The Groove Issue 59 - Why Creativity Loves Constraints
WHY CREATIVITY LOVES CONSTRAINTS
If you had a no-strings-attached $100,000 grant to create anything you wanted for your career, do you think that the result would be better than if you had $10,000 at your disposal? Or if you had an indefinite period of time to come up with a solution to a problem, would that yield a superior result than if you had a strict deadline?
According to research led by Dr. Oguz Acar, a behavioral scientist from the University of London, after analyzing hundreds of published studies about creativity and innovation in companies, he concluded that when there are no limitations on the creative process, complacency sets in, and people don’t come up with their most ingenious ideas.
Constraints give people a challenge to search for and connect information from different sources to generate novel ideas of value. The same can be said about the artistic process. But there’s also a fine line that needs to be found, because if the constraints are too severe, then the creative process suffers too. Let’s dive in.
The Constraints That Made Louise Nevelson Famous
Louise Nevelson in her studio photographed by Hans Namuth in 1977
During the mid-1930s and for several years, artist Louise Nevelson and her son Mike walked around the streets of Manhattan gathering wood to burn in their fireplace to keep warm. She had almost no money and wanted to become a sculptress, so she selected wood as her material because it was easily available.
She called herself “the original recycler” and made a point to reaffirm that she was going in the right direction because the objects seemed to find her rather than the other way around.
Louise Nevelson, Sky Cathedral, 1958. Painted wood. 11’ 3 1/2″ x 10’ 1/4″ x 18”. This is part of the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art.
She also didn’t want color to help her; always used black and later in her career, white and gold. To her, black was “the essence of the universe” and “total color” and with all these limitations in place, Nevelson started producing work and showing in respected galleries in New York.
Her monochromatic wood boxes filled with things like chair legs, wine crates and barrel lids eventually made her famous. She added disparate elements that were in a continual dialogue and interplay. She was taking ordinary things away from their normal function and rendering them into poetry - but always following her strict constraints.
A Minimalist Environment
Nevelson called herself “the original recycler”. Photo by Arnold Newman, 1973.
In 1967, the year of her retrospective at The Whitney Museum and on the cusp of the most critical and financially successful phase of her career, Nevelson completely redecorated her house with grey metal cabinets and furniture. She wanted to pare herself down to allow her ideas to flow freely.
All these constraints allowed Nevelson to solidify her career and enter art history books. The uniqueness of the spray-painted scrap materials arranged as if in an old curio shop became her trademark, and later in her life that style opened the door for many commissions for outdoor sculptures, dozens of which live in public spaces all over the United States.
After many years of financial hardship, Nevelson’s constrained body of work paid off. Not only had she amassed considerable wealth and acquired several buildings in SoHo, but by the time of her death in 1988 her estate was valued at $100 million (that’s $237 million today).
How Companies Use Constraints
Jeff Bezos has said that he likes to limit Amazon’s teams to a certain number of people and coined the term “two pizza team”: if a team can’t be fed with two pizzas, it’s too big. Bezos has favored this approach because he wants a decentralized company where ideas can flow freely.
What I have noticed in corporate environments is usually the opposite: managers keep adding more people to a project and in the end the result is diluted by too many cooks in the kitchen.
Google gives its employees the freedom to work on innovation projects that they want to pursue, which is limited to 20% of their time, but has also embraced the maxim that “creativity loves constraints”.
Some of those constraints include strict deadlines for developing prototypes and lofty performance requirements about products in terms of its usability across different devices. That means that every innovation must work on all devices, regardless of screen resolution and download at a certain speed, or else the whole thing is discarded no matter how many other great features it may have.
The next time you feel that you have hit a creative wall, add some constraints, and frame them as creative challenges. Cut your budget, your timeframe, or the amount of resources that are available to you.
If you don’t put some limitations around your projects, your mind won’t be forced to work harder in the quest for the best ideas and instead your brain will follow the path of least resistance and produce subpar results.
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.
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THE CURATED GROOVE
A selection of interesting articles in business, art and creativity along with some other things worth mentioning:
If the pandemic has proven anything, it’s that innovation can happen anywhere.
Like sports, ideas have to be played to be tested
A sprawling villa in Rome containing the only ceiling mural ever painted by the Italian master Caravaggio is being put up for sale for almost €500m.
You don’t need to go to the moon to be innovative.
Adobe’s Photoshop will be able to prepare an image to be an NFT very soon.
Best art exhibition I saw in NYC last week
When pitching an idea, should you focus on “why” or “how”?
Sleep, rest, and creativity are hot topics of debate; including the stuff of heated online discussion among leaders. Sleep deprivation is not only a risk for creativity, but also for poor health and premature death. Sleep literally keeps you alive.