Creativity

Success Criteria

Jon Kolko

Jan 24, 2024

6 minute read

Success criteria take the form of creative constraints. It is rare that constraints of any substantive value are mandated top-down on the creative team. Of course your team will have to work within real time limits, financial boundaries, and other top-down realities of business. But the most valuable type of creative constraints are those that come from an intimacy with the content and subject matter; they emerge through a back-and-forth process of making and thinking—from a sort of conversation with the thing being made.

When the thing being made is…

• …a physical object, the main constraints are also physical: the materials and their cost, manufacturing abilities, sourcing mechanisms, and competitive landscape of features and functions.
• …a qualitative-research study with real people, the main constraints emerge from the selection criteria: whom to study and what you will observe.
• …a new product or application, constraints typically emerge from the process of storytelling: creating use cases, scenarios, and storyboards that show a person using a hypothetical product to achieve a goal.
• …a corporate strategy, the main constraints often come from a leader with a strong vision of the future.

Design Theorist Henrik Gedenryd describes that the rigidity of constraints depends on whether they are mandated (“legislated,” in Gedenryd's words) or more organically emergent. An architect designing a building would never set out to build a dangerous one, but setting an intention about safety isn't enough. Instead, explicit constraints come in the form of a building code that potentially limits the architect's ability for exploration. These constraints are non-negotiable, even as the creative process acts as a form of what Gedenryd calls material negotiation.

But constraints that emerge from the work itself are only temporarily strict and rigid. They can be applied absolutely but for only a short time. The creative team can establish parameters to essentially overrule creative directions to arrive at a manageable solution set. When those solutions aren't very good, the very team that created them has complete control to flex the constraints and develop new ones. (Gedenryd, 1998, pdf)

All of that theory has practical implications, as well. The distinction between mandated and emergent constraints is an important one. The product owner or a technologist can't set the constraints that emerge from the work because, until the creative process happens, they don't yet exist.

The mandated constraints are more traditional requirements. Typically, these requirements are gathered through an internal perspective on what the market will bear, combined with an engineering perspective on what is possible. These requirements are the initial guardrails that Torchin described and the boundaries that Gedenyrd calls “non-negotiable.”

When the initial guardrails jibe with the emergent guardrails, and when the non-negotiable requirements are in harmony with the emergent ones, creativity flourishes. Misalignment and friction occurs when the top-down and bottom-up perspectives are at odds. The creative team then sees the requirements as stifling, as if a checklist can bind creativity. But no one likes being told what to do, and creative teams are particularly finicky about creative exploration. So as you build your creative strategy, minimize requirements and maximize the opportunity for emergent design constraints.

Here are some of the similarities and differences between constraints and requirements.

Constraints are often described as the product must statements and the user will have the ability to statements.

You may find yourself with what seems like hundreds of these types of constraints. That's fine; what's important is to remain at two levels of description and fidelity at once. First, make each individual constraint explicit, even if the designer established it during the creative process. Making constraints explicit enables objective judgment (“You said it would do that, but it doesn't”) and further exploration points (“We said we would have a joint partnership with a trusted content provider; who is in charge of working that deal and building that relationship?”)

Next, form constraints into categories, described in a way that a busy team member can quickly understand. Many ability to statements can roll up into larger container statements (“Ability to manage finances” or “Ability to represent themselves”). These group statements act as anchors for alignment. When a team comes together, its members need to trust that they are pursuing the same goals as they were during the last review. These grouping statements point a trajectory or course—and become ways to make sure the bus is going in the right direction.

So far, we've listed external forces and identified the constraints that point towards success criteria. A third type of constraint shapes the experience of the new product or service. These are statements that describe how the solution should feel without describing what it should be. They are experience principles, which might include thinking about usability, appeal, or engagement. Although these constraints don't have to be quantitative, they can be tracked and judged.

Experience principles are often reactive because they describe aspects of a solution that are different and better than a current solution.

The team can establish metrics related to each principle, and, once a solution exists and reaches pilot or test phase, the team can assess whether they've made progress on these fronts. These metrics can emerge almost naturally from the external inputs.

It's really tempting at this part of the process to try to create solutions to the problems we've seen from customers and users, and from the competitive market landscape. But we're not ready for that because we haven't yet clearly articulated the problem. Don't abandon those solutions, though. Write them down and park them. You can come back to them when you start building things.