Don’t Cut the Passion in your Pixar Planning & Reviews

Critique is Fine, but Don’t Cut the Passion

Let me share something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately and it connects two seemingly different worlds: construction planning and Pixar storytelling.

Here’s the truth I keep coming back to:
You can review, critique, and refine a plan all you want but if you strip out the passion behind it, you’re left with something lifeless.

It started with a conversation around PPC Percent Plan Complete a metric often used in lean construction. I’ve never been a fan. Sure, it sounds good on paper, but in reality, PPC is a lagging indicator. It tells you what happened, but it doesn’t help you prevent what’s coming. It’s not tied to flow. It doesn’t consider the criticality of tasks. It adds to the work-in-progress with little actionable insight. And most of the time, it leads to shallow root cause analysis that doesn’t actually fix anything.

What we should be tracking are things like roadblock removal rate and perfect handoff percentage proactive metrics that actually drive improvement. Yes, PPC is in the books. It’s in the systems. But that doesn’t mean we should treat it as gospel. If we want high-performing teams, we need to use tools that work, not just ones that look good.

And that brings me to the real point.

We’ve got to stop clinging to systems and reviews that exist just for appearance’s sake.

To drive this home, I want to make a comparison and it might sound out of left field to Pixar’s movie Elio. That film didn’t flop because of bad visuals or poor technical execution. It flopped because it lost its soul. From what I understand, the original story was personal, heartfelt, and packed with meaning. But it was reviewed and refined so many times that the final result ended up being about… nothing. It was sterile. Soulless. Safe.

I’ve seen the same thing happen in construction.

I think about the BSRL project a build that I’m proud to have been a part of. That job was remarkable not because we checked every box perfectly, but because we were fueled by passion. We used prefabrication, deep coordination, lean systems, and fresh planning methods, yes. But more importantly, we had crazy, passionate ideas, and we let them live. The team was on fire with creativity, collaboration, and commitment to doing something different. That’s what made it great.

So here’s my warning to myself, to all of us:

Don’t let your planning reviews turn into soul-crushing, box-checking rituals. Don’t let your risk reviews, fresh eyes meetings, or phase planning workshops become exercises in conformity. Use them to improve not to sanitize. The goal isn’t just a clean plan. The goal is to build something better. Something meaningful.

Don’t cut the passion just to make things neater.

Key Takeaway:
Planning reviews are necessary, but not if they eliminate the very thing that makes a project great passion. Whether in film or construction, it’s the heart, originality, and energy behind the work that separates the ordinary from the remarkable.