Creative Constraints

Insight professionals can benefit from learning to be more creative, as this can enable us to see things that other people might miss. But for many of us, creativity doesn’t come naturally. Typically, we’re often fairly logical people who find it hard to ‘think outside the box’.

However, a recent article in Wired might offer a glimmer of hope. The author, Jonah Lehrer, suggests that human creativity often benefits from having certain constraints. For instance, most poets write within the constraints set, say, by a sonnet or a haiku.

When a hindrance becomes a help…

Lehrer mentions a study carried out at the University of Amsterdam that suggests that obstacles can help people to think more holistically. They enable the person to take a step back and see the bigger picture. In experiments, students who had been exposed to audible interruptions while trying to solve anagrams were subsequently better at solving visual puzzles than those who hadn’t had any obstacles to their thought processes.

Jonah Lehrer concludes: “The larger lesson is that the brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded away for efficiency; we think in literal prose, not symbolist poetry. And this is why constraints are so important: it’s not until we encounter an unexpected hindrance – a challenge we can’t easily resolve – that the chains of cognition are loosened, giving us newfound access to the weird connections simmering in the unconscious.”

This perhaps also explains why techniques like De Bono’s ‘Six Thinking Hats’ (which we looked at in an earlier edition of 5MI) work so well. He explores ways of providing some structure for thought processes, with the aim of improving group communication and decision-making.

Insight Application

So how can we benefit from these fascinating ideas?

One solution would be that if you are looking at a piece of work and trying to work out the implications and the possible actions that could be taken in relation to a particular issue, always set yourself constraints that have to be met. These can be real or they could be artificial (if there are few real ones available). For example, think about how your company could provide this service for free. Or what would happen if you had to launch this product without the benefits of any advertising spend?

Ultimately, having a structure or applying certain constraints to our work can be a very positive approach to take. As Lehrer concludes: “We break out of the box by stepping into shackles.”