Managing Leadership^®

The actual phrase is “thinking out of the box.” Unfortunately, it has lost much of the impact it was intended to have, and it may have been a bit off the mark, to begin with.

The purpose was initially to serve as a caution against an over-reliance on habitual thinking. We naturally develop patterns of thought and behavior over time. These are a sort of survival technique, enabling us to deal with what life has taught us can be classified and dealt with by recourse to routine approaches. As a result, our reservoirs of intellectual energy are freed from being drained by repetitive solutions of the same problems, and are available to be alert to new developments and to devise stratagems to deal with them.

The problem is twofold. We sometimes erroneously classify the countless cues that assault us each day, and wind up well down dysfunctional paths to addressing some of them before we realize, if ever, what is happening. Second, we begin to accord undue status to the patterns we have created, evaluating data according to how they fit our theories, rather than the reverse. We need to periodically redirect our newly-liberated capacity for espying new information back onto our old solutions in order to reassess them – and our use of them.

We have to break out of the rut we lower ourselves into with use. That is the meaning of the phrase: it suggests that we have placed what become increasingly artificial boundaries around our comprehension of and responses to events.

A problem with that is that by focusing solely on the thinking process, it promotes what is likely to be equally dysfunctional – or, at least, unhelpful – alternatives. It may seem obviously useful to find ways to generate unconventional thinking in order to uncover new perspectives and approaches. But the focus here is on method, not purpose.

As always, the first thing to do before solving a problem is to be sure you’ve framed it properly. You want to be sure you have posed it in a way that meaningfully illuminates both your purpose for addressing it, and all relevant elements in the environment that will influence your ability to do so.

Once you’ve done that, your thinking process becomes rather obvious, as you work back from what you really want to do, through the terrain and situation in which you must do it, to how you will in fact get it done. The question is no longer whether your thinking is in or out of the box. It is whether it is in control – disciplined to negotiate realistically appraised assets through frankly assessed threats and opportunities to advance you toward carefully determined goals.

Don’t try to rectify patterns of thought which no longer serve their purpose by developing new ones that are divorced from that purpose. If your structure no longer works, don’t build a new one before you have examined the foundation upon which you build it.

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Today’s tip: Speaking of thinking out of the box, please see this piece from The Economist to learn why a source quoted in it says, “I wouldn’t like to have been the first person to have suggested that.” The innovative solution referred to, though, was not the result of simple unconventional thinking, but of getting the real problem right, and working backward from that.

And speaking of improving your means of addressing problems you face as a manager, there is no better source than the current Carnival of Leadership Development, hosted by Dan McCarthy at Great Leadership – please be sure to stop by for pointers to a superior collection of writing about self-improvement for managers.

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