Thinking in New Boxes

Why do you think the way you do? This book explores that question and proposes a radical but pragmatic answer: you think in mental boxes. These boxes are the categories, assumptions, and frames that simplify complexity so you can act—but they also shape and limit what you see. Your task is not to escape boxes (which is impossible) but to detect them, probe them, and deliberately replace them when they stop working.

The World Through Boxes

Every idea, judgment, and strategy depends on boxes—your internal maps of reality. When you name something, you create a box. Aristotle’s ten categories and Adam naming animals in Genesis are early symbols of this mental mastery. A box can be a stereotype, a business model, or a paradigm. Calling the rainbow seven colors is helpful, yet physics knows the spectrum is continuous. Simplifications enable action but obscure nuance.

Boxes let you react quickly: your brain recognizes a lion-shaped animal as dangerous; your company interprets a CEO resignation through familiar business stories. But boxes also trap you. Sartre’s dog kept jumping where a fence used to be; organizations often keep investing in franchises that no longer make sense because the old box still feels right.

From Box Awareness to Box Mastery

The authors argue for conscious box management. Instead of treating categories as reality, you should treat them as working hypotheses. Ask: What assumptions are inside this box? What data did I exclude? Which alternate boxes could serve me better? BIC’s shift from 'pens' to 'low-cost disposable plastic objects' led to lighters and razors—a simple relabeling that created new opportunities. Creativity, as Steve Jobs said, is connecting things; boxes are the connectors you rearrange.

Box Replacement: The Central Skill

The entire book shows how to build, replace, and sustain boxes systematically. Just 'thinking outside the box' is superficial; true innovation means creating and testing new boxes on purpose. The authors propose a five-step loop—doubt, probe, diverge, converge, and reevaluate—that converts creative flashes into ongoing strategic renewal.

Two Archetypes: Eureka and Caramba

Box changes appear as either Eureka—you invent a better frame before competitors—or Caramba—you realize too late that someone else changed the box. BIC’s leap was a Eureka; Blockbuster’s downfall to Netflix was Caramba. These opposites remind you that staying proactive in box evolution is the difference between flourishing and reacting.

From Mental Theory to Practice

The book integrates cognitive psychology (biases and perception traps), business strategy (reframing, megatrends, scenarios), and creativity methodology (divergence/convergence). You learn why your intuition fails (Monty Hall paradox, optical illusions), how to structure workshops for group creativity (Generali’s insurance session turned 140 ideas into a major digital unit), and how to institutionalize alertness to weak signals so success doesn’t fossilize into rigidity.

The Core Argument

You cannot think without boxes—but you can learn to think through them. Awareness plus design makes mental framing your most powerful adaptive skill. The reward is agility: instead of worshipping your current mental model, you treat every box as temporary scaffolding, ready to be rebuilt before reality forces you to.

Central Thesis

“You can’t think or decide without boxes—so don’t try to think without them. Learn instead to detect, probe, and change them deliberately.”

This mindset—part philosophy, part management method—teaches you lifelong mental flexibility. Whether you run a company, design policy, or navigate personal decisions, deliberate box-changing becomes the ultimate act of creativity and self-renewal.

The first step toward box mastery is learning to doubt. You must start by admitting that what you 'know' may be incomplete or biased. This disciplined skepticism—echoing thinkers from Abélard to Holmes—helps you reveal the filters that blur reality. The goal isn’t cynicism but active curiosity: you question your mental boxes so you can later rebuild them better.

Creating a Climate of Doubt

Doubt begins with humility. Workshops often start with perceptual puzzles or paradoxes—like the rope-around-the-earth riddle or optical illusions—to show how intuition misleads. These activities soften defensiveness and prepare minds to accept surprise. Generali’s executives, before designing digital insurance ideas, watched a magician deliberately deceive them to illustrate attention bias: what you 'see' depends on where your mental box directs your focus.

Spotting Biases

Your boxes are shaped by predictable biases. Anchoring locks estimates onto early numbers. Availability distorts judgment toward memorable events. Representativeness convinces you that detailed stories are more probable than simple ones. The illusion of control makes you overestimate skill versus luck; loss aversion keeps you from abandoning failing ideas. By cataloging these distortions—Tversky and Kahneman’s legacy—you begin to see thinking errors as design flaws in your boxes.

Belief Audits and Group Diagnostics

Organizations can doubt collectively through belief audits. Interview teams, map shared assumptions, and list unwritten rules. Energy executives, for example, discovered they were over-indexed on oil risks while ignoring renewables. La Poste reframed itself from a postal service to a broader trust provider via such audits. These tools expose how corporate boxes anchor you to fading realities.

Rule of Doubt

Design tests to falsify your preferred hypothesis, not merely confirm it. Truth grows through disconfirmation.

In daily life and strategy alike, the muscle of doubt keeps your mind elastic. The paradox is clear: you need confidence to act, but only skepticism keeps that confidence from turning into blindness.

After doubt comes curiosity. You can’t build new boxes without fresh evidence. Step Two urges you to investigate systematically—look at customers, competitors, and megatrends with disciplined wonder. This kind of probing replaces guesswork with insight grounded in observation, not assumption.

Understanding Customers

Insight begins with seeing people in their real contexts. Observe, shadow, and listen. Jungheinrich discovered that forklift buyers cared more about comfort and certainty than raw machine power, leading to redesigned offices with bright yellow sofas to signal their customer promise. Similarly, discovering that the average gamer is 37 years old and that nearly half are women reframed Ultragames’ target market and opened new family and educational game categories.

Broadening Competitive Awareness

Define competitors broadly. Amazon began as a bookseller but reboxed itself as a universal commerce platform—its rivals failed because they stayed trapped in the 'bookstore' box. Lytro’s redefinition of photography through light-field cameras showed how an outsider can redraw an industry’s boundaries. Such probing of what counts as competition reveals blind spots that shape strategy.

Reading Megatrends

Megatrends—urbanization, aging, digitization—are slow tectonics of change. Philips used prospective thinking to pivot toward home healthcare before the market surge. Jonathan Rothberg analogized semiconductors to DNA sequencing, leading to Ion Torrent and 454 Life Sciences: a perfect induction through trend pattern recognition. Unlike predictive analytics, which extrapolate current data, prospective thinking imagines plausible futures to build resilience against uncertainty.

Perspective Shift

Prediction narrows; prospection widens. Use both, but rely on imagination when clarity is impossible.

When you probe the possible this way, you gather material for creative divergence—the fuel for every new box you’ll design later.

Now imagination takes center stage. Divergence is structured freedom—the stage where you produce many boxes before judging any. The authors compare this phase to disciplined play: quantity breeds quality. You suspend critique, alter perspective, and let unexpected connections form.

Separating Modes

Do not mix divergence with convergence. Creativity and analysis are neurologically distinct: associative right-brain processes conflict with linear left-brain judgment. Generali’s innovation workshop followed this rule, allowing forty managers to brainstorm without restrictions before analyzing results. The outcome—140 raw ideas—later produced a €50M digital transformation.

Methods for Divergence

• Ban critical words ('Yes, but...'). Replace them with 'Yes, and...'.
• Describe problems without common nouns (describe a bank without saying money or finance).
• Use oxymorons ('safe recklessness') and headline prompts ('Astrology predicts Generali’s next move').
• Apply random verbs ('reverse it', 'make it sparkle') to ideas to stretch lateral thinking.

These prompts shake habitual boxes. NASA’s decision to use airbags for Mars landings and Linus Torvalds’ open-source model emerged from such divergent reasoning—the refusal to accept conventional constraints.

Emotional Safety and Play

Fear kills novelty, so the facilitator’s job is to guard against early judgment. Warm-ups like illusions or matchstick puzzles reset participants’ cognitive comfort zone. This is not chaos; it’s guided permission to explore. Many top firms (IDEO, Pixar, Google) systematize divergence with visible recording, time-boxing, and cross-functional mixing to prevent hierarchy from dulling creativity.

Practical Commandment

Never evaluate while you invent. Create first, judge later. The wall of ideas you build in divergence becomes the playground for convergence.

When divergence ends, you will have dozens of provisional boxes. The next step is to select the few worth pursuing through structured convergence.

After divergence’s exuberance comes convergence—the sober work of choosing. Effective creativity requires the courage to decide which boxes deserve development. This stage turns speculation into strategy through objective criteria and iterative testing.

Clarify Constraints

Start by listing non-negotiables: legal rules, budgets, production limits, or safety standards. Constraints don’t stifle creativity; they channel it. Defining these guardrails early saves time and ensures that enthusiasm meets feasibility.

Establish Criteria

Judge each idea along three dimensions: alignment with your mission and competence, feasibility in resources and execution, and impact in differentiation or growth potential. Weighting each metric transparently makes evaluation credible. At Generali, teams used these filters to trim 140 ideas down to 21 themes and four funded projects.

Voting and Iteration

Use multi-round voting. Let low-scoring boxes fall out early. Encourage dissent—discomfort signals risk not yet examined. Vamp (later StrengthBuilder) refined its selected box from entertainment to therapeutic gaming through iterative pilots tied to neuroscience evidence and credit constraints. Convergence is not closure; it’s disciplined hypothesis testing.

Lesson for Leaders

Choosing the right box demands transparency, courage, and data. Favor ideas that stretch your identity without snapping it.

Handled well, convergence converts brainstorming into business relevance—and teaches you to balance imagination with rigor.

Creative success is dangerous—it breeds complacency. The fifth step insists on relentless reevaluation so victory doesn’t harden into blindness. The world shifts; your boxes must too. You learn to watch for weak signals, paradoxes, and emerging Caramba moments that force adaptation before crisis strikes.

Recognizing Caramba

A Caramba is the shock of realizing your once-perfect box no longer fits reality. Netflix’s failed Qwikster split, which lost 800,000 subscribers, dramatized what happens when strategic moves outpace consumer perception. Being alert to such surprises—technological, emotional, or cultural—keeps reinvention continuous.

Detecting Weak Signals

Early warnings hide in small anomalies: changes in customer preferences, subtle shifts in metrics, or new entrants on the fringes. Philips acted on weak signals in brewing behavior to launch Senseo, selling 15 million units. Hindustan Lever’s slow reaction to low-cost rival Nirma shows how overlooked signals erode market share.

Institutionalizing Vigilance

Build systems to notice drift: dashboards, periodic 'what-if' reviews, reward mechanisms for people who challenge orthodoxies. Treat anomalies as gifts inviting a new box. Henry Ford’s confidence in the Model T box froze innovation—don’t repeat that mistake. Constant renewal keeps organizations alive to megatrends rather than nostalgic about past success.

Enduring Insight

No box lasts forever. Reevaluate even what works, because survival depends less on perfection than on persistent adjustment.

Eternal curiosity—combined with structured vigilance—makes renewal a habit rather than a desperate reaction.

Beyond projects and short-term products, you also build core boxes—higher-level reframings of purpose and identity—and scenario boxes—vivid narratives about possible futures. These concepts elevate creativity from tactics to strategy.

Core Boxes: Rethinking Identity

A core box defines what your organization believes itself to be. Danone moved from 'food' to 'health'; Apple from 'computers' to 'multimedia'; Natura from cosmetics to 'creating a learning community.' Such shifts unlock new nested boxes—products, partnerships, and programs that align with the broader frame. Natura’s reframing expanded its reading initiative from 310 schools to thousands.

To design a core box, you reverse the 'impossible.' Like Remo Läng’s wing-suit flight, you replace 'humans can’t fly' with 'humans can' and explore the how. Framing reality differently makes new actions feasible.

Scenario Boxes: Seeing Possible Futures

Scenarios use imagination to stress-test strategy. UNIFE (European rail industry) built four future frames for 2025—World @ Home, Mission Mobility, Dragon Corp, and Divided Nations—each drawn from megatrends and wild cards. By visualizing 'arriving at Penn Station' or 'shipping bananas from Harare to Barcelona,' teams explored implications across politics, technology, and competition. The exercise yielded insights into regulation, Chinese competition, and integrated mobility models.

How They Work Together

Core boxes set purpose; scenario boxes stretch anticipation. One defines who you are; the other defines the landscape you’ll act in. Both prevent stagnation. Used regularly, they keep your thinking prospective, not reactive.

Strategic Rule

Think of every vision as a box; design nested and scenario versions so you always have multiple futures to play with instead of one brittle forecast.

With both tools, you move from reacting to shaping, from linear prediction to robust adaptation—the mark of strategic creativity.