Creativity Demands Less Options

How Structure Compels Originality

Originally posted on Medium.

Creativity Demands Freedom

There are few things as rewarding as transforming your ideas into something tangible. Creativity feeds our need to see effort become reality. Thoughts alone serve no feedback, but building things is a direct line to nature. To craft something real is to understand the world in ways mere contemplation cannot.

There is no creativity without exploration. Piecing together our first expectations about what might work is but a catalyst to what matters. The information needed to guide our efforts in the right direction is anything but apparent, requiring we probe nature through trial, and use our learnings to take next steps.

This is why creativity demands freedom. To create is to venture into the unknown and tease out what’s needed from an opaque mess of possibility. Getting good at building things is less about our use of knowledge and more about our repeated recognition of salient truths.

Consider the creation of music. Music is how we express ourselves through vocal and instrumental sounds. To create good music is to combine sounds into something that produces what many deem beautiful.

Composing music takes a good deal of discovery to land on something pleasing. There are only so many combinations of sound that work; the task of any composer is to explore that space of possibilities effectively. Whenever we listen to a piece of pleasing music we are experiencing the end result of a great deal of exploration.

Creating brings something into existence. But it is not mere replication. Something only bears the mark of creativity if it has never been experienced before. If we hear a piece of music that sounds too obvious, very few will consider what was made a result of creative effort. We naturally detect the level of creativity in one’s work by picking up on its newness.

Between the need to explore and the need to bring about something new sits the currency of freedom. One cannot make their way into the vast unknown in the hopes of finding something new if they are overly constrained. Freedom is how one makes many attempts, waiting to stumble upon something surprising. As I’ve said before, our best work should always surprise us.

From an information-theoretic perspective we can say that what’s needed to create anything of value is surprisal. Only when our work brings a level of initial bewilderment to those who consume it do they assign meaning to what we make. The discovery of music worthy of consumption is a set of words, beat and melody that achieve a level of synthesis unexplainable through analysis. It is not for the composer to know how or why their sounds interact correctly; only to recognize when it sounds good. Such revelation is given to us through the cost of movement. Anything that prevents our flow and evolution is counter to the creative process. The greatest musicians throughout history were tapping into something primal.

We cannot be hampered by rules and regulations that limit our ability to explore. We will not be defined by some institution’s expectations of what “good” looks like, or bounded by the status quo. To create is to move against the grain by default. To find what has yet to be known, to build what has yet to exist. The next generation cannot benefit from our creativity if we are limited in our ability to embrace that beautiful chaos that drives newness.

The Problem with Options

Associating freedom to creativity seems like a no-brainer. But having options also means there are more things to juggle. Inviting additional concerns into our building efforts is not without cost. The more information we must contend with, the more mixing and matching we must undertake in our quest to discover what works.

Every attempt we make must be done against a set of decisions regarding whether or not something has been improved, and what is worth hanging onto. There is a combinatorial explosion of dependencies that arises nonlinearly any time we add to what we already have. To add one more thing to the mix could mean 20 more things to consider. While we must make a mess in order to create, that mess can quickly contaminate our efforts to piece together something useful.

Bringing more options into our creative efforts is akin to a game of Whac-A-Mole™. Just as we solve one challenge a host of new ones pop up. It happens in an unpredictable fashion, making our work less about creativity and more about chasing down bugs in the machine. That beautiful simplicity we first had begins to degrade into something that can’t be reined in. In our quest to explore ever-more interesting possibilities we lose control of our creation; able to see the trees but not the forest.

The software industry is case in point. To build software requires listening to user feedback. User feedback is given in response to others using our product, and such information reveals new situations the product should address. This leads to new features being included in the application. Think of your favorite social media app limiting the number of characters in a message, only to increase that limit over time. The products we use are not static entities, rather they are dynamic tools that evolve based on signals from the environment.

Adding features is part of the evolution of any product. No product company can survive if they don’t address the evolving concerns of the market. But adding more features to software can quickly become a disaster. Each new feature is another component that has to be maintained, be placed with an extensive testing and integration suite, and map back to an organization’s overall strategy. We cannot think of new features as just more possibilities for end users; they’re also an entirely new set of responsibilities.

The most critical part of any piece of software is the overall structure it adheres to, not any specific chunk of code. But the more we add to software the less we are able to keep our application robust to changing conditions. The addition of code in response to needs can quickly make us lose sight of the holistic structure that makes a product work properly. Adding more details to the codebase brings benefits in isolation, but also delivers a set of large-scale concerns. There is a real cost to adding more capability, and that cost is often related to losing sight of what matters.

New code gets added as a tight, modular component. That way the component can be modified as a separate concern. But any new piece of code ultimately becomes part of a network of interacting functionality. If we add a new service to our application, such as payment processing, it will need to be integrated with other data and services our product already uses. This means that if something changes in one part of the application, such as someone changing the format of data, it will affect our new payment processing service downstream. Additions have consequences that spread far beyond the added pieces.

Building software that gets used demands product teams listen to users and incorporate their needs. But the incorporation of more options brings new challenges, sometimes challenges that ruin the possibility of delivering and maintaining the product. Software cannot be made by merely embracing the freedom of optionality in the hopes of building something that works. Blindly incorporating new ideas and possibilities will destroy the chance of building good things. When we look at successful products in industry we are seeing a mix of the power of freedom with the necessary limitations that must be placed on options.

Having options is necessary, but alone does not offer a sufficient condition for creativity. It is not freedom that lies at the heart of genuine creativity because freedom rapidly becomes untenable. Freedom both moves and stops us, and the line where that happens is too mysterious to pretend we can magically stop short at the right time. Freedom alone will dampen any process of building; its power is also its weakness.

Creativity Works Better when Constrained

There are good constraints and bad constraints. Good constraints allow our efforts to move, not interfering with our need to explore. They anchor our efforts using high-level goals, signalling when we are on the right track. Bad constraints go deeper than goals, and instead try to instruct us on how to take specific actions. Bad constraints get in our way.

Good constraints act as beacons strung together into a system which, as a whole, guarantees output. These guarantees do not vow to make our work good, but they do ensure the only bottleneck to creativity is our willingness to persevere. In other words, as long as we invest the necessary time, good constraints will ensure our work converges to something commensurate with how nature works.

Good constraints lead to genuine freedom because of the way they guarantee creativity. To work in the absence of any structure is to put pen to blank paper. Sure, laying down thoughts in a haphazard fashion will lead to great insights, just by virtue of embracing the power of unconstrained ideation. But it won’t take long for this to become unwieldy. It is structure that our ideas must land on to become something tenable.

Back to the music example. The creation of music involves finding what works. The musician must discover something that is cohesive and sounds good. Good music can be seen as an acoustic distillation of a musician’s ideas and experience into something that conforms to nature. Humans have evolutionary filters for what sounds pleasing; music resonates with our emotional state.

But what sounds good is not a random collection of tones. For something to sound good it must have certain patterns that are familiar to humans. Good music tends to follow a structure. The structure of music can be described as “sectional.” The sections of music are self-contained yet interlinked musical “ideas.” These are intros, expositions, verses, choruses and conclusions. When we listen to music we are hearing more than just an artist’s passion turned into sounds, we are hearing well-established structures that work.

Looking for new experiences is part of being entertained. But people don’t really want to experience things that are totally foreign. Good music has both predictable and unpredictable parts. Imagine hearing music that followed no structure at all. It would be new but hardly enjoyable. Anything created that is deemed worthy of consumption must contain familiarity.

Humans are all about pattern recognition. We are attracted to patterns that are non-random, and often assign meaning to that non-randomness. Appreciating patterns requires recognition of regularity. Our minds must place what we see into preexisting categories, and the patterns in music are no different. Meaning requires recognition and categorization.

Structure is how we arrange the relations between the parts of what we build. The use of structure, either explicitly or implicitly, is needed to package our innovation into the necessary non-randomness that draws people in. It is structure that undergirds the materialization of our content into something that is patterned. We often don’t have a name for the underlying structure that guides creative efforts, but we can feel when it’s there. Like feeling when a math problem finally distills into an answer, it’s that sense of arriving at a destination.

To truly create means we are getting something out the door. This is only possible when we have some awareness of the structure that makes this possible. Merely mucking about and hoping-for-the-best will lead to some revelations, but only when those pieces precipitate into some arrangement that works can we truly create.

Constraints Compel Creativity

The real point is that constraints don’t just guide, they compel. We are adaptive creatures. When we have goals we change to achieve them. Structure isn’t just helpful, it’s generative. A set of good constraints brings out our best work because we want to fill the gaps between where we are and what we’re working towards. Structure triggers creativity.

Think about the expectation that all rap music rhymes. Rhyming is a constraint on the creative efforts of a rapper, since no matter what the rapper chooses to write about there is an expected correspondence between the sounds at the ending of their lines. If a rapper approached their creative process without considering rhyme they would fail. By being aware of their genre’s constraint of rhyme the rapper is guided as they build. Rhyming tells the rapper what to look for. It reduces the space of possibilities making the search for a good song more tractable.

What looks like more creativity — combing words that rhyme versus combing words that merely make sense — is actually easier to accomplish because of the constraint of rhyming. The rapper is not merely exploring possible combinations of words, they are combining words that fit a condition. There are far fewer possibilities of combined words that rhyme than words that don’t. Enhanced creativity comes from having fewer options.

Let’s take this further. We can add an even stronger constraint and show that this leads to more creativity. Think about how creative a rapper like Eminem is. If we look at his lyrics they are definitely high on the talent scale. His word play is loaded with metaphor, various types of rhyme and that trademark flexibility where he makes 2 words that don’t seem like they should rhyme, rhyme. But Eminem’s real signature is his ability to rhyme sentences with sentences; or at least significant chunks between consecutive sentences.

Using a condition to rhyme several words in a sentence with several words in the following sentence might seem overly restrictive. But Eminem doesn’t lack story. His words aren’t contrived or bland, they are full of creative expression. I argue that Eminem’s more extreme constraint on rhyming is what enables him to be far more creative than his contemporaries.

Rhyming many words with many words is a kind of automatic cleverness. Focusing one’s mind on getting a sentence to rhyme with a sentence dramatically reduces the space of possibilities, and guides the artist towards what works. It’s the benefit that comes from always knowing what we’re looking for. The more specific we are with our expectations the more rapidly we know it when we see it. Fitting words to a stronger condition has a way of cultivating prolific creativity.

To be clear, this is no way suggests Eminem is achieving something easy, just that he is employing an ingenious constraint to achieve what most people likely assume “comes out of nowhere.” As a line from one of Eminem’s songs says:

I can’t explain what it is my brain does
But however it works, it’s insane, it’s plain nuts

— Eminem

But Eminem’s intense level of creativity is not magic, just a very skillful use of constraints that breed inventiveness, imagination and originality.

One doesn’t need to analyze music to detect its patterns. If you listen to artists like Emimen you can hear the patterns they use. These patterns are generative, and greatly assist the artist in arriving at their material. These patterns not only provide a familiar structure to their work, they also enable artists to more readily map their ideas onto something usable. I argue that Eminem is an example of talented creativity attending to a structure that guarantees good rhymes.

We need a good deal of freedom to create something unique and that has meaning. But rampant ideation and trial will not alone produce a piece of work worthy of consumption. We should see creativity as something that is made possible by the use of good constraints, not mere freedom. Constraints are the grounding that gives us the necessary confidence to embrace flexibility and opportunity. We are much more willing to fly when we know we have a ground to land on.

Living with Good Restrictions

One cannot find contentment without compressing nature’s raw materials into something expressive. Bringing ourselves to the world demands we have the necessary freedom to explore; to muck about life’s sandbox until our wish of revelation is granted and we are emboldened to fashion something new.

But today’s society talks about freedom as though it’s diametrically opposed to structure. We are told that structures are impositions on our otherwise “true selves.”

The reality is that we are only free when we “get things out the door.” If our efforts don’t lead to things others see then we haven’t expressed anything. We haven’t really created if nobody notices, since in the absence of real world feedback our creations are just collections of momentary truths that never saw the light of day. To create means to build things others experience.

Imagine being tasked with creating a marble sculpture. We would start chipping away at the material, working our way towards some final form and texture. Creating such a piece of art requires we get to know the material. Over time we would gain knowledge about the give and take of the stone. We would learn how it chips off, how to apply the right pressure. If we became great at our craft we could bring our ideas to the world in a fashion similar to the works of antiquity.

In this example, marble is the resource we use to transform something raw into something new. We learn how to make that transformation via experience with the material. A marble statue must be a shape that can be achieved based on the chemistry and density of marble. If you are sculpting away and hit a vein, you could lose the entire piece to a split along the grain. The material we choose to work with dictates what is possible.

We are always at the whim of the forces of nature. No matter how much we want to express ourselves, our efforts cannot beat the fundamental truths nature rests on. The statue we make with marble cannot be anything. There are properties to the material that must be respected if we are to get it out the door. When we look upon any great piece of work we are seeing a story of constrained freedom.

People often assume great works of art stem from some innate “genius” or exceedingly rare gift. But while inborn talent definitely plays a role, there is a real process to how accomplished individuals produce great work. Being good at sculpting marble is less about some hidden talent and more about a deep respect for the stone. The familiarity that grows over time is related to the unseen truths of the material. Great sculptors build an emotional connection to those truths.

To craft our marble sculpture requires we find the statue inside the stone. But it’s not just the final physical form we are searching for. We must locate the intangible constraints that bring us the freedom to create. Constraints are what we learn over time as we build again-and-again. When we find how our sculpture should be restrained, we find how to bring our ideas to the world.

Structure makes creativity possible. Good constraints bring us the freedom to create because they guarantee our messy trials land on something that works. The best structures compel us to fill the gaps between our current and future states. Structure is generative, and sparks our imagination. Structure ensures the patterns we build are both recognizable and unexpected. We need to orient our lives around finding the structures that move us. A content life is not born out of unbridled freedom, rather it stems from our ability to know and respect the guiding fundamentals that work.