New Revolutionary ideas come in new boxes, How to achieving its

New Revolutionary ideas come in new boxes, How to achieving its

So if leaving one box simply means entering another, how can you ever “think outside the box”? Well, you don’t. Rather, innovation requires you to develop entirely new boxes.

If you don’t develop new boxes, you run the risk of suffering the damaging side effects of established boxes: tunnel vision.

Tunnel vision occurs when you lose the awareness that your individual perception of the world is merely an interpretation based on a subjective sample of information. After all, it’s your perception – you can’t have anyone else’s.

What you perceive is not some objective reality, nor is it even the best guess at what an interpretation of our complex reality should look like, and believing your box is the right one constrains the realm of the thinkable.

For example, just think about how long it took people to accept the idea that, despite their subjective inference that the Earth was flat, it’s actually spherical. And in 2011, our understanding of Earth as a round globe was once again dethroned, this time by a more potato-shaped model. And that model will also need to be adapted as rotation and gravity change the landscape of the Earth.

This tunnel vision can be severely damaging for creative thinking. Just look at Bic, a company that up to the 1970s defined itself as a manufacturer of plastic ballpoint pens. But defining themselves in terms of ballpoint pens was too constricting: their only opportunities for innovation were limited to different colors and designs!

If we can overcome tunnel vision, we can create new boxes that offer a range of fresh possibilities.
Replacing the “flat Earth” box with the “globe” box meant that people believed it was impossible to fall off the Earth, thus giving them the confidence to sail all around the world and explore other continents.

And when Bic altered its self-perception from a pen producer to a plastic products producer, it was suddenly able to branch out into a wider array of products from lighters to razors and even cell phones.

So how can we break free from conventional thinking and build new boxes? The following blinks hold the answer.