How to Unlock Creativity While Working Within Constraints

No, you can’t do that.

Little puts a person’s back against a wall like those 5 words. When autonomy and entrepreneurialism represent two of the core pillars supporting the island of your professional personality, hearing no undoubtedly has a damning impact on your creativity.

And if your work requires you to think outside the box, something blocking you in puts your defenses up.

At the end of the day, all marketers have to work within some constraints. Whether your compliance, brand or product team reviews your work, there exists a system of checks and balances ensuring the work you release into the wild represents an accurate reflection of the brand you work for.

With a few guiding principles, working within these constraints can unleash some of your most creative work.

Accept it as reality

When I broke my femur in 2009 following a freak kickball accident (let’s talk about that over a beer) all kinds of thoughts immediately ran through my mind.

This can’t be happening. Why did this happen? Is my leg really broken? Ok, your leg is definitely broken. Now you need to deal with it.

Once that affirming thought entered my mind, my whole outlook on the situation changed from one of disbelief to one of acceptance. From there, with the help of fellow interns in the area, help was called, parents were notified and the healing process began.

Similarly, once marketers accept that another team, compliance for example, will review and potentially edit their work the sooner the visceral reaction to it fades. It’s the first hump in unlocking creativity and sets the stage for welcomed feedback.

Seek out feedback, don’t just wait for it

You’ve probably been there: A piece you’ve been working on is released. It was your baby and you feel so proud of the end result. It’s ready for primetime.

Well, then it goes live and someone spots a typo. There’s a weird crop on one of the images. There’s a phrase that has an alternative meaning not in your colloquial dictionary.

You better believe someone is going to call it out. And when that feedback comes in from a public forum, the sting of the internet hurts more than any feedback a colleague could give.

Having a small team of trusted team members to review your work helps you catch these story hijackers. If soliciting feedback clams your palms and induces heavy breathing, here are a few tips in asking for it:

Be specific in your request

By focusing your ask for a particular type of feedback, you set yourself up for a few successes. For starters, it creates a shared sense of expectations between you and the person you asked. When receiving feedback, it primes your mind to focus in on key topics and themes, which can make receiving critical feedback more digestible. This also allows you to seek out opinions from many people, a crucial step in seeking feedback.

Diversity in thought > sheer numbers

One of the goals of asking for feedback is to test your own hypothesis. To avoid confirmation bias — seeking out, recalling, interpreting and presenting information that aligns with our beliefs — finding a few colleagues from different lifestyles and organizational functions puts you in a better position to have new perspectives to consider. We have a burning desire to be correct, but by testing that natural style, we grow our ideas.

Remember: It’s an opinion, not a fact

Not everyone will be happy 100% of the time. It’s tough to even have four friends all fully agree on restaurant for dinner.

And that’s okay.

Our opinions make us unique and are rarely 100% “right” or “wrong” — they’re just different. When taking into account feedback, I’ve found it useful to ask clarifying questions rooted in wanting to understand the why behind their thoughts. At the end of the day, however, choosing to implement the feedback falls on the project owners.

Be unconventional in your brainstorms

Does anything sap creativity out of a room quicker than stale air in a fluorescently lit conference room unable to regulate its temperature?

Some of the most creative ideas surface when both the physical and social environment encourage out-of-the-box thinking. You don’t have to redecorate your conference rooms, but you can try any of these:

• Have everyone sit or stand anywhere but a chair
• Book a conference room that the group has never used before
• Bring wine, candy or other treats
• Have a plush toy or ball to toss around while brainstorming
• Take the meeting outside

Perhaps the most important part of a brainstorm: Ideas first; rank, validate and judge them second. A Negative Nancy will suck the creativity out of a room in an instant and can lead to people keeping creative ideas locked away in their heads for fear of rejection. Any idea is a good idea, until the team later discusses and decides there were ones better suited for the project goals.

Constraints may seem like an impenetrable barrier to creativity. By adjusting our own outlook on them they start to look more like a feasible challenge. How do you stay creative while working with constraints?