Thinking Outside of the Box

Perhaps there is no older jargon than this when it comes to innovation.

In fact, thinking outside of the box is one of the most required challenges for managers of any organization in any segment or sector.

But if you think that in this case “it is easy to say, difficult to do”, you are wrong.

It is through the combination of thinking outside the box and the brutal effort of discipline that we can go from being mere spectators in an organization to extraordinary characters.

But after all, what does it mean to think outside of the box?

Most people would respond that it means seeing the world with different "eyes" than those that everyone else sees. That is, to see the world around you with different perspectives. But, how is it possible to think outside the box if everything you know is inside a box?!

This is “the X of the problem”. When we talk about innovation, we need to keep in mind another important jargon: "knowledge creates knowledge".

Most innovations come from information-knowledge crossed between different areas or disciplines. It comes from one of the most important words in innovation management: “interdisciplinarity”. Be careful not to confuse it with “multi-disciplinarity”.

In multi-disciplinarity, several disciplines are observed separately, while in interdisciplinarity, the relationship and interaction between several different disciplines is made. The latter is present in virtually all innovations. Take for example the study of minerals. It gave rise to new materials such as steel, glass and brass, as well as giving rise to chemistry. The interdisciplinary union between chemistry and new materials gave rise to the properties of light, vacuum and electricity, which in turn gave rise to lenses, prisms, steam engines and the entire electricity industry. The union of these gave rise to telescopes, microscopes, means of land transport, aviation and atomic physics. Finally, their interdisciplinarity gave rise to several modern technologies and sciences, such as: space research, medical sciences, the genome, medicines, electronics, telecommunications, computers and the internet.

Therefore, the only way to see what is outside of the box and apply it to what is inside the box is to practice interdisciplinarity. Take as a business example the case of General Electric (GE), a highly diversified company that operates in segments ranging from airplane turbines, through tomography devices to home appliances. In an interview given in S?o Paulo, Brazil, during a seminar, Jack Welch, a famous former president of the company, stated that one of GE's biggest challenges was to transform the company's culture into an organization without borders, that is, to make top executives of the different companies and segments in which the multinational operates communicate constantly to exchange ideas and experiences.  In addition to it, they should seek the best ideas in other companies in segments other than those in which GE operates. Thus, they adopted, for example, sales techniques used at WalMart and Toyota's inventory management. Jack Welch said that he had fired five CEOs (Chief Executive Officers) for not being in line with this culture, despite being executives with good financial performances. This is the interdisciplinarity put into practice!

However, to obtain superior performance in whatever your area of operation is not enough to just think outside the box it takes a lot of effort and work, combined with a lot of discipline. A research carried out by professors from the Universities of Florida and California in the United States and published by Fortune magazine (back in October 2006) shows that natural talent is irrelevant to obtaining high mental or physical performance. This means that you don't have to be a genius to do something high-level. As examples, the report presents the cases of Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft), Tiger Woods (world champion golfer), Warren Buffet (mega investor) and Andy Groove (considered one of the best executives in the world in the presidency of Intel), among others. What they all have in common is personal effort, their dedication and constant practice, often taken to exhaustion, that is, discipline in pursuit of their goals.

So, if you want to be have innovative mind, the next time you read a book, watch a TV show or take a course, it is best to think twice before choosing the topic. You may be incurring in lack of interdisciplinarity.

Allied to this, it is very good to rethink how you use your free time because “only practice makes perfection” (and, so much for jargons today!).