The beauty of constraints

This week we are going to take a deep dive into constraints: one of the most powerful tools that you have as a leader to help your team deliver more with less.

Now, this isn’t the first time that we’ve written about constraints, so if you’re interested in some history:

We looked at Parkinson’s Law back in 2024, which is the classic anti-pattern that occurs when people are given too much time (or no deadline at all) when asked to do something. The result is that work — like gas — expands to fill the time available, and yes, we’ve all been there with our school assignments.

We covered the iron triangle of project management in 2017, which is the classic model of the three constraints that projects typically have: scope, resources, and time. The idea is that you can only ever optimize two of the three.

We more recently explored how scope could be reframed as thoroughness in 2024, since scope alone rarely tells the whole story about what is being delivered.

But this time we’re talking about constraints as tools. Tools that you wield and can use.

Discovering places where you can add constraints to your projects is a superpower: it unlocks unconventional thinking, forces people to prioritize