This week I was thinking about better ways to visualize something I've written about in multiple previous essays: the power of constraints on creativity and how limiting your options generates innovation.
In short, the most creative solutions or discoveries emerge in the presence of constraint — on time, money, attention, resources, environment. Creating in constrained space unlocks something mentally for us that we can't easily access when we've got greenfields, infinite budgets, or no calendar deadlines.
Constraint is the subject of a whole chapter in Lorne Buchman's book Make to Know. He writes that constraints "seem to contain a kind of magic":
Constraints help to focus, to limit, to hone the creative imagination. There are practical constraints that are inherent to a project or brief—budget, schedule, and regulatory requirements, among others. Those too can help limit possibilities and focus a designer’s attention. But more pertinent for our purposes is to recognize a more deliberate, creative element of constraint for designers—making through three-dimensional modeling and prototyping.
— Lorne Buchman, Make to Know
I was trying to come up with a visual way to represent this idea. So I sketched something basic:
With no limits, there's an aimlessness, an openness so open that we're tempted to switch gears repeatedly, never getting far along a given path.
Constraints — either self-imposed or not — oddly free us from having too much freedom. They're a forcing function to just get started.
Constraint focuses, like a lens creating a tight beam of light, so hot the leaves catch fire.
Whether it's creative energy, effort, or something else entirely, narrowing the possibility space enables moving farther down a path of discovery.
A funny thing is, later the same day after making that sketch, I was listening to Ryan Singer's excellent Synthetic A Priori podcast from a few years ago. In the episode I was listening to he references an example from Stuart Kauffman on the definition of "work":
"Work is the constrained release of energy"
Kauffman uses the thermodynamic definition, but it connects well to this concept of wide vs. tight constraint in general:
Heat, pressure, motion. Each is the result of a focused application of energy. An internal combustion engine combines all three: a piston compresses gas, explodes, and rotates a driveshaft.
Ryan brings up Kauffman's example of a cannon. A pile of gunpowder and a lead cannonball, laying in an open field free of constraint could cause some damage, but it'd be unpredictable and purposeless. The release of energy is undirected.
If you contain the explosives and projectile inside of an iron tube, the energy is channeled. Lookout for your mast or your castle ramparts.
In creative work, constraint allows us to focus energy along a narrower path. We might not achieve an interesting goal if pointed in the wrong direction. But in the undirected, unconstrained environment, we never get far enough along any axis to find something novel.
There's a relationship here, too, to my essay on Hard Edges, Soft Middle:
Some of the best work I've ever been a part of happened when we chose particular things we weren't going to do — when we intentionally blocked specific paths for ourselves for some cost/benefit/time balance. Boundaries allow us to focus on fewer possibilities and give greater useful, serious attention to fewer options. We can strongly consider 10 approaches rather than poorly considering 50 (or, even worse, becoming attached to a specific one before we've explored any others).
What we're going for with the hard edges, soft middle approach is a balance between the constrained and unconstrained. We create a higher-order set constraints, a sort of playground of possibilities to explore, inside which the options are largely unconstrained. Bounding the possibility space, sort of paradoxically, frees our theoretical team from having to chase every possibility. If the deadline is 6 weeks and we're only permitted 2 people to work on the project, it grants permission to say no to a thousand possibilities we might otherwise spin wheels chasing.
It's tempting to think we always need more freedom of movement — more money, more time, more people. But I believe constraints unlock something in our heads that's difficult to access with overabundant resources.