The Art of Thinking Outside the Box (Part 1)

You have probably heard of the awe-inspiring story of the Bata company. At the close of the nineteenth century, when Africa was just opening as a market, all the manufacturers of shoes in Victorian England sent their representatives to conduct market research to see the possibility of selling their wares here in Africa. The awful realization that Africans didn’t wear shoes led to the poor conclusion that there was no market for shoe products in Africa.

But one salesman stood out. “Nobody in Africa wears shoes. So, there is a huge market for our products there.”

Boom! That out-of-the-box reasoning did the magic and today, Bata shoes have come to be known as the shoes of Africa and have reached some of the remotest parts of Africa. Bata boasts of its presence in over 5,300 shops in more than 70 countries and production facilities in 18 countries.

Bata’s story reveals that creativity and innovation are functions of vision and perspective: how you see determines what you see and create or innovate.

Whenever we confront issues that force us to ask if the glass is half-full or half-empty, we know that we are at a juncture where life is demanding our creativity. Positive thinking is a major driver of innovation.

Personally, I think that one of the difficulties we face in this regard is that we were schooled away from possibility and creative thinking. And by that, I mean that the education system we passed through in our childhood was designed to impose information on us rather than spur us to think for ourselves and reason out solutions independently.

When we attempted to think out of the teacher’s boundaries of knowledge, we were rewarded with poor scores that made us feel incompetent and perhaps, also made our parents feel that we were unworthy of further education.

This brings me to the first point on how to break your thinking box and get ground-breaking, solution-inspiring, result-producing creative ideas: spend time with children. No wonder Jesus said that unless you change and become a child, you cannot enter the kingdom of God. There are certain realms of imagination you cannot access without childlike thinking. Some of us adults are just too ‘reasonable’ to succeed.

Children see the world with an innocent lens of possibilities. In fact, they don’t know the rules and they just don’t see the reasons why certain things that they imagine are impossible. In the midst of many of the gibberish that they utter are crude solutions waiting to be refined.

Rather than spending time trying to put them away, spend time listening to children because they often ask questions that you forgot to ask. Listening to them might be hard, but it is eventually rewarding. In fact, he harder part is knowing that you missed out on a solution that a child had to offer!

But it is not just about spending time with children but with other people, animals and things that are remarkably different from you. By doing so, you are intentionally choosing to see from other people’s lens which is different from yours and to ask deep questions about animals and things which open you up to new vistas of thinking about the world around you.

Again, by studying other fields apart from your own, you can discover certain similarities in their patterns of operations and even find solutions to confront the challenges in your own field. This is even why you must make time for hobbies. For example, if you are an engineer, you can attempt music. A pastor can attempt fishing. A teacher can attempt painting.

Your subconscious mind is an ocean of superpowers. Knowing how to access and unleash it can help you shatter many mental boxes and achieve monumental feats. Two remarkable activities that aid this access is meditation and dreaming.

But there is one other activity that does the magic again and again. It quite weird but I guess it must have worked for you too. That activity is getting into the bathroom to take a shower. In fact, I sometimes think that there is a correlation between being securely naked and the opening of the mind.

It is funny when a preacher says that God spoke to him in a bathroom or a tech guy says that he experienced a gush of ideas, but I have repeatedly had my share of that experience too. It’s like we all do. Isn’t this another irony of life that miracles can result from the most unimaginable places?

To your greatness,

Bright UK

The Chief Scribe