The End of the Box

Commentary

In the 1970s, “thinking outside the box” became a popular new management approach.

It started with what was called the nine-dot problem. There were three rows of three dots, and the question was how you could cover all nine dots in four lines without raising your pen or pencil.

It turned out that you could only cover all nine dots if you drew one of the lines diagonally through the dots and created an angle to come back in and finish.

Most people automatically created a box around the three rows of three dots and eliminated the only solution that worked. In short, our natural pattern of thought led us to invent a box even though it did not exist.

This exercise was rapidly translated by consultants, management trainers, and writers into “thinking outside the box.”

It was useful in the 1970s. But the world has changed so much—and the waves of change that are coming are so overwhelming—that simply thinking outside the box is now irrelevant. It may even be destructive.

We are on the edge of a tsunami of change. We are currently seeing the marriage of artificial intelligence, robotics, and specialized materials science. It is completely reworking manufacturing. Modular nuclear power plants will soon provide an abundance of carbon-free energy. Biological breakthroughs will allow today’s 20-year-olds to live to 115 with the energy and capacity of today’s 60-year-olds. Advancements in space travel will make Americans a spacefaring people. All these and more are coming—and fast.

It is virtually impossible to understand even one of these areas of breakthrough developments. To the best of my knowledge, no one has been able to build a synergistic synthesis of how they will interact—or the opportunities and problems they will create.

We need a new team akin to Alvin and Heidi Toffler, whose “Future Shock” and “The Third Wave” taught a generation how big the transition from industrial production to information would be—and how much it would change all our lives.

Now we face an even bigger shift in capabilities and realities. No one really understands how much this is going to change our lives, our economy, our national security, and the way in which we relate to each other.

Part of what makes President Donald Trump so formidable and hard to predict is that he has none of the usual guardrails and structures that limit his thinking about solutions. He doesn’t ask what the expert opinion or accepted positions are, because he instinctively knows they are obsolete and misleading.

In writing about the end of the box, I was reminded of the advice we got from a group of major CEOs in 1995 (when we worked to balance the federal budget for four years for the only time in a century). We would bring in 15 CEOs at a time for Wednesday night dinners and ask them how they would solve a problem as big as balancing the budget.

Nearly all of them listed three rules.

First, set big goals with short deadlines.

Second, delegate like crazy to get the maximum number of people working to solve the problem.

Third—and this surprised me—kick out all the experts. They will only focus on telling you what can’t be done, and they will be wrong.

I have used another method of describing boxless thinking and endless possibilities. Look out 20 or 30 years and imagine the future that all the current developments in science and technology are going to make possible. Once you have a clear vision of a possible future, you can come back to the present and start planning how to make that future real.

If you start in the present and try to plan forward, you will inevitably be too timid and trapped in the world of the present.

It is vital to think far enough out so you can begin to imagine the synergistic effect of new technologies and scientific breakthroughs. They could change everything.

We are on the edge of a world of endless possibilities. Our limitation is the degree to which we are trapped in the world of the present, which blocks us from imagining the world of the future.

The great American adventure in freedom will soon celebrate its 250th birthday. But the exciting, dynamic years are ahead of us.

We can achieve a Golden Age of American prosperity, safety, and freedom. It will come from imagining a boxless future of endless potential—and then turning the imagination into reality.

From Gingrich360

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.