Unbound with Chris DuBois

Chris DuBois
Want to get work done faster and more creatively? Sometimes adding constraints is the trick. Are you a leader trying to get more from your business in life? Me too. So join me as I document the conversations, stories and advice to help you achieve what matters in your life. Welcome to unbound with me, Chris DuBois.

Right Hello, everyone. Today I want to talk about enabling constraints and governing constraints, sometimes in business, and just with people in general, right, we can fall into complacency with the way that we're getting things done. And once we do that for a while, we start to create these habits that stop us from achieving things at a higher level. But what if we could actually get better results without needing to add substantial effort, but rather, we remove options. So by subtracting, we can actually multiply the value of our output. Right. So to do this, we can use those two forms of constraints enabling and governing. Now, enabling constraints are the ones that are going to boost creativity. So for example, we can use rhyming schemes in poetry. So rather than with freeform, where we're getting thoughts out, and we're just putting things down on paper, by requiring a certain pattern for our rhymes, we need to think about those thoughts differently. And this forces us to tap into our creativity. Okay, with governing constraints, these are designed to help us increase efficiency. So you can think of these like lines on a road, if everyone follows those lines, then we all get where we're going faster, fewer accidents, you know, and it's just much easier to see where we need to go. And, okay, quick side quest, if you are someone who struggles to trust people, think about your ability to share the roadway, you are literally driving 60 miles per hour passing feet from someone else headed directly in your direction, right? If you can trust strangers to stay on their side of the road, you can trust your team and the people around you. Okay, back to the main question. innovation and efficiency are often on different ends of the spectrum, right. So you can be super efficient, but it's going to require you to be very, very concise with whatever rules you're putting down. Right, there is no wiggle room for creativity, you're sticking to strict processes. And you're working that way versus on the innovation side where you want to let people do whatever they need to to get the job done. You're removing a lot of those, those controls. Now in business, you can't lean on one side or the other. Because if you're leaning too far for innovation, then you're not actually getting stuff done fast enough to get it to market right and actually make money. If you're doing too much on the efficiency side, and you have zero innovation, then you're creating a commodity, you're creating something that is going to be no different than what anyone else in the market can put out and you're going to lose value, you're not differentiated, right, it brings a whole litany of other issues. And so we want to find where on the spectrum, do we actually need it for our business. And that's where you can use some of these constraints to help come up with that. So let's start with some examples for enabling constraints, you're going to notice a trend with some of these examples. And that's scarcity, drives resourcefulness and innovation. So looking at this from like a big picture, if you can just remove certain things from this, if you can remove some budget, if you can remove some free time to work on this, it's going to force people to think differently, therefore more creatively. So one, setting some aggressive timelines for developing anything new, or just even refining some of the stuff that is going to work as an enabling constraint. You can create competitions or challenges where you have limited resources, and your team just needs to get something done, you can allocate your budget differently moving towards, you know, towards higher risk, or high reward type experiments. This way, your team has to be very selective about the stuff that they're doing, knowing that there is a higher impact if they were to fail at something. Similarly, you can flip that and do allow for faster failure, let people prototype stuff and do like MVP, you know, product services very quickly, so that you can just learn very fast, and knowing that they have that very unrestrictive kind of goal, right? We're just trying to see if this works. And the market will actually accept it that often lets people think more creatively. bring teams together, do like cross functional stuff with your teams bring sales and marketing together to work through something, you're gonna find that just by doing that you are now creating other ideas, you're bringing new things to the table. And this technically is a constraint because you're telling them they have to work together, right? So you're building some sort of constraint where it's like, hey, marketing is not responsible for this sales is not responsible. You guys actually have to work together. And this team is responsible. You can also Institute something like like a hackathon, or just innovation challenges where you have a very specific amount of time to just brains I'm gonna get as much done as humanly possible and just by, you know, leaving their umbrella at home during that brainstorm, they're going to think differently about their problems. Okay? Going into governing constraints. So the intent here is to get things done faster with fewer mistakes. So we're applying more controls. Now, we still want to make sure that as we apply controls, we're not completely stifling creativity, or reducing the autonomy of our team. If you do this, you're going to be viewed often like a micromanager. Right, and people aren't generally going to work with you. Sometimes, you have to move outside of those lines on the road to avoid potholes or accidents, right? If you think of a traffic jam on the interstate, there's nowhere for people to go to avoid the issue. So everyone gets backed up. And so when you're enabling some of these, or creating some of these governing constraints, there is a chance that having too many of them stops your team from being able to just quickly work around problems, because they are too restricted on what they're actually able to do. And so some of the ways that you can do this, implement standardized processes, just best practices, create your playbooks give the team something to work from, and tell them that they have to work through this because it has been proven out if they have a new idea for something that could change, obviously, you want to change it keep working towards a better, but giving everyone that starting place to say, Hey, this is your left and right limit work within here, that's going to help having hierarchies in business and knowing who has decision making authority for various decisions. Right, that's going to help people because they know exactly who to go to, they know what's within their purview, and what they can actually influence. Give your team specialized roles and responsibilities, right? Assign owners for things, if you have a team member who is the designer, and they know everything that they do is going to be around design, that's great if that designer is also a developer, right now they're have to spread how they're thinking about problems, and they're going to be doing too many different things at once. So if you can standardize that, and actually give them that one role that's very defined, and they can stick to that, you're gonna see just much, much more efficient work, right. And that's, that's another important thing, right? There's nothing wrong with having a designer who's also a developer on your team. That's perfectly fine. They think differently, they can be very creative, and still very efficient. But right now we're just looking at adding governing constraints to improve efficiency, and having a single job will make everyone much better, we're not good at multitasking, right? We are better at doing a single focus tasks. Let's see, you can also automate tasks through by having, you know, whatever your your prescribed, like algorithms for, for these workflows. That is that systematization is going to cut waste, and it's going to help you actually move faster. You can also apply budget controls, right? So budget controls can work as an enabling constraint, they can also work as a governing constraint to let people know like, hey, we cannot work outside of this. Because if you had an unlimited budget, you're now looking at so many different options every time you have to make it a choice, because you can write there's no scarcity of that resource. And so by creating making it scarce, or saying this project has these budget limits than they know, they can limit what tools they're looking at, they can limit, you know what process they're looking at, as well. And finally, get really clear on just what metrics you actually want to look at and tell the team like give the team clear guidance on these metrics so that they know what those targets are. And by having something quantifiable, you're actually going to boost efficiency that way. So those are some enabling and governing constraints, I would add them to your workflow, and you will hopefully be able to breathe some fresh life into your business. If you enjoyed today's episode, I would love a rating and review on your favorite podcast player. And for more information on how to build effective and efficient teams through your leadership visit leading for effect.com As always deserve it