Constraint gets a bad name. Negative associations with restrictions and boundaries come to mind easily.
The central idea of this book, however, is that constraint is actually a good thing and that constraints can be fertile, enabling and desirable.
Less is more principles apply in many aspects of life. In monogamous relationships, for example, focusing our emotional energy on one person – to the exclusion of all others – provides a deeper level of intimacy and security.
Games equally have formal rules which allow for fair competition and a degree of certainty.
In the world of business, constraints have upsides too.
Google’s iconic and minimalistic home page was conceived not as design concept in itself but because it was the limit of Larry Page’s coding ability. Necessity in this case became a virtue. Google’s simplicity can be seen as an understated respect for its user.
Ambition and constraint
There’s a strong relationship between ambition and constraint. Those who refuse to scale back ambition in the face of constraint do better, it appears.
Experience suggests that while people may not always know how to make a constraint work to their advantage, the tension between the scale of the ambition and the nature of the constraint tends to fuel the search.
For the less ambitious, the opposite is the case.
When dealing with constraints, three personality types are identified: victims, who lower their ambitions when faced with a constraint; neutralisers, who find alternative ways to achieve their ambitions; and transformers, who find ways to use constraints as opportunities.
The book is peppered with examples of the latter. Nike’s chief executive Phil Knight’s left-field choice of an ad agency in the 1980s called Widen+ Kennedy is just one such example.
The agency was based in Portland, Oregon, a long way from the creative hubs on the east coast or Madison Avenue where creatives typically want to work. With no background in working on such a brief and prompted by Knight's challenge to connect with athletes, the small team threw caution to the wind and came up with innovative approach that put the runner at the centre of a highly successful series of campaigns.
The link is made to reverse or frugal innovation, often conceived in developing markets but increasingly high on the agendas of companies in more established developed markets.
This values constraint as a way of finding more innovative, cheaper and more sustainable ways of providing products and services.
Scale of ambition
The book suggests that businesses need to ask awkward questions. The discomfort of propelling questions makes us think differently and propels us towards new solutions.
again provides a stand-out example.
In the case of its automobile vision, rather than set incremental goals such as reducing car accidents, the big audacious goal is how to prevent all traffic accidents that are the result of human error. The question clearly defines the size of the ambition while pointing to the constraint in which the answer lies: to remove the driver from the equation.
There's a nod here too to Tim Ferriss's The Four Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and Join the New Rich which links a bold ambition to a significant constraint.
Ferriss’s answers to that challenging ambition – which include outsourcing to virtual personal assistants and migrating to automated sources of revenue – make us challenge some of our existing business assumptions.
Apple's design chief, Sir Jonathan Ive, is quoted on the subject of what it takes to confront those types of challenges and cites "remarkable focus" and "being inquisitive and optimistic", qualities not often found in combination.
Optimism itself isn’t enough and the challenge is not simply one of answering a question. It is one of creating the conversational climate that gives us the best chance to answer the question. There’s lots more in this vein here and Morgan and Barden have produced a thought-provoking book for leaders and entrepreneurs looking to inject fresh thinking into their perspectives on business.
