When we think of the creative process, we tend to think of outlandish and unrestrained idea generation. We assume that the most creative organizations are full of unbounded workers with unlimited resources building the future however they see fit. We assume that creativity needs total freedom to grow and develop. These assumptions are made because of a belief in the Constraints Myth—the myth that creative potential is dampened by constraints. Many artists subscribe to this myth. They believe that if their creativity knew no bounds—if they had the time and resources to do as they pleased—then the work they created would be recognized for its genius. At the same time, we constantly affirm the need to “think outside the box,” often without having fully explored the inside of it. The Constraints Myth actually provides a little comfort for when we're stuck on a creative challenge or complex problem. It provides a simple explanation for many of those frustrations: “It's not us; it's our lack of resources.” That explanation too often becomes an excuse, a crutch for those seeking to limp out of creative pursuits. The crutch is unsteady, however. There is no support for the idea that constraints hinder creativity. In fact, the research supports the opposite, and many innovative teams will tell you that creativity loves constraints.

Many of the most prolific and creative people understand how stifling a blank slate can be. All creatives need some constraints. All artists need structure. Some of the most creative poetry comes in fixed forms such as the Japanese haiku or the English sonnet. The fixed form becomes a framework that poets build from. The requirements set by these forms make the work more challenging, but that challenge pushes poets to meet their creative potential. Matthew May explains the phenomenon through sculpture: “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.”¹ What Michelangelo was able to do through the constraining substance of marble is what draws crowds to see his work centuries later. Regardless of the field, constraints shape our creative pursuits. Ideas that are novel become useful because they can be easily applied inside the given constraints. Constraints provide us a structure through which to understand our problems and think of truly innovative solutions. That structure of constraints was just what a humanitarian and a group of college students needed to develop a unique type of peanut sheller.

In 2001, when Jock Brandis was doing humanitarian work with a friend in Mali, he learned that peanuts are hard nuts to crack. Brandis was building a water treatment system when he noticed many of the village women shelling peanuts by hand.² Peanuts were plentiful in the area and had become a source of food and income for the subsistence farmers Brandis was working to help. But shelling peanuts by hand is grueling work. It takes a long time to shell a decent load of peanuts. The splintering shells often made the women's fingers bleed, and the repetitive nature of the work left them likely to develop arthritis at an early age. After seeing how difficult the process was and the toll it took on the women in Mali, Brandis made a promise to one of the women in the village where he was working. He promised her that he would get her a peanut sheller when he returned to the United States. However, when he did return, Brandis ran into a bit of a problem. What he was looking for didn't exist. Brandis couldn't locate any small-scale peanut shellers, only the large-scale machinery equipment used by commercial peanut farmers. There wasn't a market for small shellers in the developed world, and the developing world couldn't afford the large ones that did exist.

Undeterred by the lack of small peanut shellers, Brandis set to work building his own. However, he was up against a serious constraint: cost. It would do no good to design a small-scale peanut sheller at a price that subsistence farmers couldn't afford. He contacted peanut experts and engineers and eventually discovered a Bulgarian design for a small-scale peanut sheller. Brandis had to modify the design to remove costly components but still keep its essential function. After several iterations, he had completed what he called the Malian Peanut Sheller (now called the Universal Nut Sheller). Brandis's device is relatively simple, but its potential impact on subsistence farmers in the developing world is huge. The device speeds up the process of shelling peanuts dramatically and does so without inflicting trauma to the farmers' hands. And Brandis's unique design lowered the cost dramatically. Instead of costing hundreds of dollars, it can be made for less than $50 from materials that are typically readily available or easy to import. The machine is already being used by people in seventeen different countries to increase their incomes and improve their lives.

But the Universal Nut Sheller isn't perfect. Once it's made, the device is sturdy and efficient, but making one is not the most efficient process. The main component of the machine is made from concrete that is poured into fiberglass molds to harden. Although in most countries it's not difficult to get the various materials needed to manufacture the machine, these fiberglass molds are hard to make in developing nations. Instead, they are usually shipped from the United States, and this shipment increases the price of the machine as well as the time it takes to build one. That's where Lonny Grafman entered the picture to solve the next problem.

Grafman is an engineering professor at Humboldt State University who partnered with Brandis in an attempt to improve upon several projects, including the nut sheller. Grafman was particularly drawn to the country of Haiti, which had problems with plastic waste polluting its ecosystem. In the landfills and along the beaches of Haiti were vast quantities of plastic trash bags.³ Grafman challenged his students to turn this plastic waste into a replacement for the fiberglass molds that concrete would be poured into to make the nut shellers. After a few weeks of hard work, Grafman's students came to him defeated. They told Grafman that his challenge could not be met. The plastic could be melted down to make a mold, but doing so would release toxic gases into the air. The students had hit an enormous constraint. They had to develop a method for melting or shaping the plastic within a temperature range that wouldn't emit the toxic gas. But Grafman wouldn't admit defeat. He told the students that there was always a solution to be found, so there was a way to make the process work.

The very next day, his students found a solution that worked within the temperature constraint. Instead of melting the bags down to make the mold, they found they could slice the bags into thin plastic rings and weave these together to make a plastic fabric. This fabric could be heated using a simple iron and shaped into the right form. Because the bags wouldn't be melted entirely, the gases would not be released. Grafman's students not only solved the toxic gases problem but also found a way to reduce the cost of Brandis's nut sheller even further by using readily available waste material. Haitians could now build the entire nut sheller using materials available on the island while simultaneously reducing the presence of plastic waste in their landfills and on their beaches.

Brandis's original design and Grafman's students' improvements are both vivid illustrations of what creative, motivated people can accomplish. However, they also illustrate something more. The stories are so compelling because they involve several individuals working with what many believe is the chief hindrance to creativity: constraints. It would have been easy for Brandis and Grafman's students to admit defeat when faced with these constraints. But in reality, constraints often force us to be more creative, not less so. The constraints actually helped them build a better end product. By insisting that the nut sheller's mold be created from plastic waste, Grafman applied a constraint that forced his team of students to consider alternatives that would not have been obvious otherwise, and the students had to get more creative in order to find a solution. Innovation doesn't stem from wide-open spaces or from thinking outside the box. Instead, innovation happens when people work from inside the box, sometimes rethinking and reshaping the box entirely.

The Constraints Myth is easy to accept and readily believed. It even seems rational given what we know about intrinsic motivation and its effect on creativity. No one enjoys spending a lot of time on projects that seem hopeless. However, research on the creative process across multiple domains supports the opposing perspective on constraints. “Many people freeze if they are given a blank piece of paper,” notes Teresa Amabile, who has seen that freezing many times during her research career.⁴ “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 squiggly line challenge is actually a hallmark of many creativity assessments. Amabile's point is that some constraints often aid the creative process and increase the quality of work produced. Constraints provide a starting point and a problem to solve. Both are necessary for producing creative insights. Many times the presence of constraints aids our ability to generate novel ideas and shapes their usefulness to the world around us. This is a hard truth for some to accept: that a lack of resources may not be their true constraint, just a lack of resourcefulness.

As in the story of the trash bag peanut sheller, sometimes constraints themselves can be a resource for solving problems. Psychologist Patricia Stokes believes that constraints actually help by providing us with a structure to understand the problem and evaluate solutions. Stokes has taken a rather creative route to becoming a psychology professor. After earning a bachelor's degree in social science, Stokes pivoted and began a new career as an art student at Pratt Institute. After graduation, she went to work for advertising giant J. Walter Thompson and found herself working on campaigns for national brands such as Avon, Maybelline, and even Wonder Bread. Stokes traveled the world and lived abroad for several years. She was living the dream of a successful creative when something inside her changed. “It was terrific for a long time,” Stokes says. “And then something terrible happened—I got bored.”⁵

To combat her boredom, Stokes went back to school. But instead of studying more art or diverting to pair an MBA in marketing with her MFA in painting, Stokes chose psychology. She earned a PhD from Columbia University. She now teaches psychology at Barnard College in Columbia University and runs the Variability and Creativity Lab there. Stokes has become an influential researcher in creativity precisely because of her unusual path to psychology. Now she finds herself studying the psychology behind what she had been doing for years as a creative professional. Because of her background, Stokes was particularly interested in studying how the constraints of a specific medium like paint or television affect the creative process. After years of research, Stokes has concluded that constraints exert a huge influence on our creative ability and that that influence is actually quite positive. Stokes has studied the creative process in a diverse set of fields, including art, literature, music, and advertising, and found that because they work within certain constraints, creative people don't do things that differently from the established norms. They work inside or at the edges of the metaphorical box, but rarely outside it. Stokes argues that creativity actually requires some constraints and that the presence of constraints has made possible many of the most innovative works of our time, whether they be in art or advertising.⁶

All of us, it turns out, think inside self-imposed constraints. Here's a quick thought experiment to demonstrate: picture the future. Better yet, picture the future as portrayed in movies from the 1960s. In that future, the cars look largely the same, except maybe they fly. The television seems the same, except the people on the screen are dressed oddly. The homes look almost identical except sparkly clean. Ever wonder why the future imagined in the 1960s looked so much like a shiner version of the 1960s? Even if you imagined your own future, there's a good chance that it more closely resembles the present than what you'll actually find. That's because all of us have a self-imposed notion that the future will evolve neatly from the present.⁷ We actually constrain ourselves to think linearly and don't consider what disruptive innovations will occur. The envisioned future is just one example of a fundamental tendency of human cognition: we imagine from within the comfortable constraints of our own experience. If we're given free rein to be creative or to solve a problem, we typically end up focusing on what we know or what's worked in the past. Even if we had the unlimited resources or the unhindered creativity we claim to want, we'd end up imposing other constraints anyway. Constraints are a part of our life, and they are a comforting part. Stokes's thesis is that because most of us face constraints anyway, learning how to strategically use those constraints promotes a more creative outcome than roaming entirely free.⁸

Granted, not all constraints have the same effect on creativity. Some do in fact hinder creative expression. If the box is too small, then thinking inside it won't fit very many possibilities. But other constraints can end up yielding creative breakthroughs. Stokes's research has revealed four constraints that promote creativity: domain constraints, cognitive constraints, variability constraints, and talent constraints.

Domain constraints are those imposed by oneself or the field one operates in. Regardless of the field, everyone requires a certain level of understanding before he or she can contribute novel and original ideas. In many fields, there are agreed-on performance standards or standard operating procedures for any work produced. Painting requires paint. Music requires notes and scales. These examples are overly simplistic, but they demonstrate the nature of domain constraints. Domain constraints promote creativity by providing a structure that people can work within and a standard against which they can produce variations. This is why many creative individuals sometimes set their own domain constraints. They limit variability and make it easier for others in the domain to appreciate the new work. Stokes refers to these constraints as the “first chorus,” after how the first chorus in a musical piece usually sets the melody for the rest of the piece.⁹ Even if you deviate from the first chorus, that deviation draws its significance from what it is not.

Cognitive constraints come from the limitations of the mind, both the creator's and that of the audience. Oftentimes a creative work is misunderstood or overlooked simply because people cannot process it against their past experiences. Creative ideas have to be novel and useful, and that usefulness is judged against the cognitive constraints of the beholder. Consider the infamous Pets.com Super Bowl commercial of 2000. The ad championed the slogan “Because Pets Can't Drive” as an answer to why people should buy pet supplies online. The ad was certainly novel and very comical. It even became the highest-ranked commercial of that Super Bowl on USA Today's “Ad Meter.” Yet it failed the ultimate test of utility in advertising: sales. Few people who saw the ad were convinced they needed to buy dog food online. The ad's creators believed their pitch would be enough, but their belief stemmed from a lack of understanding about their audience, which didn't weigh the driving ability of pets as a reason for them to try shopping for pet food online. Becoming an expert in a given domain helps creators overcome cognitive limitations and understand which ideas are most likely to also be useful. However, being an expert doesn't excuse them from ignoring the cognitive constraints of their audience.

Variability constraints consider how much a given piece of work or creative process needs to vary from the existing standards. Exact copies aren't recognized as creative, though copies with unique modifications can be. Variability constraints help creators understand just how different their work needs to be to meet the “novel” requirement for creativity. They reveal the fine line between copying and creating. Legendary heavy metal band Led Zeppelin is still engulfed in controversy about which of its songs are uniquely original and which are uncredited cover songs. For example, the opening of their most famous song, “Stairway to Heaven,” sounds remarkably similar to a song by the group Spirit, “Taurus,” which was written three years prior.¹⁰ It doesn't help Led Zeppelin's argument for originality that they even toured with Spirit in the years before releasing “Stairway to Heaven.” Variability constraints differ greatly across industries and creative genres, just as the tolerance for mimicry differs across fields.

Talent constraints refer to the abilities that Stokes believes are genetic. Although creativity in general is not a genetically given talent, other abilities that aid creative people in their work likely are genetic traits. Tone-deaf individuals will have a significant disadvantage in musical composition, whereas it is much easier for those born with near perfect pitch. Likewise, colorblind artists will have a harder time capturing the variety of shades needed in a quality still life. Stokes is quick to note, though, that talent does not guarantee creativity and that it is hardly the sole predictor of creative ability. We're still sorting out which talents are natural and which can be developed. However, Stokes argues that even those abilities that can be developed are often acquired at different rates for different individuals due to talent constraints.

Stokes believes that these four constraints aid creativity by providing a structure that helps solve creative problems. In many fields, there are ill-structured problems that are left unresolved or problems with little hope of a resolution, such as a “unified theory of everything” in physics.¹¹ While physicists are actively looking for a single theory to explain everything in the universe, every new discovery adds a level of complexity to the rubric against which a theory of everything would be measured. We don't yet know everything about the universe, so we don't know our constraints. It is thus difficult to develop a theory to explain everything. Ill-structured problems are difficult precisely because they don't have constraints. Just as when we try to envision the future, ill-structured problems reduce our solutions to what has worked in the past. When constraints are applied that limit our ability to return to these past solutions, they force us think more creatively.

The creativity-boosting power of constraints doesn't just come from the fact that they provide a structure to work within. In turns out that when our minds encounter constraints, we're better able to tap into our creative potential. Psychology researchers at the University of Amsterdam recently showed that people open their minds to more creative ideas and better connect unrelated thoughts after they encounter constraints.¹² The researchers divided participants into two groups. The participants in both groups began first by playing a computer game that challenged them to escape from a maze on the screen. One of the groups, however, played a modified version of the maze that severely limited participants' options and made escape a much harder endeavor. Their game was significantly constrained by the lack of options. After the maze game, both groups of participants were given a standard creativity assessment consisting of several puzzles designed to test their ability to draw connections among seemingly unrelated thoughts. The participants who tried to escape the more difficult maze ended up solving 40 percent more puzzles than the group that played with a simpler maze. The researchers concluded that the constraints in the harder maze also triggered a response in the participants' minds, which heightened their imaginative abilities. What these researchers have discovered about the creativity-enhancing power of facing constraints, some companies have already known and implemented. These organizations willingly embrace constraints. One such company, 37signals, goes beyond tolerating constraints for the sake of greater creativity. It creates them.

Chances are good that before it was mentioned in Chapter Six, you had never heard of software company 37signals. But the company has generated lots of publicity within technology circles for its contrarian views, its criticism of most tech start-ups, and its willingness to work within self-imposed constraints. With Jason Fried at the helm, 37signals was founded in 1999 as a website design firm that specialized in creating websites for businesses.¹³ From nearly the beginning, the group utilized an alternative billing approach that forced them to work within constraints. Many website developers at the time billed by the hour or bid on large-scale, long-term products with high price tags. Instead, Fried's group billed $3,500 per Web page built, and offered to complete the page inside of one week.¹⁴ If the client wanted to add another page, the price was another $3,500 and another week. Adopting this format forced Fried's team to work efficiently inside the constraints of time and medium—they had only one page, one week, and $3,500 in labor costs with which to develop their product. The offering took off. In addition to developing creative Web pages, 37signals' constrained pricing allowed companies to minimize the risk they took on a Web developer. Businesses liked that they could bet a small amount on 37signals and that if it didn't work out, they could look elsewhere. Most of the time, though, it worked out better than expected.

In 2003, the 37signals business model began to change dramatically. It was then that Fried first hired David Heinemeier Hansson as a contractor to develop a project management system for 37signals to use internally.¹⁵ The program worked so well for the company's purposes that it decided to release it as a commercial product. In 2004, Basecamp, the company's flagship project management tool, was launched. By 2012, Basecamp was being used by millions of people to manage over eight million projects,¹⁶ from Fortune 500 companies' product launches to presidential campaigns.¹⁷ “When we were building Basecamp,” Fried and Hansson write, “we had plenty of limitations. We had a design firm to run with existing client work, a seven-hour time difference between principals (David was doing the programming in Denmark, the rest of us were in the States), a small team, and no outside funding.”¹⁸ Fried and Hansson believed that these constraints didn't really limit their capability. Instead, they helped them create a beautiful product because “these constraints forced us to keep the product simple.”

Although it was initially just a response to the constraint of resources, the simplicity of their Basecamp product became a self-imposed domain constraint for 37signals. Basecamp was such a usable product because it was so simple. The developers didn't have the resources to build a feature-laden product, so they didn't. What they found was that users didn't want all those features; they wanted something that was simple to work with. Any new iteration of Basecamp, or any 37signals product, has to stay simple to use. The company currently offers only four core products: Highrise (a customer relationship management tool), Campfire (a real-time group chat room for business collaboration), Backpack (an information manager and intranet), and Basecamp. Each of these products is simple, effective, and devoid of the “feature creep” of most software tools. The initial lack of resources has turned into the keystone of the company's success. “These days, we have more resources and people, but we still force constraints,” Fried and Hansson write. “We make sure to have only one or two people working on a product at a time. And we always keep features to a minimum. Boxing ourselves in this way prevents us from creating bloated products.”¹⁹

In addition to its self-imposed constraint of simplicity, 37signals has also found freedom inside another self-imposed constraint: pricing. Although its product pricing is tiered depending on usage, the company places a maximum possible price on what any single customer will pay for a given product. For Basecamp, that price is $150 per month. Regardless of the number of user accounts a customer creates or how much the product is used, the price will never exceed $150. This pricing constraint isn't a marketing ploy, either. Fried has found that this arrangement puts his mind more at ease and allows the entire company to focus on providing great service and making great products. “Lots of business owners spend their lives trying to land the whale—the single, massive, brand name account that will fatten the top line and bestow instant credibility. But big customers make me nervous,”²⁰ Fried writes. “After all, he who pays you the most has the most control over you. And we don't want any one customer to control us.” While this constraint may force them to stay extra lean, it also frees them to focus their creativity on developing great products, not entertaining large clients.

37signals' enthusiastic embrace of constraints seems to be working. Its simple, elegant products generate several million dollars in revenue a year.²¹ Its success is remarkable in light of another self-imposed constraint: 37signals hasn't accepted a single dollar of venture capital funding in its lifetime. Fried and Hansson believe that most outside capital is a polluting influence, and, although the resources would be nice, the pressure to turn a profit, sell the company, or make an initial public offering would be distracting.

There is a lot 37signals can't do. It's not likely to become a giant tech company like Microsoft, Apple, or Google. The constraints produced by its lean emphasis won't allow it to throw hordes of cash at solving problems or improving products. However, it willingly embraces these difficulties because it is these difficulties that have produced much of the success 37signals has experienced in the company's ten-plus-year existence. The lack of resources has served as the trigger for the creative and elegant solutions the company has developed while creating or improving products. “Constraints are advantages in disguise,” Fried and Hansson write. “Limited resources force you to make do with what you've got. There's no room for waste. And that forces you to be creative.”²²

There's a good chance that Fried and Hansson have never heard of Patricia Stokes's research on constraints and creativity. However, there's an equally good chance that Stokes's advice to those who complain about lack of resources would be the same as 37signals': “Stop whining. Less is a good thing.”²³ Despite their admonition, many of us prefer to whine. We see our setbacks and creative difficulties and revel in the Constraints Myth. We want an outside explanation for why we aren't more creative, and constraints are an easy excuse to cite. In organizations, this belief leads to stalled-out projects and little innovation. It leads to teams focused on finding more resources and eliminating constraints instead of working inside those constraints and boosting their creativity. If we believe the Constraints Myth and focus on solving the problem of getting more resources, then we divert our attention away from the original problem. Instead, the evidence suggests that we should lean into constraints and focus on the structure they provide around our problem. From Lonny Grafman's college engineering class to world-class companies like 37signals, the most innovative people and companies embrace constraints and focus their creative attention on coming up with solutions that work inside set limitations. Creativity doesn't just love constraints; it thrives under them.

1. Matthew May, The Laws of Subtraction: Six Simple Rules for Winning in the Age of Excess (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012), 113.

3. Tina Seelig, inGenius: A Crash Course in Creativity (New York: HarperOne, 2012).

5. Patricia Stokes, Creativity from Constraints: The Psychology of Breakthrough (New York: Springer, 2006), xi.

7. Kathleen Arnold, Kathleen B. McDermott, and Karl K. Szpunar, “Imagining the Near and Far Future: The Role of Location Familiarity,” Memory & Cognition 39 (2011): 954–967.

10. Kirby Ferguson, Everything Is a Remix Part 1: The Song Remains the Same, directed by Kirby Ferguson (New York: Goodiebag, 2011), http://vimeo.com/14912890.

11. Patricia Stokes, “Using Constraints to Generate and Sustain Novelty,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 1 (2007): 107–113.

12. Janina Marguc, Jens Förster, and Gerben A. Van Kleef, “Stepping Back to See the Big Picture: When Obstacles Elicit Global Processing,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101, no. 5 (2011): 883–901.

14. Jason Fried, “How I Got Good at Making Money,” Inc. 33, no. 2 (2011): 54–60.

18. Jason Fried and David Heniemeier Hansson, Rework (New York: Crown Business, 2011), 68.