Going Outside Of The Box

If you want a few parts of your organization to stay "in the box" because parts of the organization are working well, then you don't want any "outside of the box" ideas. You can't do both. You can't play two golf-courses at the same time and you can't be both in and out of the box at the same time. Not possible.

Maybe you're looking for a few new ideas for your organization. That's OK. But don't call it out-of-the-box thinking just because you've never done it before. Out-of-the-box (OOTB) is doing what NO ONE ELSE is doing. In order for you to be able to do that, you would have to give up everything you know about how your business runs right now.

The biggest barrier to OOTB is getting your people, who have been living inside the box, to even remotely comprehend what OOTB looks like. Any great idea that would revolutionize how you do things would be met with skepticism and resistance by people inside the box. They just won't get it.

If your people think it's a good idea, then it's probably just a SAFE idea. If it's a really brilliant and creative idea, your people will resist it because most people fear change and because they're inside the box. Your people will desperately try to fit the new idea around their old perceptions. It doesn't fit because you would have to ask your people to give up everything they know about how your business works in order for them to conceive a new way of doing business. And that's risky to them.

So again, are you looking for a few new ideas that can make the organization better or are you looking for a revolutionary new way of doing business? One is ideas and one is out-of-the-box.

Attitude Adjustment: The best way to think outside of the box is to never get in the box in the first place. Because once you're there, and you've hired your people to work inside the box and you've trained your customers to buy from you inside the box and your processes are designed to work inside the box, then you will have to change the world before you can change your organization.