How innovation is easier when you think in new boxes
This week Luc de Brabandere and Alan Iny help me understand why we can’t think outside the box, we have to create entirely new ones to innovate.
Luc de Brabandere and Alan Iny work with the Boston Consulting Group and have written Thinking in New Boxes to help people recognise the ‘mental boxes’ that commonly trap our thinking when we face uncertain problems and learn how to overcome them.
The way we have been taught and conditioned to see the world, they say, can unconsciously betray us by blocking good ideas out or feeling fear when we should feel excitement.
Mental boxes or models help us make sense of our complex reality. Our minds constantly develop models of the world to help conserve energy and make it easier for us to live. In fact, we can’t reason without these mental models – it’s how our brain works.
They argue you can’t really think outside the box. Rather, you need to create new boxes to help your mind think differently.
For example: replacing the earth is flat box with the world is a globe box meant people were no longer afraid they would fall off the earth if they sailed too far. This helped open the door to exploring new continents.
Luc and Alan suggest these strategies to help create new boxes to improve your ability to solve problems and innovate:
Don’t (always) trust your gut feeling: What feels familiar will tend to feel right. But this can be misleading if it’s based on outdated mental models.
Doubt your worldview constantly: Mental boxes simultaneously enable and constrain your thinking. Ask about key values, objectives, assumptions, and fears to help uncover what mental boxes may be constraining or overly influencing your thinking.
Arm yourself with fresh input: Gather data and use it to generate questions, not find answers to start with. It’s the questions that lead to creating new boxes that will help you develop better solutions to a problem.
Generate hypotheses: Develop a wide range of possible new boxes, no ideas should be excluded at this stage. The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of good ideas to choose from.
Develop criteria to evaluate the best options: Look for boxes that give you the biggest possible opportunity to succeed. Nintendo made playing cards before a shift in self-perception (new box) opened the door to video game production, merchandising and movies.
Plan for an uncertain future: Keep your mind open to many possible futures and regularly examine the mental boxes that could be constraining your view of reality and limiting your success.