To Improve Innovation, Embrace Your Constraints

Stop Limiting Yourself to the Obvious Solutions

You’ve just arrived in Vietnam. The government asked you to come and solve a major issue for the country — childhood malnutrition.

You don’t speak Vietnamese. You don’t know anyone here. And you have six months to fix things.

This was the situation that Monique and Jerry Sternin found themselves in 30 years ago. The Vietnamese government asked their employer, Save the Children, to open an office in the country and take on the nationwide malnutrition problem.

Soon after they arrived with their ten-year-old son, the foreign minister let them know that many people in the government did not appreciate their involvement. He told them that they had six months to develop a solution.

Six months. Minimal staff. Little budget. To solve a nationwide problem of childhood malnutrition.

It seemed unsolvable. Yet, it turns out that these constraints would provide the advantage they needed.

Constraints Free Us From the Obvious Solution

“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self,” said Igor Stravinsky. “And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.” We tend to see constraints as something that holds us back. We tend to view them as a limit to our creative options. Yet we take this view to our detriment. Constraints can provide the key to greater innovation and better solutions. They can push us away from the status quo and into new ways of thinking.

Without constraints, our minds tend to jump to the obvious solutions. Our brains are looking to save energy. Who wants to think harder than they need to?

Constraints knock us out of this trap. They force us to think beyond the obvious solution.

As the Sternins arrived in Vietnam, many agencies had previously tried to improve childhood nutrition. The cause of the problem was well known — a combination of poverty, lack of clean water, and poor understanding of nutrition.

The obvious solution was to reduce poverty, purify the country’s water, and educate people on the importance of nutrition. Which, in fact, was what many others had tried to do. Unfortunately, the level of resources needed to solve these problems never led to a sustainable solution.

The Sternins classified this diagnosis as TBU — true, but useless. Attempting to fix nationwide poverty, purify a country’s water supply, and educate a nation of people on nutritional values with 6 months and virtually no money to spend would never have a chance. With their constraints, going down this path would have been a complete waste of time.

So they looked for a different solution. They couldn’t solve everything that was going wrong. So they focused on finding something that was going right.

The Sternins collaborated with the local women’s unions. They sent volunteers to measure and weigh every child in local villages. When they got back, they looked for any examples of kids that were bigger and healthier than the typical child.

The women found that yes; it was possible to have poor families with well-nourished children. Malnourishment was not inevitable. There were solutions out there. And if some kids could stay healthy despite the problems, then it was possible that all children could.

They found that healthier children’s parents were mixing tiny shrimp and crab into their children’s rice. They added sweet potato greens as well. Other families considered these foods to be lower class and preferred to feed their children “higher-quality” rice. When asked about it, mothers of the healthy children were embarrassed at feeding their children these non-traditional foods. Yet it was these “lower class” foods that provided the much-needed protein and nutrients to the children’s diet.

Many experts and agencies had tried to solve the problem of childhood malnutrition in Vietnam. They focused on the obvious problems — poverty, clean water, and education. But after decades of research papers and development plans, nothing had improved.

Budget and time constraints kept the Sternins from pursuing these same paths. They never did address the root causes of poverty and clean water. But forced to operate within a tighter limits, they were able to find a solution.

Constraints Drive Creative Ideas

“Creativity,” Ben Orlin wrote in Math with Bad Drawings, “is what happens when a mind encounters an obstacle. It’s the human process of finding a way through, over, around, or beneath. No obstacle, no creativity.” Researchers Ravi Mehta and Ming Zhu demonstrated this thinking in a 2105 study. After reviewing the impact of scarcity and abundance on creativity, they found that without constraints, people don’t have the incentive to look for new, innovative solutions.

This makes sense. After all, if you have the money or resources to easily solve a problem, then you don’t have a problem.

It’s only when those resources become constrained that we force ourselves to find new, innovative ideas. These limitations force us to broaden our perspectives and look for alternate solutions. As Jeff Bezos put it,

“One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.”

When the Sternins realized they had a solution, they found another constraint. There was no easy way to broadcast and educate the villages. A formal announcement wouldn’t reach everyone. And even if it did, knowledge alone is no guarantee of action. As Derek Sivers eloquently put it, “If information was the answer, we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”

Instead, the Sternins developed a program to have the villagers teach each other. They had groups of families meet and prepare food together. Each family needed to bring shrimp, crabs, and sweet potato greens and they cooked together to develop these new behaviors. Most importantly, this promoted the idea that it was their solution — one developed within the villages. It reinforced the confidence that they could solve this problem — and keep their children healthy — without the help of an outside agency.

Six months after their initial visit, 65% of the kids improved their nourishment. And to date, these programs have reached more than 2.2 million people and are estimated to have saved the lives of over 50,000 children.

Make Your Constraints Your Advantage

“Innovation is born,” wrote Marissa Meyer, “from the interaction between constraint and vision.” Constraints fuel creativity. Limits encourage us to look for a creative response. It’s in these uncomfortable and seemingly impossible situations that we start thinking differently and begin to look for more innovative solutions.

Without constraints, complacency sets in and we default into following the path of least resistance. It’s too easy to choose the obvious answer, the one that jumps into their mind, instead of taking the time to consider more novel solutions.

The tight deadline or the limited budget — instead of looking at these as obstacles to overcome, try to see them as a source of innovation. A tight schedule can force you to test new ideas and get quicker feedback. Scarce resources can encourage you to look for different connections and other industries that may have solved similar problems. Technical challenges aren’t problems to overcome, but opportunities to focus your discipline and cut distractions.

In many ways constraints are inevitable. But rather than accepting them as limits, recognize their value. Let them guide you into new ways of thinking. Use them to push you to another level. In the wise words of Michelangelo,

“Art lives on constraint and dies of freedom.”