Thinking in New Boxes summary

So if leaving one box simply means entering another, how can you ever “think outside the box”? Well, you don’t. Rather, innovation requires you to develop entirely new boxes.

If you don’t develop new boxes, you run the risk of suffering the damaging side effects of established boxes: tunnel vision.

If your “train of thought” were an actual train, would you be a passenger or the conductor? Developing an awareness of boxes and the limitations they place on our thinking is the first step to getting into the engine room and taking control.

Start with the simple understanding that sticking to the familiar will always feel right.

As we’ve seen, boxes simultaneously enable and constrain our thinking. But once you are aware that all our subjective and collective models of the world, i.e., our boxes, are necessarily incomplete, you can then examine your own boxes.

Recognizing and challenging your boxes is the key to creating new ones. Ask yourself and your colleagues about key values, objectives, hopes and fears in order to identify which boxes you’re stuck in and which beliefs and assumptions might be holding you back.

The idea that great innovations come from geniuses who find inspiration from within is romantic, but bogus. As we’ve seen, we’re unlikely to come up with any game-changing ideas if we just let our minds run on autopilot.

For this reason, we need to be diligent in gathering information to remove the blinders imposed by your old boxes.

Imagine you’re a gold digger in Yukon in the nineteenth century. You wouldn’t expect to find a nugget in your first 30 pans of sand, would you? The reality is that you’ll be standing over the water for a long time before you catch gold. The same goes for finding innovative ideas.

At this stage, your objective is to come up with a wide range of possible new boxes. It’s important not to limit your creativity by discarding ideas before they have a chance to develop. Go into this exercise with the assumption that there are no such things as bad ideas, and encourage your team to look at your problem from all possible angles, even if they might seem crazy or far-fetched.

Imagine your business as a house of cards: if you want to remodel, your mental programming limits you to only working on the upper floor for fear that the whole house will come crumbling down. This comes at the expense of radical transformation, as you are not able to touch the foundations upon which your company was built.

But it is in challenging the most fundamental aspects of your business that you find the most creative potential. Think back to Bic’s defining moment. They could have created more superficial boxes, for example, by manufacturing all kinds of pens instead of just ballpoint, or even plastic office supplies.

What’s the difference between companies that get left behind by revolutionary changes and those that profit from or even spearhead them? In short: Their ability to change boxes in real time.

Long term success in business requires you to keep your mind open to many possible futures. Beware of the ever-lurking trap of tunnel vision: all too often, we plan for one vision of the future – one that is likely based on our present understanding. In other words, we use predictive thinking to prepare for the future.