‘Above the Box’ thinking… THE NEW WAY OF BECOMING EffECTIVELY CREATIVE!
Mayur Kalbag is a Leadership Coach, Corporate Trainer & Author who regulalry does corporate training in Fiji. This will be his regular column in our Jobs section on Saturdays providing readers some useful tips. He can be contacted via email: mayurkalbag@ hotmail.com
Creative thinking or, similarly known as, innovative introspection is one of the more relevant topics for managers and leaders of today. As the famous saying goes, in today’s world we must not use yesterday’s methods to be successful in tomorrow’s business!’ It is therefore imperative that we develop the attitude along with the aptitude towards thinking outside the box. Gone are those days when employees and managers or leaders were satisfied with the execution of their tasks and responsibilities in the same and monotonous manner. Today, the times are different. There is constant and tough competition and along with the aspects of slowdown of economies across many countries around the world.
In such scenarios the question arises, although it is better to not get stuck inside a box and to think out of it, is just thinking OUT OF BOX is enough. It is here that I wish to quote,Hitesh Chandra,a good friend and participant from a leading organization here in Suva, Fiji. He once told me that the time has come to ‘THINK ABOVE THE BOX’ and not just out of it! “What do you mean by that?” was my spontaneous question and he explained his thoughts wonderfully. “Dear Mayur, going outside a box and therefore thinking about new ideas and creative solutions is good but there has to be a correct and sensible direction towards achieving higher objectives.There are many managers who spend a lot of time on ideating but that is not enough.At times these managers are simply happy that they were able to throw ideas at their teams but almost all those ideas were found to be pleasantly useless or impractical. So, did they think out of the box? The answer is yes.The next question is if any of these ideas were relevant and productive? And the answer unfortunately could be a ‘no’.What I mean to say is that, the time has come for creative and innovative managers and leaders to tweak their thinking.They must look at working hard towards thinking ABOVE THE BOX and by that I mean to work intensely towards not only evolving ideas and solutions but ensuring that they are ascertained, introspectively assessed,scrutinized and finally inferred to be pertinent, productive and progressive. It is then that creative thinking will be most appreciated by the senior management and also the customers” These perspectives from Hitesh were amazing for me.The lesson I learnt from my conversation with him was to not only go outside but ABOVE the box!
This helped me a lot as I became more accountable to myself when it came to becoming innovative in my leadership and managerial trainings. I would think more deeply about how a new idea of mine would truly bring a positive and productive change in my work.