Cognitive Obesity: A Prescription for Healthy Thought-loss

That's pretty much it for now....but it's a darn good Title.  Made you look....

Well, not really...this posting is going to be about "taking that infernal Thinking Box and relegating it to the deepest place I can find without leaving my chair". 

Who coined the phrase "Thinking Outside the Box?"  This is potentially the most counter-productive instruction that any Instruction Giver could ever possibly give to an Instruction Receiver.  You might as well say "Imagine a box, then forget the box you just visualized". Now how many of you just visualized a box?  I mean besides me, since I am actually writing about boxes, and unfortunately having to think about boxes while I do so.  So Team, forget about the box I've been talking about.  Erase that square shaped container-oriented object from your memory, and start thinking outside of it.  I see two immediate problems:
1.  If I am able to achieve the impossible( within a reasonable amount of time, and without the house starting to burn down), and forget all about the boxy shaped Box; how will I know if my thinking is outside of it?
2.  Because (most) everyone will have fond memories of their "comfort box", it's quite likely that their thinking will not stray too far from the box they were supposed to forget.  I like to think of this as something like a man with a chain around his neck dragging a 500lb safe around whereever he goes, and of course "not thinking about it"

So what do we expect? Well, I for one do not expect the neck-chained-safe dragger to get very far.  It's very hard to forget about something as oppressive as a safe'o round the neck.  But neck-chained-safe-dragger-man( officially known as NCSDM, pronounced Ne-Ksa-Duh-Mmmm).  Regardless of his zeal to innovate his way, far away, from NCSDM, he's really not going to get far.  The box is too much a part of his life.  So he struggles mightly and finally innovates his way to conceptualizing a Box that is somewhat lighter, thus improving efficiency, reducing travel time,and increasing employee moral.  His stroke of RAW innovation has both Hard and Soft benefits, its not been tried before, and thus his itty bitty teensie baby step of "fauxnnovation", is what drives his company forward in minute increments of innovation( hell, forget about leap-frog technology...be realistic about how hard it is to hop with a safe chained around your neck".  But so it goes.  The Innovation Short Bus has left the station, and everyone at the round table is thrilled with their breakthrough achievement.

Now bear with me for a moment because the next bit is super complicated:  if you want "real" Innovation( you must first understand what that means), the LAST thing you want is to kickstart the A-Team of absurdly compensated Consultants by have a project launch meeting in which you talk about "the box" for an hour, then issue the instruction to spend 100,000 man-hours defining the box, so that when we get to the next step of "thinking outside the box", we have made sure that in every possible way, everyone even tangentialy attached to the project is completely saturated to the point of Cognitive Obesity( remember that phrase?).  Cognitive Obesity is the result of continuous over-consumption of information that is fundamentaly a hindrance to cogntiive nimbleness.  But, the corporate buffet never closes, and culturaly it's expected that everyone will ceaselelssly gorge themselves. 

So, the solution put simply: get some damn people who don't about your stupid box, and sure as hell don't hammer the boxy-box-box concept into their fresh and nimble brains, lest they become victims of CO as well.  Without severe trauma, or exceptional lengths of time, forgetting something is VERY hard when you have been immersed in it daily, with the box-drummer tirelessly beating out a metronome of rhythm that could make even my somewhat healthy pepper plant wither and die.

Here it is again, and I'll type slowly this time: get people who don't even know that a box exists, give them some basic objectives, and keep them out of earshot of the box-evangelists.  The results may well be innovative, because the odds of a group of uninitiated randomly ending up in the same box that already exists are extremely small.

And yes this does work. And yes I have lead the teams at very large corporations who have made it work, and yes successful solutions were produced that were in fact REAL innovation.

Anyway, at this stage you either are with me, against me, or floundering around in your box. 
I'll add a bit more to this later, but for now, just accept that I am right. :)

and no i did not meticulously edit this article, I was actually more interested in expressing a concept.  I'll have my people talk to the editing people, and in a few man-weeks, we should see some documentation regarding the best way to go about editing this article.......