Be constrained
‘The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.’
IGOR STRAVINSKY
Sometimes you can have too much freedom. Like a red setter let off the lead, your mind can go bounding off enthusiastically … but end up lost and panting.
And sometimes if you can do anything, you end up doing nothing.
But give yourself an artificial constraint – and by forcing your brain to think around this new, arbitrary obstacle, you may come up with an interesting new idea.
Alternatively, you can introduce a constraint that’s not arbitrary but adds something desirable. It’s different from having a problem that has to be solved, it’s introducing a constraint that other companies aren’t looking at (because it’s not a problem they need to solve). By forcing yourself to introduce it, you create a great new opportunity.
Visual
Using a constraint is about narrowing the options, not so you (necessarily) get there quicker, but so you get somewhere different. In diagram 1 there’s no constraint and you come up with solution A, same as everyone else. But in diagram 2, the constraint cuts off solution A and creates the chances of finding solutions B, C and D.
Some examples of constraints you can try are: the solution must cost nothing; must be implementable within a day; must be the first of its kind; must be popular; must be controversial; must remove an existing element; must not be technological; must not involve people; must make things simpler.
Theory
When I was at university I played the drums in a student rock band. After one particular gig at a hall of residence, we were sitting in the bar having a drink and recovering from our exertions. Especially me – I’d been banging hell out of my drumkit, spinning the drumsticks, throwing them in the air, barking backing vocals, giving it my all.
Along came a couple of girls: new fans! They asked the vocalist: ‘Hi. Will you go back on stage and play a Red Hot Chili Peppers song?’ The vocalist shook his head. ‘Can’t,’ he said. ‘We don’t know any.’ Undeterred, the girls turned to the lead guitarist: ‘Oh go on, please, play a Chili Peppers song.’ ‘We can’t,’ said the guitarist, ‘We just don’t know any.’ The girls pursed their lips and moved along the row of stools to the bassist. They implored him, too, to play a Chilis’ song, and, again, he shook his head laughingly, telling them we didn’t know any.
Finally the girls moved down the line to me. There I was, pouring with sweat, my breathing still slightly laboured, my fingers raw from my frenetic drumming. They peered at me through narrowed eyes, like I was a strange, alien lifeform. ‘Erm,’ they said hesitantly in an unsure tone of voice. ‘Err … mmm … were you in the band?’
And that’s when I realised: if you’re the drummer you’re barely a step up from a roadie in terms of visibility. You want to get noticed? Join a rock band. Just not as the drummer.
Except.
Tommy Lee is the drummer for Motley Crue. And he is, let’s say, an exhibitionist. An outgoing, extrovert, attention-seeking individual. So we might phrase his ‘problem’ as ‘When I’m on stage, how do I make sure the attention is on me?’
But he’s got a constraint to add to the mix. ‘When I’m on stage, how do I make sure the attention is on me … even though I’m at the back of the stage … sat behind an enormous drumkit?’
Just do a search on ‘Tommy Lee spinning drumkit’ or ‘Tommy Lee rollercoaster drumkit’ to find the answers. He worked around the constraint of being behind a drumkit and made it part of the solution – a more spectacular and unique solution than if he’d just stuck with the original problem of ‘How do I make sure the attention is on me?’ Which might have led to ideas where he got off from his drumkit and came to the front to compete with the vocalist and lead guitarist.
So how does using a constraint work? First, if you already have a problem, adding an additional constraint can disrupt the normal patterns of thinking. Suddenly you’re thinking about the problem in a way that no one without the constraint is doing, so you’re likely to get different answers than them. Even if you fail to fully overcome the constraint, you may still get exciting new answers to the original problem.
For instance, you might add to the problem, ‘Oh, and it’s got to be solved at zero cost’. That might seem crazy, and might even be ultimately unachievable, but that extra direction of now looking for ‘free’ solutions might set you down a new and successful path.
Secondly, if you don’t have a ‘real’ problem but are just introducing a constraint which, if achieved, would create a real business benefit, you’re giving your brain something to work with – a ‘fun’ problem to solve. Like a computer game that has a challenge to solve to get to the next level/area.
It gives you something to focus on and push against. ‘OK, if we can’t do that, then how about this?’
And it’s a proven tool for achieving remarkable breakthroughs.
Action
BE CONSTRAINED TOOLKIT
- Brainstorm some constraints you could introduce to the problem solving (or become problems of their own) or choose one from the examples given on page 47.
- Ask which of those constraints might have an upside. Would adhering to that constraint be advantageous?
- Whether your constraint has a clear benefit or is simply different, add it to the initial problem (if you had one) and brainstorm how to solve the problem now.
- Because the constraint has been artificially created, it may not matter if you only partially achieve it, if it still gives you a great new solution to the original problem.
Four ways to constrain yourself
You begin by creating the constraint. To start with you could have a look at the ones below:
‘The solution must cost nothing.’
‘The solution must be implementable within a day.’
‘The solution must be the first of its kind.’
‘The solution must be popular.’
‘The solution must be controversial.’
‘The solution must remove an existing element.’
‘The solution must not be technological.’
‘The solution must not involve people.’
‘The solution must make things simpler.’
You could also think up your own, very random constraints. ‘The solution must have an edible element’, or ‘The solution must have a marine theme’, or ‘The solution must involve music’, as suggested by the Igor Stravinsky quote at the beginning of this tool.
And you could look at other companies and products – either direct competitors or not – and ‘borrow’ one of their innovations to create a useful constraint. Such as ‘Our solution must be ethical, like The Body Shop would do’, or ‘Our solution must involve fashion as Vogue would do’.
And finally, you could think of a constraint that would give you a competitive edge. Such as ‘Solve the problem in a way that also reduces the cost to the customer’. Or ‘Solve it in a way that also makes the product more robust’. Or ‘Solve it so that it doubles the speed of the process’.
In fact, the next step is to look at the constraint and see if solving that too might have an obvious benefit.
For instance, if you were using the constraint, ‘The solution must not be technological’ you might say ‘The benefit of that is, some of our competitors are more technologically advanced than us, so anything we came up with they’d copy and improve upon almost instantly’. Or ‘The solution must not involve people’ might suddenly get you solving your existing problem in a completely different way than you would have done, because now you’re trying to do it without the final solution involving people at all – which might not only give you an unexpected answer, but one that’s not subject to human error or costs.
PROBLEM-SOLVING TIP
Constraints are great when you haven’t got a specific, urgent problem, but are just looking for greater business success. Like back when Apple launched the Macbook Air. ‘Let’s make the world’s thinnest laptop.’ They artificially constrained themselves to make their laptop thinner than anyone else’s, not because they had a particular problem and not because that feature was in huge demand, but because it would give them a unique talking point for their product. They had to remove the mechanical hard drive and the optical drive to do it – but they got there.
Whatever constraint feels right to you will depend on the problem, obviously. It can be anything you want ultimately, just something that gives you a more specific line of attack for your brainstorm.
Tie them down to free them up
Once you’ve got your constraint, add it to the mix. You’ve tied everyone’s hands: now see how they get on brainstorming the solution. In a way, it’s the opposite of the think bigger tool. You’re narrowing the thinking, and in part distracting their conscious mind (which, as we discovered in Part I: Insight, can work well).
Instead of discussing the problem, they’ll be discussing the interesting new angle they’ve got to deal with. They’ll explore how it can be achieved. And, perhaps, they’ll get there.
It’s like the movie Apollo 13. ‘Houston, we have a problem.’ During the movie (and sure, I know it’s based on true events, but I’m sticking with the movie for my ‘facts’) there are a number of innovative solutions found to a whole host of problems they face. When they’re cobbling together some new air scrubbers to reduce the CO2 level in the air they’re massively constrained as to what things they’re able to use – so they have to be really creative with the solution (including using a sock as part of the filter).
It may sound strange, adding to a problem before trying to crack it, making it at first glance more difficult, but it really works. And as with many of the tools, you can use be constrained in conjunction with others. If adding a constraint alone doesn’t stimulate people’s thinking as much as you’d hoped, try solving the problem (with the constraint added) using another tool – like choice architecture or interrogate and extrapolate.
Example
Apple is a wonderful example of a company that gives itself constraints (or certainly used to, under Steve Jobs) in order to create breakthrough products and services.
I’ve already mentioned the Macbook Air, but what about the iPhone? Before it arrived, every single phone had a physical keypad. In fact, the idea of a phone without keys would have been laughable to every other manufacturer (like the then-dominant Nokia, Blackberry and Motorola). And to most customers too.
So there was no real problem to solve – people were happy with physical keys. They expected it. But Apple gave themselves an artificial constraint:
‘What if we made a phone with no keypad?’
‘Why would we want to do that?’
‘Hmm. Good question. Well, if there was no keypad, there’d be more room for the screen.’
‘And?’
‘A bigger screen would mean it would be more useful for emails, web browsing, playing games …’
‘Sounds good. But how do people make phone calls? Voice activation?’
‘That could be one way.’
‘But there’d still be times when you’d need to enter numbers and letters, like for texting.’
‘OK, but if the whole phone is a screen … how about a virtual keypad, that just appears on the screen when you need it?’
‘How would that work?
‘Maybe we’d make the screen touch-sensitive.’
‘Can we do that?’
‘Hmm. Let’s find out.’
In 2005, Apple bought a company called Fingerworks – experts in multi-touch surfaces. And on 9 January 2007, Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone to a gobsmacked world.
The negatives: the virtual keypad was not to everyone’s taste. It was harder to use than a physical keypad, especially at first while you got used to the change.
The positives: a much bigger screen. The possibility for app icons – effectively buttons that you could customise and move around. Many more keys, because you get the (virtual) set you needed at any particular time. And of course, the fantastic experience of using a touch-sensitive screen for much more than pressing virtual keys; it was for swiping between screens, pinching to zoom in and out of webpages, touching to play games.
You could consider that achieving their constraint ‘Let’s make a new phone … with no keypad’ was only a partial success. Because there still is a keypad – it’s just that it’s virtual, and only appears in cases when you need it. But that’s the beauty of introducing a constraint: there’s no absolute need to achieve it 100 per cent, it’s a tool for changing your thinking or finding a new advantage.
Today it’s hard to remember just what a groundbreaking idea a touchscreen phone was – and how it helped Apple leap ahead and dominate the mobile market in a very short space of time. (To the point where companies that kept physical buttons for a long time – like Blackberry – saw their business collapse.)
And it all began with a constraint. A constraint that, at first, could have been arbitrary. But which, when explored, would clearly provide some advantages. So they pursued it and pursued it and bought a company and developed a technology and launched a groundbreaking product that did something no other phone had done then … but which almost every phone does now.
Their kooky constraint has become de rigueur in the smartphone market.
Summary
Be constrained is a useful tool when the problem seems too open to solve, without any clear direction. Or when you don’t have a specific, known opportunity, but are looking for an angle to then exploit.
To create an opportunity, come up with a powerful constraint to introduce to the status quo, and then explore what benefits it might have (like in the imagined Apple conversation in the example above).
That makes it different from the ‘random insertion’ tool described later (where you find a link with something random), because here you explore what possible benefits the constraint could have, and only once you’ve found one, proceed to use it.
Finally, to use be constrained successfully, ask:
- What constraint could we introduce? Either from the list under the toolkit for this tool, a competitor, our own imagination or specific to the particular problem (like keys on a phone)?
- What benefit might introducing that constraint create?
- Are we remembering that the aim is a great new solution/opportunity/innovation – so we don’t have to actually implement the constraint part if we don’t wish, it’s just a thinking tool to help our brainstorming?