Luc de Brabandere, Alan Iny

Thinking “outside the box” is neither as desirable nor as liberating as it sounds, because the space outside the box is infinite. Faced with limitless possibilities, the human mind feels adrift and tends to fall back into the familiarity of “the box.” People cannot help using mental models, frameworks, and theories—or, as we called them, boxes—to organize their thinking. Thus, a far more powerful approach to spurring creativity is for companies to develop a new set of boxes that free the mind to think the unthinkable—and to do so proactively, before their competitors force them into an inhospitable box by outmaneuvering them.

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