Innovative Thinking - Get "Out of the Box"

“Get out of the box!” We’ve heard it over and over again, perhaps to the point of being tired of it regardless of whether it is good advice or not. Have you ever wondered where the phrase comes from? I really don’t know but years ago I heard a story that may provide a clue. It’s all about fleas.

We all know that fleas get from one place to another by jumping. A dog walks by and the fleas jump from the ground onto the dog. Someone once asked me, “Do you know how to train fleas?” I replied, “No,” and he proceeded to tell me this story.

Take a box and put some fleas in it. Then, place a lid the box. When the fleas try to jump out, they will hit the lid. Pretty soon, they learn that they can only jump as high as the lid. Now, here’s the really interesting part. Remove the lid. The fleas will jump out – right? Wrong! The fleas will jump no higher than the height of the lid that is no longer there! In essence, they are “in the box,” have learned they can only jump so high, and so are limited by their previous experience.

Is this where the phrase “out of the box” comes from? I don’t know but I do know this. Like the fleas, if associates try to get out of the box and provide ideas for improvement and aren’t listened to, just like the fleas they will soon learn that they can only jump so high and soon retreat back into their “box.”

Do you allow your associates to provide improvement suggestions, give consideration to them, and provide constructive feedback to the associates as to why their idea will or will not work? If not, you may be restricting their creativity and losing potentially valuable improvement suggestions.

Innovation – Baby Carrots

At one time or another, most of us have eaten the tender, delicious “baby carrots.” I can remember when they were first introduced that they immediately became extremely popular and most folks felt they were getting carrots that were harvested very early before they got big and tough. Nothing could be further from the truth.

For many, many years, carrots that were crooked or in some way “unattractive” were discarded, at a significant loss in profit for the growers and sellers. Then a creative entrepreneur named Mike Yoursek came up with an idea – “Why don’t I take all these rejected carrots, trim them into a nice attractive shape, and sell them as “baby carrots.” As they say, the rest is history.

How to Innovate

First, “get out of the box” and allow those reporting to you to do so also.

You can improve the chances of finding new opportunities if you are willing to question the status quo, look at familiar processes in new ways and listen to people with a point of view different from your own.

A number of cultural characteristics can accelerate innovation. The absence of even one of these can have a negative impact on our ability to innovate:

• A willingness to learn.

• A belief that there always is a better way.

• A belief that everyone in the company, regardless of their position, can participate in innovation – innovation is part of everyone’s job.

• Avoid “not invented here” thinking – be open to learning from others.

• Be willing to ask “why.”

• Humility and intellectual honesty:

• A willingness to recognize the limits of our own knowledge and abilities.

• A genuine openness to be proven wrong. Always be on the side of “truth” even when what you thought would work didn’t work.

• Seek out new information even if it may contradict our own.

• Using evidence rather than relying on past practice, emotion, or instinct.

• Avoiding filtering information in order to fit it into a preconceived notion.

• Leaders encourage and reward objectivity and intellectual honesty.

• Effective collaboration and “challenge:”

• Courageously speaking up and offerings a point of view different from the views of others.

• Welcoming challenge and constructive feedback from others.

• Sharing ideas across the company and not just in isolated “silos.”

• Appropriate work methods:

• Being action oriented and practical.

• Building organizational networks and working to eliminate barriers to collaboration.

• Effective goals and leadership:

• Tapping into the energy and ingenuity of all associates.

• Celebrate, rather than belittle, ideas – even the bad ones.

• Establishing clear innovation goals so that innovation doesn’t fall victim to the urgent. Being consumed with the urgent eliminates innovation which in turn eliminates future possibilities.

• Identifying gaps in existing capabilities, including talent and making appropriate investments.

Questions to ask:

• When did I last change or propose to change part of my routine work?

• When did I last offer a suggestion to a peer, my supervisor, or someone in another area?

• Do I know the amount of freedom I have to change how things are done?

• If I were designing my job today from scratch, which of my current activities would I keep? Which would I stop doing?

• What outside organizations represent best practice in my area? What can I learn from them?

• If we were not already doing them, which of our activities would we not start today? Which would we do in a different way?

• How did I react the last time someone on my team suggested a change? What was the outcome?

• How do I make sure that everyone on my team knows that innovation is essential?

Innovation Quotes

"Men who have excessive faith in their theories or ideas are not only ill prepared for making discoveries; they make very poor observations. Of necessity, they observe with a preconceived idea, and when they devise and experiment, they can see, in its results, only a confirmation of their theory.”

-Claude Bernard

"The thing is it’s very dangerous to have a fixed idea. A person with a fixed idea will always find some way of convincing himself that he is right.”

-Atle Selberg,