Do you think that Bill Gates thinks there’s a box? Or Warren Buffet? Do you think that Muhammad Ali thought there was a box? What about Sir Richard Branson? How do you think Tiger Woods or Roger Federer would feel if they thought that they had to operate inside ‘the box’.
Very often, I hear business leaders – I mean ‘normal’ business leaders, not the people whose names we all know – talk about ‘thinking outside the box’. This phrase is frequently used in business, whether it relates to problem solving or innovation. Lots of business people talk about it – very few ever rise to what is in fact not much of a challenge at all. What very few of them have realised is that there is no box!
Only special people, unusually successful people – in other words, not normal people – realise this fact. That’s why we all know their names – they stand head and shoulders above the rest of us.
There is no box – other than the box we create for ourselves. From a very early age, society and education fashion a box for us – and because we’re all in the box together, it seems OK. “Get yourself a good education” (Bill Gates dropped out of university) or “Get yourself a good job” (Richard Branson left school when he was sixteen and started Student magazine).
When you do get yourself a good job, you’re taught how to be a “team player” – that really means “Don’t do anything that would upset anyone else on the team, play by the rules and, for God’s sake, don’t do anything unusual or innovative.” And, of course, organisations have a “corporate culture” – that means “this is how we do things around here – conform”.
So the box – that you’ve effortlessly slid into – is all around you, supported by the mindless behaviour of all the other clones. And when I hear people talking about “thinking outside the box”, I know for a fact, that most of them never will.
Never mind “thinking outside the box” – what about living outside it?
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Life is a sustained journey composed of a range of journeys. Some are personal and individual. Others are shared. Still others involve teams, groups, organizations, and even nations. Each journey, large or small, begins with the seeing of a destination. This seeing is commonly referred to as the vision, a future destination to be achieved. Until the vision is clear, you cannot move forward.
There is a powerful message flowing throughout society today that urges us to think positively. At first thought, that might seem like an easy thing to do.
When Edward DeBono conceived his “Six Thinking Hats,” he envisioned a framework that functions well for individuals, for teams, for groups, for communities, and for organizations. However, people, even today, have little experience with thinking. They have even less training. They can memorize. They can understand what they are told. They can disassemble what others have created. They can apply the thinking of others. They can evaluate the work of others. What they cannot do, with any kind of frequency, is think into the future. Therefore, you must prepare them.
Price, cost, value — all cut from similar cloth but ending in very different garments. The first two arise from data analysis. Value, by contrast, demands thought. Too frequently, individuals approach this thinking with great seriousness, a practice which slows the process. Replace the seriousness with play and the resulting value creation is deeper and more powerful.
Inside each of us lies a sleeping giant, the part of us that is wild and crazy. We need only to re-position the giant’s energy toward thinking, especially playful thinking, silly thinking. Many of us keep the giant hidden from view because of the unpredictability. With “new-ideas” thinking, the unpredictability is exactly what is needed. You do not want to present the tried and true. Rather, you want to open your brain to exploring alternatives and possibilities. Each new-idea represents a break with your traditional thinking. Each idea, wild and crazy as it might be, reveals a window of opportunity for the future.
When we become adults, we put away childish things. Sadly and too often, we also lose our curiosity, our ability to learn, joyously, through discovery. To recapture the feeling that comes with discovery of something previously not experienced, you must return to the time when everything was appearing in your world for the first time. Allow yourself to be the child again in your mind.
The world of innovation scares many people. Typically, these frightened people associate innovation with HUGE, risk-laden ideas that change things dramatically. To the contrary, “innovation” refers to change and to doing something new. Here, size does not matter. In fact, some very small changes create dramatic innovation.