A Beautiful Constraint: How To Transform Your Limitations Into Advantages, and Why It's Everyone's Business

10 MAKING CONSTRAINTS BEAUTIFUL

How to use the ABC approach

THIS CHAPTER FOCUSES ON:

1. What might be a simple and easy way to use what you learn from this book?
2. What would be a more formal and disciplined way to use this approach with a larger team?
3. Can we summarize the different types of benefits that constraints stimulate?

How constraints can transform the way we think and behave

We have come a long way from the optimistic but vague generality of “every cloud has a silver lining.” The cases we have seen have opened up a rich variety of ways in which constraints, whether externally or self-imposed, stimulate better outcomes and solutions.

Constraints are not the forces of regression or punitive restriction we tend to think of them as. On the contrary—they are liberators of new possibilities, and we need to have a completely new kind of relationship with them. Their apparent limitations force us to question, surface, and challenge assumptions that, while they might have been reasonable once, are no longer useful strategic foundations for us. They push us to think of what we do or offer in an entirely new way, offering up a fresh and fertile perspective. They impel us to behave differently—amplifying, simplifying, dramatizing. They make us search for and find primary solutions in secondary or unconsidered areas. They drive us to create new kinds of alliances, develop new kinds of capabilities. They are parameters that have the potential to expand, not constrict.

Table 5 summarizes ...