A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations into Advantages

On my bookshelves are tons of Victorian novels, cognitive and personality psychology tomes, Permaculture titles, and...I also read business books.  I suspect that one of the big things about all of these topics/genres that I love is innovation: or, the human mind making more of a situation than it seems at first could be there. At the thrift store last week, I found a business book that is exactly what interests me in that way about Permaculture. It's called A Beautiful Constraint: How to Transform Your Limitations into Advantages, and Why It's Everyone's Business by Adam Morgan and Mark Barden.

By now I've read everything by authors Daniel Pink and the Heath Brothers at least once, and in my opinion this is the type of book that should have been produced by their publishers in that popular, inviting, easy-to-take-off-the-shelf style. But instead it was published by Wiley, and so it looks (and feels) like a textbook, although the book is packed with stories and diagrams that make the content of the book easy to understand both visually and through the power of story.

It is and it isn't a business book: the examples of constraints catapulting innovative thinking are taken from every imaginable sector, showing how people using constraints to their advantages can create amazing organizations, solutions, and situations anywhere. This is exactly what Permaculturists do; they observe and identify the constraints in an ecological situation, and they use the constraints as frames to construct flows and connect energies to build something productive that didn't exist before, and wasn't even thought of before. Some of the examples in this book are directly related to agriculture and farming, such as the smallholding chicken farmers in Kenya and the brewing company looking for better barley yields with less irrigation in South Africa.

It is a book that not only challenges readers to develop their thinking to make the most of constraints and supposedly limiting situations, but also gives charts and directives, walking readers through cognitive processes, giving a launchpad for applying the solutions-finding methods profiled in the stories to each of their own situations.

So far I am only halfway through, but I couldn't put it down during our recent road trip, and I think that this book deserved more press than I suspect that it got due to its dimensions, publisher, and overall feel (never heard about before, and it's almost 8 years old now). I couldn't miss out on the opportunity to let you Permies know that it is a good book out there that might be of interest to many of you as well.

Thanks for the recommendation, Rachel. I have all kinds of constraints on my time and all kinds of ambitions that I want to achieve. So I picked up the book from my library and I am reading it.

I just picked it up again for a reread this week! What a nice coincidence that you have begun it. We will have to have some delicious book gossip when you're further in!

Interesting items from the 1st Quarter of the Book:

p. 49--the need to find a nontoxic shoe glue, and it worked BETTER than the other stuff

I love the naming of " the victim mindset" and "path dependence" which I have both of, in spades. It's nice to know they can be named and combatted!

p. 66, with the Bernstein quote: "To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time." Yes, definitely yes!

Ahhhhh!

The way we tend to think about resources, in other words, is a form of path dependence.

A Beautiful Constraint, p. 104

Yes, this is me, alas!

But not my mother! My mom homeschooled four of us on an absolutely shoestring budget, and she had the knack of seeing absolutely everything as a valuable learning opportunity, making spinners for homemade math games out of cereal boxes, and curricula out of thrift store finds...she still amazes me to this day with her ability to see everything differently, and how things can be made into other things or commandeered for uses I could never have thought of. I need to spend more time with her and figure out her secrets to seeing beyond the obvious paths!

p. 135:

Negative emotions can help drive persistence, commitment, and focus. Positive emotions help stimulate cognitive flexibility and the ability to see new kinds of connections.

True, and again verified by my experience!

I am the one in the family with the most negative emotions, and I won't say I am the only one of us with persistence, but I am the one motivated to the bitter end by an inborn sense of duty--that is what gets me doing things I don't really want to do. I do persist and focus more than others, although it would be so much better if I did my focusing with a smile. This drive to complete necessary things that have been started is not shared by others in the family.

My husband is a quiet, cheerful person, experiencing lots of positive emotions every day. And he is known by family and friends as the one who comes up with the unusual ideas and brilliant connections. It's one of his top traits in the Gallup StrengthsFinder thing, notably. I am happy for him, and jealous, too.

At least we're a great team! (How come we don't rule the world, I want to know!)