…of coming from and understanding where one stands before looking where one might want to go. (see last post)
Think Cheserton’s Fence.
Change efforts often walk down the ‘thinking outside the box’ path and then work with a radically new idea. One of the challenges with this is that, as Bruce Wheaton, author of ‘The Tiger and the Shark’ stated, “If an idea is truly new, it generally won’t be accepted.”
Seems to be a bit counter-productive to work with brand new ‘outside the box’ ideas which, more often than not, might not be accepted.
K.C. Cole‘s comment that “Truly new ideas not only build on tradition…,” brings this idea home through Piaget’s theory of constructivism that suggests learning involves actively constructing meaning; a new idea that doesn’t connect with past knowledge can make assimilation (fitting new information into existing knowledge) difficult.
Maybe a better approach is to work at the edges of the box, either just outside or just inside, which will often produce the change and innovation required because most people live and work more in the middle of the proverbial box.
‘Outside the Box,’ as many people have experienced and written about, is often cold, dark, and lonely and expanding the box might be a better way forward than working outside of it.
PS: This blog post was thought of and written by me, no AI here, and is a mosaic of my experience, reading, and forward learning.
William Kerr And associates 