Why You Must Think Out of The Box

Running a business is a lot like having some examination questions and then coming up with a set of multiple choice answers for each question without any references. Then when the time to act comes, you are trying to select the correct decision from one of the choices for that question. So what happens when all the answers you came up with for a particular question are wrong? In that case, it does not matter how long you spend on the question, how deeply you think about it, how good your intuition for guessing the correct thing is, because as long as you are focused on picking one of the available choices for an answer, you are already wrong! This is what we do most of the time. Thinking out of the box is continually realizing that there may be a different answer to every question and persistently looking for that answer.

To illustrate what I mean with an example, my friend and I once found ourselves at a crossroads and he asked, do you think we should go left or right to get home? He favoured right, but left seemed more like it to me. Something told me to ask someone else for an extra opinion, someone more experienced in the matter as it were, you know like a local who happened to be passing by. To our surprise, her response was that we did not need to go in either direction. We just needed to wait where we were and after a short while a bus would pass by which we could hail to take us home.

The bus eventually came and took the left road at the junction. Surprisingly, what had seemed like an obvious choice between left and right turned out to be an even more nuanced decision a little ways down the road. The bus only proceeded along that route for a few metres before it took another left turn; it now seemed to head in the direction we were coming from in the first place. So even if we had been lucky to guess to take the left road at the junction, we definitely were going to missing that other left turn because it was so counter-intuitive. And this is just one of the simple ways in which an outside the box (of obvious choices) approach can sometimes save you from massive blunders not only today and right here but also tomorrow and further down the road where today’s decision impact what you will be doing then.