Green Shift: Why Innovators Love Constraints

I love this idea a million ways to Sunday.

Harvard Business Review blogger Gretchen Rubin writes about the possibilities born from tight spaces:

Why Innovators Love Constraints

To make choices about how we will expend the resources we do have available to us, to find cheaper, more nimble ways of doing something as a person – and as a corporation. Our perceived limitations may give us direction on where we might play, or want to play. Indeed, if we will let them, constraints can (and will) drive us to disruption.

When it comes to Sustainability, our constraints are very real.

We exist within a finite set of Planetary Boundaries. Nine of them, in fact.

Via guardian.co.uk:

Promise and problems in planetary boundaries

The Nine Planetary Boundaries, the identification of nine limits that cannot be crossed if humans are to avoid catastrophe, were developed by Johan Rockström et al in a 2011 paper in the Nature journal (and a nod to the Club of Rome’s 1972 Limits to Growth), are now being used as the basis for campaigns and policy work by NGOs such as Forum For the Future and WWF.

General Patton famously said, “Pressure makes diamonds.”

Given our constraints, what will we create?