constraints leading to abundance, e.g., your tochas
If you and your team are in an early design phase of your work, which I’d define as one where you aren’t immediately beholden to a clear customer or end user, it can be tricky to find the fulcrums, the tradeoffs, the criteria. The sturdy, plausible reasons to choose one move over another.
Sometimes I think of these as the edges of the gameboard. Sometimes I think of them, more floridly, as beautiful constraints.
I offer below three statements of constraint. Each can serve as a prompt for better design thinking. You might use the statement in its raw empirical form. You can also carry the statement with you as an adage - you’re not going to use it for the concrete fact it describes but for the line of thinking it opens. More #yolo than schematic.
Some constraints to consider:
Physical space: You can only sit in one chair at a time. (me, or a French proverb, “Il a le cul entre deux chaises,” literally, “He has his ass between two chairs” - an expression of untenable discomfort and perhaps poor judgment)
Attention: Your brain can process a maximum of roughly 185 billion bits of information in a 70-year lifespan. (Csikszentmihalyi)
Relationships: In a surprising number of contexts over millennia, humans sort themselves into groups of ~150 people, which appears to be the maximum number of relationships one person can maintain. There are degrees of intensity within that 150. The innermost circle of most intimate relationships typically has no more than 5 people. (Dunbar’s number)
(This is in no way an exhaustive list!)
Two observations about these constraints that sit in some tension with each other:
Diverse Groups of People Doing Things That Matter can go awry when they ignore these constraints instead of a) embracing them or b) defying them. They are to be taken seriously, even and especially when you believe you can overcome them.
Great leaders tend to set extraordinary expectations for what can be done with and within these constraints.
-Eric
