How to Create More Room for Innovation

Build a bigger box

It’s become so routine to hear people admonish us to “think outside the box” that the phrase itself has come to represent in-the-box thinking. When people come together in a mandated effort to “think outside the box”, the forced responses often are born in a new box. It’s the box of “creativity on demand” by a people and institution that are individually and collectively trapped in cardboard.

The question more of us should be asking is what box we’re trying to get out of. Let’s start by examining the boxes we’re in.

There’s the age box.  Those of us who were the best and brightest are now the establishment, and those born after us do think differently. Growing up in a world flooded with technologies (many of which we invented), they respond to it differently. They perceive opportunities that wouldn’t occur to the creators of the technology they exploit. Think Facebook.

It is normal for us to manipulate and reinvent our environments.  Our parents shaped the environment we’re born into, and we immediately begin to alter it.  Beyond technology, children have invented earmuffs, popsicles, trampolines and even Braille. These are not items whose utility extends only to children – just ones that required a fresh awareness to imagine.

Class exists in our “classless society” – and it can limit you. We can’t necessarily perceive an opportunity that serves a class other than our own – and you might make terrific mistakes in assuming to understand a market that you aren’t part of.  My example? I never “got” the chia pet, but it continues to make millions in profit every holiday season.

The gender box: Women are almost half of the workforce and make 85% of the consumer choices in our country, statistics that have influenced changes in the work environment and driven product innovations.  But, as any woman can tell you, American industry is still designing for men – whether it’s the location of the headrest in the SUV or the bench adjustability in the gym equipment.  Guess which product the family will buy when she test drives two cars?

Economic success can itself become a “box” that impedes innovation. Studies show that we become more risk averse as we acquire a little something to actually lose.  Can you remember what you were willing to take a chance on before you were afraid to lose something?  Sometimes those early risks are exactly what made us successful. Breaking that box may require stepping back from our fear zone and calculating the risks in a more fresh-faced way.

Race, marital status, geography, religion and education all box us into ways of thinking and seeing the world around us.  Over time, we start “knowing” things to be true that are, in substance, only conventions.  And that impedes our ability to imagine a different reality – to innovate.  

Yet all the assumptions of modern life grew up as somebody’s great “aha”.  Whether it was Martin Luther’s proclamation nailed to a church door, sparking the Protestant movement, or Henry Ford’s assembly line, our modern conventions result from earlier “innovations”.

Even the language we speak impacts our capacity to think “outside the box”.  Recent studies indicate that multi-lingual individuals process information differently, actively engaging more of their brains than those limited to one language. Research indicates that monolingual thinkers and bilingual thinkers vary in their perceptions of color, representations of time, space, motion and emotion. Language may be critical to defining the size of your box – more language, roomier box.

Innovate Yourself
How does the smart CEO get outside the box? Here comes the really tricky part: you can’t. You simply cannot conceive what you cannot conceive.  We cannot know what we don’t know that we don’t know.

We need the perspective of others to see the opportunities around us. Viggo Mortensen, the actor immortalized as Aragorn in the film “Lord of the Rings” almost turned the role down because he had never heard of the books. Lucky for him, his son had.

So, the smart CEO surrounds him or herself with diversity.  When brainstorming, make sure the team represents a broad range of approaches.  Hire for true diversity and build your teams to exploit it.  Ethnicity, gender, generation, educational background, hobbies – everything that defines the person both limits and enriches them.  To plumb the richness, indulge in variety.  

Then, really listen. Don’t dismiss what comes from that other “box” in the room just because it’s unfamiliar to you.  The fact that it is unfamiliar is a bonus.  

Don’t be afraid to engage somebody from outside. Bring in a consulting team with no institutional preconceptions, and let them have a crack at it.  An innovative team should reflect diversity and elasticity of thought, and have experience across numerous industries and challenges.

Maybe the best way to get beyond your box is literal. Every step outside our daily routine opens new possibilities. A trip across the world can lead to fresh insights and stimulate creativity.  It can transform how we do business, as it did for Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, whose coffeehouse empire was inspired by a trip to Italy.  And it can transform us, expanding our “box” of awareness and forever broadening our potential to imagine solutions.  

We “innovate” ourselves into better thinkers and better leaders every time we learn a language, patronize a coffee shop in a new neighborhood, engage with someone outside our routines and comfort zones. So do something new today to build a bigger box. If you can’t get outside it, make it enormous, diverse, and dynamic.

View this article online at SmartCEO.