trust (in fact, his group coined the term Brain Trust), where he relied on his advisers to weigh pros and cons of alternatives (Britannica Editors, n.d.), Nike used outside advisers to solve internal challenges. When trying to create shoes with less environmental impact including non-toxic glues, Nike “used the trade-offs surfaced by its outsourced manufacturing business model as an opportunity to look at how the upstream processes of design, commercialization, and sourcing might have been undermining efforts to improve practices downstream” (Kaplan, 2020).
To do so, Nike let NGOs concerned with environmental impacts be the advisers to them and their suppliers, serving as a brain trust that helped them rethink upstream design and sourcing practices.
Similarly, Levi’s co-created with NGOs to address worker turnover. ”In Mexico, Apparel International organized peer-led sessions with an NGO, Yo Quiero, Yo Puedo (I Want, I Can), to learn about worker experiences and train supervisors. The vendor made seemingly small changes at work, like providing better fans and water fountains, shaded parking for motorcycles, and microwaves in the break room” (Kaplan, 2020). Combined with improved communication such as more coaching and less shouting from supervisors to employees, the NGO sessions resulted in healthier workplace dynamics with lower absenteeism, lower turnover, and changes in how the staff interact.
Even when there are competing interests among diverse stakeholders, Nike’s and Levi’s show that “there are ways to make things better, and the solutions involve collaborative innovation among all of the stakeholders” (Kaplan, 2020), emphasis added).
Innovation shouldn’t happen in a vacuum. “One of the most important paths forward is to co-create with the stakeholders. In the end, no company can innovate for stakeholders and get it right. The company must innovate with stakeholders” (Kaplan, 360 Corporation, emphasis added).
Don’t Do This: Compartmentalized Collaboration (How Gov’t Gets It Wrong)
Too often in government, we seek feedback only when there’s programmatic overlap.
We may seek feedback or collaboration from other departments if we believe there is a programmatic cross-over (e.g. bike lanes leading to parks might bring together the department of transportation with the office of public works and office of parks and recreation).
We also might seek feedback if we need to work together to move a plan forward or need another department’s approval (e.g. engineering and communications).
In this way, collaboration becomes transactional and compartmentalized in government rather than foundational and robust. We don’t see a way to innovate or co-create internally or externally unless there’s an immediate win-win. And even then, I’ve seen efforts to collaborate turn sideways or reverse track entirely.
Internal Collaboration Can Also be Compartmentalized
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At a state agency, I’ve seen plans “change” to look exactly the way they started after another department staff’s input was considered, and then quietly discarded. In “Making Differences Matter,” Ely and Thomas drive this point home through examples of inclusionary work practices, “diversity only drives performance when organizations learn from identity-based experiences. Co-creation requires power-sharing.” In this case with the state agency, diversity and inclusion wasn’t the purpose for power-sharing, it was simply diversity of ideas from various departments.
Fake collaboration (regardless of the stakeholder type) is expensive. It wastes taxpayer dollars and produces policies that never evolve with the times.
Don’t be the type of government leader that allows for one department to share input with another department simply to “check the box” in appearing collaborative. Residents see through that, especially watchdogs, leaders see through that, especially ones with integrity, and that is when we get sued and our work stalled, again.
Toxic workplace cultures and competing departments lose sight of what makes a program beneficial, efficient, and lasting. Being open to change means seeing the program development effort and true collaboration through.
What are the tradeoffs if we don’t co-create?
In the public sector, there is often a group of staff that inevitably provide internal resistance, or, what I call “the frozen middle.” These folks are blocks to innovation. Resistant to change and risk-averse, these bureaucrats prefer the status quo then to find out ways to meet even legal mandates to do their jobs in new or more relevant ways to serve the public.
At Cal EPA, and other government entities, I came across many of these unwilling co-creation and anti-growth types. Fortunately, I witnessed and was a part of an inside/outside strategy in which advocates or residents would get around this government staff inertia to policy implementation through collaboration. Another strategy that worked was simply a phased‑in approach for some policies which often helped bring business stakeholders along and showed progress to environmental watchdogs.
But more often than not, the status quo persisted: stalled policies, lawsuits, distrust, and frustration from both taxpayers and vulnerable residents who feel unheard.
The cost of not co‑creating is stagnation; the benefit is a government that learns, adapts, and delivers with the residents it serves. The choice is ours.
Let’s share power, invite real collaboration, and let stakeholders shape the work, so that we create programs that actually evolve and public institutions that finally earn the trust we keep talking about.
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Next in this series: Private Sector Lesson 4: Co-Creation as Culture explores how companies move beyond consultation and what that type of co-designing with residents can look like in government.
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References:
Britannica Editors. (n.d.). Brain trust. In Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Brain-Trust
Burstan, G. (2025, June 9). How Pixar’s brain trust saved the company. Considerable. https://www.considerable.com/how-pixars-brain-trust-saved-the-company-and-sparked-creativity/
Catmull, E. (2014). Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the unseen forces that stand in the way of true inspiration. Pixar.
Ely, R., & Thomas, D. A. (1996, September–October). Making differences matter: A new paradigm for managing diversity. Harvard Business Review, 74(5), 79–90. https://hbr.org/1996/09/making-differences-matter-a-new-paradigm-for-managing-diversity
Kaplan, S. (2020, January 20). The 360° corporation. Strategy + Business. https://www.strategy-business.com/article/The-upside-of-trade-offs
Rae Cinema. (2026, June). Toy Story 5 — First look (2026) preview [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5fk3qvrLzQ
Rae Cinema. (2026, June). Toy Story 5 — First look (2026) preview [Figure 1 Photograph Screenshot]. From Rae Cinema YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5fk3qvrLzQ
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. (n.d.). “They are gonna have a real hard time firing me” — Tom Hanks on his play “This World of Tomorrow” [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OOUwM3RTAc
Yvonna Cázares is a writer, civic leader, and public engagement strategist. She leads two ventures: Viridian Management Group and Helios Media Group. Her thoughts are her own and don’t represent her clients nor organizations she works with in a personal or professional capacity.
All concepts, materials, and ideas shared by Viridian Management Group remain proprietary to the firm unless otherwise agreed in writing. Shared for collaboration, please credit to Viridian if shared and or implemented.
