About limitations and self-managing teams
The core of the article Say yes to the mess was that there is a very precarious balance between agreements and freedoms. If there are too many agreements, freedom is extinguished. If there are no restrictions, people will not know what to do with their freedom. In 2015, Reinier Kist wrote in NRC about self-managing teams and why that does not always go well. Pitfalls are that employees overstep their boundaries. The increased freedom would create more pressure, the dirty jobs are not picked up and there is always a type who thinks that he or she is the de facto leader. Then the question is whether this do-it-yourselfer with some charisma also has the capacity to take the group in tow. It almost starts to look like a Korean supervisor.
A lack of limitations is the greatest limitation to a group's creative potential.
Research with children
Time for a study, in this case a study with children. In 2006, a test was conducted at Mississippi State University into the creativity of children. A simple setup. During the long break, the children from the nursery school went outside to play. In one group, a fence had been placed around the spacious playground, the other group had a borderless playground, they were allowed to go in any direction, the local world was at their feet. And what you might intuitively expect, happened. The children who were given all the freedom stayed very close to their teacher, afraid of getting out of her sight.
The other group, with the fence, went about their work much more enterprisingly, without focusing on the teacher, they formed groups among themselves and started playing with each other. The hospitals mailing list interaction between them was much more active than with the other group. The conclusion was that children who are given certain restrictions, allow themselves much greater freedom within those restrictions and develop curiosity to play with each other, than the group that was completely free to go and stand where they wanted. The short version: safety leads to greater creativity, a small set of restrictions provides more stimulus to exploring possibilities.
Drawing: Sterre Steins Bisschop. Click on the image for an enlargement
The creativity of programmers
Programmers are one-dimensional nerds, so the popular wisdom goes. They are autistics who have to survive within the movement space of a set of perhaps a few hundred commands.
Let me help you out of this dream. Programming is one of the most creative activities in this world. And that is precisely because of all the limitations. Programming is the ultimate creation on the square millimeter. And within those strict agreements, conventions if you will, you will have to give programmers the optimal freedom. It will lead to incredibly elegant solutions for major issues. Take the hardware of a smartphone as an example; the big limit here is the size and weight of the device, and within these physical limits an incredible amount of functionality has been stored in the last decades.