Here’s a little thought experiment for you. You’ll need a watch or timer with a second hand. You have exactly 30 seconds after reading the instructions, to see what you come up with:
Think of a story.
How did you get on? Was it easy? Difficult?
Were you pleased with the story you came up with?
Okay here’s another one. Same rules as before – 30 seconds after reading to come up with the best story you can.
Think of a story about two thieves.
How was that? Easier? Harder?
Let’s do one more. As before, you’ve got 30 seconds to make the most of the instructions.
Think of a story about two thieves. The thieves are brothers, who have spent their whole lives together. All this time, one of them has kept a secret from the other. But recently it’s become harder and harder to keep the secret. The thief with the secret is horrified to notice that it’s starting to interfere with his work – on their last job, they almost got caught because of a mistake he made. But he’s terrified that confessing the secret will destroy their relationship.
How did you get on that time? Was it easier or harder than the previous experiments?
Details, Details
When I’ve run this activity with a group, it is not uncommon for people to ‘draw a blank’ when they do the first experiment. Like the proverbial writer gazing at the blank page, they are stuck for inspiration. ‘Creative freedom’ is usually spoken of as a positive thing – but in this case, having total freedom to write any kind of story they like tends to paralyse people. Even if they do manage to think of something, 30 seconds isn’t long, and because they are starting from scratch to stories tend to be pretty unimpressive.
The second experiment tends to get better results. We may not like thieves, but they tend to have interesting lives. They provoke all kinds of emotions and associations. We are reminded of characters and situations from books and films. Where do they live? What do they steal? Who are their victims? Are they small-time crooks or elite criminal masterminds? Suddenly the whole genre of crime fiction is there for us to riff on. And the fact that there were two of them has all kinds of dramatic possibilities. Why are they working together? Are they part of the same gang? Do they have complimentary skills? Do they like each other, or are they sick of each others’ guts by now? Crime is a stressful business – they must have a few arguments and dustups along the way …
The third experiment usually works better still. In addition to all the great dramatic inspiration from the crime genre, most of us have either experienced sibling relationships ourselves or observed our friends and their siblings at close hand. We recognise the dramatic tension in the interplay of affection and rivalry. And we all know what it’s like to keep a secret, to be afraid that others will find out. The questions come pouring out: What’s the secret? How did he manage to hide it from his brother all this time? Why is it a problem now, when it wasn’t before? How is it affecting their relationship? Does the other thief suspect his brother? Maybe you’ve guessed it already? How is it affecting their work? What happened on that last job? How will the secret come out? Will he confess it or will it be discovered? What will happen then …?
So the more details you are given, the more images and thoughts are sparked in your mind. And the easier it becomes to make up a story. The story starts to write itself, as the details spark questions, the question spark answers and the answer spark images, characters, situations …
But the thing is, every detail that is added to the instructions takes away a little more of your creative freedom. Want to write a story about two window cleaners? Sorry. Rather write about sisters and brothers? Tough luck. Or two brothers with nothing to hide from each other? No chance.
The Value of Creative Constraints
As we saw last week, being told to ‘think outside the box’ is no guarantee of inspiration. And the thought experiments suggest that sometimes it’s easier to be creative ‘inside the box’ of details and constraints.
Could it be that creative freedom is overrated?
Ernie Schenck would answer that question with a resounding ‘Yes!’. As an Emmy Award-nominated creative director with a string of successful advertising campaigns behind him, he should know a thing or two about creativity. In his book The Houdini Solution, he shares the creative wisdom accumulated in his career and invites us to “put creativity and innovation to work by thinking INSIDE the box”:
the biggest secret of productive creative people is that they embrace obstacles, they don’t run from them. In their minds every setback is an opportunity, every limitation is a chance. Where others see a wall, they see a doorway.
Schenck draws inspiration from Harry Houdini, bound in chains and lowered into a glass box full of water. Resisting the box and fighting against the chains would have been fatal. Houdini had first to accept the reality of the constraints on his movement, and work within them to find a way out.
Another of his examples is the Apollo 13 mission, when an explosion on board caused the spacecraft to lose oxygen, electricity, light, and water 200,000 miles from planet Earth. Unless the engineers at Houston could find a solution the astronauts could implement using the materials on board, the crew would die of asphyxiation before they made it back home.
talk about thinking inside the box. You’ve got to design a new product. You’ve got to build that product. Your raw materials consist of cardboard, plastic bags, duct tape, and other low-tech materials. And, hey, just for good measure, you’ve got less than 48 hours to do it all people are going to die.
Fortunately, as we know, in this case necessity really was the mother of invention.
Schenck is scathing about “self-styled creativity guru[s]” who tell us to “think outside the box”:
if only we could free ourselves, if only we could climb out of that infernal box, they told us, we could discover our true creative selves.
And yet for millions of us, those boxes are very real. Almost everything in our lives is a box. Our relationships. Our jobs. Where we live. How young or old we are. Our bank accounts. They’re all boxes. They all have walls. They all have boundaries. But they are not all bad.
So next time you feel frustrated by constraints that limit your options – take a deep breath, centre yourself like Houdini, and start looking for the creative opportunity…
Over to You
What did the thought experiments tell you about your own creativity?
When starting a new project, would you rather have complete freedom or a few pointers as ‘building blocks’ to help you get started?
Can you think of a time when rules and/or constraints helped to spark your creativity?
Do you agree with Michelangelo that “art lives on constraint and dies of freedom”?
About the Author: Mark McGuinness is a poet and creative coach.
View Comments (45)
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« Previous 1 2 3 4 5 … 7 Next »Like Wily, I believe that thinking outside the box means looking elsewhere, perhaps somewhere seemingly unrelated, and that it does not mean no limits.
There are also different aspects of creativity - the "what" and the "how". The "what" is the problem to solve, the thing to be created. That is the box with constraints, and those constraints are a good thing. They are more likely to lead to a suitable result. There is too much design about which simply serves itself, created with no limits. The "how" is where the boundaries can, and often should be, pushed. This is where thinking outside the box (in some other box?) can lead to real innovation.
Constraints are definitely helpful, even necessary. Most people, being creatives or just employees, are looking for the opportunity to have a superior or client lay out the boundaries and then tell them, "Do whatever you want in THIS sandbox." When you limit the variables, restraining the areas that ARE NOT flexible, you empower yourself and others to excel in completely exploiting the areas and pushing the edges of the areas that ARE flexible.
Great post.
You know, life itself is not permanent. It has an end.
But, if life was without end on this earth, how much would we try to make something of ourselves? Be it spiritually, or career wise.
By being inside the box, it forces you to make things happen.
I froze up with "think of a story," but immediately thought of how my girlfriend's 10-year-old could have done it. Of course it would have been about his favorite Pokemon, but no inner critic wouldn't have stopped him from doing the exercise.
I very much agree that embracing constraints is not just good advice for creating things, but also excellent advice for living a life as a work of art! To paraphrase Nietzche, "This is exactly what I need." (Said to anything and everything that comes your way.)
Constraints tend to not only focus the mind, but the potential number of solutions. In coaching or psychotherapy, one of the first things that is often helpful to do is narrow down the presenting problem, contextualize it, and find the smallest possible solution that will move the situation forward.
On the other hand, Bradford Keeney in The Energy Break (unfortunately out of print) advocates the practice of automatic movement with almost no constraints or rules ("autokinetics"). Doing this for 10 minutes or more is a practice of directly entering a creative flow state.
While this takes practice at first, in time this serves to "tune the instrument" for your creative work and life. Keeney in fact argues that the rituals of baseball players (as you wrote about in a previous post) are primarily beneficial due to the spontaneous, non-thinking movement. One could test this by using a classic NLP anchor of a finger and thumb pressed together (having linked this to a "peak performance" state) vs. spontaneous movement and see which works better!
Great article. It told me I am a genius hahaha.
You see, I don't think in the box, or outside. I think of being the space within and out of the box.
You see - I think because I came from another country, where famine was ripe, war, and we lived sometimes in street, or cardboard boxes, so we had to do with what we find to make things and make money.
Even turning tap on, is strange, and having access to all I see especially internet, having a businesses, etc.
So, these constraints I had in past, helped to stretch my mind, and now, well, it is easy to do things, even what some may see as possible.
These are things that test us but also enable us to see how amazing and creative we are.
Cheers for the article. brought back some memories.
Thanks for the article, Mark. Your thoughts remind me of Covey and how he talks about working within your sphere of influence.
I prefer to work with constraints, or at least guidelines to get started. The most creative sessions come out of brainstorms, working with people I have a high synergy with.
One example I can think of - my student organization just won a $400 mini-grant from our college for a guerilla marketing campaign on environmental awareness. It was difficult at first, but after brainstorming for an hour we organized a campaign involving street performers.
Yes, I agree with Michelangelo, but I'm also reminded of Jackson Pollack. That guy seemed to work entirely without constraints. Toe each his own, I guess.
Certainly, I have been in many a project with limitations that sparked up my creativity and i was happy for it. The way i see it, details, contraints or limitations are what gives our creativity direction. What's the use of a power that isn't channeled towards something? The whole point of being creative is to accomplish an end. This end could be ours (internal) or from others (external), doesn't matter which it is, but in both cases one thing is certain, that end has to be specific!
Simply being creative with no end in mind, is simply being busy doing nothing. So yes, i concur with the benefits of thinking inside the box. Creative people need details so as not to get lost in the creative process.
So true.
Back in school I used to go to this art class in which the teacher would give us an exercise which was, in fact, a certain limitation. "Choose a narrow or wide piece of paper", "Use only two colors", or a more conceptual limitation such as "Paint a sequence". Sometime he would give something really vague like "paint a moment".
I have about a hundred paintings piled up to prove that this works. You need a context.
Long time reader first time commenter.
This technique applies in many places where creativity is needed. I wrote an article awhile back on using this technique for songwriting:
Songwriting Tip: Constrained Writing
Constraints inspire me. A deadline is a constraint, and forces me to stop overthinking and just "let go" and write music.
Great article. Thanks.
DM
Wow thanks everyone, really great feedback and examples. Impossible to single out any of them - well worth making a cup of tea and sitting down to read them all carefully.
You know, Lateral Action is turning into my favourite blog - I'm sure I'm getting just as much from reading the comments as anyone does from reading the articles. :-)