My Thoughts

Limits are often treated like a problem to solve, not the tool to invent with.

Creative work gets better when you turn some levers off. Strange to say, but true. Set a border around the work and the mind begins to paint in strokes it otherwise wouldn't bother with. Give someone a blank, limitless field and they'll wander; hand them a box and they'll build a ladder.

Let me be blunt: most leaders think creativity means endless choice and radical freedom. That's a romantic view. Useful in adverts. Useless when you have budgets, stakeholders and quarterly targets. The truth is messier. Constraints, time, budget, brief, materials, form, force selection. Selection encourages depth. Depth breeds novelty.

This isn't just poetic musing. Behavioural science backs it. One classic finding shows the paralysis of too much choice: shoppers offered 24 jams were far less likely to buy than those offered only six, 3% versus 30% purchase rates in that experiment. Choice overload isn't theoretical; it kills outcomes. (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000). Don't let freedom be the thief of results.

Why limits make better stuff

There are a few blunt mechanisms in play.

Focus. Constraints narrow the cognitive field. You stop chasing every shiny idea and start interrogating the ones left. Depth beats breadth in most workplace problems.
Friction breeds craft. When materials or time are tight, you learn craft, how to get meaning into fewer words, how to make simple visuals communicate complex messages, how to write a pitch that lands in three slides not thirty.
Necessity encourages lateral thinking. If the usual tools are gone, you invent new ones. This is where genuine novelty arises, not from adding more but from making different use of the little you have.
Decision utility increases. When options are fewer, commitment goes up. Teams choose and commit rather than endlessly rehearse hypotheticals.

I'll say something a lot of people will roll their eyes at: bureaucracy can be useful. Yes, really. Processes, templates and gates, when well designed, convert creative chaos into repeatable outcomes. They stop great ideas becoming vapour. This is controversial. But I'd rather have an excellent idea shipped than fifty perfect drafts never finished.

Real world places where constraint has helped

The sonnet. Fourteen lines, a rigid volta, formal rhyme. Yet within that tiny box Shakespeare and his peers rattled human scale emotions into compact, unforgettable arguments. That discipline makes every word matter.

Classical architecture. Columns, proportions, limits on materials, and somehow the Parthenon still looks effortless. Constraints guided aesthetics; they didn't kill it.

Start ups. The cliché of the bootstrapped start up exists for a reason. Limited cash forces prioritisation. You build a product that solves the core problem because you simply can't afford scope bloat. I'll risk another contentious opinion here: start ups that raise huge early rounds often do worse at creating truly focused products. Money sometimes masquerades as strategy.

Design thinking and Agile, process as constraint

Modern practice has something in common with old wisdom. Design thinking doesn't let teams riff forever: empathise, define, ideate, prototype, test. Those stages funnel creativity into iterative, testable work. It's not the opposite of creativity; it's creativity with hygiene.

Agile gives another example. Sprints, story points, minimum viable products, all are constraints. But they focus teams on delivering value fast, then improving. You see that in software and increasingly outside it: in marketing, operations, even HR interventions. Constraints become a discipline that lets ideas be proved or buried quickly.

The paradox: more options, less creativity

There's a cognitive cost to unlimited options. The brain has finite bandwidth. When every choice is open, decision fatigue creeps in. Project teams waste cycles deciding fonts, formats, meeting times. They under invest in the tough trade offs: what not to do.

An experiment I often use in workshops works like this: give groups a ridiculous range of colours, fonts and templates and see how the work slows. Then restrict the palette and watch the difference, faster decisions, bolder hacks, clearer outcomes. People wrongly equate fewer options with less quality. Usually, the exact opposite happens.

Neurology and constraints

From a brain perspective, constraints reduce cognitive load. Less noise = greater capacity for high value processing. That's why deadlines increase creativity for many people: pressure channels attention. Our prefrontal cortex is better at focusing when there's a boundary to aim at. But, and this is a big but, too much pressure kills creativity. There's a Goldilocks zone: enough tension to stir the brain into "solve this" mode, not so much that it freezes.

This is where leadership matters. Leaders need to set the right limits: enough structure to focus, enough freedom to explore. Too much control and you get compliant, boring work. Too much freedom and you get indecision and low throughput. Balancing that tension is the practical art of creative leadership.

How to use constraints deliberately

If you're managing teams or running projects, here are practical moves that work.

Define the problem narrowly. Make the brief tight. "Increase conversion by 8% on this landing page" is better than "make customers happier."
Limit prototypes. Tell teams: three concepts, two iterations, one pilot. This forces trade offs and prioritisation.
Reduce choice architecture. In design or comms, limit the typefaces, templates and photos. Fewer variables = cleaner decisions.
Time box. Sprints, half day creative marathons, or 48 hour rapid prototyping. Short cycles increase focus and urgency.
Resource box. Give a small budget and watch teams negotiate priorities. This is particularly useful in training and L&D where pilot programs should be intentionally frugal.
Introduce formal constraints as creative prompts. A word count. A single slide. A 60 second pitch.

Some of these will sound like micro management. They aren't. They're tactical decisions to increase creativity's signal to noise ratio.

Constraints aren't universal medicine

Not every creative task enjoys constraints. Long form research, deep exploration, or blue sky R&D need breathing room. The trick is to choose the right mode for the work. Use sprint constraints for delivery, open inquiry for exploration.

Here's another opinion that'll ruffle feathers: remote work needs more, not less, constraints. Yes, set clear hours for collaboration, fixed asynchronous protocols, and a predictable update rhythm. Without that, remote teams drift and innovation stalls. Many will disagree because the gospel of "flexibility above all" has become orthodoxy. Flexibility is great, but structure is the soil creativity grows in.

When constraints trap creativity

Be mindful that constraints can calcify into restrictions. Two failure modes stand out.

Constraints that are lazy: "We can't because…" becomes a culture of excuse making. That kills experiments.
Constraints that are punitive: too many approvals, risk averse sign offs, or perverse KPIs steer people away from valuable risk taking.

Leaders must prune constraints continuously. Make constraints temporary and purposeful. And always ask: is this limit serving the work or serving the person who had doesn't want change?

Measurement: how to tell if constraints are helping

You can measure creative output without fetishising vanity metrics. Look for things like:

Time to prototype (faster is better)
Number of discarded ideas (shows experimentation)
Conversion from prototype to production (quality of ideas)
Employee perception of creative freedom (surveys)
Stakeholder satisfaction with outcomes

Don't confuse activity with impact. Constraints aim to increase meaningful output, not simply more work.

Case study sketch, a Sydney marketing team

We worked with a mid sized Sydney firm that had a bloated campaign process—six review rounds, three agencies, and endless design variants. Result: delayed launches and watered down concepts. We imposed three constraints: one creative agency, a 24 hour review window, and a two concept limit per campaign. The result? Faster launches, clearer creative, and better conversion. Not magic, just fewer decisions and more commitment.

Designers thrived. The account team loved the clarity. Finance saw cleaner budgets. A little friction, intentionally placed, made everyone perform better.

Practical workshop prompts you can run tomorrow

If you're running a team session, try these quick prompts:

The One Slide Challenge: Summarise the campaign strategy in one slide. No exceptions. Then refine.
The 60 Second Pitch: Each idea must be sold in a single minute to a random colleague.
The Budget Box: Give teams a tiny budget and force a trade off between reach and depth.
The Constraint Swap: Each team must swap one resource with another team, forcing recombination.

These are small, tactical nudges that shift behaviour fast.

A note on leadership temperament

Leaders must be reasonable. Constraints ask people to be disciplined. Discipline needs trust. Don't hand down arbitrary limits and then punish people for inventive ways to meet them. If you are limiting resources or time, be clear about what you're optimising for and why. And celebrate creative solutions that stretch constraints rather than break them.

Finally, a little hypocrisy: I like process. I also love a well timed creative meltdown in a room where nobody cares about process for a day. Both are true. Institutions need both: workshops for exploration, sprints for delivery. The leadership job is to design both seasons.

The creative economy of scarcity

We live in a culture that equates abundance with progress, more choices, more tools, more data. But in practice, abundance often dilutes action. Scarcity sharpens it. Constraints force prioritisation, craft and courage.

Use limits deliberately. Don't weaponise them; design them for outcomes. Let them be scaffolding for imagination rather than cages for it. If you get the balance right, constraints won't be the enemy of creativity. They'll be its engine.

Think of constraints as a new material. You can sculpt with them. You can smash them. Mostly, you'll find that the right ones help you build things that matter.

Sources & Notes

Iyengar, S. S., & Lepper, M. R. (2000). When choice is demotivating: can one desire too much of a good thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(6), 995–1006. (Experiment reported: 30% purchase rate with limited choice vs 3% with extensive choice)