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Jumping out of the box?

Some sketches about the boxes you will find when thinking out of the box.

We all work in people business! If you think about the rational results of your daily work: analysis to be checked, reports to be discussed, concepts to be integrated and so on. But pure - formation based - knowledge leads to some kind of loneliness in the office. What are all your skills worth without a partner to discuss an issue? What will you do without any kind of knowledge exchange between people anywhere "out there"? You would sit in your office, working alone, more or less interconnected to your company’s colleagues. And this situation might be anti-progressive.

To my mind, nothing compares to a personal discussion, especially to a workshop: Collecting ideas jotted down in a mindmap, combining visual elements i.e. for clustering or prioritization: This is the way it should be bringing things together on a conceptual basis. To put in other words: You can leave your personal box for a while.

In management literature or current leadership / team programs you often read or hear this sentence: “Thinking out of the box.” Yes, that’s true. But you should not forget: Maybe the only thing that you find, when thinking out of the box, is the risk of jumping straight ahead into another one.

What do you think about the value added of this kind of personal interaction? Tell me about the boxes YOU know.

-- Thomas

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Beware: Collective boxes ahead!

Posted by Jürgen Dümont at 07.12.2009 17:48
Personal interaction can surely be a sensible source of information and/or challenge. However, one must be careful not to fall prey to some common “fallacies” related to discussions, e.g. trying to please the person you are talking to or putting your own ideas into the spotlight instead of helping your discussion partner to clarify his own ones.

While the last two examples may be a matter of education or personality some other problems are inherently tied to our (common) psychological makeup. Let’s briefly discuss two of them: herding and group-think.

“Herding” refers to the fact that we sometimes blindly follow “the herd”, i.e. we act in accordance with a large group of people without thinking. In an evolutionary context, herding makes sense: If the herd flees, danger (e.g. a pre-historic predator) might be ahead and simply following the herd accelerates your reaction time. In the context at hand we might follow arguments simply because they are accepted by a major share of the respective peer group.

By contrast “group-think” phenomena arise because the respective group is build up in a homogenous way with the result that diverging views do not arise. In short: People think the same, e.g. because of their rather similar intellectual background.

Thus, by engaging in personal interaction we might end up in “collective boxes” which might do us a disservice in challenging our ideas and provoking new thoughts. So you’d better chose you challengers wisely!

Beware: Collective boxes ahead!

Posted by Markus Stricker at 10.12.2009 23:27
Professional societies want to set standards - the actuarial society included. With the internationally coordinated actuarial education and the new continuous professional development rules, we are defining the border of the "collective box".
One way out of the box is not to align the working teams with the professional boxes - a plea for inter-disciplinary teams.
Socialization develops relatively quickly even in interdisciplinary teams: Exchanging team members - even if it is just for a while - helps a lot to break down the walls of boxes.

Beware: Collective boxes ahead!

Posted by Thomas Schaffrath-Chanson at 11.12.2009 17:15
Jürgen's explanation is quite usefull in terms of understanding how teams are to be built! I am not afraid of herding, because this happens in some special and extraordinary situations. Group-think, on the contrary, might lead to homogenous team building initiatives on an expert-to-expert level! Thus, there is some disturbing element missing. Box equals system. People from outside the system would surely be helpfull in disturbing a homogenous team sitting in a collective box: Adding new ideas, challenging the way of thinking, behaving in a different manner and so on.