…without a purpose. Some people will say that it is hard or even impossible to be creative when they are restrained within a context or set of rules. We talk a lot about ‘thinking outside the box’, and over the years, it’s become a fashionable term.
But do we really understand what it entails? The process to ‘think outside the box’ starts with a person forgetting all the information, knowledge and experiences they have acquired since they were born. Easy? I don’t think its worth even trying.
Therefore, thinking outside the box is just an illusion. We will never be able to achieve it as the thought of trying to think outside the box already defies the whole idea of the true ‘outside the box thinking’.
What’s achievable is to ‘think inside the box’ and to build on what is already there. To be creative inside the box means to generate fresh thinking within a set of rules and context in order to build things from the inside out. It means creating new ideas by connecting unrelated but existing planes of thought. This is what creativity is.
Being creative without a purpose and without a box is to create things that have no relevance.
The first rule for thinking creatively is to define the master objective to achieve through the creative process, and this is the first step towards ‘thinking inside the box’.
That’s the idea – to create something which doesn’t exist and which isn’t relevant to the real world, not even applicable, until it is made to be so – think of business strategies here (you create a framework to sustain your invention and make it used by many because it’s “cool” and hopefully in time, users will find it useful.”
Thinking outside the box + business strategy work well together.
Thinking inside the box does not mean new ideas cannot be created. I am not talking about the things that can be generated through the thinking process, but I am talking about the thinking process itself.
The term ‘thinking outside the box’ is just an illusion because the way our mind is constructed and makes sense of the world around us means it can only generate thought when it thinks within a context. The mind cannot think from scratch. The basic idea of thinking in french, creole or english means we are already isolating the thinking process within a context, where we will inevitably be limited to the boundaries of that context. Communication/language is the base of all contexts.
Its impossible to generate an idea without having preliminary information and knowledge. A creative idea is the connection of 2 planes of thought that were previously not connected and had not relation.
1 existing idea + 1 existing idea = 1 new idea.
When connecting them together, it is very important to know if the customers will be able to connect these 2 ideas in their mind and realize the product/service has a use value. This is where the inexistent relevance starts to exist. Relevance does not fall from the sky but it is established by assigning logic to things that previously did not have a rationale.
The reason why there are great inventions that flop and simple inventions that succeed, or vice versa, is because inventors fail to understand that customers need to be able to make the connections in their mind in order to see the logic in a new product/service.
Business strategies (most of them) are based on frameworks that have one 1 thing in common – connections – exploring connections, establishing connections, sustaining connections and improving connections. To be able to establish connections, the planes of thought should already exist.
ya ya nice nice
like i always say,
life is like boxing
everybody’s got a plan…
… until they get pUnChEd in that face
OW!!
right, brother!?