On a creative path such as innovation, setting your box on fire cuts off your ability to pull back when things get scary. When Collins countered, “I thought options always have positive value,” Grousbeck cautioned, “No. When it gets really scary, you’re going to pull back. Otherwise, you’re going to hold something in reserve. ![]() You’re doing a low odds game, which means you have to put all in, 100 percent, full cannonball, go off that cliff. Grousbeck replied: “If you have the option to come back, it will change your behavior. He went to Irv Grousbeck, one of his mentors at the University, and asked him, “Do you think I should keep enough capital alive here at Stanford that if this doesn’t work out, I could come back?” Jim Collins, the renowned business researcher and author or coauthor of such iconic, bestselling books as Good to Great, recently recounted such a story on “ The Tim Ferriss Show.”Ĭollins was considering leaving his job at Stanford to go off on his own to research and write a new book. One sure-fire way to set your box on fire is to get rid of your backup plans. (Not to mention that you’ve also now destroyed the box.) The human survival instinct is extraordinarily powerful, and the “fight-or-flight” response will lead you out of the box. That way, you’re forced to make a choice: Get burned, or get out. And while that may sound all well and good, the question is, how do you get beyond the box, especially when it’s been reinforced, if not baked in, over time? The kind of creative thinking that leads to serious innovation requires approaching challenges without any boxes. That’s precisely the mindset you’ll need to solve difficult problems. ![]() (After all, he effectively hated your last idea.) Instead of letting his previous feedback stop you, recognize the artificial boundary condition that you’ve placed on yourself -and choose instead to go for it. So let’s say that you’ve got this crazy new idea, but you’re convinced that your boss won’t go for it. If left to your own devices, you almost certainly would have made a different choice-and happily colored all over the page. Chances are, one of the first things you were taught as a kid was to color inside the lines. And when you think about it, it started at an early age. You’ve also learned that there are risks, and often repercussions, for trying something totally new and different. ![]() You’ve been taught what is-and isn’t-possible. Whether you realize it or not, there are boxes all around you. Recognize boundary conditions are a choice To develop the best ideas, make a critical new assumption: There is no box. The car is an unintended box: The fastest way to get to Miami is to drive to the airport and get on a plane. And still others develop a plan to rotate drivers so they can limit stops and drive all night.Īll may be good ideas, but the starting point-the fact that they’re in a car-limits them by creating an assumption. Others take it a step further, weighing factors such as traffic, time of day and rest stops. What’s the fastest way to get there? Most people simply try to map out the most efficient route. While seemingly harmless, such an assumption is a dangerous boundary condition, creating a reference point that limits possibilities that you might otherwise take into account.Ĭonsider, for example, that three people are in a car going from New York City to Miami. The trouble with approaching any challenge with the mindset of “thinking outside the box” is the belief that there’s even a box to begin with. But that wasn’t the case they just assumed it to be so. For instance, in his study using the nine-dot puzzle, participants assumed that the dots on the paper represented a box within which they had to try and solve the problem. One of the observations from Guilford’s research is that people apply boundary conditions to their thinking that, while appearing quite real, don’t actually exist. ![]() Why? Because it creates an unintended, self-limiting mind trap that prevents people from seeing what might really be possible. Throughout the 1970s and well into the 1980s, the nine-dot puzzle (you can find a brief history here) and the phrase “think outside the box” became widely used metaphors, spreading, as Boyd says, “like wildfire” in business, psychology, the creative arts and countless other circles.Įven today, all these decades later, the metaphor is still considered a logical starting point for individuals and teams looking for new ideas.
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