How constraining your business sets your creativity free

The human brain is a funny old thing and often behaves in unexpected ways. One of the surprises is that it is far more imaginative if it is constrained in some way.

The way it works is this. Every day the brain is subject to a cacophony of activity and if it didn’t chose to ignore most of it we’d go bonkers. The brain works so hard on ignoring stuff that the rest of the time it has to be mega efficient. The result of this is that when the brain is asked to think about how to solve a problem it doesn’t bother digging too deep for a clever solution, rather it just grabs the closest answer.

But when you put an obstacle in the way of the brain so that it can’t grab the nearest information it steps up a gear, and magic happens.

First of all the brain sorts through its impressive store of information and then it plays with it, matching seemingly unrelated bits of information in various permutations and combinations until, amazingly, a clever solution appears.

So how can you use this knowledge of how the brain works to improve your business?

Well think back to when you were a start-up. You had no money, and (because you had few staff) little time. But you had to get going, you had to get your product ready and customers buying it. You had to make your business work on a shoestring or give up.

Can you remember the amazing results you achieved?

I recall a story of a start-up that was trying to win a major bank as a first client. All was going well in discussions until the bank said they wanted to have a meeting at the start-up’s premises. Problem was, there were no premises! Undeterred the start-up rented a small space, hired some furniture, gathered friends to be “employees” and, well, when the bank came for their meeting they saw a fully functioning office and hired them on the spot. What a creative solution!

But when your business get’s beyond start-up, when it has a (modest) amount of cash, available, and when there are more than a handful of staff, the obstacles to getting stuff done are less. So what does the brain do? It reverts to being efficient and it stops digging deep for those clever answers. Your business becomes less imaginative, less creative, less innovative.

So if that’s the bad news, how can you get back some of that start-up spark?

By imposing constraints.

The two most obvious constraints are time and money, so you want to look at ways of making time frames tight, and be even more frugal on budgets. But the constraints need to feel authentic, not of the made-up-by-the-boss variety.

One way to achieve this authenticity it to promise clients that you will deliver to a tight deadline. This provides a genuine obstacle and your team will engage their deeper brain to achieve the timetable.

But the benefits don’t just stop there. There is a sort of hangover effect for your brain. By activating your deeper brain and reminding it how to use those neural pathways, it’s more likely to dig a little deeper the next time.

The brain likes obstacles, it likes to be constrained. Think differently – being short on money and time is not a curse for the brain, it’s a blessing.

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses: Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).