Creativity and Constraint, Part 1

Many managers and academics believe that creativity thrives in work environments that are relatively unconstrained compared to those found in traditional businesses. In this view excessive bureaucracy, tiny cubicles, strict P&L requirements and TPS reports are anathema to new ideas. Bell Labs physicist Sharad Raanathan expressed this in a recent (8/21) Wall Street Journal article on Bell Lab’s newfound market orientation, saying that “it’s important to have some people released from the constraints of immediate or even remote applicability of their research” in order to create groundbreaking innovations.

Conversely, many creative professionals claim that creativity needs constraint. In this view, people are more creative when they have roadblocks that must be worked around. Too little constraint is paralyzing and constraint helps people focus on the problem. Google’s Vice President of Search Products, Marissa Mayer, makes just such a claim in this Stanford Technology Ventures Program video where she declares that, “creativity loves constraint.”

So which is it? Does constraint hinder or help creativity? As with many topics involving creative work, the answer is that it’s probably a good deal more complex than that. Constraints take many forms, and managers must judiciously apply and remove various kinds and levels of constraint in order to encourage creativity. Fortunately, there is some excellent theory and evidence available (which will be covered in this series of blog entries) that can help make the issue more manageable.

Jon Elster’s Theory of Constraint

The best work, to my mind, on the subject of creativity and constraint comes from Columbia University political scientist Jon Elster. In 2000 Elster wrote a book titled Ulysses Unbound (Amazon link) that draws on evidence from a variety of domains to form what he calls ‘constraint theory’. Constraint theory has many facets, but in it’s most basic form holds that people ‘self-bind’ themselves to arbitrary sets of constraints when there isn’t sufficient constraint present in either their environment or the problem at hand.

Elster’s book didn’t receive much attention from the management community largely because it is a book ostensibly outside the field of management with a broad, multi-disciplinary scope. This shouldn’t be a turn-off though. Nearly all of the best management theories originated in other fields (e.g. sociology, economics, psychology). Good social theory can be a wonderful source of knowledge about management once it is tailored to the particular problems and phenomena of the workplace.

Elster seeks to explain situations where more options do not equate to better decisions or creativity. In these situations, there are two types of constraints that are beneficial. The first type of beneficial constraint occurs when it is desirable for specific options to be “unavailable, available only with a delay, or at greater cost.” An example of this would be the situation where the lack of an exit option for a project forces a team to do better work than if they believed it was possible to cancel the project (assuming they went ahead with it). The other type of beneficial constraint occurs when it is desireable for fewer options to be available, but there is no desire to exclude specific options. Elster provides a nice example of this in the, “film director (who) decides to shoot in black and white so as not to be tempted by the facile charms of color photography.”

Both of these types of beneficial constraint (specific and arbitrary) are important to creativity and innovation, but can be difficult to for managers to get a handle on. In my next blog entries I will discuss the role of specific and arbitrary constraint in more detail.

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Posted in Academic research by Ralph Maurer | | Permalink |

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