Blippar Speaker Sessions: A Beautiful Constraint
February 8, 2017
Blippar Speaker Sessions: A Beautiful Constraint
Every month at Blippar we invite an illustrious speaker to address the company. This month we welcomed Adam Morgan, a writer, branding expert and inventor of the concept of the challenger brand. Adam spoke to us about his latest book A Beautiful Constraint.
Have you ever sat in a meeting and felt swamped by negativity? Every idea batted back with ‘but we can’t do that because….’. Of course you have, we’ve all been there and it stifles creativity. But what can we do? There are always constraints to be considered, lack of resources, time, know-how or money hinder nearly every project we embark on.
Adam takes this viewpoint and flips it on its head. He sees limitations as opportunities and urges us all to increase our ambition in the face of constraints. Be propelled to think differently than you normally would to solve a problem. Don’t state ‘but we can’t’ instead ‘we can if’.
Consider these real world examples. The California fire service needed to recruit 4,000 more firefighters for a highly dangerous job but only had the budget to pay a couple of dollars a day. Not possible right? Wrong. It can if they use volunteer prison inmates. Inmates learn useful skills, spend time outside the prison walls and earn a small wage.
Or how can the furniture brand Made.com launch itself at the world’s most prestigious furniture show if it can’t afford an exhibition space? It can if it showcases its furniture in real homes. Its customers homes to be precise. In keeping with the brand’s ideology of stripping out the expensive middlemen and connecting customers directly with designers.
We can all learn to embrace the limitations of a problem by adopting a different mentality:
We can if…
...we think of it as X
...we substitute X with Y
...we use other people to do X
...we mix together X and Y
...we fund it by X
So go forth and ponder what you can if...
