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Embrace Constraints

Whom the gods wish to destroy, they give unlimited resources.

—Twyla Tharp

Constraint, limit, restriction, shackle, ceiling, cap, regulation, ration: Americans living in “the land of the free” don’t much like these words, believing that anything that infringes on our freedom undermines our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But nothing could be further from the truth when it comes to pursuing a new challenge. Constraints offer structure that can liberate us from the chaos and disorder of entropy.

Not only are constraints theoretically good, as a practical matter, they are unavoidable. Did you know, for example, that many of the iconic scenes in Jaws came about because of a malfunctioning mechanical shark? The original screenplay called for numerous scenes depicting the shark approaching its prey, knifing through the water and attacking its victims. The mechanical shark was not up to the task, frustrating Spielberg’s original vision for the film. Over budget and behind schedule, Spielberg decided to shoot those scenes from the shark’s point of view, trusting that the cinematography, intense music, and viewers’ imaginations would evoke the heart-pounding fear he was after. Jaws swam its way to critical acclaim and box office success.1

I’ll confess I have a love–hate relationship with constraints. For years, I touted the importance of bootstrapping a business, without any real experience of pulling up the straps myself. But, as I have progressed in my career, including becoming an entrepreneur, I have become a reluctant believer in the power of working within limits. Constraints aren’t fun, but they do work.

Constraints Lead to Faster Feedback

Because changing the status quo tends to be unnerving, most of us want feedback on how we’re doing as quickly as possible. The most effective and accurate way to achieve this is by imposing constraints.

This may seem counterintuitive. You might argue that if you are undertaking a new venture, you want complete freedom, which will allow you to explore all the possibilities. You may also be concerned that by limiting yourself you will not be able to get where you want to go. To understand why this is the wrong approach, let’s begin by imagining what disrupting yourself would look like if you had no constraints.

First, let’s consider the math behind a life with complete freedom. While the possibilities are impressive, the complexity can be debilitating. Examine a simple ten-step process with only two options for each step. Doing the math gives you 210, or 1,024, possibilities. Given enough time, you could probably figure out which path would yield the best result. Now, take this same ten-step process and increase the number of options so that you have three possibilities for each step. This gives you 310, or 59,049, possibilities—significantly more daunting. What happens when you have complete freedom or an infinite number of possibilities for each step in the process? You got it. Before you even complete the first step you are faced with an impossible number of possibilities. The sheer enormity of options overwhelms.

The human mind has astounding learning capabilities but constantly seeks out constraints. Including constraints allows you to make a faster, more accurate prediction of the consequences of your actions, letting you determine which course of action will likely give you the best result. Think about skateboarders. Author Daniel Coyle posits they are some of the quickest learners in the world, because they receive incredibly fast and useful feedback—every action, every move has an immediate consequence.2 It’s the same logic that leads coaches in numerous sports, including soccer, swimming, and baseball, to shrink the space their athletes train in to create tighter feedback loops.

Shrinking the space can also be helpful when you are looking for feedback on your products or company. Vala Afshar, chief marketing officer of Extreme Networks, is an interesting case study.3 Trained as an electrical engineer, Afshar joined Extreme Networks in 1996 as a software developer/quality service engineer, eventually transitioning to run the services business, becoming the chief customer support officer. In this role, Afshar became very active on Salesforce’s Chatter, a private social network for business, and by 2011 had built a large internal following. As the chief information officer took note of Afshar’s intracompany influence, he signed Afshar up for Twitter and gave him the mandate to interact with networks outside of the company.

As Afshar prototyped his ideas in real time, he gained an external following. A publisher approached him about writing a book; his presentations on Slide-Share gained more than one million views; and he was promoted to chief marketing officer. Vala Afshar has become a thought leader, epitomizing a new breed of chief marketing officer, both highly social and highly technical—and Extreme Networks has unusually high name recognition for a $500 million company. Afshar’s ability to shrink the space, getting immediate and actionable feedback, was pivotal in expanding his space into a high-profile public role.

Fast feedback is also useful when it comes to identifying your distinctive strengths. Karen May, VP for people development at Google, invented a method she calls “speedback.” It works like this: “partway through a training session she will tell everyone to pair off and sit knee to knee, and give them three minutes to answer one simple question: ‘What advice would you give me based on the experience you’ve had with me here?’ Participants say that it’s some of the best feedback they’ve ever gotten.”4 When we are willing to impose constraints—in this particular, instance, time—we have a better chance of identifying what is working and what needs to be changed.

Constraints Help Us Solve for One Variable at a Time

If you are trying to move up the curve, and you are feeling crushed by constraints—not enough time, money, expertise, and buy-in—this may be a signal that you are tilting at windmills. And, like Augusten Burroughs, you may need to find a different dream. But it could also mean you need to slow down and solve for one constraint at a time.

Consider the scientific method. The most definitive scientific experiments are conducted when you change only one variable at a time. An example is the experiments performed by Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase. In the early twentieth century, scientists thought that protein, not DNA, was the genetic material in all organisms. Several experiments had caused scientists to question this assumption but it wasn’t until 1952 that Hershey and Chase performed the breakthrough experiment that would prove that DNA rather than protein housed the genetic code in all organisms. In their research, they conducted two side-by-side experiments where they changed only one parameter. In one experiment they tagged the DNA inside the virus with a radioactive molecule, which is essentially a molecular tracking device. In the other they tagged the proteins. They then asked the question, “When the virus propagates (i.e., has babies), do the children inherit the DNA or the protein”? The answer: DNA. This simple discovery has been foundational to all modern genetic research, from understanding genetically related diseases like cancer and cystic fibrosis to DNA sequencing and cloning.

The take-home message is that clear thinking, coupled with the right constraints, can lead to unequivocal answers.

Michelle McKenna-Doyle didn’t graduate from college and apply to become the chief information officer of the National Football League. Instead, she began her career with a degree in accounting, sitting for the CPA exam and working as a senior auditor at Coopers & Lybrand. Once she had these basic skills, McKenna-Doyle was ready to try something new. Because Metropolitan Life, a Coopers & Lybrand client, had worked with her for three years and had proof points of her competence, McKenna-Doyle was able to expand into a controller role, managing Metropolitan Life’s real estate portfolio. After four years, and having gotten a clear handle on strategic planning, by keeping her functional role largely intact, she was able to pivot into Disney, a new company and industry.

Over the next decade, as the proof points continued to stack up, she was promoted frequently, eventually becoming a VP in information technology, where she overhauled Disney Destination’s sales processes and implemented customer relationship management. Her trifecta of accounting, strategy, and IT expertise fully burnished, McKenna-Doyle was recruited into her first CIO role. But only after three different CIO stints, including at Universal Orlando Resort, did she make a lateral move into her fourth CIO role, at her dream organization, the National Football League. She found her job at the NFL, let it be noted, while picking her fantasy football team.

When we patiently isolate variables, we can more easily solve the equation of personal disruption.

Constraints Help Us Stay Focused

In 2012, approximately 420,000 people were injured in motor vehicle crashes involving a distracted driver. Hence the plethora of laws constraining the types of activities you can be involved in while driving a motor vehicle. The inability to clearly survey the landscape around you without distractions can be a prescription for disaster. What’s true for driving is also true for disrupting. Constraints can be the perfect remedy if you are having a difficult time focusing or are unable to clarify how you want to disrupt yourself.

This principle is clearly illustrated by observing how our vision works. The electromagnetic spectrum encompasses all possible frequencies of electromagnetic radiation, informally referred to as light. If we had a detector that captured all electromagnetic wavelengths simultaneously there would be so much information that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of our surroundings. One form of electromagnetic radiation is visible light; our eyes resolve a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum into the faces of people we love, for example. To detect infrared radiation with longer wavelengths, we need night goggles. To see through solid objects, we need an X-ray machine, which sees only shorter wavelengths. In applying limits to the electromagnetic wavelengths we can observe, we gain clarity.

A corporate instance of using limits to improve focus is Intuit, the company that brought us Quick-Books and TurboTax. The VP of product development was given the mandate to change the lives of India’s 1.2 billion people. Given this grand vision, one might expect that Intuit would throw a lot of resources at this project. Instead, the company put together a team of three engineers, sent them to rural India for three weeks, and said, “Figure something out.”

One afternoon, during a torrential rainstorm, the engineers took refuge in a bus shelter alongside some local farmers. As the two groups chatted, the Intuit engineers learned that the farmers had limited access to changes in commodity prices, and no way to efficiently determine who the highest bidders were on any given day.

Now that they’d identified a problem, you might think they spent money to solve it. Actually, the engineers began to experiment with a basic and very inexpensive solution—no algorithms, no code—they manually texted price and buyer information to the farmers every day for several weeks. By working with a small team, a minimal budget, and a deadline, the engineers came up with a simple, elegant solution. It was easy to iterate, so they were able to get feedback quickly, figuring out what worked and what didn’t, and eventually accumulating the data they needed to get buy-in for the proposed product. Because Intuit was willing to impose constraints, and the engineers were willing to embrace them, they developed a service known as Fasal. It is an easy-to-use, text-message-based platform that uses complex matching algorithms to help the farmers get the best prices. Fasal has more than two million active users in India who enjoy a 20 percent increase in their bottom line.5

Imposing Constraints

Of course we all need at least some resources to get going. You can’t bootstrap without straps or boots. Scarcity imposes a cognitive tax on our brains,6 and we have no excess bandwidth to even consider hopping on a new growth curve. Take the case of sugar cane farmers in India who were asked to participate in a series of cognitive tests before and after receiving their harvest income.7 Their performance was the equivalent of ten IQ points higher after the harvest, when resources were less scarce.

But too many resources can become a snare. According to organizational psychologist Adam Grant, increasing resources enhances our ability to make a go of a business or project,8 but there’s an inflection point at which too much money or time or even buy-in actually diminishes our ability. Grant describes this as an inverted U-curve. On the ride up (or in our model, at the base of the S-curve) when you lack resources, it’s about embracing constraints. But, once the pace of growth quickens, a surfeit of resources has the potential to thwart progress. We can counter this by imposing constraints, or making the most of those already imposed on us. Here are several types to consider:

Money

One common constraint is money. And that’s a good thing. The lack of money makes business owners impatient for profits, and makes individuals hungry for discernible progress. Real estate entrepreneur Nick Jekogian shares, “When I started my business, money was the biggest constraint. I found ways to turn that into an advantage, and ten phenomenal years ensued. When easy money came into the picture in 2007, because I stopped focusing on innovation, substantial problems with our business model ensued, and we experienced significant losses during the downturn.”

In 2007, Entrepreneur magazine compiled a list of the five hundred fastest-growing companies in the United States.9 I was intrigued by the various ways these companies had funded their growth, rather than taking outside cash. Only 28 percent had access to bank loans/lines of credit, 18 percent were funded by private investors, and 3.5 percent received funding from VCs: as many as 72 percent of these successful businesses were pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. I believe these companies were successful not in spite of, but because of, their constraints.

A prototype for bootstrapping is Pluralsight, an online training library for developers and information technology professionals. In 2004, Aaron Skonnard and three software developer colleagues launched Pluralsight on a shoestring budget of $20,000. Growth needed to be funded through cash flow, so they were highly incentivized to get the business model right. By 2007, they had grown the company to $2.5 million in revenue. After they pivoted from classroom to online training in 2008 and demand exploded, Pluralsight finally took in outside money in 2012, raising $27.5 million to fund future growth. In 2014, they generated revenue of $60+ million, and CEO Skonnard was recognized as an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

Knowledge

A lack of experience or knowledge about a particular aspect of a business can be a restriction. But this can also have its advantages. After Athelia Woolley LeSueur’s career in international development was derailed by poor health, she started Shabby Apple, an online dress shop. LeSueur, who loved fashion, had almost no knowledge of fashion industry protocol or jargon. Because she wasn’t aware of the industry practice of hiring an expensive wholesaler to represent the clothing line to buyers, she simply set up an online shop, saving much needed cash and avoiding unreliable partners. The only manufacturer who agreed to work with her gave her just two choices of fabric, and because each seam, pleat, or button in a dress cost extra money to produce, LeSueur kept her designs simple, making the process easier and faster.

LeSueur was hardworking and smart, but her skirting of industry protocol ended up contributing to the success of Shabby Apple, which generated revenue of nearly $2 million in 2014. When you are trying something for the first time, your approach may very well be innovative and fresh.

Time

Several years ago, I had purchased an ad for my blog on Gabrielle Blair’s Design Mom blog; Blair is the founder of the blogger bootcamp Altitude Summit. I needed new content for my blog every day, but I didn’t have time to write that frequently. I began inviting people to guest blog, and to grapple with the why, what, and how of their dreams on my site. The conversation happening on my blog was enlivened and enriched. The stories shared by these guest bloggers became integral to my first book Dare, Dream, Do. My time crunch produced value I couldn’t have dreamed of.

Of course, sometimes multiple constraints combine. This is illustrated in the experience of the team of NASA researchers who confirmed on October 9, 2009, that there is water on the moon.10 Naturally, this was exciting news for planetary scientists. But what I find intriguing is the way they made this discovery. When the leaders of NASA’s $491 million Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) discovered they had an extra 1,000 kilos of payload capacity, they requested shoestring proposals for a companion mission. Led by principal investigator Anthony Colaprete, a team from NASA’s Ames Research Center proposed the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (known as LCROSS), which entailed slamming a projectile the size of a bus, otherwise destined to become space junk, into the moon. Given their lack of time and money, rather than commissioning expensive parts for the car-size spacecraft that would shepherd this projectile and analyze the six-mile-high plume of vapor, the team utilized off-the-shelf non-aerospace technology, including equipment used in carpet recycling and NASCAR heat imaging. Not only was this a scientific success, the team (yes, the government) was able to meet a tight time frame and come in under its $80 million budget.

Invisible Constraints

While some constraints are fairly visible, like not having enough time or money, some are less so—the demons of addiction, insecurity, depression, and illness.

Author Laura Hillenbrand suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome, and has been mostly confined to her home for nearly twenty-five years.11 In 2001, she published the New York Times best-seller Seabiscuit: An American Legend, the story of a champion thoroughbred, a small horse with an inauspicious start to its racing career that became a symbol of hope during the Great Depression. In 2010, she wrote another bestseller, Unbroken, the story of Louis Zamperini, a U.S. Army Air Corps lieutenant during World War II who crashed at sea and, after forty-seven days aboard a life raft, was captured and tortured by the Japanese.12

“I’m attracted,” Hillenbrand says, “to subjects who overcome tremendous suffering and learn to cope emotionally with it.” Zamperini himself summed up the secret to Hillenbrand’s successful writing career: “because she’s suffered so much in life, she was able to put my feelings into words.” Every constraint, whether physical or mental, external or internal, can be a catalyst for moving up our learning curve.

Turn Stumbling Blocks into Stepping-Stones

A constraint you don’t think about creatively and strategically is just an inconvenience. In their book A Beautiful Constraint, Adam Morgan and Mark Barden, experts on how small brands can challenge big brands, provide a six-step prescription for transforming a constraint into something useful.13

1. Move from victim to neutralizer to transformer. When faced with a constraint, we initially tend to adopt a victim mind-set, believing a constraint will inhibit our ability to realize an ambition. We either go into denial around the constraint or reduce our ambition to fit the perceived impact of the constraint. As we move to the neutralizing stage, we recognize that the ambition is too important to allow the constraint to inhibit it, and start looking for workaround strategies. In the responsive transformer stage, we recognize that the constraint could be the catalyst for a better solution. We may even impose constraints to stimulate thinking, leading to breakthrough approaches and solutions.

2. Break path dependence. If you have locked-in ways of thinking and behaving, examine your biases, personal or organizational, write down the six most important words in your organization or your life, and analyze what you mean by them. If “innovation” is your word, what do you mean—disruptive innovation, sustaining innovation, or something else? Then examine how you usually approach the challenge of a constraint. What is your typical approach? How could it be different?

3. Ask propelling questions. A propelling question links a bold ambition to a significant constraint. Think of escape artist Harry Houdini. If you are low on resources, what grand idea or ambition can you hitch your wagon to? If you have significant resources and a clear ambition, what constraint could you impose that would preclude you from thinking about the problem the way you would instinctively? This is what Intuit did in India.

4. Reframe to “can-if.” Think about how improvisational comedy teams work. In a skit, players never contradict one another; each actor builds on what the previous actor said or did. Instead of saying, “No, but,” they immediately proceed to “Yes, and.” When you come upon a constraint, instead of thinking, “I can’t because,” focus instead on how the problem can be solved, beginning every statement with “I can, if . . . .”

5. Seek new sources of abundance. If you lack resources, find a way to access them from elsewhere. Rather than focus on the resources you control or are given, think of other resources you can access, including those of stakeholders (who almost always have more to offer than you have drawn on), external partners, resource owners (who have a lot of what you need and may also need what you have), even competitors, and then figure out how you can barter with them to obtain the resources you need.

6. Activate emotions. If we cannot connect the need to transform our constraint with an emotional reason why it matters, we won’t have the stubborn adaptiveness and creative tenacity when our initial solutions hit setbacks. You’ll want the full range: fear, frustration, excitement, and love. Emotions are at their most potent when they contrast. This tension prompts us to make a plan and act on it more than positive thinking alone does. When you activate the right emotions, you can move away from the victim into the transformer mind-set.

Whether we create or impose constraints, having a plan for how to make constraints work for you—asking not “Why did this happen to me?” but “How did this happen to help me?—is the difference between bracing yourself for a lesser version of you, and moving at a breakneck speed up your personal learning curve.

Constraints Give Us Something to Push Against

Without certain limitations, we are creating ex nihilo, and can easily lose our way. A beautiful example of this is the music for Ave Maria, composed by Charles Gounod in 1859. He could have started anywhere, but Gounod chose to begin with the constraint of composing a melody over Johann Sebastian Bach’s Prelude No. 1 in C Major composed two centuries earlier.14 By giving himself something to bump up against, Gounod wrote one of the most beloved and enduring melodies of all time. Twentieth century composer Igor Stravinsky, who also drew inspiration from Bach, said, “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self.”

If you still think it would be preferable to sprout wings and soar to the top, rather than having to slog up the side of an S-curve, consider what happens when human beings actually experience weightlessness. While most of us have, at some point, wished we could fly, people participating in zero-gravity flights often get violently ill. In addition to nausea and vomiting, astronauts who spend extended time in zero gravity may experience headaches, lethargy, and muscle atrophy. Our bodies evolved in an environment where stress and strain are the norm. Weight lifting causes microtrauma that initiates a damage response pathway that secretes growth hormones. Weight lifting, not weightlessness, builds strength.

Constraints keep us grounded, and staying grounded gives us traction. Theologian and academic David L. Bednar recounts the story of a man with a four-wheel drive truck with no load on the back.15 He’d gone into the mountains and was stuck in the snow, spinning his wheels. Instead of just waiting for help, he got out of the truck and chopped wood. With the addition of a load of firewood, the truck was able to gain traction and drive out of the snow bank.

When you disrupt yourself, you are looking for growth, so if you want to muscle up a curve, you have to push and pull against objects and barriers that would constrain and constrict you. That is how you get stronger.

Pushing against obstacles is how AnnMaria De Mars, for example, got stronger. Having studied programming at Washington University in St. Louis in the late 1970s, she was able to get a position at General Dynamics in the 1980s, when “pregnant, female, Hispanic” was about as far from the stereotype of industrial engineer as one could imagine. She also was the first American to win at the World Judo Championships, winning the 1984 tournament in the under-56 kg class.

Instead of settling into a corporate lifestyle, De Mars left General Dynamics to get a PhD in statistical methods. She then went to teach in North Dakota, where she made connections on the American Indian reservations doing consulting, research, and grant writing. While in North Dakota, her husband was in a sledding accident. After several years of complications, he died, leaving her with three small children and many large medical bills. She is now a professor of statistics at Pepperdine, and cofounder of 7 Generation Games, which emphasizes math skills for Native American students. De Mars’s ability to use resistance to build strength is allowing her to contribute in a meaningful way.

What I try to remember about resistance is that it is relative. What was resistance for De Mars may be a trifle for you, or it may be incomprehensibly difficult. But whether you are AnnMaria De Mars, Nick Jekogian, Intuit’s farmers, or NASA’s investigators, you are going to have constraints.

Here’s what’s important: when resources are at a minimum, successful people dig deep to discover an embarrassment of riches right under their feet and a plumb line to distinctive strengths. They are also more likely to play where others aren’t playing—because other doors are closed—consequently taking on the less risky market risk. Constraints invite all of us to make choices and to own those choices, a critical developmental milestone without which we cannot scale and jump to new curves.

In 1954, an editor at Houghton Mifflin read the now famous article “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” and, concerned, he challenged one of his friends: “Take 225 unique words every six-year-old knows and write me a story first-graders can’t put down.”16 It took a year and a half, and at one point the friend was so discouraged he almost gave up entirely.

But when Theodore Geisel published The Cat in the Hat in 1957, it was an instant hit. Years of reciting rhymes and creating cartoons prepared Geisel to reinvent children’s literature when presented with a 225-word constraint.

For disruptors like you and me and Dr. Seuss, constraints aren’t a check on our freedom. As we learn to embrace them, they become valuable tools of creation.

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