The Paradox of Constraint, or: What a space movie told me about creativity and stuff.

Here in CreativeTown (not a real place), we have our fair share of clichés and tropes and tired conceits that could probably use a nice, semi-permanent retirement in the countryside. And I don’t mean the solutions themselves, when they get overused. Not the stuff we might be lazily tempted to make or write or do to solve a problem quickly, hoping the client or customer (or our own conscience) won’t notice.

That’s its own challenge, for sure.

I mean some other clichés. The internal ones, you might say. The ones that we use amongst ourselves, that live in conversation about the work, around the work, and amidst the work.

For instance: there’s the one where we declare ourselves “Creatives,” instead of simply describing ourselves as “creative.” The whole noun-ification of a perfectly sound adjective is kind of alot. And we have to capitalize it too?

I’d be fine if we sent that one packing.

Or there’s this gem: “Contemporary.” That’s a code word for sure. Nothing like snatching up every single possible current fad, as well as the already fading ones, and lumping them all together into a bulbous, lumpy heap of a word that, because it has lots of syllables, gets to feel more sophisticated than the word “Trendy” feels.

Yeah, that can head off for a nice long sabbatical too.

But the winner for me, the one that has most often landed on my brain as worthy of an extra long vacation in faraway anywhere USA… it’s one little packet of words that has for years made this Creative (see what I mean? capitalized?) wince a bit every time he hears it.

“Out Of The Box.”

Oh my dear god. I just wrote it, and it actually kinda hurt physically.

For a long time, it was just the pinnacle of the worst-case scenario Creative Brief. A client (or fellow collaborator) wants something uniquely fresh and truly original -- which is great! And then they use the most singularly tired and unoriginal phrase to express that very desire. Sigh.

A box. Cool.

Before we go further, I want to be clear: I’m not just scrawling out some angry missive about How Hard It Is To Be A Creative (did it again - sorry) these days.

I’m going somewhere here, for real.

In fact, I’m willing to say that this last piece of worn-out creative lingo, while painful, holds some serious revelation. Like, it could be considered epiphany-level stuff.

And of course, that quasi-epiphany came to me as most consciousness-raising insights about the world come to any of us:

In a Tom Hanks movie.

Yes, good ol’ Tom. A man so pure of heart and warmly human that he is sometimes referred to as “America’s Tom Hanks.”

Quite a few years back, he was in a proper modern classic about a failed mission to the moon. Most of us have seen it, but even those who haven’t still know it… seeing as it gave birth to a catchphrase that’s permanently embedded into our shared psyche. We roll it out whenever there’s just enough trouble that someone, somewhere, needs to be alerted. Heck, you don’t even need to say the whole thing. You can actually just level your gaze at a person and utter “Houston…” with sobering gravity and the right kind of trailing off in your voice, and anyone within earshot knows exactly what you mean: Shit has gone sideways in a serious way.

OK, anyway: the movie. Apollo 13. A high-tension drama, based on history, and beautifully told by Ron Howard, with our man Tom at the helm. Literally. Top to bottom, it’s a worthy way to spend 2 hours. Do yourself a favor and give it a (re)watch this weekend.

Since I don’t wanna ruin anything – I despise spoilers as much as we all do – I’ll tread very lightly on plot points. It’s just that there’s this one scene. Which I’ll get to. First: the basics.

The Apollo 13 lunar mission is underway. And then, disaster! An explosion on the ship! Cause: unimportant. Effect: multiple failing systems. And these guys are floating away from Earth in a tin can with less computing power than an iPhone. Bad times.

And it’s in this crisis where we find that one scene… and potential revelation. All in a floating cylinder in space.

Well, it’s actually in a work room in Houston. But still.

Among the problems they’ve got up there: a quickly diminishing oxygen supply. Or rather, a rapidly increasing carbon dioxide supply. No bueno. Three panicked guys, breathing more than they would have on a typical mission, kicking out a deadly compound too fast for the lunar module CO2 filters to keep up. This was a real-life story… and this danger was all too real.

But wait! There’s a solution!

There are more filters. Plenty, in fact… over in the command module. Great! Borrow those!

Only, not.

Because wouldn’t you know it? The lunar module filters are square shaped, and they fit into a corresponding square-shaped hole to function. The command module filters, meanwhile, are (you guessed it) cylindrical, and require a round hole to work.

So what do you do?

Well, see for yourself. Watch the first 2 minutes or so of this clip to find out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cYzkyXp0jg

Pretty impressive that this all happened. Even more impressive that things turned out OK. And on this particular issue… on this unique challenge… I was struck by what those NASA guys did to solve it.

The team strictly defined their boundaries.

Or, they had them defined strictly by the situation. To quote that short NASA guy:

“We gotta make this… fit into the hole for this… using nothin’ but that.”

The team in that work room had to be ingenious. They had to be imaginative. They had to be truly creative. They had to rethink, or unthink, or reapproach items and purposes and intent that they previously assigned to known objects and tools.

They had to do the very thing that I think a creative brief, or a client, or a colleague might call “Out Of The Box Thinking.”

Only here’s the thing:

They could only do what they did because they wereconstrained. They were only able to accomplish the task because there werea finite number of ingredients.

Out Of The Box?

Hell, the damned solution literally got poured onto the table from a freaking box!

They were not OUT. They were IN the box. They found their answer not by roaming wildly off into the hinterlands of what-if’s and maybe’s and you-know-what-might-be-cool’isms… they found true creativity by studying carefully what lay within a set of utterly immovable, and severely limiting, fixed parameters.

You have these objects, guys. You have these boundaries.

Find your solution.

And… go.

I don’t know about you, but I find this sublimely rewarding. Like I said: this is the stuff an afternoon revelation is made of.

Because this is what that narrative tells me:

It tells me that constraint is a state of mind. That solutions live inside the immediate. Or more to the point, that they hide there.

That the very things which might at first seem to be doing nothing but keeping you from adventurously exploring?

They are likely the things that hold your answer.

I feel this in my bones as true, creatively. I certainly struggle to fold it into each and every project, but I recognize more and more how deeply valid it is. Because the other way only leads to one of my own worst creative spaces: the open range.

No fences? Well that sounds appealing… at first.

Wide open possibilities? Cool. For a few days. Or hours. Or less, sometimes.

Being turned out onto the open range of All The Things You Can Ever Think Of Ever as a landscape for creative problem-solving just finds me wandering that wilderness, endlessly. I just keep reaching a promising rise, spotting another one off in the distance, and heading that way. Nonstop. Over and over.

Wide Open Space. Great for Dixie Chicks songs. Lousy for my creative process.

Anyone else know this feeling?

On the other hand, you give me a space with cleanly defined borders… and then, ironically enough: I can really go places. Once I’ve walked the edges of the project, and found the raggedy border beyond which lies the Things I Can’t Afford, or Time We Can’t Spend, or Messages We Must Include, or any other constraints… then I know where to start digging.

Because I think that the rich discoveries of good creative don’t lie in covering more distance. I think that, more often than not: they lie in plumbing more depth.

So hey: fence me in.

Define my tools.

Limit my time.

Delineate the budget (but please: be kind when you do).

Once we are familiar with our space, we can find what is valuable. How we might perhaps reuse something for a new purpose, just like the NASA guys did. We can see how much more is inside a limited area when we look more closely at it. When we look more deeply. Because the answers are there. There is always more to be found when you go closer and deeper. (Which all speaks to my belief that creativity is a fractal experience, but: more on that another time.)

At the last studio where I worked, we had a regular meeting aimed at simply loosening up our creative muscle. Among the exercises we used was one called Creative Hat Pull (hats, it seems, are everywhere in my world). In that “game,” if you will, the challenge was to create a piece of content using the random rules that would come from a series of yellow post-its drawn from a hat.

How long a duration? Reach in and find out.

Which platform is it bound for? Pull from the hat to see.

How long have I got to make it? Let’s see what the hat says.

We added in all kinds of borders and boundaries. Sound limitations. Settings. Editorial restrictions. More.

It was a great way to get an answer to the question: What does a vertically-shot, single-character, black and white Proactiv ad with only three cuts look like? Oh, and it has to have a fight sequence. And type onscreen for half of its duration. And you have 24 hours.

To be sure, it made for some fresh (and hilarious) results. But more notably: it turned out some incredibly original problem-solving.

Because when you know where you must stay, and what is utterly off limits, you free yourself to see the known quantities totally differently.

Here’s another way to capture this thinking, borrowing from more Industry Lingo that’s actually further borrowed from our childhood: The Sandbox.

Personally, I’ve used this term pretty loosely as a way to define the space a given project might occupy as it develops. Sometimes it’s a noun (“Let’s get three artists working in that sandbox right away”), and other times it’s a verb (“This one could be tricky; we should sandbox it a bit next week”). But no matter how I use it, the essential meaning is the same, and it conjures the same iconic children’s play space: an enclosed, clearly demarcated zone for creative exploration.

Now think about the reality of an actual sandbox from back in your youth. The ones I remember were at the park. They were technically full of what you might call sand, but there was also kind of a permanently-wet-dirt-sand-thing happening in there too. And the boundaries were always big thick pieces of wood, reassuringly bolted together at the corners.

But here’s the thing that really strikes me: know what those park sandboxes I remember best were surrounded by?

MORE sand.

Yeah, I’m sure of it. I distinctly recall that the rectangular zone defining the Place Where You Create Stuff was really just a random sector of sand-dirt amidst a larger, typically undefined swath of the same sand-dirt.

There was nothing uniquely magical about it. Four boards. Some bolts. A square. And then:

Behold. This is now the place where construction projects would come to life, and Star Wars action figure misadventures unfolded, and unsatisfactory sandcastles and (when things really came together) highly satisfactory tunnels were born, perfect for toy cars to pass over and through.

It’s right there: We offer kids a place to be endlessly imaginative… by doing what? By literally putting boundaries around a chunk of the very same stuff that surrounds it. Then we say, “Look at that! Look in there! That place? That place is magic! Go see what you can find and dream up and make!”

A sandbox. Cooler than a box.

Happily, it doesn’t have to end at the playground borders.

Adults get to play too.

Want to see how interesting things can get for grownups embracing this particular notion of creative exploration?

Witness the work of Lars Von Trier and Jorgen Leth in The Five Obstructions. Here you can watch as one experimental filmmaker challenges the other to make, and remake again, and again, the same short film with new limitations each time. Heck, the solve for the first obstruction alone is worth the price of admission. (Note: these are two Danish auteurs with highly avant-garde sensibilities. So… Way less Tom Hanks in this movie. Way more cigarettes and silence.)

from The Five Obstructions. Don't say I didn't warn you.

I have to wonder, then: could this be right? Are we perhaps more free to imagine when we are more constrained?

Limitation = Liberty?

Yikes.

What would Patrick Henry say? Or George Michael, for that matter?

But somehow, I like it. And anymore, I even welcome it. Because there’s almost nothing as creatively satisfying as witnessing a success and knowing that it came about with one hand metaphorically tied behind your back. It makes for great shop talk over drinks, too.

Now I cannot, and will not, claim in any way that this is a wholly new concept. I know that Necessity Is the Mother of Invention, and all that. There are many who have realized and memorialized this notion, or something like it, long before I have.

But what I like about my own uniquely-flavored understanding of this Necessity/Mother truth is that it celebratesthe Necessity part. A mindset that can not only accept limitations, but can embrace them, and can even learn to utilize them, to play them like an instrument… that’s the stuff. That’s what the NASA guys were doing.

Gimme some of that NASA Nerd Mojo any day, and all day long.

So. Now it’s time for the soon-to-be-predictable Bigger Picture portion of the blog entry.

Because I’ve been wondering:

How can this artistic quasi-truth apply to more than creative problem-solving? What can the idea of Embracing The Box do for me, or for us (if I might presume) as we move through the world?

Hey, glad you asked!

(Or, glad I asked, I guess.)

Is it possible that someone can welcome this as a personal philosophy and be enriched?

I’m gonna go ahead and say Yes. And also that it’s already out there, hard at work.

Because this notion - the celebration of limitation - seems to me that it’s basically a riff on the Bloom-Where-You’re-Planted ethos.

Rather than endlessly fight the fact that we cannot effect large-scale change at will, being relatively limited in power and influence… we instead choose to use the tools that we have, and the factors that in any one moment define us, so as to make an impact at a smaller level.

It’s the same thing.

It’s Creative Hat Pull. But in real life, and with better purpose. It’s the sandbox, but the stakes are higher. It’s a box of random space stuff, and you’re at the table.

What’s the challenge? Oh, it’s making the world a better place? Great. What are my constraints?

(pulls from hat) OK, I live in this zip code here.

(pulls from hat) I am incredibly busy as a parent, and only realistically have weekends open.

(pulls from hat) I’m kind of a good teambuilder. Or, I like running, or I can draw… or…

you get it.

And here’s what I like most about this as a potential Life Philosophy: To embrace it, you get to accept as truth the idea that the tools you need to achieve any kind of any thing are already within your reach. It is, in a weirdly inverted way, a philosophy of empowerment. It’s just disguised as limitation.

The hat has the solution. Reach in and see.

The sandbox is your answer. Start scooping things around.

The table full of space-stuff holds the key. So start bashing some parts together.

And sure: I recognize that we should always be reaching for more, or pushing out against limitations at any level. It’s crucial to test the boundaries and constraints in creative development. Just like it is as you move through life, when find the big stuff you want to work on.

I’m just saying, the reality is: There are going to be boundaries. Constraints happen. And it can seem to make an issue utterly unsolvable. Especially the World-level ones.

But whenever stuff gets to feel too big, I say we just imagine that it’s Tom Hanks’ impossibly warm-but-dramatic voice letting you know:

“World, we have a problem.”

Then go ahead and take a breath, and put on your best short-sleeved button-down nerdy-workshirt, and round up some of your fellow nerdy-workshirt-wearing friends… and gather around that work room folding table.

Because

(box full of random stuff gets poured out)

This is what you got to work with.

And you gotta come through.

And you likely can.

At least, I think so. It just makes good sense.

So, anyway: that’s why I have such a problem with that tired old phrase.

“Think Outside The Box.”

Outside the box?

Screw that. I’ll take the box, please. Every single time.