How might boundaries encourage greater creativity?
A short short book preview of: Steal Like an Artist
I love Austin Kleon’s book, Steal Like an Artist. He shares his 10 lessons to unlock your creativity 💥. Why re-invent the wheel when many great minds before us have made great work, came up with wonderful solutions and ideas!? After all, many innovations are sparked outside of their own field.
But my favourite lesson: Limitations mean freedom from the chapter Creativity is Subtraction.
Limitations mean freedom.
He talks about the age of information abundance and overload 🤯, where having constraints actually allows you to concentrate on what is important 👀.
So brainstorms where we say, “the sky is the limit” 🔭 are not that helpful. They’re paralysing.
So, how might boundaries encourage greater creativity?
I found this study from the American Society of Landscape Architects🌳from 2006 where they tested if a fence would constrain children in their play.
Turns out that on playgrounds without fences children were playing it ‘safe’. They tended to stay around the teacher, keeping him/her in sight 👩🏫.
On playgrounds that were fenced in, they ran around the full space. They were more free to explore the entire playground 🏃🏃♀.
Pretty cool I think.
With more constraints we actually get more creative to explore the far corners of what is possible within those boundaries↔↕.
So next time you do a brainstorm, instead of pushing teams to think outside the box, make sure there is a clear box defined📦.
In the Design Sprint we do this naturally. On Monday, after a full day of understanding the context, the team chooses a target. The target sets a clear boundary of what we focus on, and what we will not focus on. So on Tuesday, when we head into the individual brainstorm everyone has the ‘fence’ defined and is ready to be optimally creative 😁.
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