Why thinking outside the box is overrated
[Music]
[Applause]
today i thought i’d start with a very
simple demonstration that i saw
years ago that was presented to me by an
ex-boss and mentor called adrian holmes
this is a box and the idea
is to connect a with a b with b and c
with c
without crossing any lines a with a
and b with b is easy and if you think
outside the box
c with c is no problem which will make a
very strong case for thinking outside
the box but i don’t i don’t agree the
true solution to this puzzle
lies in thinking inside the box or
should i say the elegant and the better
solution
so a with a and b with b is the same but
it is this curve
that connects c with c that is the
beautiful part
in the outside the box solution no lines
were effectively crossed
but the fundamental rule of effective
creativity
which is staying inside the box was
broken
if you’re not convinced let’s take a
look at tennis
tennis is a game played inside boxes
there is a set of boxes for the service
there’s a set of boxes for the singles
there’s a different set of boxes for the
doubles but the best players in the
world
their genius is about staying always
inside these boxes if you took away the
boxes
tennis would be kind of pointless and
very hard to keep score and if you take
away the net
well you know where i’m going so what
i’m trying to say is if we are fully
conscious of the limitations
that reality imposes or will impose on
our solutions and we stay within them
and we respect them
we will come up with a lot better
solutions
the box should be what defines a problem
and let’s think about our current
situation we are trapped inside boxes
we are trapped inside a box uh we can’t
leave home we are
we can’t go to work we can’t travel
we can’t even go for holidays we are
trapped inside this box
and yet we’ve been in this box that
we’ve been trapped
for over a year we have come up with
behaviors and solutions
and uh and ideas
that i’m sure will not go away when
we’re outside our boxes
i am sure we will travel a lot less for
business
i am sure we will conduct a lot more
of our working life through video calls
i am sure we are going to video call our
friends and our family a lot more in the
future
i am sure that when we travel we are
going to stay for longer
all of these things have happened and
the world has been able to carry on
because we have managed to stay
inside this inside the box because we
have
kept trying to do what needs to be done
always staying inside the box yet
we are told constantly to think outside
the box
and what does thinking outside the box
actually mean does it mean
thinking without constraints does it
mean
never never self-censoring your your
ideas or does it mean breaking
the rules and ignoring the rules to me
thinking outside the box is
usually when you ignore the rules
and i believe that the limitations
are the ones that define the quality of
the solution
but i also believe that the limitations
should not define the ambition
a vaccine for the world should be
effective
a vaccine for the world should be cheap
a vaccine for the world should be easy
to store
should be easy to distribute and should
be very easy to administer
the vaccines that stay within that box
and within a tighter box
are better than the ones that don’t
in my business of advertising ignoring
reality and ignoring the limitations
that reality imposes
usually results in ideas that no budget
could cover
that the technology is not there or
ideas that are plain wrong
but if you define a box if you are clear
about the budget
about the objective if you’re clear
about
target audience and how they behave and
what kind of media they see
your i your ideas and your solutions
will actually work
what i do know you have to do is always
think with freedom
always look at the problem from every
possible angle
walk around it turn the box upside down
if you will
never self censor and maybe you can move
the box around you can say what if we
had a little bit more
budget or what if we didn’t talk to
these people but talk to these people
you can play around with the limits a
little bit but fundamentally
the box is reality the fact that a
person can’t fly
is a limitation but focusing
on making a person fly without killing
that person
is the possibilities yogi berra
the legendary baseball player and coach
famously said
when you get to a fork on the road take
it
in times of change and uncertainty only
those who embrace the difficulties
while permanently moving forward will
thrive
that has been the essence of our
survival and that
in this case will be the essence of our
revival so let’s go back to my business
in my business of advertising there are
many many restrictions
and and things that define the box and
not least that the target audience you
the target audience don’t really care
about what we’re trying to say
but one of the things that does not
define the box
is what has been done before so in order
to deliver
an important message an emotional
message that we wanted to deliver
during the period of christmas we had to
bear in mind that one the people
we needed to reach did not watch
television or mass media two that when
they left
their their their places uh where they
left
or when they moved they usually moved
around at night
and through very well identified but
uh very hard to reach jungle paths
we had to be able to implement uh
this communication piece literally
overnight and we had to do it across
very different and diverse regions of
the country
so thinking outside the box and not
not respecting those uh limitations
would have probably yielded a beautiful
film a
a beautiful piece of content of of a
homecoming
of people coming together um it would
have
almost felt like a soft drink commercial
for christmas
but that’s not what christmas is like
for for for these people these people uh
have were felt like prisoners they
wanted to talk to their families they
wanted to
join their friends and their friends
were literally
two miles down the road they just
couldn’t come together
and uh and so our solution
was uh completely
inside these boxes what we did was we
identified
some gigantic trees in the in the jungle
covered them
covered them in in christmas lights and
these trees were located
in in the walking paths that we used we
covered them in christmas lights
and they had a banner that said if
christmas can come to the jungle
you can come home at christmas anything
is possible
it was cheap it was visible it was easy
to implement
it was fast and at no time
in the over 50 years war that colombia
had been suffering through
had there been more demobilized
guerrillas that during
that period this led to other uh
incredible solutions that responded to
surreal limitations
but uh and and it also
led to about 18 000 demobilizations
which eventually led to the peace that
my country so desperately needle
needed if it was going to experience a
true revival
now let’s look at what i consider
classic
outside the box thinking quadraphonic
uh you probably have no idea
what that even means it turns out that
someone thought
that if you recorded music using four
channels printed the vinyl records in a
particular way
and precisely placed four speakers
around the room and placed yourself
facing in a in a certain direction you
would enjoy the music a lot more
the fact that you’ve never heard of
quadrophonic records or systems
but are fully familiar with the concept
of hi-fi
and stereo which respond to the ambition
that you want to hear music with better
quality
and stereo which means you only have two
ears
is in my opinion a very clear
example of how you should stay always
inside the box
there’s boxes and there’s limitations
everywhere
in my industry coming back to
advertising
during the lockdowns we have had to
carry on
shooting and producing commercials and
spots and
photographs and and communication for
our clients
and in this particular case
we had to ship equipment
and cameras and lights to the houses
of the actors and direct them via
whatsapp or via zoom
and have this whole setup and and
and and they they would film themselves
doing
uh or acting out their their scenes in
their living rooms or in their terraces
or in their kitchens or
or wherever that needed to be so a
typical
shoot would look like this
and the end result looked like this
so if you’re conscious of the
limitations and stay
focused on the result you want and you
need
you can keep your eyes on the donut and
not on the whole
you can remember that you need to get a
finished commercial
and not worry too much about it not
worry about the limitations the
limitations need to be solved
so revival is not really about what we
can’t do anymore and then coming up with
entirely new things to do
it is much more about doing what needs
to be done
in spite of the circumstances so if we
focus
on the task and embrace the limitations
we will prevail
and i think what you need to do is as i
said before look at the problem from all
sorts of different angles
here is an example that i think is is
extraordinary
the senior students of central saint
martins need
to work all of their last year of school
on a graduation project
and this graduation project needs to be
displayed and needs to be shown to the
public
and and during their their academic year
they usually have workshops
and they have tools and they have
teachers
and mentors around them and and the
university offers studio space
and it also offers display a display
space and it offers galleries and
and that creates interaction with the
work
and makes it easy for the students to
display their work and show it to their
professors who are grading them
and to the general public and
even though these are
difficulties themselves they are the
usual
the usual difficulties but halfway
through last year
these these students were working on
their projects they were working on
their
on their under graduation
projects and they had a whole vision set
out
and everything changed right in the
middle
and one of them particularly illustrates
uh
the the way these limitations actually
made the project a lot better
sandra polson is an angolan native
and she began a project where she
went back to her native angola and
started gathering information
and documents and artifacts and moments
and headlines and oral tradition
that she thought defined the
economic political ethnic and
cultural landscape of her native land
in her own words in a quarter here
this ongoing project utilizes a
selection of common household and gold
and golan items
to discuss the relationship between
family and inherited societal memory
from colonial angola and the civil war
the project
then evolved into prototyping and
building artifacts made of wood
of screen prints of metal slowly
becoming what would have
what should have been an impressive
display
of art research performance and a strong
confrontation with
reality but lockdown happened in london
sandra was confined to her living space
where she could not continue to develop
the work
in the way she had envisioned it in
search for a solution
she started to use the roof of
her next door flat and in that she kind
of
colonized that roof she occupied it
without permission
and then she met the owners and it
became
a literally a colonization which kind of
switched her mentality dramatically and
and made
and and changed the the essence of the
of the project
in her words i began an eight-week
self-led roof occupation which at points
i argue
perhaps became the actual work sandra’s
project
evolved changed and blossomed because of
her determination
but also because she accepted the
limitations and worked within them
and found herself in a completely new
and uncharted territory and i think this
is what
staying inside the box can do
revival is only possible if the
solutions we come up with or
the changes we come up with are doable
practical
and real revival in my opinion is a pure
act of stubbornness it is a triumph of
creativity over the circumstances
reality imposes the box imagination
is our weapon revival has to come from
inside the box
thank you
you