Excerpt from Applied Minds

From trapeze artists to thoracic surgeons, constraints affect everyone. Yet one person's constraint is someone else's liberty. People diet and try out beach-body boot camps. Governments sequester their budgets and try to find meaning in frugality. Institutions are bound by their protocols and orthodoxies. Religions prescribe and practice constraints. We even apply constraints to get refined results from a web search engine. Yet the goal of these constraints is to reconsider and re-evaluate our position in life.

Aeronautical engineer and former president of India AP.J Abdul Kalam likes to tell a story from his junior year in college. Kalam and six other students were asked to design a light attack aircraft for a semester project.

''I was responsible for [the] aerodynamic and structural design of the project. The other five [members] of my team took up the design of propulsion, control, guidance, avionics and instrumentation of the aircraft,'' Kalam recalls.

The project was due on a Monday morning, and Kalam's team hadn't made much progress until the Friday before. Kalam received a warning from his professor that he would lose his scholarship if he didn't pass. As a student from a disadvantaged family, Kalam couldn't afford to lose his scholarship.

''There was no other way out but to finish the task,'' Kalam said. This pressure was crucial to finishing the work on time and on target.

Decades later, Kalam considers this experience a lesson in systems design, systems integration, and systems management, carried out under a rubric of constraints.

''If something is at stake, the human minds get ignited and the working capacity gets enhanced manifold,'' Kalam added. His reflections parallel the words of eighteenth-century British essayist Samuel Johnson, who once remarked, ''When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.''

Deadlines and constraints don't suppress innovation; they direct it. When properly used, they may be a gateway to new possibilities.

(See interview: Decoding the mind of an engineer)