Collecting constraints

Sometimes constraints lurch out of the shadows at the 11th hour of your work. Some weird technical integration no-one told you about. A political stakeholder issue that never came up. A hot-off-the-press requirement.

It’s easy to get frustrated. But instead, you could be proactive about finding these constraints.

You see we start with an idea in our head of what we’re setting out to do, and along the way constraints emerge. Each new constraint is a blade, slicing off the aspects of our idea that we love. It bruises egos an diminishes motivation. And it keeps happening, all the way through, every single time.

But what’s actually happening, is that the extraneous bits of our idea are being trimmed away. The fat is getting cut and our initial idea is being reduced to the smallest, most focused version of what it needs to be, until you end up with the only possible, feasible, viable and desirable bits of the idea that you ever needed.

Michelangelo chipped away everything that wasn’t David. Our job is to do the same.