What is the box?
Coming up with radical inventions requires you to step out of the box, but what does this mean? Well, the box is a metaphor for your preconceived notions. The box is the Matrix. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes and blinds you from the truth. It is said that Edison once fired a man for salting his soup before he tasted it; the reason is that this implied that the man was so blinded by the box that he forgot to check its validity. The man couldn’t know that soup needed salt if he hadn’t tasted it, but of course he assumed that he had to salt it because he had eaten so much soup that the salting was on autopilot. The box are all those things we take for granted. From the small things, such as “hamburgers are eaten with a side of french fries, not rice” to the big things, like, “the earth orbits the sun”, some of these assumptions may be true, but this isn’t really the point, the point is that the assumptions block us from thinking differently.
Why should we step out of the box?
First let’s look at why we are in the box. Our minds are designed to maintain the reality we believe exists, and generally this is very useful. What if you had to rethink how to open a door each time you walked through it? What if you had to decide if you liked your girlfriend each time you met her? What if the doctor had to convince you that the drugs you are taking actually will help each morning? It would make life extremely tedious, and the strain on our cognitive ability would be very high, so that our brains would require a lot more energy, i.e. we would need bigger brains and more to eat, which isn't good from an evolutionary perspective. Another reason we are in the box is because it is useful to maintain a sense of stability and reality. Research even shows that after people make a decision on any topic the brain will start to justify the decision so that you won’t change your mind so easily. This also goes for belief. Think about politics, when you decide that a certain party or politician is the one that should be elected it is really hard to change. This is called cognitive dissonance, and is just one of many mechanisms that help us maintain a healthy sense of continuity and reality, it makes us feel consistent. Historically this was useful because it freed up the brain to solve more important issues with its limited resources, in modern day society it's useful for that very same reason.
The problem with our sense of continuity is that it blocks our ability to think about what the world would be if it wasn’t the way it is. This is why US presidents are reelected more times than not. We strive for continuity, because we don’t understand how the world could be different. Stepping out of the box allows us to think about the world in new ways. It allows us to see things that others cannot see. First when you free your mind from the idea that transportation is either by foot or by horse can you start thinking about cars. Did you know that the wheel was never invented on the American continent before the Europeans arrived? They had circles, but no wheels, how weird is that? And no one can blame them, this is how our minds work. We see everything that exist as obvious and natural (the wheel for you and me), and everything that don’t exist, well it generally doesn’t occur to us.
Let me give you an example. I heard an anecdote that goes something like this: Once upon a time, in the olden days a man was running a factory, this factory produced a type of malleable sticky clay that was used to remove sot from the walls. You see, back in those days people warmed their houses by burning coal, and this left residue on the walls. A person would then buy some of this clay-like substance and roll it on the wall, the sot from the coal would then stick to the blob. Since the blob was white the coal would color it so you could even see when it was so dirty that you had to get a new one. One day however the sales started declining, a thorough market analysis revealed that people were using less coal to heat their houses, thus the demand for white clay-blobs fell as well. The manager of this factory started to worry, so he hired the best MBA’s in the kingdom to figure out what to do. The MBA’s effectivised the routines, lay off people, streamlined shipping and so on until they had reduced the cost of the factory to the point where it was impossible to reduce them further. The factory was however still in a crisis, because the problem of course wasn’t the cost, it was that no one needed their product. So what was he to do? In total despair he went to dinner to his sister, she was a preschool teacher, and as casual dinner conversation he explained everything and that he was probably going to lose his job and would have to shut down the entire business. His sister asked if she could look at the product and the manager fished out a piece of white clay from his pocket, his sister started molding it into shapes, and decided to bring it to her daycare the next day to show the kids. When she came back, she suggested making the clay in different colors, calling it Play-Doh and marketing it to kids. Today this business is much bigger than the wallpaper cleaning business of decades past ever was.
The moral of the story is of course that when you look outside the box of your usual surrounding you find solutions that you wouldn't otherwise find. This manager hired MBA’s, and no offence to MBA’s, they’re great, but they all think alike. If you need someone to think different, then don’t use people that think like you and each other. If you do the same, then how come you expect different results? MBA’s have a set of tools, and when you have a hammer, a surprising amount of problems looks like nails. Only when the manager (by chance in this case) got someone that thought differently to think about the problem could a radically new idea come about. To continue reading click here.
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