Photographers Don't Fight the Light

Excerpt: A backlit iris bud in the garden taught me something I keep applying to strategy: when a problem has no acceptable solution inside the framing you started with, the answer almost always lives at a different angle, not behind a more clever argument.

Category: Reflection

Tags: problem-solving, strategy, photography, brainstorming, constraints, decision-making

Unorthodox angle: Most stuck problems aren't blocked by the constraint, they're blocked by the framing the solver is standing inside. The reliable move is to physically change position before re-deciding, not to argue harder from where you already are.

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I went out at sunrise yesterday hoping to photograph this iris bud and ran straight into a problem that had no good solution from where I was standing. The flower was fine. The light was wrong.

The sun was rising directly behind it. Two paths forward, both bad:

1. Shoot with the sun at my back and get an evenly lit, technically fine, completely forgettable frame of a flower I've already photographed a hundred times.
2. Shoot directly into the sun and watch blown highlights, lens flare, and washed-out color destroy the composition I actually wanted.

Neither produced a frame I'd keep. The constraint — the position of the sun relative to the only good bud on the plant — closed off both of the paths I was naturally inclined to take.

This is the moment that interests me. Not because it's about photography, but because it's the same moment I run into in product, consulting, and strategy work on a roughly weekly basis: a problem with no acceptable solution inside the framing I started with.

What I did in the garden was climb into the flower bed. I parted some plants behind the iris, found an angle a few feet to the left and slightly lower, and from there the same direct sunlight that was ruining the shot from my original position became the thing that made it work. Light slipped through the spathe and lit the veins of the bud from inside. Background distractions blurred into deep, soft bokeh. The "problem" became the most interesting element in the frame.

The move I want to talk about isn't the artistic instinct. It's the problem-solving instinct underneath it.

The move, explicitly

There's a four-step sequence underneath what looked like a single decision in the garden. It's the same sequence I now apply consciously when a strategy problem stalls:

1. Notice that the obvious paths are all bad. Not "harder than I'd like." Bad. They produce outcomes I would not keep.
2. Refuse the lesser-of-evils choice. This is the step most people skip. The pull toward picking the least-bad obvious option is strong, and it's almost always wrong when the option doesn't actually clear the bar.
3. Treat the blocking constraint as data, not as an opponent. The light isn't in my way; it's telling me where the answer is, if I'm somewhere else.
4. Physically change position before re-deciding. Not metaphorically. Reorder the inputs, redraw the org chart, restate the user problem, sit somewhere different — change something material about the vantage point before evaluating again.

Step 4 is what climbing into the flower bed looked like. Steps 1 through 3 are what I had to do in my head before my feet would move.

Why this works (and why it's hard)

The reason this is a real problem-solving technique and not just a vibe is that it directly counters one of the most studied failure modes in problem-solving research.

In 1945, Karl Duncker published the candle problem, now a foundational experiment in cognitive psychology. Subjects were given a candle, a book of matches, and a box of thumbtacks, and asked to attach the candle to a wall so it would burn without dripping wax onto the table below. The solution requires using the box as a shelf — but only about 43% of subjects saw it in the original framing, because the box was being presented as a container for the tacks. Re-present the same objects with the tacks in a separate pile and the box empty, and solution rates jump substantially. Same materials, same goal, different framing.

Duncker called this functional fixedness: the inability to see an object's potential beyond the role it's currently playing. The candle problem is specifically a problem-solving test, and it shows that the bottleneck isn't the materials or the goal — it's the framing the solver is locked into.

The light in my garden was the box of tacks. From my original position it had one function — illumination — and that function was working against me. The constraint hadn't changed. The framing had.

Two further findings reinforce why "change position first" is a real heuristic and not just a personal habit:

• A 2019 Journal of Management review of 145 empirical studies on constraints and innovation found a U-shaped relationship between constraints and creative output: too few reduces it, too many crushes it, and the most innovative work tends to happen inside meaningful constraints. Constraints aren't friction to be removed — they're often the structural condition that makes the best solutions possible.
• Meta-analyses of insight-problem research suggest brief incubation periods — short breaks from active problem-solving — increase solution rates by roughly 10–20%, partly by allowing fixation on the original framing to decay. Stepping away is, cognitively, what climbing into the flower bed is physically.

The data points all the same direction: the most reliable way to break a stuck problem is not to push harder on the existing framing, but to deliberately change something about your position relative to it.

What this looks like in strategic brainstorming

Three quick examples. Each one walks the four-step move: original framing, the reposition, the new path.

"We can't ship this feature — we don't have engineering capacity." Original framing: the feature is the goal. Engineering is the constraint. Unsolvable inside that framing. Reposition: the goal isn't the feature; the goal is the outcome the feature was supposed to produce. Engineering capacity is data about what kind of solution you can afford. New path: a manual workflow, a partner integration, a sequencing change that delivers the outcome without the build.

"We can't acquire this segment — our pricing doesn't work for them." Original framing: this segment is the target. Pricing is the obstacle. Reposition: the segment isn't a fixed target; it's a hypothesis. Pricing not working is a strong signal it isn't yours to win. New path: the same product, repriced, almost always fits a different segment cleanly. The constraint was telling you where actual product-market fit lived.

"We can't run this campaign — we don't have brand permission to talk like that." Original framing: the campaign is right; brand permission is the blocker. Reposition: brand permission isn't a barrier to break down; it's a structural fact about who you are. The constraint is telling you the campaign is right for someone else. New path: kill the campaign, or hand it to the brand it actually belongs to. Build the right one for yours.

In each case the move isn't to fight harder against the constraint. It's to let the constraint reveal where the answer actually lives.

The takeaway

When I'm stuck on a problem now, the first question I ask isn't "how do I get this constraint out of my way?" It's "what does this constraint imply about where the right vantage point is?"

That's a smaller mental rotation than it sounds, but it changes the work. The constraint stops being adversarial. It becomes geometric — information about where the better view exists, if I'm willing to step into the flower bed to find it.

The light was never the problem. My position was.

Enter the Creatorverse.

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References: Duncker (1945) on functional fixedness and the candle problem; Acar, Tarakci & van Knippenberg (2019), HBR / Journal of Management, 145-study constraints-and-innovation review; insight-problem incubation meta-analysis literature.