Executive Summary
Why does the advice to “think outside the box” so often fail to produce breakthrough ideas? Dr. Catrinel Tromp, professor of psychology at Rider University and specialist in the cognitive science of creativity, argues that creativity doesn’t flourish despite constraints—it flourishes because of them. Her research reveals that the most dangerous barriers in organisations aren’t the real ones; they’re the “faux fixed” constraints that masquerade as immovable but are really just unchallenged assumptions.
Core insights:
- The Green Eggs and Ham Hypothesis: Dr. Seuss wrote a bestseller using just 50 words—and Catrinel’s experiments show everyday people produce more creative results when given random constraints than when given total freedom
- Fixed vs Faux Fixed: most organisational barriers treated as immovable are nothing of the sort—”that’s just how our industry works” is rarely a fact, it’s an unchallenged assumption
- The Carryover Effect: people who practise working under constraints don’t just perform better in the moment—the creative benefit persists even after constraints are removed
- The White Bear Effect: framing constraints as “don’ts” triggers avoidance and self-monitoring; framing them as “dos” provides direction and a starting point for creative search
- Constraint Fluency: the best organisations don’t wait for a crisis to practise working with constraints—they embed constraint experimentation into daily operations
- AI and Prompt Engineering: mastering AI is essentially mastering constraints—lazy prompts yield lazy outputs; skilled constraint architects unlock AI’s creative potential
- Possibility Literacy: the emerging skill every employee needs—understanding not only what possibilities can be uncovered, but how to go about uncovering them
The Green Eggs and Ham Hypothesis: Why Less Freedom Yields More Creativity
“Constraints themselves don’t magically produce creativity. Just because somebody throws a constraint at you, it doesn’t mean that it will automatically or necessarily yield a creative outcome. What happens is the mind gets used to, builds a very good cognitive habit, and becomes more comfortable searching in more specific areas.”
The story that launched Catrinel’s research career involves Dr. Seuss—the pen name of Theodore Geisel, who was challenged to write a bestselling children’s book using no more than 50 of the same words. The result was Green Eggs and Ham, one of the most commercially successful children’s books ever written.
But sceptics dismissed the lesson. “Yes, of course he was able to do this,” they argued. “He’s already a very gifted writer with an agent and a publisher.” The constraint story seemed to apply only to exceptional people.
Catrinel set out to test whether constraints benefit ordinary creativity too. She asked participants to write messages—birthday cards, thank-you notes—either freely or under the constraint of having to include a randomly selected word. Carrot. Vest. Sheep. Words with nothing to do with the message being conceived.
The results were clear: constrained responses were more creative than unconstrained ones.
“When I say ‘happy birthday,’ what comes to mind are candles and confetti and birthday cakes. These are clichés. When you’re forced to think in a more semantically distant way and bring in concepts that don’t usually go together, that makes the task more challenging—but also the outcome more creative.”
This connects to what previous Arkaro podcast guest Dr. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle explored in her research on creativity. When she challenged participants to think of uses for a brick, initial responses were predictable—breaking windows, building walls. But add a constraint (“imagine you’re in an artistic environment”) and ideas flooded through: painting it, using it as a surface, creating sculptures.
The burst of creativity from an apparently random constraint feels counterintuitive. But the cognitive science explains it.
The Cognitive Science: What Happens in Your Brain Under Constraints
“I want to point out that constraints themselves don’t magically produce creativity. What happens is, especially the more you practise with constraints, the mind builds a very good cognitive habit and becomes more comfortable searching in more specific areas, sometimes by incorporating concepts that aren’t typically put together.”
The brain operates through associative networks—concepts linked to related concepts. When you think “birthday,” your neural pathways light up with close associations: cake, candles, presents, party. These are the clichés.
Constraints force the brain to make longer jumps across the associative network. When you must connect “birthday” with “sheep,” you’re forced to traverse semantic distance—to find unexpected bridges between concepts that don’t normally sit together.
“It’s like fusion cuisine,” Catrinel explains. “Two cultures that you think are really different—it’s more challenging to find commonalities and bring them together. But once you do, you really hit the jackpot.”
The most creative people, Catrinel observes, are adept at self-imposing constraints even when facing a blank canvas. “The mind knows how to search better and how to self-constrain in order to create more unexpected outcomes and uncover possibilities that maybe others wouldn’t think about.”
This has profound implications for creative practice. The problem isn’t too many constraints—it’s too few.
Fixed vs Faux Fixed: The Constraints That Aren't Really There
“It’s a mistake to assume that all constraints are immovable. Very few of them are set in stone. The laws of physics, yes. But most constraints? They’re flexible—and the really flexible ones that masquerade as fixed are what I call faux fixed constraints.”
Catrinel introduces what she calls the IConIC model for classifying constraints. The critical distinction: fixed constraints (genuinely immovable boundaries like physical laws or certain regulations) versus faux fixed constraints (barriers that feel permanent but are actually just unchallenged assumptions).
The danger lies in the faux fixed category. “This is the way we’ve been doing things for a long time. There are assumptions embedded in there that make it appear as if there is no other way.”
Consider the assumption that to buy a book, you must visit a physical location. For centuries, this seemed fixed—until someone questioned it and online retail was born. Or the assumption that only white pearls had value, with black pearls dismissed as defects—until clever framing and marketing transformed them into premium products.
“The best organisations are adept at distinguishing between constraints that are really immovable and those that are flexible,” Catrinel observes. “For the fixed constraints that are set in stone, accept them early rather than bemoan them and waste energy. For the flexible constraints, try to see what you can do. Can you tweak them? Change them? Might there be an alternative way of framing them?”
This connects directly to what Scott D. Anthony explored in his Arkaro podcast on Epic Disruptions. The story of Bethlehem Steel illustrates what happens when organisations treat faux fixed constraints as immovable. Bethlehem Steel could see Nucor’s mini mills coming—there was no secret. But the three ghosts Scott identifies (past traumas, present patterns, future fears) prevented action. The company felt bound by perceived constraints about location, technology, and identity that were actually changeable.
The result: extinction for Bethlehem Steel, while Nucor thrived.
The Playground Paradox: Why Fences Create Freedom
“Even when you start by somebody giving you external constraints, the most creative people are really adept at even self-imposing constraints, even when they’re faced with a blank canvas.”
Stephen Wunker shared a powerful research finding in his Arkaro podcast on AI and the Octopus Organization. If you put children on an open playground, they cluster around the central equipment—the swings, the slides. But build a fence around the playground, and children explore to the edges.
“There’s always an implicit fence in people’s minds,” Stephen observed. “But if people don’t know where the fence is, they tend to stick to the centre.”
Catrinel’s research explains why. The implicit constraint creates anxiety. Without knowing the boundary, people self-limit far more conservatively than necessary. Make the constraint explicit—even if it’s further out than people imagined—and creativity expands to fill the available space.
“Usually in organisations, that fence is actually further out than a lot of staff think it is,” Stephen noted. “By setting clear boundaries around the use of AI, around strategies, around degrees of organisational change, you actually enable a tremendous amount of freedom.”
The lesson for leaders: ambiguity about constraints is worse than explicit constraints. When people don’t know where the boundaries are, they invent imaginary ones far tighter than reality requires.
Agriculture Innovation: How Water Scarcity Produces Premium Tomatoes
“Under fixed constraints, it’s possible with the right mindset to turn them into opportunities. Instead of asking ‘what does this prevent us from doing,’ ask ‘what new possibilities does this suggest?'”
Catrinel offers a compelling example from agriculture—an industry where constraints are often treated as purely negative.
Water scarcity is a fixed constraint in many regions. Traditional thinking treats it as a barrier to production. But the constraint sparked innovation in multiple directions.
First, drip irrigation emerged where traditional irrigation failed—a more precise method of delivering water to plants that has since become standard practice worldwide.
Second, and more surprisingly, water-stressed tomato plants produce a different product entirely. “Their roots go down deeper, and they extract a smaller fruit—but one much more intensely flavoured. Under those constraints, maybe you have fewer or smaller tomatoes in terms of weight, but a more premium product.”
The metrics shift. Instead of optimising for yield and volume, farmers optimise for quality and price. “You can think of different marketing. You might have, in a sense, a very different product.”
This reframing—from “what are we prevented from doing” to “what new possibilities does this suggest”—transforms constraints from obstacles into creative springboards.
Hidden Constraints: Fear, Politics, and Psychological Safety
“These are excellent examples of very common faux fixed constraints that are often overlooked. They’re based on fear, politics, inherited rules—and they create invisible fences that prevent people from engaging with creativity in the first place.”
Beyond the obvious operational constraints lie hidden ones: the assumption that innovation must go through R&D, that ideas require seventeen layers of approval, that you can’t possibly partner with competitors.
“In order for businesses to innovate—and in today’s environment, it’s not even an option anymore, it’s a necessity—some businesses might think this involves risk and discomfort,” Catrinel observes. “I would say complacency is even riskier.”
The psychological safety dimension is crucial. Hilary Scarlett’s work on the SPACES model, explored in a previous Arkaro podcast, shows that creativity requires conditions where people feel safe to surface difficult truths. Without that safety, concerns go underground—discussed in corridors rather than meetings.
Catrinel’s prescription: make possibility exploration legitimate. “Anything that encourages and makes what I would call possibility exploration legitimate in an organisation is very much worth doing.”
This connects to work she’s doing with Vlad Glaveanu (also an Arkaro podcast guest) on what they call “possibility literacy”—the skill of understanding not only what possibilities exist, but how to go about uncovering them.
The Carryover Effect: Why Constraint Skills Persist
“Not only were people more creative under a constrained condition, but that effect lasted even after the constraints were removed.”
This finding from Catrinel’s experiments has profound implications for training and development. The creative benefit of working under constraints isn’t temporary—it persists.
“People who have been exposed to constraints and have leveraged those constraints successfully tend to gain more confidence and learn some tricks. They then even self-impose constraints under conditions of complete freedom.”
Writers who create detailed environmental constraints before beginning. Photographers who return to film cameras despite digital capabilities. Design thinkers who start with customer constraints before exploring possibilities.
“In business, companies who explore what customers want and then have that as a starting point for innovation”—using the constraint of customer need as a creative launch point rather than treating it as a limitation.
The practical implication: organisations should practise constraint-based creativity proactively, not just reactively. “The more you build that creative muscle under constraints, the easier it becomes to respond to externally imposed constraints when they arrive.”
The White Bear Effect: Why "Don'ts" Undermine Creativity
“There’s a well-known white bear effect. The more you tell somebody ‘don’t think of a white bear,’ the more difficult it is to suppress that thought and the more your mind is focused on monitoring to make sure you’re avoiding it.”
Catrinel distinguishes between two types of constraints: “don’ts” (exclusionary) and “dos” (directional).
Don’ts trigger avoidance and self-monitoring. The brain focuses on what not to do, scattering attention and consuming cognitive resources on suppression.
Dos provide direction and a starting point. “Include this word in your message” focuses the mind and initiates creative search.
“They’re less creativity-friendly and more cognitively toxic,” Catrinel says of don’t constraints. The negativity bias that evolution gave us—hypervigilance to threats—makes don’t framing especially problematic.
The implication for leaders: frame constraints as dos rather than don’ts wherever possible. Instead of “don’t exceed the budget,” try “find a solution within £X.” Instead of “don’t use traditional channels,” try “explore digital-first approaches.”
The cognitive effect is measurably different.
AI and Prompt Engineering: Constraint Mastery for the Age of AI
“This is where I would argue that even prompt design, prompting engineering, is essentially now a mastery of constraints.”
The conversation turns to the elephant in the room. AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT have made creative generation dramatically easier. Anyone can produce an email, an image, a piece of code with a simple prompt.
But Catrinel sees this as constraint territory.
“You can’t just tell Claude or ChatGPT ‘give me an email’ because they will give you an email—but it doesn’t reflect exactly what you had in mind. It doesn’t capture the parameters, the tone, the specific humour.”
The skill isn’t generating content. The skill is constraining the generation appropriately. “Both the exclusive sort—do not do this, do not include these words—and also direction: focus on this, use a particular way of framing.”
This connects to what Marco Ryan explored in his Arkaro podcast on AI leadership: the distinction between “lazy AI” (poor prompts yielding mediocre outputs) and “augmented AI” (skilled human-AI collaboration producing superior results).
Vlad Glaveanu‘s concept of “slow AI”—using AI to generate better questions rather than quick answers—is constraint thinking applied to AI interaction. The constraint of “don’t give me the answer, help me think about the question” transforms the human-AI dynamic.
“Without the human input—and I would say, for constraints—it’s not that useful nor that creative,” Catrinel concludes.
Possibility Literacy: A Skill for Every Employee
“With my colleague Vlad Glaveanu, we’re talking about possibility literacy—a really great concept where people have to become aware not only of the possibilities that can be uncovered, but how to go about it.”
Possibility literacy is the skill Catrinel believes every employee at every organisation should develop.
It includes:
- Awareness of what possibilities exist (and might exist)
- Understanding of how to uncover possibilities systematically
- Ability to leverage constraints in the discovery process
- Comfort with the discomfort that creative exploration requires
“At this point in time when we have AI, we need to leverage constraints in the process,” Catrinel emphasises. The organisations that thrive will be those where possibility literacy is widespread—where constraint fluency isn’t limited to the innovation team but embedded throughout operations.
The paradox Catrinel has spent her career exploring resolves itself: by mastering constraints, we unlock possibility. By accepting boundaries, we expand what we can achieve within them.
Why This Matters Now
The conventional wisdom tells leaders to remove constraints, to give teams freedom, to encourage blue-sky thinking. Catrinel’s research suggests this advice is not just incomplete—it may be counterproductive.
The implications extend across domains:
For innovation leaders: Stop treating constraints as barriers to remove. Start treating them as creative assets to leverage. Embed constraint experimentation into your ideation processes.
For change management: The faux fixed constraints in your organisation—the “that’s how we’ve always done it” assumptions—are likely more limiting than the genuine fixed constraints. Systematic constraint classification reveals where flexibility actually exists.
For AI strategy: Prompt engineering is constraint architecture. The organisations that get most value from AI will be those whose people are skilled at constraining AI appropriately—not those who simply adopt the tools.
For leadership development: Constraint fluency can be trained. The carryover effect means that investment in constraint-based creative practice pays dividends beyond the immediate exercise.
As Catrinel puts it: “Instead of asking what does this prevent us from doing, ask: what new possibilities does this suggest?”
The organisations that ask that question systematically—that build constraint fluency as a core capability—will be the ones that thrive as complexity accelerates.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Watch the complete discussion with Dr. Catrinel Tromp on YouTube or listen via your preferred podcast platform.
Audio Podcast with your favourite podcast provider: https://arkaroinsights.buzzsprout.com
About the Speakers
Dr. Catrinel Tromp is a professor of psychology at Rider University, specialising in the cognitive science of creativity and innovation. After earning her PhD from Princeton, she worked in a Manhattan hedge fund and co-owned a recruiting firm. Her research has been featured by the BBC, the New York Times and leading scientific journals. She is also an abstract oil painter.
Find Catrinel’s research: Search “Catrinel Tromp” on Google Scholar
Mark Blackwell is the founder of Arkaro, a B2B consultancy specialising in change management, innovation, and commercial excellence for the agriculture, food, and chemicals industries. Arkaro’s collaborative “do it with you” approach works closely with clients to leave behind sustainable, value-generating solutions.
Website: https://www.arkaro.com
Is Your Organisation Leveraging Constraints—Or Fighting Them?
The shift from viewing constraints as barriers to viewing them as creative assets requires both mindset change and practical capability building. Most organisations have more faux fixed constraints than they realise—assumptions masquerading as immovable limits.
At Arkaro, we help organisations:
Identify and classify constraints (fixed vs faux fixed)
Build constraint fluency across teams
Design innovation processes that leverage rather than fight limitations
Create psychological safety for creative exploration
Our collaborative “do it with you” approach ensures your organisation develops lasting capabilities rather than dependency on external consultants.
“We don’t just coach—we get on the pitch with you.”
Related Reading from Arkaro
Creativity & Constraints
- The 5 Disqualifiers of Strategy – The Emergent Approach to Strategy takes constraints as key to allow for emergence starting with its rules based apporach
- Why Smart Companies Miss Disruption: The 3 Ghosts – Scott Anthony on Bethlehem Steel: the organisational ghosts that prevented action were faux fixed constraints masquerading as immovable reality
- AI & the Octopus Organization – Stephen Wunker’s Playground Paradox research: why explicit fences enable greater creative freedom
Innovation & Ideation
- B2B Innovation Strategy: Avoiding the Quick Win Trap – Why ideation without strategic constraints produces poor results—supports Catrinel’s argument that constraints focus creative search
- Jobs to Be Done: The Missing Link in B2B Innovation – Customer needs as enabling constraints for innovation
- AI and Jobs to Be Done: Where Human Judgement Wins – Scott Burleson on the divergent phase of innovation research and how constraints focus ideation
Psychological Safety & Creative Culture
- The Neuroscience of Collaboration: The SPACES Model – Hilary Scarlett on creating the psychological safety that enables creative exploration
- From Technical Fixes to Adaptive Solutions – Building innovation culture requires psychological safety for teams to experiment—the hidden constraints that prevent creativity
- 10 Signs Your Organisation Needs VUCA Adaptation – When real conversations happen in corridors, not meetings—the faux fixed constraints of organisational culture
AI & Constraint Mastery
- Rewire or Retire: Why AI Is a Leadership Issue – Marco Ryan on “lazy AI” vs skilled prompting—constraint architecture as the key AI skill
- Why 95% of AI Implementations Fail – Strategic clarity (constraints) must precede technological sophistication
External Resources
Dr. Catrinel Tromp’s Research: Search “Catrinel Tromp” on Google Scholar
Rider University Psychology Department: https://www.rider.edu/
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