Thinking Outside the Box is a Big Hoax

For as long as I can remember, we have been persuaded to think outside the box, to innovate, be creative and even dismantle the box, build a new one and destroy it once more only to build another one just like the one that was there before. Complete waste of time!

The problem I have with some of these popular taglines is that they are so easy to throw around and with the global acceptance they earn, it becomes sweet to the ears in no time. The moment a speaker throws in that magic line: “we must start thinking outside the box”… people begin to take them seriously, only to be disappointed because it usually ends up being nothing but hot air.

Why should one dream of thinking outside the box before they even begin to scratch the surface of the task at hand? Unless you are an antelope or a wildebeest, you cannot run before you learn how to crawl. Then walk. Baby steps. That is the linear pattern of life for humans, anything to the contrary is a fuss, big joke.

Now, if I continue with this tone, I may end up bombarding you with my biased personal views and risk losing objectivity in the process. We don’t want that to happen, so I will give you a classic example to justify and open the flood gates to my arguments.

Actually, I will talk about one product known to all of you. The iPhone. In the year 2010, more than three years since the Apple iPhone was first introduced to the market, the gadget was voted as one of the 10 greatest inventions ever. This was according to a poll of 4,000 consumers in the United Kingdom. That was 2010.

In that same survey, your guess is as good as mine as to which single invention was considered number one. Yes, the wheel! Coming to think of it, have you ever imagined the world without the wheel? This evening as you drive home, take some time to think about this. So, the next time you are warned against reinventing the wheel, do not disregard such sagacious words, it may be given freely but the damages that may come with disobedience can never be reclaimed.

This year at the famous CES 2019, billed as the Global Stage for Innovation, many were awed by cutting-edge technological gadgets but what was clear was that big as it was, nothing came close to the iPhone. Almost a decade later - with all the ‘thinking outside the box’ - no single innovation could smash the iPhone box!

What that tells us is that we may be getting way ahead of ourselves with this creativity and innovation talk. May be, just may be 2019 is the year when we should slow down on this and go back to the basics. Back to the good old box. And think inside the box, achieve the basics and only then can we consider what is outside the box.

The most popular excuse people give for this ‘thinking outside the box’ is that people become more productive when given the space and freedom to do what they want. That professionals should not be limited in narrow spaces nor be constrained to work within certain boundaries. Nothing could be further from the truth.

You realise that the very nature of our work is that it is limited by a number of things that no matter how much you want to think outside the box, you will still find yourself back to the box when the time comes to harvest your seeds (read performance appraisals.)

I want to believe this is the reason many find it hard to accept their scores after an assessment. Usually the individual scores poorly not because s(he) did not work but mostly because s(he) spent too much time doing the interesting and creative things outside the box and spent little or absolutely no time on what is inside the box - otherwise known as targets. 

At this point, it will be important to refer you to the annual or periodic targets setting. In all the companies I have worked for, each employee is given a standard template to fill in. the format to begin with is a box - literally. In which one is expected to fill in targets, activities and in some cases may also include timelines and budgets.

Now, unless your role is at the top of the business – in the case of public servants, that will have to be the President and not even the Cabinet Secretaries – you do not have a long leash when developing your targets. You are limited to what your boss has signed with his or her boss. Feel free to think outside that box at your own risk.

Coming to think of it, perhaps the most difficult conversations I have with my team members is during the performance appraisals. While one expects to score 99% because of the ‘effort’ put in during the year - to which I was a witness - the final score at the end of the assessment mostly comes to an average 55%.

Some of those conversation always degenerate to being personal and the days that follow are not always the best. Other than causing an individual to gossip with colleagues about how ‘nimemuonea’ the process tends to cause some friction in the team that may last for weeks.

This happens because when appraisals are conducted objectively, the supervisor’s only guide is the ‘box’ and what was put inside it over the period under review. It is more like a bank account, if you deposited nothing, you cannot expect to withdraw anything… this insanity reaches fever pitch when one sits pretty expecting to earn interest on an account reading zero.

The other frustrations one is likely to grapple with is the money box. However creative and innovative one may try to get, this can only happen within the available and approved budget. When there is no money for an activity, it simply will not be done unless you misappropriate funds. Then you will have to do a lot of explaining both to your boss and business owners – a process that may not only be injurious to your morale but may also cost you your job.

And then, there is the aspect of time – when things are to be done and by who. Most of it is already predetermined in the performance targets, so no matter how long you take to think about it, things will not change. In the end, long after your chickens have come home to roost, you will begin to realize that life could have been much easier if you restrained yourself within the limits of the box and do all that appertains to box - without unnecessary gymnastics outside this playing field. By this time however, it probably would be too late!

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