Like many other management concepts, thinking out of the box has become a cliché. Every organization has its thinking out of the box sessions but the results of that thinking seldom meet expectations. You may think that the dot-coms were doing their thinking out of the box but if they were, they left basic principles of managing in the box. They didn’t take those principles with them. If the dot-coms had thought out of the box, the dot-com balloons would not have disappeared. Buying new and faster computers doesn’t necessarily make us better or more productive professionals. The tools and toys are only performance enhancing when we provide the thinking.
To think out of the box we must wipe our minds clean of what we’ve done in the past and think about what we’d do today with the advanced knowledge and experience we’ve gained over the years. Begin the process with a clean and blank sheet of paper and begin turning our thoughts inside out, upside down, left to right, right to left, top to bottom, and so on. We usually acquire that competence by going outside our professional disciplines, observing the real world, and then synthesizing what we observed with all the other knowledge and experience gained from other experiences.
It’s like going on a foreign assignment or doing extensive foreign travel. You face new languages, new customs, and new cultures. You quickly learn that you are not necessarily the owner of all the world’s greatest thinking and best practices. You learn that people think differently about their personal and organizational lives. They have different priorities and different cultures. Even within the United States we find different thinking patterns as we travel from east to west and north to south. Such experiences help us open up to other ways of thinking. We find similar situations in most countries.
But what does it really mean to think differently? You’ve started with that proverbial blank sheet of paper; where do you go from here? Can you make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear? The process begins by focusing on a particular problem or opportunity and not on some abstract and undefined real problem. I remember too often how many of my professors made such comments as assume friction is zero or assume resistance is infinity. That wasn’t the real world that I came from. Defining the concept of thinking differently is not really possible but we usually know it has happened when we see the results.
The xerographic copying process invented by Chester Carlson is now over sixty years old. It basically replaced carbon paper. Carlson could have spent his time trying to develop better carbon paper but he chose to think differently. There had to be a better way to make copies. After many years of research and search for funding the invention became the proprietary information of the Xerox Corporation. Xerox became the principal player in copying, lost its position, regained its position, and lost it again. Competitors arrived on the scene and found better ways of implementing the xerographic process. Digital technology arrived on the scene and is now beginning to replace some xerographic processes. Did Chester Carlson think out of the box? You decide.
This example is not about technology; it’s about integrating all the different disciplines that make up our organizational structures in order to direct their resources for some defined purpose. The technology, although important, was only the vehicle. Xerography without customers, marketing, finance, and all the supporting entities of the organization would remain a dream. Xerox introduced innovative marketing techniques. They didn’t sell the product; they leased the product and collected a fee for every copy. Written communication also changed over the centuries: from hieroglyphics in stone to pen and ink script to the printing press followed by the manual typewriter, to the electric typewriter, to the memory typewriter, to word processors, and finally to computerized word processing with all types of options. Although developing the technology required thinking out of the box, the success could not have been possible without every organizational function thinking out of the box.
Theodore Levitt in The Marketing Mode provides an excellent example of thinking differently. Levitt tells us that in the preceding year (probably 1968) one million quarter-inch drills were sold not because people wanted to buy quarter-inch drills but because they wanted quarter-inch holes. The focus went from drills to holes and opened new avenues because there are many different requirements for half-inch holes.
When Jack Welch became CEO of GE he stated his vision for GE in very simple terms: We’ll be number one or two in every market or we won’t be there. In one of the GE Crotonville workout sessions (that’s actually GE University), Welch was told that that vision was preventing GE from achieving some of its growth targets. At one time that market strategy made sense but now that strategy was boxing in GE. The GE Power Systems Group took the challenge. While they had 63 percent of a $2.7 billion market with low growth opportunities, they redefined themselves as an organization that had 10 percent of a $17 billion market but with significant growth opportunities. Welch took the idea and included it in his annual officers meeting and suggested they all prepare a one- or two-page brief to introduce some new thinking.
Most organizations need to examine their thinking protocols and their impact on organizational competitiveness. There are thousands of opportunities to think out of the box. Each only takes one dedicated person to start the ball rolling. As we go about our daily activities we need to think just how thinking out of the box, going through a metamorphosis, or just plain thinking might help us take advantage of new opportunities.
So what does the concept of thinking out of the box imply? How much thinking out of the box do organizations really want? Studies show that most managers proclaim the need for more out of the box thinking for innovation but too often their actions do not support their position. Most managers either directly or indirectly stifle the process or too often kill the messenger. But keep in mind thinking out of the box 24/7 is not required and would only create chaos; it does require risking your reputation, and those risks need to be evaluated. Of course thinking inside the box does provide a comfort zone, at least until someone decides to raise expectations or the next downsizing occurs.