Constraints? Do It The T20 Way!

With the IPL season raging, a discussion turned to what makes T20 cricket so much more interesting and popular than the classic 5-day Test Cricket (which was, perhaps aptly, described by the late Hollywood actor Robin Williams as ‘baseball on Valium’). The group quickly arrived at the consensus that all the constraints imposed on the game in the T20 format are what makes it interesting. We proceeded to count the constraints that define the T20 game, as opposed to a Test match, and came up with nearly 3 dozen rules that go to make us root for the T20 format, when it comes to sheer entertainment.

 Starting with the limit of 20 overs per innings, the power-play rules, number of overs per bowler, the rule on wide balls, and the free hits for no balls are just a few that makes the game a thriller.

While the purists swear by the longer format, the fact remains that all these constraints serve to give even inexperienced players a shot at fame. The over-the-hill veterans playing in IPL keep coming back to surprise us in the ways they use their accumulated expertise to overcome the T20 constraints.

 In a marketplace full of uncertainties that is more akin to a T20 game, does this success of veterans and the ‘fringe’ players have parallels? If established players attempt to make rules based on non-negotiables like distribution channels, service levels, pricing models or even technologies, can newbies make quick ‘inroads’ into such established fortress walls, steal small market shares and get noticed? Amazon came from behind to shock existing tech giants (like IBM) in the Data Centre business by changing quite a few of the extant rules and went on to win contracts from even the US Federal Government. Veteran HP’s resurgence in the laptop market globally has a lot to do with major organisational changes while retaining their penchant for always offering the best in technology and quality in all their products.

 The lesson, therefore, from T20 as a format could be that if there be no constraints, we may want to create a few. That will change not just the rules of the game, but the game itself.

In business, there are barriers to entry that are common to all players in the marketplace. These are typically regulatory or cultural. Like in T20, if companies look closely, every constraint could be an opportunity to play the game differently.

 Then there are entry barriers that we need to construct for our competitors. In true T20 style, playing to shorter time horizons, building customer loyalty, working with strategies that are also tactics, and making multiple ‘thrust and parry’ attacks can confuse and confound existing players. Restrictions, whether of time, of purpose or of structure, don’t have to be the death of creativity. Once you know what you need to do, you can start working on new, exciting ways of doing it. 

 At the personal level, working with constraints is a hallmark of Personal Mastery, says Peter Senge, the author of The Fifth Discipline: “(Mastery) stems from your ability and willingness to understand and work with the forces around you.”

When you see Anil Kumble turn up for practice, and bowl hundreds of balls at a single stump, you know the Master here is ‘creating’ constraints to be better. Women cricketers and wrestlers build superior skills by playing and grappling with the men. As an employee, we ‘see’ constraints everywhere – regulatory, competition, senior management myopia, managers’ incompetence, lack of talent in the market, shortage of R&D dollars and even ‘limited’ markets. Each of these is a call to revise your personal benchmarks to a new, higher level.

 Orson Welles, the director of Citizen Kane, says: “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations. Instead of having money to hire hundreds of extras, you have to sneak a cameraman in a wheelchair through the streets of New York City and steal the shot, which gives you a look of much greater reality.”