A New Lens To View Limits Through: Constraints & Creativity

Hey Mad Aver's,
Last week I polled on whether employee turnover was a turn for the better or worse. While excessive turnover is damaging to a company's revenues and reputation, moderate levels of employee turnover can replace complacency with new energy. I asked, you answered--63% favor turnover and voted "change is good", while 37% voted that "change is no good".

This week, I'm looking at how constraints affect creativity. But first, a BIG thanks to Marissa Ann Mayer, Google's vice-president for search products and user experience. Mayer's article, "Creativity Loves Constraints", (access free after BW registration) inspired this week's topic. Marissa believes that constraints empower creativity, and remarks, "creativity thrives best when constrained". Rather than constraints and creativity living at odds, she posits a complementary, almost symbiotic, relationship between the two polarities, writing, "innovation is born from the interaction between constraint and vision".

While no one likes constraints placed upon their creative license, establishing parameters at the outset--be they limits to size, shape, budget, time, needs or preferences--can reap solutions that make it to market, rather than ideas that never make it past the boardroom. As marketer, I've witnessed my fair share of 'analysis paralysis' where clients suffer from too much data and too little action. Had executives placed a constraint upon the amount of data they aggregated, and the amount of time they spent poring over it, indecision could have been replaced with implementation, inertia replaced with action.

We've all been heartbroken when our brainchild gets the budget ax. But the longer we spend crafting a concept, the higher our level of investment to it becomes and the harder it is to let go of. More difficult still, is finding the motivation to move onto creating new concepts when we're left mourning the loss of the old. Mayer takes loss out of the equation altogether by limiting investment levels, and explains, "By limiting how long we work on something or how many people work on it, we limit our investment."

Where constraints were once thought to hamper creativity, Mayer gives us a new lens through which to view these limits: Limits transform from creative blockers to creative tools--they no longer limit creativity, they empower creative thinking. Since constraints focus creative energy on projects that are far more capable of coming to fruition, constraints are creativity's friend, not foe (since they drive innovations that get, well, created).

Looking at constraints through this creative lens leads to this week's questions: Is creating within limits, limiting our creative license or increasing our productivity levels? Do constraints hamper product innovation or move products to market? Should we be thinking outside of the box, or brainstorming within boundaries?

Here's a creative constraint that I constantly grapple with: length. I have to keep my columns to a certain word count to be sensitive to readers' busy schedules. Get too wordy, go off on too many tangents, and I lose my audience. Here's another constraint: deadlines. If I don't file copy by a certain day each week, weekly polls become monthly polls, and I lose my gig.

In her column, Mayer states, "Constraints can actually speed development. For instance, we [at Google] often can get a sense of just how good a new concept is if we only prototype for a single day or week." I reap the rewards of time constraints every week; because my polls are limited to a one-week timetable, within a matter of seven days, I'm able to decide if a topic should be revisited...or should never have been visited in the first place.

There are far more gems to mine from Marissa's piece, but, alas, I'm constrained by space--click here to access her article in full. (access to article is free, though it does requires BW site registration) I'll report the results in next week's column, or you can check them out in real time by taking this week's poll (it only takes a second).

Until next week,
- ck
P.S.: Got a hot idea, trend or topic? Give a shout out to me and I'll give you a great promo.