Ever notice how many times an unsuccessful project team will explain their failed
Dr. Seuss, "Green Eggs & Ham," Cover via Amazon
performance in terms of the constraints that made success "impossible"? The next time you hear this, beware! There's good reason to believe that constraints are far from debilitating to creativity, and could, in fact, be liberating, instead.
Here are three familiar constraint categories that you might wish to experiment with in terms of "toughening them up" rather than relaxing them:
Time: the first, and possibly most important, constraint that Steve Jobs gave to Apple's iPod team when they began to search for a way out of the economic debacle that Apple found itself in following the catastrophic introduction of the music-indifferent iMacs, was "8 months from start to market." If the team could not deliver on this requirement, not only would the iPod miss the Christmas ordering deadlines, but Apple would likely be dead as an organization as a result. It remains nothing short of amazing to me that they were able to go from no-concept to market in such a short period of time; but, of course, there was no alternative! One week is all that Nordstrom's Innovation Lab typically gives itself for any project, resulting in a real rethinking of the innovation process, including sometimes moving design right onto a store's floor, so that designers can speak directly to customers, shortening the time required for these conversations. Even shorter was the weekend that it took to create the proposal for the fabled B-52 bomber. In 1948, six Boeing engineers worked for weekend in a hotel room to produce a 33 page proposal, which included moving from turbo-prop to jet engines, and accompanied this proposal with a balsa-model prototype, in order to salvage a team project that was at the risk of failure. In all of these instances, short time targets undoubtedly served to impress a sense of urgency on all involved, and resulted in the "fat" being cut out of the innovation processes.
Resources: A Google search suggests that there are 39,100,000 words in the English language, yet Theodore Seuss Geisel -- Dr. Seuss -- chose to employ only 50 of them (49 of which were single-syllable) in writing the 62 page Green Eggs & Ham, in 1960, which went on to become the eighth best selling English-language children's book of all time, despite this self-imposed constraint (involving a bet with Random House publisher Bennett Cerf). When Denmark’s famed chef René Redzepi (of Noma) and California chef Daniel Patterson (of Coi), recently spent a weekend together in an experimental cooking-conversation (Food & Wine, January 2012) they severely constrained their hunt for eligible vegetables to “two square meters of the California organic farm County Line Harvest.” According to Redzepi: "Restriction—'a smaller sandbox to play in'” is an effective way to stimulate creativity and focus attention on the elements of innovation that have enabled the signature dishes at his restaurant, Noma, to emphasize natural tastes from the surrounding region around Copenhagen. A third example of how conscious and deliberate resource restrictions can stimulate creativity can be found in the famous Van Gogh-Gauguin collaboration in Arles, when both artists decided to paint on jute, a medium that neither had ever worked with before, in a deliberate effort to stimulate new ideas by having to tackle a completely foreign surface.
Space: Great innovative teams often benefit from uncomfortable surroundings. As rapper Kayne West speculates about becoming more of a music industry omnipresence, he has tweeted about: "... assembling a team of architects, graphic designers, directors musicians, producers, AnRs, writers, publicist, social media experts, app guys, managers, car designers, clothing designers, DJs, video game designers, publishers, tech guys, lawyers, bankers, nutritionist, doctors, scientist,teachers.. [and putting these] creatives in a room together..." Not a bad idea! After all, Edison's innovation factory was built around one big room, as is IDEO's approach to innovation, the B-52 team mentioned above, Sid Caesar's writing team, and many other incredibly successful great innovative teams. In fact, our book on Virtuoso Teams was, in many ways, a paen to the virtues of cramped quarters and intense physical intimacy among project team members in an effort to have faster conversations and to harvest every brain cell possible out the assembled virtuoso performers! It should come as no surprise that Microsoft's decision to start from scratch in developing its mobile phone software came out of a intense seven-hour meeting, in a cramped room, which is now referred to as the "cage match." Big change requires total attention and no escape until the goal is accomplished.
Talent: The one element of a teamwork that we never found constrained among outstanding innovative teams was talent. Quite the contrary! With almost no exceptions, the great teams that we have observed have made it an absolute must to break all constraints in the search for the best talent obtainable [and not settling for the the best talent available]. Great teams begin with great people, and then make managerial choices, often imposing constraints, in an effort to get the very most they can out of the talent that they have assembled. Don't relax constraints in an effort to be more "reasonable"; instead, thoughtfully embrace constraints in an effort to get more out of your innovative talent. After all, if you've gone to the trouble of attracting great people, you owe them the chance to be great, and sometimes it is constraints that make this possible.
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Bill Fischer is the co-author (with Andy Boynton & Bill Bole) of The Idea Hunter (Jossey-Bass, 2011).
Bill Fischer can be followed on Twitter at @bill_fischer
