Boundaries Give You Freedom

Put a fence around a playground and children use the entire space.

Remove the fence and they huddle in the middle.

Keep putting fences around children that don’t belong to you?

You’ll have a knock on the door from your local constabulary…

We lose freedom in this example, not because the space gets smaller, but because without the boundary, staying close to what you know is the thing that feels safe. Freedom doesn’t always expand our behaviour, often it actually contracts it.

Nolan Bushnell - the guy who founded Atari - had a technique for this. He’d ask his team to rank all their ideas from best to worst. He would then take the bottom six, that everyone thought were rubbish - and tell them to get to work on these ones.

He wanted to figure out what was right about them in the first place for them to even be on the list. That constraint changes everything because ‘make your best idea better’ makes you critical, which makes you tighten, you edit, you play it quite safe because it’s a good idea anyway. \

‘Find what’s worse with your right idea’ triggers your creative brain. You have to look deeper, you have to search for something that’s not as obvious. That constraint forces you into territory your best ideas would never take from you.

But the bit that people miss about this story is that his team had ideas to rank in the first place. They had some raw material, things they’d been collecting, developing, sitting on. They were ideas that had been bouncing around long enough to collide with each other.

An idea is just a new combination of old elements. But if you’ve got nowhere to store those elements, nowhere to develop them, nowhere to let them sit until they connect? No amount of constraint helps because you’ve built the fence and the playground’s empty.

The interesting things I’ve found with coaches is that it’s not that they don’t have ideas - they have ideas all the time - in the shower, on a walk, while speaking to a client.

It’s just that most of those ideas disappear within hours because they haven’t got a system for catching them. The ones who have something, a place where ideas are captured, developed, allowed to collide; are the ones who always seem to have something interesting to say. They’re not any cleverer than other coaches, they just have somewhere for their ideas to grow.

Creativity doesn’t come from unlimited freedom.

It comes from being able to apply constraints to enough raw material for something to come out.

What you choose to constrain is irrelevant, if you’ve not built anything worth constraining in the first place.