Art consists of limitation.
The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham did not set out to launch a global wave of creativity. They were simply trying to figure out how to make a go of Super Deluxe, a tiny basement venue they owned in Tokyo that wasn’t doing very well. The two architects, name partners in the Tokyo-based firm Klein Dyson architecture (KDa), weren’t having much luck renting out the underground gallery/club/bar/lounge/performance space/creative kitchen. On a lark they decided to invite some architect colleagues over to spend an evening sharing their work and engaging in a bit of pecha kucha (peh-CHAHK-chah), a Japanese phrase meaning “chitchat.”
There was a catch, or rather several catches. First, it was a formal sharing by way of a stand-up presentation. Second, each presenter had only 6 minutes and 40 seconds to show his or her work. As Mark and Astrid tell it, the rationale behind the time limit was simple: “Because architects talk too much! Give a microphone and some images to an architect—or most creative people for that matter—and they’ll go on forever! Give PowerPoint to anyone else and they have the same problem.”
There were three other constraints: if you wanted to participate, you had to show exactly 20 images, each one for exactly 20 seconds, and those images were advanced automatically by a timer while you spoke. But the time constraint wasn’t as arbitrary as it sounds. Mark told NPR in a 2010 interview that he and Astrid “were trying to find a catchy five minutes or so for the architect to present.” What they settled on was a Goldilocks formula: 10 slides at 10 seconds per slide was too short, and 30 slides at 30 seconds per slide was too long; 20 by 20 was just right and made for an effective, efficient, entertaining, and rather elegant presentation. It further enabled the duo to squeeze 20 speechlets into a single evening.
The first night went so well that the two planned another for the next month, dubbing it PechaKucha Night. PechaKucha Night soon became a popular monthly event, with the audience growing in size to hundreds and participants other than architects wanting in. Drinking, thinking, and networking proved to be an irresistible draw for the creative set, including designers, artists, and scholars. It wasn’t long before the problem of what to do with Super Deluxe was no longer an issue.
Word began to spread beyond Tokyo, and after three years and 30 events, PechaKucha Nights began cropping up in other cities. Astrid and Mark put up pecha-kucha.org to announce new venues and events, and within another two years PechaKucha Night had gained an international presence. By 2010, PechaKucha Night had gone viral to over 230 cities all across the world, with new cities coming on board every few days.
When you go to a PechaKucha Night—I’ve been to several and participated in two—you’re struck by the creative energy flowing through the people and the place. The description on pecha-kucha.org is accurate:
PechaKucha Nights are informal and fun gatherings where creative people get together and share their ideas, works, thoughts, holiday snaps—just about anything really, in the PechaKucha 20x20 format. PechaKucha Nights are mostly held in fun spaces with a bar. Anyone can present—this is the beauty of PechaKucha Nights. It has turned into a massive celebration, with events happening in hundreds of cities around the world, inspiring creatives worldwide.
I first heard the term in 2005 from a colleague at Toyota who had just returned from a visit to the company headquarters in Japan. When he described it to me, I didn’t get it. I couldn’t imagine the attraction. It wasn’t until I read a short article two years later on the Wired website, penned by Daniel Pink and accompanied by a video of his own pecha kucha, that I began to see the challenge and potential of it. I’ve since used it on many occasions and teach it as a technique for pitching creative ideas.
Pecha kucha shares the constraint of time with the very popular TED talks. TED is a nonprofit organization founded in 1984 that brings together people from the three worlds of technology, entertainment, and design to share “Ideas Worth Spreading.” Through two major conferences and hundreds of minor ones, a paying audience can hear the most creative people on the planet talk about their work in 18-minute (or less) presentations. Although speaking at a TED event is by invitation only and an invitation is considered an honor, TED at its core is a kindred spirit to pecha kucha: both began as a small gathering to share stimulating ideas within a time limit to keep things moving and lively.
What both formats have in common is the fourth law of subtraction: Creativity thrives under intelligent constraints.
The magic of the constraint—whether it’s an 18-minute TED talk or a 6-minute and 40-second pecha kucha—lies in the ability of a boundary or limit to provide both a focus and a framework, which is exactly what the human brain needs to make the neural pathways that connect the dots into the kind of thought that we call creativity. Also, both TED and PechaKucha Night are unconventional, unorthodox frameworks: they send the signal that something is different and thus that we need to think differently.
As TED host Chris Anderson explains the 18-minute constraint: “By forcing speakers who are used to going on for 45 minutes to bring it down to 18, you get them to really think about what they want to say. What is the key point they want to communicate? It has a clarifying effect. It brings discipline.” It’s like a child’s sandbox: more creative play will occur inside the sandbox than in the entire backyard.
I spoke at a London TED event in November 2010. Compared to pecha kucha, a TED talk is a walk in the park. The constraints are not nearly as daunting as those of pecha kucha. Interestingly, though, the theme of the event was “Reframe.” Although this chapter began with a popular quote by the British writer G. K. Chesterton, I began my talk with a quote from Frank Zappa: “The most important thing in art is the frame. For paint, literally, for other arts, figuratively—because, without this humble appliance, you can’t know where the art stops and the real world begins.”
Zappa and Chesterton have it right in elevating the figurative frame to the level of art itself, as it is the constraints—the canvas edge, the marble block, the musical octave, the structural limits of language—that spark and spur creativity while bringing the art of subtraction front and center. Michelangelo’s statue of David would not be considered the masterpiece it is had he chosen to mold it from clay rather than sculpt it from marble, a subtractive endeavor involving an unyielding and unforgiving material.
Framing is every bit as important when it comes to creatively solving complex problems in areas other than pure art. The ability to properly frame an issue or problem goes far in avoiding the typical pitfalls that limit our ability to reach a creative solution. Setting intelligent constraints will not only reveal the most creative thinkers in the room, it will also work to attract them to the challenge in the first place. The experience can be as exhilarating for the creator as the outcome is memorable for those looking on.
It is as important to see how that works as it is to understand why it works.
It’s one thing to give a time-constrained talk for a few minutes; it’s quite another to send a spaceship into space on a shoestring. It takes a special kind of person to be inspired by a mandate riddled with risk and having little margin for error, such as the one issued by NASA to its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California: “Take risks but don’t fail.”
Such a person is Brian Muirhead, who at age 41 in 1993 accepted the job as flight systems manager of the Mars Pathfinder project and with it the NASA challenge to land a cutting-edge, remote-controlled robotic all-terrain rover on Mars that would reliably beam back images, collect samples, and return scientific data on the red planet. The only catch: he was given just three years and $150 million to do it. The immediately preceding Mars Observer, which carried a $1 billion price tag and had taken 10 years, had just been lost in space, an embarrassing failure for the U.S. space program. No one in his or her right mind would want to manage the next Mars project, if indeed there was one. At the time Brian accepted the job, project funding was not guaranteed.
Brian is a quiet, cerebral, and unassuming rocket scientist. Now chief engineer at JPL, he has a significantly bigger title, significantly less hair, and significantly more white in his beard than when I first met him, undoubtedly as a result of his almost 35 years of intense involvement with high-profile missions in pursuit of JPL’s mission to push the outer edge of space exploration.
Brian was a frequent visitor to the Toyota campus during my tenure there. After reading his 1999 book High Velocity Leadership, we invited Brian to guest speak about the Mars Pathfinder project, and he soon became a regular fixture in the University of Toyota’s “lean” leadership curriculum. Through the sessions I became quite familiar with Brian and his saga. It was and remains one of the most compelling examples of how to use seemingly impossible constraints to tap into and guide human creativity in a team setting.
“Faster, better, cheaper” was the phrase used by a frustrated Mark Albrecht, staff director for the White House National Space Council, in a 1990 article he published calling for new management approaches at NASA. Albrecht’s plea responded to a series of multi-billion-dollar NASA proposals for returning to the moon and exploring human expeditions to Mars: “the basic goal is to do things faster, cheaper, safer, better.” The wholesale failure of the 1992 Mars Observer project sealed NASA’s fate, and in early 1992 President George Bush appointed a new NASA administrator, Dan Goldin. Goldin laid out the “faster, better, cheaper” approach in a speech he gave later that year:
We should send a series of small and medium-sized robotic spacecraft to all the planets and major moons, as well as some asteroids and comets. Let’s see how many we can build that weigh hundreds, not thousands, of pounds; that use cutting-edge technology, not 10-year-old technology that plays it safe; that cost tens of millions, not billions; and take months and years, not decades, to build and arrive at their destination. Slice through the Gordian knot of big, expensive spacecraft that take forever to finish. By building them assembly line style, we can launch lots of them, so if we lose a few due to the riskier nature of high technology, it won’t be the scientific disaster or blow to national prestige that it is when you pile everything on one probe and launch it every ten years.
In 1993, Goldin announced that JPL would explore a return to the surface of Mars by looking for creative ways to achieve the objectives of the failed Mars Observer project with a series of smaller missions. Mars Pathfinder was the first of those missions. Goldin’s accepting attitude toward failure was fine in theory, but in reality his attitude was quite different: “Pathfinder could not and must not fail,” Brian told us. “But judging by the looks on the faces of the thirty or so people staring at me when I walked into that first project meeting at JPL, the mission was impossible.”
“The constraints were impossible,” Brian would say. “Unheard of. Crazy. We were being asked to do a major NASA mission for less than what it cost to produce the movie Titanic. And provide a happy ending to boot! The Viking mission to Mars in the late 1970s took seven years to develop, and we had three. But for whatever reason, maybe because it was that risky, it had a magnetic attraction for me.”
Impossible is a word that you never quite get accustomed to, although it does get less surprising. I heard it repeatedly at Toyota, as did everyone.* It rang through the halls of Toyota when in 1987 the chief engineer for the secret project that would become the first Lexus, Ichiro Suzuki, issued the challenge of producing a luxury performance sedan that would beat the best luxury sedans—BMW 735i and Mercedes 420SEL—across the board in comfort, styling, performance, handling, cabin noise, aerodynamics, weight, and fuel efficiency. His goals included a top speed of 155 miles per hour (735i and 420SEL topped out at under 140), 22.5 miles per gallon (735i and 420SEL got less than 20), a cabin noise level of 58 decibels at 60 mph (735i and 420SEL were over 60), and an aerodynamic drag of 0.29 or less (735i and 420SEL were over 0.32), all in a vehicle weighing 80 pounds less than the 3,880-pound 735i.
The reaction from the 1,400 engineers involved was unanimous: impossible. Legend has it that the product engineering chief, Akira Takahashi, told Suzuki to his face that he was out of his mind, refusing to go along with the plan. The goals were too high individually, but together? Impossible. Takahashi’s argument made sense: no Toyota car could go faster than 110 mph except the Supra, which at its top end of 130 nearly became airborne. Suzuki planted himself in Takahashi’s office, refusing to leave until Takahashi agreed to try. To this day, Suzuki, now retired, will smile and repeat: impossible.
Impossible. Unheard of. Crazy. Those are the words of breakthrough. Those are fighting words to the right person. The right people will hold on to the creative tension between clearly conflicting objectives. They will leverage the scarcity of resources. They will reframe constraints to be the very source of innovation. And they will find a way to get the job done without compromising the dramatic destination.
“That’s the secret,” as Brian Muirhead says. “You have to point your team, your people, toward a dramatic destination.” Landing on the surface of Mars in three years for $150 million is dramatic. Beating the best luxury performance sedans on the planet when you’ve never built one before—essentially building the best car in the world—is a dramatic destination. Every time Brian would retell his story, we’d look at each other, smile, and nod: “Lexus.”
Dramatic destinations are all well and good and get the blood boiling. But what Brian emphasized and what Ichiro Suzuki knew was that dramatic destinations must be broken down into tactical targets: working-level goals that people can own and focus on. In other words, to grow a forest, you have to tend to each individual tree without losing sight of the forest. “That’s where leadership comes in,” Brian says. “A creative leader is both the glue and the grease. Keep the moving parts moving, together, and in the same direction.”
Dramatic destinations demand different thinking. Those facing the Pathfinder and Lexus teams called for bold and radically creative solutions. Designing a vehicle, though—whether a car, plane, or spaceship—is often an act of sacrifice and compromise. But Ichiro Suzuki’s war cry was naukatsu, which means “never compromise.” And as Brian Muirhead would say, “it was crystal clear that we would simply have to throw the rule book away.”
The issues facing Lexus engineers were many, conflicting, and complex. Greater speed and acceleration conflicts directly with fuel efficiency, noise, and weight, because higher speed and acceleration requires a more powerful engine. A more powerful engine is a bigger and heavier engine, and so it makes more noise and consumes more fuel. A smooth, quiet ride conflicts directly with lower weight and better handling at high speed. Heavy, non-performance-oriented cars with beefier insulation and a softer suspension provide the smoother, quieter ride. Refined styling and high-speed stability conflict directly with aerodynamic drag; the more angled look of 1980s luxury cars provided greater stability because of the higher air friction. Suzuki demanded a V8 engine with a 4-liter displacement, something unheard of in a lightweight, fuel-efficient, quiet luxury car.
For Brian Muirhead, it wasn’t so much the launch as the landing that posed an enormous challenge. There are two ways to land on the surface of another planet. The first way is called a propulsive descent. It’s the traditional approach used by Apollo missions to land on the moon and by previous Mars missions, such as the Viking mission of 1976: you use a big rocket burn on approach to enter orbit and slow down and then use another big rocket burn to escape orbit and land on the surface. This way is tried and true, safe and sensible. The only problem is that that option required a much bigger launch vehicle, a lot of additional hardware, and far too much money for the budget constraint.
The only option was to head directly into Mars at an interplanetary speed of about 16,500 miles per hour. Few missions—by anyone, anywhere—had attempted the direct approach, and none had been attempted with Mars. “This was the first time anyone had even attempted to enter Mars’s atmosphere directly,” said Brian. “We had to really thread the needle to survive entry.” A direct landing required entering the Martian atmosphere at just the right angle, with little margin for error. But budget constraints left no other alternative. The question was: how do you slow down enough to land safely?
What both Brian Muirhead and Ichiro Suzuki realized early on was that thinking differently often requires fresh eyes, open minds, and youthful energy.
Nicknamed Dezi, Akihiro Nagaya was all of 25 years old when Ichiro Suzuki handpicked him to join the nine other designers working on the Lexus prototype design team. Dezi had no experience; in fact, he was still in design school when he went to work for Toyota in 1983. Suzuki liked his ambition and drive and kept an eye on the youngster, who in the four years before joining the Lexus team had demonstrated raw talent and a flair for bold ideas. Suzuki knew Dezi would bring that energy with him and breathe new life into the design team, all of whose members except Dezi were seasoned vets.
Dezi had a unique perspective on automobiles. As a youth in Japan, he had fallen in love with automobiles the moment he drove one. But for him, a car wasn’t just a car. Cars were, in his words, “moving sculpture,” and he wanted to be the one to sculpt them. It was exactly the kind of thinking Suzuki was looking for in tackling the impossible constraints, since sculpture is by definition a subtractive art. It was exactly the perspective that would save the Lexus design from falling well short of something worthy of the world’s best car.
Projects in pursuit of dramatic destinations demand flexibility in execution and the ability to recognize when to tack. It’s like sailing, in which you’re at the mercy of changing winds and know you can’t go on a straight line to get where you want to go, especially if you can’t see the destination. You have to zigzag your way to get there, all the time keeping your eye on the horizon and the North Star for guidance. Efficient tacking is the key to your success. But what do you do when the wind dies?
Late in the game, the Lexus project stalled, and the project team got stuck on two key challenges. The first was fuel efficiency, which gave the team the most difficulty. There was a very serious practical consideration, which was avoiding the gas guzzler tax of $1,000 per car not rated at 22.5 miles per gallon or better. There was also a point of pride: to that point, no luxury car had avoided it, and Suzuki wanted Lexus to be the first to do so.
One of the most effective ways to boost a car’s fuel efficiency is to reduce its coefficient of drag, or aerodynamic friction. A good way to do that is to emulate the shape of a teardrop: you raise the rear deck and sculpt the exterior shape. A lower front end helps, as does streamlining the underbody. The problem was that in the late 1980s, luxury styling was all about lines and angles, and cars like that aren’t very aerodynamic. Shackled by that mental model, the designers and engineers simply hit an impasse after dozens of attempts and failed wind tunnel tests.
The second challenge concerned the front-end design: nothing about it satisfied Suzuki. Stubborn and subscribing to the notion that harmony consists of opposing tensions like that of a bow or a lyre, he believed that styling, comfort, and performance could, and in this case must, coexist harmoniously in a car such that it would be as calming as warm bath yet invigorating at the same time, more “like a warm bath after an hour of yoga.”
To that point, Dezi had been quiet, working on lesser design challenges. Out of ideas, the senior designer, Kunihiro Uchida, asked Dezi to take a crack at sketching what he thought the front end should look like. “I was asked to create a front that would save the ass of the [Lexus] LS,” Dezi would recall later.
And save he did. “Flow. I focused on flow,” Dezi said. To him, the transitions between the various elements suggested that each of these seemingly contradictory notions had to be seamless. The only alternative was to refine luxury styling. Dezi described it this way: “You have to actualize impossible combinations.” The sketch depicted flowing lines with smooth transitions, without lines and angles. As he tells it, when he saw the sketch, Suzuki shouted, “This is it!” “It was quite a risky gamble to count on a rookie for such a critical sketch,” Dezi said. “I have special respect for Suzuki’s decision and Kunihiro’s management to let me do it.”
Dezi’s design helped get the team unstuck and opened the floodgates of creativity to allow solutions to begin to emerge. What had been seen as contradictions began to be reframed and seen as complementary. Aesthetics and aerodynamics could complement each other, for example, by fitting window glass and door handles into the metal itself, producing a cleaner look and better airflow. Sloping the rear window just enough to push air off the trunk and building a spoiler into the trunk lid to make the back end more stable enabled a sleeker profile. The innovations kept coming.
In a reversal of conventional design wisdom, function began to follow form, and mechanical components were redesigned in dramatic fashion. The engine was cast almost entirely from aluminum—block, pistons, valve lifters, cam covers, everything—saving 120 pounds. The propeller shaft, originally in two parts connected by an angled knuckle—like most rear-wheel-drive cars at the time—was replaced by a perfectly straight one, enabling a nearly silent cabin.
Tommasso “Tom” Rivellini was also just 25 when he came to the Mars Pathfinder team as a hardware systems designer. He had never even held a design job, much less designed hardware for a mission. But to solve the design challenge of landing safely on the surface of Mars, Brian Muirhead was looking for someone and something you can’t find on paper. He didn’t follow the traditional human resources approach of matching résumé credentials with job requirements.
“We hired some of our best people without any of the conventional evidence that they could do the job,” Brian would say. “We had energy, we had drive, we had enthusiasm, but not necessarily a lot of experience. So that’s what we were looking for, and that’s what we liked about Tom. He had that drive, that ingenuity. Nobody had done what we were trying to do before, so Tom looked to be as talented as anybody. Very creative. But more than anything, Tom had the drive.”
Little did Tom know that Brian’s boss, project manager Tony Spear, would soon become fond of throwing his arm around Tom and saying, “Hey, everybody, the whole mission is riding on this guy right here.”
Here’s Tom on taking the job: “You know, basically I was too ignorant to know that I was getting in way over my head, and I actually think most people were too ignorant just in terms of what the Pathfinder spacecraft development was going to turn into to know that they should never have given me this job. But nonetheless, I got the job, and I just, you know, I woke every morning and was just totally enthusiastic about it and just totally loved it. And so it was easy to put in many hours and weekends and everything that it took to make it happen.”
Image courtesy of AstroBio.
The “it” Tom is referring to is the radically creative approach to landing the Pathfinder on Mars: air bags. Pathfinder would head straight into the Martian atmosphere, slowing its descent first by parachute and then by air bags just before the craft hit the ground. “It was a wild idea,” Brian would say. “Use giant air bags to cushion the lander’s impact, then let it bounce and roll to a stop? NASA basically just looked at it and said, ‘Well, propulsion; that’s the old way of doing business. You guys will never get this job done if you do it the old way; it’s too expensive, so, try it.’”
Try was the operative word. As Tom would later tell the story in NASA’s online magazine Astrobiology:
Our task was to design and build airbags for Pathfinder’s landing on Mars, an approach that had never been used on any mission. Airbags may seem like a simple, low-tech product, but it was eye-opening to discover just how little we knew about them. We knew that the only way to find out what we needed to learn was to build prototypes and test them. We just didn’t know how ignorant we were going to be.
Airbags seemed like a crazy idea to a lot of people. Nobody ever said that, mind you, but there seemed to be a widespread feeling that the airbags weren’t going to work. “We’ll let you guys go off and fool around until you fall flat on your faces.” That was the unspoken message I received day after day.
Everyone’s main fear about using these giant airbags was that the lander would be buried in an ocean of fabric when the airbags deflated. I began the search for a solution by building scale models of the airbags and lander, and I played with them in my office for a couple of months.
I built the models out of cardboard and plastic, and taped them up with packing tape I got from the hardware store and ribbon from the fabric store. I used a small raft inflator that I had at home to pump up my model airbags. Over and over again, I filled the miniature airbags and then let them deflate, watching what happened.
I fooled around with a dozen or more approaches before I finally came up with something that I thought worked. Slowly but surely, I came up with the idea of using cords that zigzag through belt loops inside the airbags. Pull the cords a certain way, and the cords would draw in all of the fabric and contain it. Wait to open the lander until after all of the airbags had retracted, and the fabric would be tucked neatly underneath.
A creative design does not become a viable innovation until it actually works. The Lexus and Pathfinder teams obsessed over testing. That’s understandable in light of the fact that human lives in the case of Lexus and millions of dollars in the case of Pathfinder were at stake. Both projects involved a lot of trial and error, as both projects involved things that had never been done before.
“My boss, Tony Spear, had one mantra from the very beginning,” Brian would tell us. “Test, test, test.” Using air bags meant the Pathfinder would be bouncing when it landed. Tom Rivellini conducted dozens of tests using helicopters that dropped the air-bag-wrapped Pathfinder hundreds of feet onto a Mars-like surface, starting with a 1/20 scale model and working up to full scale. Each test produced important new refinements, but the first drops were complete failures. “We weren’t sure if this thing was going to work,” Brian would say. “But we kept working the details, improving the design, and going back in to test. It was a very iterative process.”
I’ll never forget the story of how the team tried the analytical approach but ended up burning over a week of Cray supercomputer time to get just a few seconds of fairly worthless data on the impact. “The problem was just too complex,” Brian said. “So we had to rely on Tom and his team’s ability to design, build, and test their way to a design that would work.”
Here’s how Tom told the story of testing in his Astrobiology post:
Even after we had the mechanics figured out for the airbags, a big question remained: What about the rocky Martian terrain? Landing on Mars, we had to accept whatever Mother Nature gave us. The Pathfinder wouldn’t have a landing strip. To simulate conditions on Mars, we brought in large lava rocks the size of a small office desk. They were real lava rocks that our geologists had gone out and picked; if you tried to handle one of them, you would cut up your hands.
The more landscape simulations we tested, the more we started tearing up the airbags. Things were not looking good. Once again, we realized that this was an area that we just didn’t understand. We tried material after material, applying them in dozens of different configurations to the outside of the airbag. Each test became like a ritual, because it took between eight and ten hours to prepare the system including transporting the airbags into the vacuum chamber, getting all of the instrumentation wired up, raising the airbags up to the top of the chamber, making sure all the rocks were in the right place. The vacuum chamber where we did the drop tests used so much power that we were only able to test in the middle of the night. Once the doors of the vacuum chamber were closed, it took three or four hours just to pump down the chamber. At that point, everybody either broke for dinner or went to relax for a while, before coming back at midnight or whatever the appointed hour was. Then we had another 45 minutes of going over all of the instrumentation, going through checklists, and then ultimately the countdown.
The last 30 seconds of the countdown were excruciating. All of that anticipation, and then the whole impact lasted less than one second. When we finished a drop test, we knew right away whether it was a success or failure. Brian Muirhead, the flight systems manager, was always insistent that I call him immediately, no matter how late it was. At 4 a.m., I would call him at his home and have to give him the news, “Brian, we failed another test.”
The day for the final test drop came, and Tom’s plane from Los Angeles to the test site in Ohio was delayed. He told the team not to wait but to conduct the test without him and leave a videotape of the test for him to review. Tom recalls it this way:
When I got to the facility, the test crew wasn’t there. I went into the control room and ran into the guy who processes the videotapes. “So what happened?” I asked him. “Did you guys do the test?” He pointed at a VCR and said, “The video is in there. Just go ahead and press play.” So I hit play. Down comes the air bag in the video. It hits the platform and explodes catastrophically. My heart sank. We weren’t going to make it. But then I realized that there was something strangely familiar about the video I had just watched. In an instant it came to me; they had put in the videotape from our worst drop test. The practical joke could mean only one thing: We had had a successful drop test and were finally good to go.
The entire Mars project from concept to touchdown was completed in 44 months—less than half the time needed for the 1970s Viking mission. The project team numbered just 300 members, a stark contrast to the 2,000 workers assigned to Viking. They also met their fixed budget, one-twentieth the cost of Viking.
On July 4, 1997, the Mars Pathfinder landed successfully on the red planet, and the tiny Sojourner rover started its now famous trek across the surface of Mars.
Mission: Accomplished.
The Lexus project took a total of six years from concept to launch: twice as long in development time as the Mars Pathfinder project. It would require the efforts of 1,400 designers and 3,700 engineers. Over 900 engine prototypes were developed and tested, along with 450 test models. Engineers spent hundreds of hours in wind tunnel tests and drove nearly 2 million test miles. Prototypes were dropped off and left in the Arizona desert for months with the windows down to observe the ravages of time and harsh exposure in an effort to create solutions to counteract those effects. The thickness of the chromium plating was increased dramatically, bodies were layered with six separate coats of paint, and a new laminated glass was created for the rear window to reduce sun damage.
When the Lexus LS400 made its debut on September 1, 1989, it stunned the automotive world and set a new luxury standard. It was by all objective measures the best car the world had ever seen. The facts made history: in every category rated by Car and Driver, the LS400 trumped the BMW 735i and Mercedes 420SEL. The Lexus LS400 was five decibels quieter, 120 pounds lighter, and 17 miles per hour faster; got more than four more miles to the gallon; and retailed for $30,000 less than the BMW 735i. It then took just two years for Lexus to displace Mercedes-Benz and BMW, which had been entrenched for generations, as the top-selling luxury import nameplate in America.
Upon tearing down two LS400s given to General Motors headquarters by a southern California auto dealer, Cadillac engineers in Detroit concluded that the Lexus car could not possibly be built.
Mission: Accomplished.
Dan Roam uses the back of a napkin to scribble solutions to tough problems. Jessica Hagy of ThisIsIndexed.com offers brilliantly funny insights on 3 by 5 index cards. Hugh MacLeod of GapingVoid.com draws cartoons on the back of a business card. When I was working with Toyota, I learned how to use A3-size paper to propose solutions and strategies. When I worked with frog design, I learned to pitch ideas using a 6 by 9 idea sheet like the one shown here. Use the constraint of space to let your creative ideas shine.
Why do constraints exert such a powerful influence on creativity? The idea that boundaries and limits can produce boundless and limitless thinking is counterintuitive and paradoxical. If we can understand a bit more about the mechanism behind constraints, perhaps sparking our creativity will become that much easier.
Yahoo! CEO Marissa Ann Mayer believes in the power of constraints, and offers an eloquent and thoughtful explanation of how they influence creativity. Before being named Yahoo’s CEO in 2012, Marissa was Google’s “gatekeeper,” responsible for keeping the Google interface clean, simple, and uncluttered. Several years ago she revealed in an online post the philosophy of constraints that guides her work. “Creativity is often misunderstood,” she begins. “People often think of it in terms of artistic work—unbridled, unguided effort that leads to beautiful effect. If you look deeper, however, you’ll find that some of the most inspiring art forms—haikus, sonatas, religious paintings—are fraught with constraints.”
Michelangelo would agree, with painting the Sistine Chapel being a case in point. Pope Julius II dreamed of a grand mausoleum for himself and commissioned Michelangelo as his artist of choice. Given carte blanche and unlimited resources, Michelangelo proposed an ambitious concept of more than 40 marble statues. After the initial design was approved, he spent nearly a year in the hills of Italy cutting massive marble blocks. But the Pope’s advisors viewed Michelangelo as a threat to their influence and persuaded Julius to end the project before it began. On the advice of counsel, Julius then challenged Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel as a fresco. It was a diabolical scheme. The Pope’s advisors knew that Michelangelo not only detested painting as a medium but had no experience whatsoever with fresco. If Michelangelo accepted the commission, his anticipated failure would position him as inferior to Raphael, an up-and-comer who was being hailed as a genius. The comparison would destroy Michelangelo. However, if he refused, his career would end that day.
Caught between Charybdis and Scylla, Michelangelo did the only thing he could: use the impossible position to drive his creativity. Refusing the help of expert fresco painters brought in to advise him, he chose to completely reinvent the fresco technique. He even expanded the job’s scope, deciding to paint the walls as well. He built his own scaffolding, locked himself in the chapel, and for four years contorted himself, hanging upside down, painting the incredibly beautiful scenes.
“They’re beautiful because creativity triumphed over the rules,” according to Marissa. Here’s how she completes her thought.
Constraints shape and focus problems, and provide clear challenges to overcome as well as inspiration. Creativity loves constraints, but they must be balanced with a healthy disregard for the impossible. Disregarding the bounds of what we know or what we accept gives rise to ideas that are nonobvious, unconventional, or simply unexplored. The creativity realized in this balance between constraint and disregard for the impossible are fueled by passion and result in revolutionary change.
It’s often easier to direct your energy when you start with constrained challenges … or constrained possibilities…. These constraints fuel passion and imagination. They generate creativity…. Constraints can give you speed and momentum. In shaping the process used to design a product, constraints can actually speed up development. Speed also lets you fail faster.
But constraints alone can stifle and kill creativity. They can lead to pessimism and despair. So while we need constraints in order to fuel passion and insight, we also need a sense of hopefulness that keeps us engaged and unwaveringly in search of the right idea. It is from the interaction between constraint and the disregard for the impossible that unexpected insights, cleverness, and imagination are born…. True creativity makes the impossible possible. It can revolutionize a product, a business, the economy, and the world around us.
What I find intriguing and insightful about Marissa’s explanation is this: although many creative activities—from the arts to design to athletics—all seem to be free-form in nature, in reality they are anything but. Each has its own set of limits that governs the performance by providing two very important elements: focus and frame.
Take comedy improvisation, for example: it is the audience that sets the limits. It is the audience that throws suggestions to the performers, themes that are often unlikely and, in the funniest skits, contradictory. The actors stitch the themes together with no further planning, and that sets the stage, as it were, for what happens next. And what happens next—on stage and between the performers—is much like what happens in a shared space such as Exhibition Road: behavior emerges within the given context, following the simplest rule: accept what is given to you by those with whom you are interacting. In comic improv, every line you produce builds on the line that comes right before it, and you can never question that line. This is a daunting constraint, because you cannot plan, prepare, or in any way rehearse your own lines. Your only choice is to remain focused and attuned to everything that is happening on stage, ready to react with nary a moment’s notice. This simple limit, though, makes for nearly infinite possibilities and actually frees the performer to invoke his or her imagination.
When you learn comedy improv, you practice the technique of “yes, and….” Not coincidentally, that is what the most effective creative brainstormers use in problem-solving sessions. It’s the idea of building on others’ ideas; when any idea is proposed, participants react to it with their own idea, beginning with “Yes, and….”
All these examples—PechaKucha Night, a TED talk, Mars Pathfinder, Lexus LS400, the Sistine Chapel, and improvisational performance—have in common one thing: immovable obstacles. Recent studies offer evidence that, contrary to popular belief, the main event of the imagination—creativity—does not require unrestrained freedom; rather, it relies on limits and obstacles.
Researchers at the University of Amsterdam’s Department of Social Psychology sought to prove that obstacles can prompt people to open their minds, look at the “big picture,” and make connections between things that are not obviously connected. This ability is called “global processing,” and is the hallmark of creativity. Participants in the study played a computer maze game. One group, though, played a version of the game that had an impassable blocking obstacle in one of the routes through the maze, which significantly limited options and made it much harder to discover the escape route. Then they were given a standard creativity test containing what psychologists term remote associates puzzles. Three remotely associated words appeared on the screen—for example, plate, shot, and broken—and the subjects were asked to find a fourth word that connected them all. (The answer is glass.) Those who had played the harder maze game containing the obstacle solved 40 percent more of the remote associates puzzles. The constraint had forced them into a more creative mindset, and their imaginations benefitted from first struggling with the obstacle in the maze.
“Daily life is full of obstacles,” write the researchers in the November 2011 edition of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “A construction site blocking the usual road to work, a colleague’s background chatter interfering with one’s ability to concentrate, a newborn child hindering parents in completing their daily routines, or a lack of resources standing in the way of realizing an ambitious plan. How do people cognitively respond to such obstacles? How do the ways in which they perceive and process information from their environment change when an obstacle interferes with what they want to accomplish?”
They answer those questions by concluding that it is not until we are faced with a difficult challenge or hurdle that we free ourselves from the cognitive chains that may be unconsciously inhibiting new connections waiting to be made in the right brain. They write: “Obstacles will prompt people to step back, broaden their perception, open up mental categories, and improve at integrating seemingly unrelated concepts.” In other words, relevant obstacles, limits, and constraints make us (to borrow a phrase) “think different.”
Raychem founder Paul Cook once told William Taylor in a Harvard Business Review interview: “To be an innovative organization, you have to ask for innovation. You assemble a group of talented people who are eager to do new things and put them in an environment where innovation is expected. It’s that simple, and that hard.” Dan Wieden, founder of the highly creative advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy, the firm behind Nike’s “Just Do It” tagline, echoes Cook’s sentiment by telling one journalist: “It really is that simple. You need to hire the best folks and then get out of the way.”
In other words, give the right people the right challenge and trust that the solutions will appear. The Mars Pathfinder and Lexus LS400 missions illustrate how exceptional people facing monumental obstacles can rise to the occasion. But what is interesting in both cases is that it was the impossible goals that attracted those people to the project in the first place. And although those individuals were exceptional, they are not exceptions to the rule—they are the rule.
The rule is this: creativity thrives under intelligent constraints.
TINA SEELIG
DEREK SIVERS
TERESA AMABILE
PETER SIMS
SETH BERKOWITZ
HAL MACOMBER
DAN SCHAWBEL
MOE ABDOU
PAUL AKERS
In my course on creativity and innovation at Stanford University, I decided to use a game to demonstrate that changing the constraints has a significant effect on creativity and team dynamics. I brought eight Scrabble boards to class and let the students play. Once they settled in, every 10 minutes I changed the rules of the game. Some of the new rules removed constraints, and others increased them.
For example, to reduce constraints, I allowed players to pick nine letters instead of seven, use proper names, or use foreign words. To increase constraints, I required players to add only four-letter words, build each new word onto the prior word only, or add a word to the board within a certain time limit.
The results were wonderfully surprising.
Whenever I loosened the rules, there was an audible cheer, and when I tightened the rules, the students groaned. But the cheers were misleading. You would think that the players would score more points and be more creative when the rules were looser. However, that was not the case. The students were more creative—and earned more points—when there were tighter constraints.
For example, when the rules were loosened to include proper names, one student put down a jumble of letters and claimed it was the name of her future child. Although it was funny, all agreed that this was a sloppy response rather than a creative solution. When the constraints were increased, the students had to be more creative. In addition, the competition around the board broke down. Those playing the game had to work together to reach their individual goals, and they collectively earned more points.
In the end, the students all felt that the original Scrabble rules have the perfect constraints and that is why the game has thrived so long. But they also realized that adding and subtracting constraints drastically changed their experience. They walked away with a new appreciation for the sensitive levers they have at their disposal when they manage or are part of creative teams.
They realized that they should fully appreciate the goals they have in mind and put constraints in place to inspire others to reach them.
Tina Seelig is executive director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Programs (stvp.stanford.edu) and the author of inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity, from which she adapted this story.
Let’s say you’re a musician.
I say to you, “Write me a piece of music. Anything at all. Go.”
“Umm … anything?” you say. “What kind of mood are you looking for? What genre?”
There are too many possibilities. The blank page problem.
How do you begin with infinity?
Now imagine I say, “Write me a piece of music, using only a xylophone, a flute, and a shoe box. You can only use four notes: B, C, E, F, and only two notes at a time. It has to be in 3/4 time, start quiet, get loud, then get quiet by the end. Make it sound like a ladybug dancing with an acorn. Go.”
Ah … your imagination has already begun writing the music as soon as it hears the limitations. This is easy!
Those of us in developed countries—on fast Internet connections, reading books on subtraction just for fun—have a blank page. We can do anything. Anything we want. No restrictions.
And that’s the problem. We’re paralyzed by the infinite possibilities.
Give yourself some intentional restrictions in life and you’ll finally get inspired to act.
Restrictions will set you free.
Derek Sivers (sivers.org) is a musician; the creator of CD Baby (cdbaby.com), which became the largest online seller of independent music, and the author of the bestselling book Anything You Want.
CREATIVITY-FRIENDLY CONSTRAINTS
I have spent much of my career as a research psychologist showing how constraints can undermine creativity. But I have also discovered that the right sort of constraints can jump-start creative thinking.
Here’s the key to the conundrum for managers who want to stoke the innovation fire: that close cousin of scarcity, constraint, can indeed foster creativity. Many people freeze if they are given a blank sheet of paper and told to draw something creative. But if they are given a blank sheet of paper with a squiggly line on it and asked to elaborate on that squiggle, they often have fun turning out something pretty interesting. The human mind requires stimuli—inputs for response—and certain forms of constraint serve as stimuli for creative responses.
Creativity-friendly constraints include (1) a clear problem definition with clear goals such as the specific challenges of online innovation competitions or the Iron Chef “secret ingredient” constraints and (2) a truly urgent, challenging need such as bringing the Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to earth. But intentionally strangling resources below a sufficient level in a misguided effort to spur new thinking probably will spawn only aborted attempts at innovation. The same goes for constraints that straitjacket the autonomy needed to passionately search for new solutions.
Japanese haiku, a lovely and time-honored art form, is full of tight constraints; the classic three-line poem must have five syllables, then seven syllables, then five more. But because the form offers a clear and challenging set of parameters and because there’s no scarcity of words in any language, creativity can blossom.
All of which leads to a question, with apologies to the great masters of haiku:
Starving or stoking,
Scrounging or brandishing tools,
How do you create?
Teresa Amabile (progressprinciple.com) is Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and coauthor of The Progress Principle. The essay here first appeared in longer form on hbr.org.
Some people swear by the “go big or go home” philosophy. If you haven’t seen the movie Moneyball, it’s about how a baseball game, which is dominated by big budgets and flashy players, can be won with the exact opposite of that way of thinking. Hitting singles and getting on base more can be a better strategy than swinging for the fences.
I learned that lesson well when I was developing my proposal for a book I wanted to write based on my work at the Stanford d.school and design thinking called Experimental Innovation: Turning Little Bets into Breakthroughs. Design thinking taught me the value of down and dirty prototypes, getting quick feedback, and iterating. So instead of writing a full book proposal, which is essentially a lengthy business plan for a book, I put together a three-page concept document and circulated it to a few potential “users”: agents, authors, and executive readers.
I will never forget the first conversation I had with one of the agents. After I sent her my rough three-pager, she and I spoke for 30 minutes. It was a long 30 minutes and painful. I almost threw up after hanging up; it was that bad. The only thing she really liked was something in the subtitle. She liked “Little Bets.”
Over a hamburger a few days later, a friend and fellow author, Ori Brafman—he wrote Sway and Click—looked at the same three-pager for about three minutes and said, “I love it! You should call this The Little Bets Book.” It was as if he had solved the riddle and could now eat his lunch. Then, after taking a bite, he stared into the distance with a pensive expression, turned back, and said, “I am not using little bets right now, but I should be. It’s a different way of thinking.”
After I moved “Little Bets” from the subtitle to the title and focused the central idea, the entire audience response suddenly changed. Nearly everyone I talked with, from agents to CEOs to friends from school to my uncle (who is a truck driver), liked the idea and found the thinking useful. Little bets with big returns was simple and to the point, and it didn’t seem to matter what was in those three pages after that.
Despite the fact that I had never developed a book proposal, let alone a new book idea from scratch, “eating my own cooking,” as they say, helped me not only efficiently identify the core problems but also zero in on the big idea.
If I had gone big, I might have ended up staying home.
Peter Sims (petersims.com) is a Silicon Valley–based entrepreneur and the author of Little Bets and the coauthor of True North. (Photo: Nicholas Zurcher)
We’ve had to get a little crafty at audience acquisition. We don’t have the brand history or the financial backing our competitors do to burn on advertising. When we huddled to build our strategy, we immediately decided to go the route of first paid search and then search engine optimization.
Our thinking was that if everyone was using Google as the gateway to the world’s information, we would be more comprehensive than the rest of the pack and leverage that content girth to own access to the gateway.
We hired more journalists and data editors than everyone else and along the way generated 3.4 million pages of content. That strategy catapulted us into the top 100 most cited websites in all of Google Search and helped us build a very large audience: 17 million unique visitors a month, 100 million-plus a year. Not bad.
And yet.
Somewhere on that journey, we lost our way. In trying to do whatever it takes to help people find the car that meets their every need, we became a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. If you want true market pricing, you can find it on our site. If you want editors’ picks, you can find it on our site.
When we were completely honest with ourselves, we realized that you can find pretty similar stuff elsewhere. While we’ve done lots of things well, we haven’t done anything that buries the rest of the pack. We haven’t made them irrelevant. Not yet, anyway.
Lately, we’ve decided that maybe more isn’t better. Maybe less is better. Less of the stuff you can get elsewhere. More of the stuff you can’t. Better for our customers, better for our clients and partners, better for us. If we are going to redefine the car-buying experience in America, it will not be by providing yet more information but by making a few simple promises or guarantees and throwing all our weight behind them.
No one can foretell the future. But we’re pairing our now significant weight in the automotive space with the power of subtraction in a bet that we can transform the way consumers buy cars: by removing the stress, hassle, and uncertainty inherent in the current state and restructuring the broken relationship between consumers and dealers.
The bet is on addition through subtraction.
Seth Berkowitz is the president and chief operating officer of Edmunds.com, the leading portal for automotive consumers.
December 2008. Recession situation dire. That the construction industry would be hit hard was a gross understatement. Our lean design, project management, and construction clients not only would cut back on consulting but might disappear entirely.
Our response: double down on learning and improving. But what could we offer where a fee was not a preemptive constraint? We had only one choice: leverage the limitations.
We settled on a mastermind group like that of Ben Franklin’s Junto and the group of Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and Thomas Edison. Today, mastermind groups are generally facilitated affiliations of professional people who come together around a specific purpose, and members gladly pay to join them.
We launched the Lean Leaders Guild in March 2009 with the goal of meeting every other week for 90 minutes.
We entertained charging a small one-time fee for the year that would cover our expected costs and pay for some of our time. We tested that with some of our clients. Breaking that into a monthly charge would be easier for them. Something less than $75 might work, we thought. But after speaking to a number of prospective members, we reconsidered. We eliminated the fee entirely.
The only catch was that they had to make most of the sessions, and if they missed a session, they listened to the recordings. We pivoted away from revenue and toward contribution and participation. No easy feat in the middle of a downturn in business.
Subtracting the fee led to unexpected results. We attracted the very group of people we wanted: owners, architects, engineers, trade partners, general contractors. We developed good friendships. We attracted new business worth far more than the fees people would pay. Many of the participants started doing business with one another. Competitors teamed to pursue business. The group developed an openness to experimentation. We had very candid conversations about what was working and not working.
Free has now become a key strategy for companies. In our case, any amount we were considering charging was surely far less than the value people would derive from their participation. Subtracting that fee acknowledged that we expected to gain tremendous value from participating with them.
Free didn’t just seal the deal, it ensured our success. Not only did we survive, it paved the way for us to thrive.
Hal Macomber (halmacomber.com) is practice leader at Lean Project Consulting, Inc. (leanproject.com), a Colorado-based construction management consultancy.
When I was starting out in my career, I took on multiple projects at once without clear goals and objectives. I really had no idea where my journey would lead to and the impact personal branding would truly have on my career.
Within six months, I had started a blog, a magazine, and a video podcast series while holding a full-time job running a Green Belt Six Sigma project and writing for online websites.
Back then, my focus was primarily on passion instead of profit. Each project I worked on limited my ability to excel at other projects that might have been more important to my future business. In a sense, I couldn’t give 150 percent to the projects that would give me the best possible outcome. As a result, it took longer to grow my blog community and magazine circulation and months longer to quit my job and start a company.
Fast-forward to today, where I’m limiting and trying to justify each project that I work on with measurable objectives. Projects that I’m passionate about but don’t have time for are outsourced, and I concentrate on projects that have an impact on my bottom line. I’m moving from eight websites to five websites and am consolidating my operation entirely.
I’m putting website features in place that automate my marketing systems so that I have more free time to do what’s important. I’ve limited the services under my consulting company, and I’ve created a team of people who are experts in their field to help me accomplish everything. I’ve embraced my mistakes and learned from them and advise clients on how to avoid making them.
In some cases, the fewer projects you’re involved with, the more successful you are. It’s easy to spread yourself too thin when you love what you do and you see many opportunities. I get a lot of inbound queries from people who want to work with me in some capacity, and I’ve started turning many down. I don’t consider an opportunity an opportunity when it limits your ability to have major successes in business.
It’s far better to do really well at fewer things than moderately well at many things.
Dan Schawbel (danschawbel.com) is the founder of Millennial Branding and the author of Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future.
At the beginning of 2009, I was reading Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. It really hit me about this whole eliminate piece. I realized I was spreading myself way too thin.
I decided I was going to focus on just a few things in my life. It really started with my relationships.
I sat down and drew three concentric circles. The outer circle was for acquaintances. The second was for friends. The inner circle was for the truly inspirational people in my life, the ones who if they called at 4 a.m., it would be my pleasure to help them.
It wasn’t the hundreds of people in the outer circle or the 50 or 60 in that second circle but the 10 in that third inner circle who have become my focus. They have in turn had the greatest contribution to and impact on my life.
For me that simple diagram really helped direct my attention to what mattered most. It intensified my attention in the right areas and allowed me to reduce, if not eliminate, the attention I had been paying to what didn’t matter anywhere near as much. I don’t feel guilty anymore if someone is in that outer circle and for some reason I don’t return an e-mail or phone call right away.
I did the same thing for projects I’m working on. Now I have just three key projects. Being able to say no strategically to everything else gives me the greatest opportunity to make progress on those three.
And I did it for my goals. I used to write down 20 or 30 goals at the beginning of the year that I wanted to achieve or the ideas that I wanted to devote some energy and attention to. But I never got anywhere with them. My goals now are totally different. Money didn’t make it to the inner circle—it’s about inspiration, it’s about family, it’s about relationships, it’s about spirituality.
So my life is really simple: what are the three most important things for me professionally, what are my three most important goals personally, and what are the most important relationships in my life?
I’ve been living subtraction since 2009, and I’ve never been happier, more fulfilled, or more evolved.
Moe Abdou is the creator of 33voices.com, a global conversation with a mission of inspiring and igniting the ambitions of entrepreneurs everywhere.
Two years ago our pad printing room was large, about 15 by 15 feet, with an 8-foot ceiling. In there we had a lot of tables, conveyor systems, racking, and shelving. But as our company grew and we made the decision not to buy a larger building and expand, as companies traditionally do when they grow, we asked, How can we do more with less?
Our business was growing—we launch about two dozen new products each year—and our need to pad print more products was growing, yet we didn’t have the room. We challenged ourselves to cut our pad printing space in half. We found another area in our facility, half the size of the existing room, and moved the pad printing into it.
It really forced our operator to find ways to be more efficient—reduce all the resources needed, including human motion and movement, that went along with the pad printing process. He did a phenomenal job.
But we kept growing, and we now needed that half-size space for something else. Our operator found a four-foot by eight-foot by seven-foot spot underneath a pallet rack. Underneath a pallet rack!
Two years in, our sales have grown dramatically, we’re pad printing much more than we used to, and now that pad printing position uses about a third of the space we started with.
I recently gave a tour of our facility, and we had three—three!—people in addition to our operator in that small space, watching the pad printing in action, cranking out hundreds of items efficiently and effectively.
How is that possible?
Simple: instead of walking from spot to spot in a nice big room, our operator sits in one spot and spins around in his swivel chair as he prints, puts the product on a conveyor belt, dries it, and drops it into a box behind him. It’s a complete circle where he never has to take a step and everything has perfect flow.
That’s the magic of leveraging a limit.
Paul Akers is the founder and president of FastCap, LLC (fastcap.com), a product development company based in Bellingham, Washington; host of the radio show The American Innovator (the americaninnovator.com); and author of 2 Second Lean.