The Great-Aunt of Invention

If Necessity is the mother of invention, then Constraint is its tough-as-nails but oh-so-generous great-aunt.  In fact, constraint is so essential to innovation that leaders are taught to create it artificially as a way of driving creative thinking.

What would happen if the price of your main product were suddenly cut in half by a competitor?  How would you redesign your product to get it to market in half the time?  What if the government suddenly imposed regulations that took away your most profitable market segments?

Oh, and what would happen if you were making pancakes for ten Thanksgiving guests the morning after and discovered you only had a thimble of maple syrup left in the bottle? 

Exactly: innovation.

Over Thanksgiving break I laughed my way through Scott Adams' 20-year retrospective of Dilbert--Dilbert 2.0 (find it here)--and was reminded again how something that looks so much like fun and games can really be so much gruelling work. 


Adams tells the story of the creation of Dilbert, and his own journey as a cartoonist.  It's a good story, made all the more poignant by a guy named Jack Cassady.  Adams wrote:

I came home from work [Pacific Bell] one day, and found myself in the right place at the right time.  I started flipping through the channels on TV and noticed the tail end of a show about cartooning.  As the closing credits rolled by, I grabbed a pen and paper, and wrote down the name of the host: Jack Cassidy.  I wrote a letter to Jack Cassady, asking a number of questions about starting a career in cartooning. . .

Not only did Cassady respond, but he did so "with a two-and-a-half-page handwritten letter that was packed with tips."  With that encouragement, Adams proceeded to submit his cartoons--only to have them summarily and repeatedly rejected.  


So, he shelved his art supplies and went back to his day job.


Here's where it gets interesting, and here's a good reminder for successful, experienced managers who forget what it was like to be young and ambitious.  Adams continued:

A year later, out of the blue, I got a second letter from Jack Cassady.  This was especially odd because I hadn't even thanked him for this original advice.  Why would he write a second letter after so much time had passed?  Here's why.

Somehow he knew I needed the encouragement.  He saw something in my work that Playboy and the New Yorker didn't see.  In fact, I didn't see it myself. . .But Jack saw it.  His letter accomplished exactly what he intended.  I got out out my art supplies and started drawing again.

The rest, of course, ended up in a brilliant 20-year retrospective (that would make a great Christmas present for that warped manager in your life).


And, to return to the main point, it included this very funny lesson about constraint.


In August 2005, Adams submitted a comic that showed a policeman firing a gun, only to discover an "unwritten and relatively recent rule in newspaper comics: You can't show a handgun being discharged."


Constraint.


So, Adams re-drew the middle panel of the strip, removing the cop and showing only "Bam Bam Bam Bam Bam etc."  Voila: no discharging gun. 


Again, though, no deal.  Constraint. 


Adams' solution: "I knew I needed to think like a committee to get my comic past the committee of editors."  So, he let the cop fire a donut.   

The original idea was funny, but this made me positively laugh out loud.

Idea.  Constraint. Better Idea.  That's how it's supposed to work.

Tomorrow morning as I think about how to create constraints to power innovation, I'm going to stop at Dunkin' Donuts to see if the Old-Fashioned discharge better than the chocolate glazed.  I'll let you know.

By the way, Adams says that it was much easier to write Dilbert after the bust of the Internet bubble than during it.  Seems hardship and stupidity are much funnier than success--but we already knew that.

Here's a bonus (from the very generous CD packaged in with Dilbert 2.0) for all you aforementioned "successful, experienced" managers:

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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