Anything Goes. Now What?

The first class of a new academic year always feels a little tentative. The students in Idea & Innovation Management do not know me yet, and I do not know them. Ahead of us lies a programme in which they will constantly be asked to come up with ideas, investigate them and turn them into something real. But before I introduce any techniques or processes, I want to know what creativity means to them.

So I start with questions. Who do they consider a creative person? Leonardo da Vinci, Jay-Z and Elon Musk all get mentioned. They would make a curious project team, but in my students’ minds they apparently fit quite comfortably under the same word. Then someone says, “My mother.” I find that answer at least as interesting. Creativity does not always hang in a museum, stand on a stage or launch a rocket. Sometimes it is standing in the kitchen at home. Next, I ask them how they would define creativity. Their answers differ, and that is what gets the conversation going.

Then I ask a question that brings it closer to home: what stops you from being creative? Almost every year, one of the answers is: “When I’m not given any freedom.”

I understand that response. Who wants to come up with ideas when someone else has already decided what is and is not allowed? Still, I sometimes do something the student probably did not see coming. I hand them a blank sheet of paper and a marker.

“All right,” I say. “Here’s your chance. Be creative. I’m not placing any restrictions on you.”

Usually, there is a pause. The paper is ready, the marker is ready, but where do you begin? I have given them no subject, no purpose, no audience and not even a hint about what kind of idea I expect. Anything goes, and suddenly nothing seems to come to mind.

I know I am playing a little unfairly. Asking someone to be creative on the spot, in their first class and in front of fellow students, is hardly a fair test. Their silence does not prove that they cannot be creative without restrictions. But it does make something tangible that we easily forget when we talk about creative freedom. An empty space does not yet give you a direction.

The problem with a blank sheet of paper

At first glance, the sheet seems like the perfect place to start. There is nothing on it that you have to preserve, improve or obey. You can draw, write, make a diagram, invent a story or do something that fits none of those categories.

At the same time, you have to navigate all those possibilities yourself. Before you can make anything, you must decide what to make and why. Even the first mark requires a choice, and that choice pushes countless other possibilities into the background. “Be creative” sounds liberating, but it leaves the hardest part entirely to the person trying to begin.

I recognise that feeling from my earlier work as a graphic designer. Give me a concrete challenge and my thoughts start moving. Tell me whom I am making something for, what it needs to communicate and what resources I have. Even if those resources are scarce, I have something to work with. Give me nothing but the instruction to “make something original”, and I too can spend a long time staring at a blank page.

A constraint can offer a starting point. Suppose the assignment is to create an invitation for a neighbourhood event using only words and one colour. Immediately, I can ask myself who will read it and what might make them curious. I can play with tone, rhythm, typography and that single colour. There are fewer possibilities than on the completely blank page, but I can see them more clearly.

What a constraint can set in motion

When I wrote When the Box is the Limit in 2018, I wanted to explore what constraints can do to our creativity. They can focus our attention, make us look differently at what we already have and render familiar solutions less obvious. Sometimes an idea begins to take shape precisely when an obvious route is closed off. [1]

I had seen this in my work as a designer. A client might want a strong impact on a small budget. An expensive photo shoot might be out of the question. Of course you can wish you had more money, but eventually you have to work with the resources available. What if the image does not have to carry the message? Perhaps a few carefully chosen words and strong typography can do more than a photograph.

The constraint does not come up with that solution for you. It does, however, prompt a question you might otherwise never have asked. At first, you think about what you cannot use. Then you begin to discover what the materials you do have might be capable of.

You can find such examples in music too. Igor Stravinsky wrote his piano work Serenade in A with a technical limit in mind: each of its four movements had to fit on one side of a 78 rpm record. The available playing time helped shape the piece, but it did not dictate the notes. Within that limited time, Stravinsky still had to make music. [2]

That distinction matters. A constraint can define the challenge without deciding all the creative choices in advance. It can say: this is the space you are working with. What happens within that space remains open.

When a boundary becomes a wall

My students are right to ask for freedom. Suppose I ask them to find a solution to food waste among students. But at the same time, I decide that it must be an app, which features it should have and how they must present the concept. They would have little reason to investigate the problem for themselves. They would mainly be developing my idea. The assignment would have boundaries, but leave them hardly any room to discover something of their own.

Time shows how differently a constraint can work. A deadline may help you make choices and finally get started. But anyone who has worked under sustained pressure knows how little room can remain to explore a thought or try a less obvious approach. A study of people working on creative projects found a relationship between perceived time pressure and less creative thinking, particularly at very high levels of pressure. [3]

So the question is not simply how many constraints we need. Their nature matters, as do the conditions in which people work with them. Research with four research and development teams found that constraints could either support or hinder creativity. The dynamics within the teams played an important part in how people understood and responded to those constraints. [4]

I think about this perhaps even more now than I did when I wrote my book. A lecturer may intend a constraint as an interesting prompt, while a student experiences it mainly as control. A manager may urge a team to “get creative with limited resources” when that team has already spent months trying to do good work without enough time or people. To those living with the consequences, celebrating constraints can sound rather cheap.

Some boundaries challenge us. Others make good work impossible. We need to keep paying attention to the difference and, sometimes, be willing to question a boundary itself.

Direction and a say in the matter

Over time, I have come to think of freedom and constraint less as two quantities. You cannot simply take a little of each and trust that creativity will follow. What matters is how they affect one another.

A clear challenge can help someone use their freedom. It provides direction: this is what we are trying to achieve, for these people, with these resources. Autonomy then creates room to find an approach nobody had thought of beforehand. Someone may use the available resources in an unexpected way. They may even discover that a boundary everyone assumed was fixed can be changed.

The two forces can support each other in this way. Without any direction, freedom can feel overwhelming. Without freedom, direction soon becomes an instruction to follow. Together, they can create a situation in which someone knows what they are working towards and still has room to contribute something of their own.

Their relationship can change within a single creative process. At the start, a focused question may help people get moving. While exploring ideas, they may need more room to wander, combine things and reconsider the original question. Later, a budget, a format or a deadline can help turn a range of possibilities into something real. You do not have to settle that relationship once and for all. You have to keep noticing what the work needs at each stage.

Back to the blank sheet

Sometimes I think I should give my students a second chance after my little provocation. The same sheet of paper, the same marker, but now with one extra sentence: “You have five minutes to make something that will make someone else in this class laugh. How you do it is up to you.”

I do not know what would appear on the page. Perhaps a drawing, perhaps one well-placed sentence, perhaps something I would never have thought of. The assignment offers no guarantee of a good idea. It does offer a reason to begin, while leaving the student free to decide what to do with it.

Does creativity need boundaries? Sometimes. But it also needs room for people to move within them, shift them or say that they have outlived their purpose. A boundary can be the beginning of an idea. When it also determines where that idea must end, it is time to look again.

The sheet of paper is still blank. You simply no longer have to go in every direction at once.