Is there a negative side to thinking out of the box? It depends. Organizations that function on the leading edge and are the leaders in their particular domain have an almost built-in thinking out of the box approach but they don’t emphasize it. The very fact that they’re on the leading edge gives them an opportunity to continue on the leading edge. The word complacency does not exist in their dictionary. However, not all parts of any one organization will be on the leading edge. So the concept of thinking and rethinking from new perspectives must become a way of life.
Thomas Kuhn tells us "we shouldn’t think ‘outside the box’ . . . until the box is wholly shattered." Unfortunately such an approach may be too late for a successful recovery. Michael Lewis writes that a new corporate language has been invented to support people’s need to believe that their work is actually an endless quest for originality. Before we attribute every novelty to be thinking out of the box we might consider his statement that:
Outside the box is to our age what plastics was to the 1960s. The one thing that is certain is that anyone who uses the phrase out of the box is as deeply inside the box as a person can be.
Lewis makes a very good point. By considering everything as being out of the box thinking we trivialize the concept.