Constraints

I recently heard the story of the “K?ln Concert” by Keith Jarrett. In a nutshell, it goes like this: jazz pianist Keith Jarrett was scheduled to play a concert, but due to some organizational mishaps, the wrong piano was put on the stage. Since that instrument was detuned and generally not in good shape, the musician was about to cancel the show. He was ultimately persuaded to go on anyway, and so he adapted his playing to the limitations of the piano. This made his performance so special that the recording of this evening became one of the most successful and acclaimed jazz recordings of all time(1).

The story resonates with me a lot, because it's a great example of a fundamental belief that I've become more and more convinced of over the years:

True mastery shows in your ability to work within constraints and still achieve great results.

To me, this is as true for the photographer who can take a brilliant picture with an old fixed-lens camera, as it is for the cook who is able to create a sophisticated 3-course menu in an average home kitchen, or the architect who turns a derelict ugly building into a stylish venue.

And it also applies in my professional context:

• As a software engineer, does it really demonstrate seniority if your default approach is to 're-write from scratch' and your merit comes mainly from greenfield coding without any real time constraints? Or is it rather your ability to successfully work with a legacy code base, slowly modernizing and improving it, while still meeting stability and backward compatibility requirements and ambitious product goals?
• Should we really be celebrating the manager who is leading a high-performing team if they got to hand-pick the perfect combination of people to work on a very rewarding project? Doesn't their colleague who had to take over a problematic group of individuals and turned them into a team that's doing somewhat okay deserve at least as much applause?
• Does it really tell you much about a CEO's qualities if they ran a company in a growth phase where money was flowing in and they could basically afford everything? What about that other executive who took over in a crisis and kept the company afloat despite extremely tight budgets and a frustrated workforce?

To me, all of these questions have very clear answers. And yet I observe a strong tendency to judge people primarily by their accomplishments and to ignore the context in which they achieved them. I think that's problematic, because it has a significant and lasting impact on the effectiveness of our organizations.

So, maybe, as leaders, we might want to start paying a little more attention to this when evaluating our teams and our people. We might want to celebrate not only the big wins, but also the seemingly small successes that were achieved in a challenging environment. We might want to call out behaviors and attitude in the face of difficulty, and we might want to look for more than just an impressive track record when hiring.

As for ourselves, we might also want to keep in mind that constraints are not necessarily just obstacles that get in our way. They can be challenges that help us grow. Constraints can spark creativity(2), they can make things easier to manage, and they can help create focus on what's really important(3). They can force us to finally make some of those harder decisions, or to address problems we've known about for a while, but for some reason accepted.

All of that is definitely a lot more difficult and time-consuming, especially when we have to defend our assessments to people who don't share our perspective. But hey, no one ever said this management job was easy. And who knows? Maybe the constraints you are facing right now will eventually lead you to your own little masterpiece.

1. ‘The K?ln Concert’ on Wikipedia
2. Oblique Strategies is one prominent example that makes use of this fact
3. Take any student you know and ask them about the most productive phase of their bachelor's or master's thesis. Chances are they'll say it was the last few days before the deadline. But there's a big caveat: It can also go in the complete opposite direction if you ignore the constraints and try to do more than you have time or capacity for. Everyone involved in a project needs to be on the same page to create this focus. Another case study: Ed Catmull's "Creativity, Inc." has a subchapter titled "The Power of Limits" that makes essentially the same point