Anyone who’s ever worked on anything involving other people will have experienced the demon named Changing Requirements. If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll be on first name terms. Maybe your kids play together on the weekends.

At some point in the distant past, I started wondering if the whole business wasn’t just too easy. Your wife sees a wonderful new cupholder design. You don’t even have a cupholder in your project. HyperGlobalMegaCorp has buckets of cash to throw at this, and it’s your job to disrupt the market, right? So in the end, you add your cupholder, and maybe a toaster and a kettle by the time you’re done, and HyperGlobalMegaCorp foots the bill. There’s no risk to you in throwing all that stuff in there. There’s no pain.

So, inspired by Merlin Mann and Mike Monteiro’s meeting tokens, I came up with a slightly more personal approach to change management. It’s all about constraints.

At this point I should also acknowledge the inspiration of my morning walk past a shop that seems to specialise in machetes. And I think there’s something from a dream about tally sticks in there, too.

You want a change, you pony up.