How constraints can make you more creative
Life is full of contradictions, each one more paradoxical than the next. A child – or a visitor from outer space – would be perplexed to hear that humans learn more from failures than successes, or that we must experience sadness to truly appreciate joy. Equally alien are the many cognitive biases that are hardwired into our brains. Protecting our mental health in the 21st century is challenging when our primal instincts insist on paying far more attention to negative than positive information. If the opposite were true, our news media landscape would look radically different.
Too many choices, as it turns out, can have a paralyzing effect.
Creativity, too, operates on a contrarian logic that can leave you utterly perplexed. In a previous article for Innovators Magazine, I explored how creativity is a powerful tool in both our personal and professional lives, helping us navigate everything from the extraordinary to the ordinary. Returning to these scenes of everyday life reveals a harsh truth about creativity, one that seems to clash with the values of a free and democratic society. To unlock the full potential of your creativity, you must first shackle it, impose limits, and build a metaphorical prison around it.
Too many choices, as it turns out, can have a paralyzing effect. A shopper at a North American big-box grocery store has likely experienced decision paralysis at some point in their lives when confronted with the abundance of ingredient and product choices greeting them in every aisle. The graduating high school, college or university student surely must have felt similar emotions upon hearing the phrase, “The world is your oyster,” in at least one valedictory address. Equally overwhelming for a family or couple seeking an evening escape from the real world is the endless array of movie and TV show titles scattered across dozens of streaming platforms.
Excessive freedom of movement or intellectual space to experiment can also have an adverse effect. Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Albert Einstein experienced his “miracle year” at a time in his career when he had the fewest educational resources and the least amount of time to dedicate to his research. From 1902 to 1909 Einstein had worked in the Swiss patent office in Bern, describing it as his “worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas.” He gave these ideas written expression not in a university environment, but at home in his apartment after the formal workday had ended. Einstein’s four groundbreaking papers of 1905, which revolutionized physics and our understanding of the universe, were written under conditions that modern scientists would hardly consider ideal for research.
And yet, creative constraints surround us. We’ve simply lost the ability to recognize them or understand how they can both limit and empower us. Ironically, we’ve also forgotten that these constraints are human constructions, not natural laws.
Take teenagerhood as a distinct stage of life between child and adulthood as an example. Our teenage years, spanning ages 13 to 19, are a time when we typically undergo puberty and experience, or endure, a wide range of physical, cognitive, emotional, and social changes that define this critical period of adolescent development and experimentation. The teenager is, however, an invention of the 20th century. While humans have turned 13 for hundreds of thousands of years, the concept of teenagerhood did not gain prominence until the 1940s, when rapid economic growth and sweeping social changes gave rise to teenagers as a distinct demographic, along with the emergence of a new youth culture.
Legal codes that prescribe acceptable and proscribe unacceptable behaviors within society are ancient forms of constraint, yet they are equally human in their creation. From the Code of Hammurabi, a set of 282 laws governing relations and doling out harsh punishments in the ancient kingdom of Babylon over 3,800 years ago, to the Napoleonic Code of 1804, which spread across Europe through trade and military conquest, the stability of society and regulation of human behaviour have seldom been left to individual interpretation. By establishing rules and guidelines, the law challenges individuals and organizations to find creative ways to work within those constraints. It’s important to remember that the boundaries and safeguards of individual and collective freedoms are not always the work of liberal democracies. History is filled with examples of human ingenuity in response to social control and systematic repression by authoritarian regimes – though creativity driven by naked survival should hardly be seen as a model or motivating force to emulate.
Time is one of the most powerful creative constraints, and it’s also one of the least resource-intensive tools that anyone, from a project manager to a CEO, can use. A keen observer of Chester & Fourth’s website will notice the following quotation by British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Parkinson’s damning indictment of excessive bureaucratization inside the British civil service is easily translated. If you give someone five years to complete a task that normally takes one, they will find ways to stretch that one-year task over the entire five years. An absence of reasonable deadlines and time-based incentives can, therefore, be a huge drain on both organizational resources and human creative capital.
Decision-makers and innovators would be wise to view time’s role as a creative constraint not solely in terms of duration. Just as important are considerations of timing and the specific moment in time – the operational context – in which decisions are made and creative solutions are introduced.
