Take a sheet of paper and write down everything you can think of that’s white. You have 15 seconds, go. Done? Good, now take 15 seconds and write down everything that is or could be in your refrigerator that’s white. Finished? Raise your hand if had better luck with the second list.
Dan Heath, who co-authored the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die with his brother Chip, started his talk by asking the audience to complete the exercise described above.
We’ve all heard the term “thinking outside of the box,” Heath told the audience. But thinking out of the box isn’t really as great as it sounds. As his exercise demonstrated, it can make things harder. “We don’t need to think outside the box, we don’t need to escape it, what we need to do is find the right box and get in it,” said Heath.
Inside the box thinking is found all around business in the form of what Heath called a “high concept pitch.” Example he gave are Jaws in space = Alien, Die Hard on a bus = Speed, and Blockbuster by mail = Netflix. These pitches are boxes that inform creative decisions down the line.
“The idea that we need to think out of the box is wrong,” concluded Heath, “instead we should go box shopping. We need to try on as many boxes as possible.”
Photo by anker1922.
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