Think Inside the Box: Make Use of Limits
[Originally published in Imagination First, by Eric Liu and Scott Brandon.]
In our culture today, everyone is told to think outside the box.
Put aside the question of how much original thinking can be going on if everyone is rushing outside the box. Even in Lake Woebegone, we can’t all be nonconformists. The real question that arises when we hear this advice is, “What’s wrong with the box?”
It turns out that boxes — that is, limitations — can be incredible prompts to imagination. In the Seattle fringe theater scene, there is a biannual pressure cooker of creativity called “14/48, The World’s Quickest Theatre Festival.” Every winter and summer, over the course of forty-eight hours, fourteen ten-minute plays are conceived, written, scored, rehearsed, and performed. On Thursday night, seven playwrights are given a theme — mistaken identity, say — and the next morning they come back with a play that the actors, tech crew, director, and musicians scramble to bring to life. Repeat, with seven new playwrights, Saturday. These command performances are remarkable for how much beauty and hilarity they randomly generate.
At Marine Corps Officer Candidate School, they do something similar. One of the most grueling and revealing tests that young candidates go through is called the Reaction Course. You are assigned to lead a team of four. You are brought to what looks like a small makeshift playground, with, say, a barrel, some rope, a high wall, what looks like a gymnast’s uneven bars, and two wooden poles. The instructor paints a scenario: one of your team has been severely wounded and you must devise a way to transport him across a gully, represented by the uneven bars. You have fifteen minutes. Go.
The instructors are watching, clipboards and timer in hand, to see how the team leader leads under pressure. The Reaction Course might well be called the Revelation Course, for it quickly reveals whether you’re a delegator, a controller, a listener. Do you suffer from paralysis by analysis? Do you rush into an attempt without thinking it through? Do you let someone else take charge? Do you defend your authority at the expense of good ideas?
There is no right answer to the challenge; in most cases, there may be no solution possible in the time allotted. Maybe the two poles can be turned into a stretcher. Maybe the ropes and barrel can be used to make a pulley. Maybe the wall can be used like a fulcrum. Maybe one of the poles can be — time’s up!
The genius of the Reaction Course is that is uses severe limits, of time and material, not only to test the temperament of the team leader but, more fundamentally, to awaken the leader’s openness to new ideas. As in 14/48, the intensity and accelerated incubation of ideas can yield inspired works and performances.
Pick up a little pamphlet published by the toy and game company MindWare, called “101.3 Ways to Create Imaginative Solutions.” Open up to any page and it will say something like, “For the five challenges listed here, you may use any of the five following items: Macaroni, Shoe Box, Rubber Bands, String, Cardboard.” Then scenarios follow, such as, “You have recently become aware of a major burglary in your local museum. Formulate or demonstrate a superior alarm for the museum.” Or, “Devise a method to automatically could the number of coins in a pile.”
When the celebrated architect David Rockwell was a child, with his widowed mother working in vaudeville and a parade of performers streaming through his life, he became fascinated with communal play. He looked at the world around him and saw on the beaches and in the attics and by the roadsides the stuff of carnivals and black box theaters and haunted houses.
Years later, he noticed that his own children enjoyed playing more with the cardboard box that a new art table came in than with the table itself. The stunted, risk-averse plastic playgrounds of our era no longer capture the imagination of children. They’d rather just have a box. Rockwell began to conceive of a new kind of playground: unstructured, free, child-centered, and consisting almost entirely of raw ingredients. Loose parts made of wood and metal, sand, some water, multiple levels of platform and ground. “Playing with sticks,” Rockwell observes, “reminds us that in the best play there are no permanent artifacts.” There’s just some stuff, and imagination.
The adventure playground movement that Rockwell has helped pioneer places no time limits on the play. But by stripping down the materials to their basic essence, this new breed of playground reminds us that limits can be our friend. (Rockwell now has designed “Imagination in a Box” kits for adults, based on the same principle.)
The critical factor is intention. Our lives are boxed in by limitations, material and attitudinal, that we inherit or create. It takes intentional practice to see those limitations not merely as something to tolerate but as the source of new invention. When we can convert scarcity into an asset, we are not just playing well. We are living well.
Header image by Erda Estremera, unsplash.