Leaders with minds inside the box

Think outside the box is a concept that is easy to understand and easy to perform. Simply stated, we’re invited to creatively brainstorm. We’re encouraged to imagine as many scenarios as we can that might be associated with the problem we’re trying to solve. We’re asked to move our thinking outside the confining perimeters of the prevalent and accepted way of looking at things.

“Stand the problem on its head. Examine its denotations and connotations thoroughly. Rearrange the words, if necessary,” Think outside the box suggests.

I expected ordinary folks, who are living routine lives and working in routine jobs, to need someone to remind them to think outside the box. However, I did not expect our national leaders to need someone to remind them to do so. Thinking outside the box is a leadership skill that is essential for running our nation. Leaders need to be able to see problems from all possible angles in order to solve them. Yet, it seems like everywhere I look, I see national leaders whose inabilities to contemplate solutions, external to the narrow cartons of primitive thoughts, have become detrimental to our nation’s future. Their narrow and limited way of viewing problems are rapidly becoming our national narrow-and-limited policies. Instead of empowering our nation, their problem solving skills constrain it.

Consider, for example, we are literally creating national policies based on the following constrained views:

Inside Box 1.Our national government is spending more money than it is taking-in, so we need to cut spending.

Inside Box 2.We need to reduce taxes in order to create jobs.

Inside Box 3.Cutting entitlements is the best way to reduce our national debt.

Inside Box 4.In order for the United States to compete with the rest of the world in the future, our students will need to be competitive with foreign students in math and science.   

I can think of ten different creative ways of meeting the objective of each box without the use of the underlined action. Personally, I think this is very easy to do for the first three boxes.  The fourth box appears to be more difficult, until you recall American history: Beginning with the revolutionary war, most of our nation’s greatest achievements were accomplished in the years when other nations were more advanced than us in math and science, including the ones we defeated in military combat and surpass in economic wealth. Some of the keys to economic competitiveness are creativity/innovation, vision (specific strategies for making, marketing, and sustaining), teamwork (led by leaders whose game plans bring the individual players together to create collective formidable teams), desire, and the specific global demands for goods and services.

Creative thinking is very liberating. Too bad our national leaders are unaware of this fact!