IN OR OUT?

Some days, we have the phrase ‘think out of the box’ ringing in our ears, especially those of us who work in the marketing and advertising fields. Whether we are working alone or in groups, it’s an exhortation that is supposed to motivate us and help that elusive little insight or idea appear magically out of nowhere.

Creative thinking is difficult to pin down despite wonderful books like James Webb Young’s A Technique for Producing Ideas. Everyone has come up with a great idea at some point but very few can do this consistently. And in professions that rely on any form of creative output, these few people are Gods that the mere mortals look up to admiringly and hang around in the hope that something will rub off on them. The Gods preside over meetings and reign supreme in group brainstorms, while the mortals take notes and recycle words to express allegiance to one idea or another or blasphemously hunt & kill those ideas that they can’t relate to.

The problem, we are told, is that the mortals are accustomed to boxes – those cubicles they have been assigned and remain willingly confined to, while the Gods roam free in the spaces between boxes. So are enslaving boxes the fate of the mortals and free spaces the domain of the Gods?

Perhaps, the difference between the Gods & the mortals is not what it’s made out to be. Both depend on the existence of boxes and without those boxes, both would be equally lost.

Magic and logic, after all, are the yin and the yang of creative thinking. The best creative people I have worked with have always expressed a more than healthy respect for logic and the best suits would be redundant if they were unable to appreciate & nurture magic. It turns out that the Gods are not those who pretend the boxes don’t matter, nor are they those who are afraid to venture out. The Gods see the boxes as well as the spaces in between, they are able to hold both images in their heads and create meaning.

The premise of ‘out of the box’ thinking rests on the existence of the box. If the box didn’t exist, there would be nothing outside it or even inside, for that matter. The box is the compass that shows the direction. The choice to follow it or to oppose it is ours. And sometimes the best ideas can come by choosing to do both.