The Principle of a Constrained System for Creativity

As I collaborate with @ChrisSpagnuolo and @rhensley99 on designing systems of creativity and innovation in a variety of enterprise contexts, one key principle identified is to constrain the system. There is plenty of research and anecdotal evidence of the impact of constraints on creativity and goal achievement - too many references to include here - but I am particularly interested in this principle of constraints that can positively impact systemic creativity in the marketplace. And the interdependencies between these constraints. So here is where we are right now - what have we not considered? What are some other perspectives out there?

A System of Constraints
This is s simple representation of my current view of core constraints:

Constraint on Ideation
It seems reasonable for both stimulating creativity and providing guardrails to the creative process that some form of constraint on ideation is needed. This concept has been identified and discussed by several others and researched in academia. So I expect the conversation will turn towards how to best identify and use this particular constraint.

What are some key considerations you've identified for designing such a constraint?

Constraint on Investment
While a start-up has this constraint naturally through a given amount of initial funding which creates an explicit "runway", when considering the introduction of a creative process into an enterprise this must be designed. I've personally observed R&D initiatives in clients that seem to go on-and-on with little visibility and few outcomes. So it is interesting to determine practices for creating this sense of a limited runway and provide the enterprise with financial risk mitigation. This may be challenging in the face of standard budget practices of a larger organization.

What are some existing financial strategies to co-mingle conventional and investment forms of funding in large organizations?

Constraint on the Time to Learn
Again, there are a couple aspects to this: create urgency / catalyze creativity and minimize feedback loops and time to achieve product / market fit. Given our experience creating and implementing scaled agile systems, I expect this will be an easier problem to solve; however, I expect the lynch-pin to be the creation of sprinting with creativity, identifying critical assumptions, and creating testable hypotheses. Since there are many practices existing in this area, I expect our focus will be on designing an overall system and building a high degree of capability in the organization.

What are some practices that you've found particularly effective for quickly iterating on learning that may not be so obvious or prevalent in the existing body of knowledge?

Over time I expect we will find even more constraints as levers in such a system, and I look forward to working with clients to identify and understand critical interdependencies between these constraints to fine-tune system performance.

I'm interested to know your experiences and your thoughts on the validity of this principle and the potential implementation of a constrained system for creativity and innovation.