Audit – Lessons from The Box
Let’s not burn The Box just yet
I’ll never forget Jack, a marketing director that once held his box above his head and yelled, “Let’s burn the box!” While Jack is memorable, many participants have shared a similar sentiment, with perhaps not as much dramatic effect.
And this makes sense.
When we take off our thinking box, we do feel more open, more free, more alive. We intuitively know that thinking in new and novel ways will be beneficial, but really getting outside of the box is not easy.
You will almost never here someone say, “You need to think more in the box,” because society does exactly that almost every day of our lives. We call it obeying the rules, being safe, following procedures, improving efficiency, following orders or even just staying alive.
If we compare the amount of time that parents, friends and society in general spend to create the boundaries of our thinking box to the amount of time given to teaching us how to think out of the box, it isn’t surprising that creative thinking is a real challenge.
Thinking in the box must have some real benefits to it, otherwise we wouldn’t be constantly taught how to do it.
Survival and success
Imagine our ancestors taking a bite of a new red berry never seen before. Suddenly their face turns white, and they start throwing up. In the next few days everyone will know, “Don’t eat those red berries!” And that limitation that society sets up helps people survive.
Our boxes today operate in a similar fashion. Look both ways before you cross the street. Don’t drink and drive. Wear your seatbelt. Get plenty of exercise. Don’t eat foods that are too fatty. All of these are common boundaries that we are told throughout our lives to keep us alive and healthy. You could argue that at the most primary level, the box is really there to keep us alive by limiting our choices to those that increase our chances of health and longevity.
I’ll never forget the leader who said, “I don’t have any problems surviving in the world. My difficulty is surviving in my job. I was interviewed by ten VPs when I was hired. All of them have been pushed out in the last few years.” Each company, team or organization has its own unwritten rules for survival. While it might not be as easy as, “don’t eat the red berries,” people who have been in an organization for a long time are often quite good at predicting new comers who will last, and those who won’t.
Our ability to adapt our thinking to meet the changes in needs from situation to situation is a big part of how our box helps us survive in a number of situations.
In addition to survival our box is also designed to help us succeed.
If we return to our ancestors who have learned not to eat the little red berries, they also shared information about how to be more successful. This might have been as simple as finding a way to preserve food or a new hunting methodology. By sharing these best practices, they found ways of being more efficient or improving their quality of life.
In both of these cases society teaches “do this,” or “don’t do this,” as a means to improve the chances for survival and success. And with centuries to improve those messages of what is necessary for success, we humans should just about have everything down to perfection.
In fact, that would be the case except for one thing. Our context is constantly changing.
If our context never changed, then thinking outside of the box wouldn’t be so important. We could set up standards, rules and ways of being that were highly optimized for our survival and success.
We don’t live in that kind of world. In our world it is not just the rules of the game that are constantly changing, the game itself is constantly changing. One of the easiest ways to lose is by playing a new game by an outdated rules set.
Just like we can’t “burn the box” as it keeps us alive and connected to the world around us, we also need to be careful not to just accept our current thinking as optimal.
The box may not be our enemy, but my current configuration of my box may not be getting me the level of success that I would like, and in drastic cases, may even be putting my survival in jeopardy (I’m looking at those of you who text and drive).
I am the Creator of my Box
One reason that we need to be reminded to think out of the box is because we are the creators of our thinking.
My box makes sense to me.
My box is perfectly designed to generate my current results.
I’ve spent my whole life refining and improving my thinking. Through a lifetime of trial and error I have had positive and negative experiences that have shaped my thinking. Consciously or unconsciously I find my winning strategies that help me understand, connect survive and succeed in my life.
Our boxes represent our own special brand of common sense. Common sense is culture and geographically based; what makes sense in the southern hemisphere might not make sense in the northern hemisphere and what makes sense if you are living in the city might not make sense of you are living in a rural area.
While I have been influenced by my context, the people around me, my culture, my heritage, I still choose the outside and inside of my box. It is my best definition of who I am and how I win in life.
I am the Curator of my box
Imagine a large museum with more artefacts than could possibly fit into the confines of the exhibition hall.
Who determines what will be shown and in what manner? Who determines the themes for different seasons? Who acquires new objects?
The Curator.
The same is true for our thinking.
We have more resources, more possible experiences, ideas or filters than we could use at any one time. We get so used to looking at life through certain filters that we forget that we have other ways of perceiving the events of our life. We have more than one vision for our future. We have different preference depending on our context.
So like a curator of a gallery or museum, we organize our thoughts. We rearrange, align or prioritize our thinking based on our context and our vision for the future.
This is why we use Post-it® notes on the inside of our boxes – things can and do move around.
This sounds like an easy job, after all, it is MY thinking that I am organizing. As the creator of my thinking, I should also be good at making adjustments to it.
There is just one challenge, my box resists change.
Remember that my thinking makes sense to me, and has helped me achieve my success in life, so why would I change it? And if I change or go outside of my normal thinking, will I still be as successful?
Because we’ve been working on our thinking all our lives, and because all the results we have had to date are the results of our thinking, and because we’re pretty comfortable with all this (it is, after all, common sense) then our thinking resists change. We don’t want to think that something else might be better than this: we don’t want to give up on this or that idea; we might not want to open new filters; we don’t want to have to learn again and we don’t want to have to listen to the opinions of someone with whom we disagree. So as we refine our thinking over time, we become even less open to change.
To make our resistance to change even firmer, we attach our identity, values, culture and sense of self to the invisible thinking box; we might start to question ourselves when the box no longer gives us the results we’re looking for and this will make us uncomfortable.
We can’t Change Other People’s Thinking for Them
While we can change our own box, we can’t change other people’s boxes for them. What many employers and employees, spouses and parents would love to do is just to stick their hand inside that box and re-write or move the Post-it® notes to give the other person the boundaries that they think are going to help to them, open filters for them that will help them see the world better and provide them with the vision of the future that’s going to drive them forward through their limitations.
If we could find a way to do that, then we would sell that process that instead of this one, because to be honest people would rather buy that!
We can influence or impact each other’s thinking, but we can’t change it. When senior leaders find we have a process to help people think out of the box, they see this as a wonderful opportunity, “Our people don’t think creatively.”; “Our people don’t think out of the box.”; “We need our company to be more innovative and creative, but they just keep coming up with these ridiculous ideas.”
One of the most insightful comments that we heard from a participant in Malaysia was, “Our boss says he wants me to think outside the box, but what he really wants is for me to think inside his box.” When we spoke about this it was clear that his boss wanted him to think in the same way that he does. The boss had no interest in the employee’s novel ideas, what he wanted was an alignment with his own thinking.
When we work with senior leaders we need to emphasize the difference between out of the box thinking and aligning the thinking of the organization; mixing these two up can be frustrating for everyone.
And while we can’t change someone else’s thinking, understanding their filters, their preferences and their tension allows us to frame our communication in such a way that we can have a greater impact. But we don’t get to choose their thinking for them.
Thinking out of the box can be risky business
The obvious risks of thinking out of the box would be to do something overly risky, like crossing a busy street in a turtle costume blind folded. Very “out of the box,” but also very risky.
There are other levels of risk associated with thinking out of the box that are less obvious than ones that put our survival at risk.
I might be seen as irrelevant.
We’ve all been in that meeting or at that group dinner. Everything is going fine, and then Bill says something out of no where that just makes no sense. Its like he wasn’t even listening to what we are talking about. After a few seconds of silence someone says something like, “Okaaay. Thanks for sharing Billy. Now as we were talking about…”
While that is a drastic example, I find that when talking to participants about why they don’t speak out with more creative ideas the number one reason is they don’t want to be ridiculed or judged negatively by an idea that goes against “common sense.”
This fear of being seen as off topic, or talking about something that is out of bounds keeps us all playing things safe.
A participant once introduced me to “the most popular game played in our company, ‘Answer the Boss!’ The rules are very simple. The boss will say something or ask a question, or even just look at you funny, and you are supposed to say what the boss wants you to say. If you think you know what the expected answer is, you speak clearly and confidently. If you are uncertain of what the boss wants to hear, then you might mumble, or just say something noncommittal and hope that the boss asks someone else. You lose the game if you say what you think and the boss disagrees with you.”
In many contexts saying something expected and acceptable is more important than saying something authentic or thoughtful. Play it safe. Keep your head down. Tow the company line. Don’t stand out. The risk for thinking out of the box is too great.
I might be seen as irreverent.
Sometimes the out of the box thought is contextually unacceptable. We may be seen as insensitive, inappropriate, or challenging authority. Offending others, even inadvertently, can be a career altering experience.
What if my idea doesn’t work?
One of the big fears of going outside of the box is the chance that people may actually support and implement it, and it fails.
In a meeting with a senior leadership team a Managing Director threw an advertisement on the table and yelled, “Who is the idiot that ran this campaign?” One month later, the person in charge had quit his job, and took half of the marketing team with them.
In stifling environments, people learn early on in their careers to execute the ideas of superiors rather than to innovate and push boundaries.
I feel threatened by ideas that are out of my box.
I so closely connect with my thinking that I may equate my box with my identity. When someone suggests something that is contrary to my thinking, I may feel threatened or a need to defend my point of view. Once I take that defensive stance, it is very difficult to open up and think beyond my set boundaries.
I forget that my whole life has been a series of adjustments to improve my thinking and may feel like I am compromising or losing a piece of myself by even discussing something that contradicts my current thinking.