Thinking in new boxes : a new paradigm for business creativity

330 Pages·2013·3.47 MB·English

by  de Brabandere

ALSO BY LUC DE BRABANDERE
The Forgotten Half of Change: Achieving Greater Creativity Through
Changes in Perception

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Thinking in New Boxes is a work of nonfiction. Some corporate names and identifying details have
been changed.
Copyright © 2013 by The Boston Consulting Group
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Brabandere, Luc de.
Thinking in new boxes : a new paradigm for business creativity / Luc de Brabandere and Alan
Iny.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8129-9295-3
eBook ISBN 978-0-67964436-1
1. Creative ability in business. 2. Creative thinking. 3. New products. 4. Diffusion of
innovations. I. Iny, Alan. II. Title.
HD53.b7125 2013
658.40714—dc23 2013000538
www.atrandom.com
Design by Simon M. Sullivan
v3.1
This book is dedicated to all of our colleagues and clients, who have
enabled us to learn about creativity while teaching it, and to our wives,
Bernadette and Roberta, who have enabled that to happen.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
ONE New Boxes for a New Reality
TWO How to Create and Use Boxes
THREE Doubt Everything
FOUR Probe the Possible
FIVE Diverge
SIX Converge
SEVEN Reevaluate Relentlessly
EIGHT From Inspiration to Innovation: Building Bold New Boxes—
and Then Filling Them In
NINE Imagining the Future
TEN A New Beginning: How to Custom-Fit the Five Steps to Your
Situation
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Notes
About the Author
Preface
N A SMALL FARM amid gently rolling hills, there was once a playful
Labrador retriever named Sartre. Every day Sartre would leap over
a fence at the back of the farm to run through the woods and chase
squirrels. Eventually, the fence was dismantled, freeing poor Sartre from
the burden of having to hop over it every time he wanted to frolic, but
Sartre still jumped every time he came to the spot where the barrier had
been. He had developed a set of memories and assumptions that made it
almost impossible for him to notice the fence was no longer there.
Sartre’s behavior was in some ways similar to that of the three main
characters in No Exit, the famous play by the French existentialist
philosopher for whom he was named. Garcin, Estelle, and Inez are
prisoners in Hell (a boxlike room) who long to leave the claustrophobic
space. Yet in the play’s final moments, when the door suddenly flies
open and they are free to leave, they stay, terrified to step out into the
unknown space beyond.
The dog’s mistake may seem comical, and the plight of Jean-Paul
Sartre’s pathetic characters a bit heavy-handed, yet both of these stories
expose profound truths about human nature.
Every day, all of us create countless mental models—or what we will
refer to here as “boxes”—in order to make sense of the world. Many of
these boxes will help you for a while—as Sartre the dog’s fence-jumping
tactic did for years. But they can also hold you back and make it hard for
you to notice important changes around you. Our brains pull us toward
the familiar, so we cling to old boxes that may no longer be relevant.
Most of us are averse to risk, and try to confirm existing opinions and
deny how rapidly and radically things are changing.
In today’s ever more turbulent world, such failures of perception can
be costly. Relying on your existing boxes to simplify the infinite
unknown is useful, indeed unavoidable, but relying too heavily, or for
too long, on any mental model can lead you to miss exciting
opportunities. It can prevent you from seeing critical “breaks in the
fence” or from achieving success in the abyss of the unknown (which, in
essence, is the fate of the characters in Sartre’s No Exit).
As business strategy consultants with decades of collective experience
working with major organizations worldwide, addressing high-stakes
challenges that can affect thousands of employees and millions of
customers, we have seen that the key distinction between winners and
losers, leaders and followers, those who soar in the face of change and
those who are defeated by it, comes down to the form of strategic
creativity that we refer to as “thinking in new boxes.” This process
marries pragmatic analysis with the free-flowing generation of ideas.
When you think in new boxes, you continuously develop and test
hypotheses—including new ways to embrace complexity, navigate
uncertainty, and prepare for the disruptions that inevitably await you.
Perhaps you are an entrepreneur introducing a new idea or an
architect imagining a dazzling edifice. Or maybe you’re an engineer
trying to conceptualize a new software program, a politician seeking
revolutionary social change, or a manager leading your organization
through one of the most perilous economies in modern times. No matter
what challenge you face, the creativity process we describe in this book
can change how you interpret everything happening around you and
how you solve problems. It can improve how you lead your team despite
not knowing what lies around the next corner (after all, no one does).
You will rediscover the full power of thinking, in all its many
dimensions, via our pragmatic system for achieving productive, free-
flowing, perspective-expanding, life-enhancing, practical, and
sustainable creativity.
Read on, and our system will help you imagine, shape, and then
release into the world new designs, strategies, and visions that could
help you and your colleagues create the next Post-it note or the next
iPad—or at least help you think of business creativity in a completely
new way. It will spur you to dream up multiple future scenarios in which
you could be doing business, and thus better prepare for whatever the
future holds. And it will even guide you toward a more open way of
thinking about your life and show you how to ask the right questions, to
better enable you to reach all your goals, both personal and professional.
You will learn to think differently, and more effectively—and this will
change the way you do business, and the way you live your life. And it
will be fun. We promise.