Hack:
The Box of Outside-The-Box-Thinking

To leverage the full potential of divergent thinking and simultaneously reduce some of the risks related to it, organizations could use a very simple tool, though apparently an oxymoron: “The Box of Outside-The-Box-Thinking”. 

The Box can be envisaged as a wikispace, which allows people to post and share their ideas, and to connect, combine and collaborate. Thanks to technological progress and the viral diffusion of social media, collaborative platforms are now affordable - even for smaller organizations - and easy to use - even for people not so familiar with technology. If your company already has a well used share-point, intranet, forum or any kind of collaborative platform, then that should be used.

The Box must have a Mentor that oversees the activity, provides directions for use, answers specific questions, solves practical problems related to the tool or the process, sets milestones if needed, etc. The Mentor should either be a senior manager, or have access to one. Without an authoritative sponsor, in fact, ideas will struggle to be implemented.

All members of the organization should be encouraged to post their divergent ideas in the Box, provided they use a common template to describe the idea and follow a few, clear rules: first of all, they should adopt the “building up approach”, e.g. not just complain about something, but propose solutions.

There can be different categories of divergent ideas. Here are just some examples:

1. innovative business ideas: since we are so successful in producing bio-fertilizers, why don’t we study the possibility of entering the bio-plastics business?
2. organizational changes: in our pharmaceutical company, it simply makes no sense to have the Market Access department totally separated from the Public Affairs department
3. working methods and interaction between people: top managers should talk to people, not just send emails; the software we use for project management is too complicated and time-consuming, we should move to a web-based, more agile tool
4. murmurs of dissent: our mission statement should be refreshed, it was written ten years ago and never updated.

Tags can help to categorize posts.

All members of the organization should have free access to the Box, and can comment and rate divergent ideas. Comments should be consistent with the “building up approach” typical of design thinking, which basically means building ideas up instead of tearing them apart. As far as the rating system is concerned, it should be transparent and time efficient, and automatically rank divergent ideas in the Box according to their level of appreciation within the organization. 

To reduce the risk of excessive conformism in the rating process - especially in the case of smaller companies - twice a year the short list of the top "X" divergent ideas rated by company members should be shared with a small group of external stakeholders: customers, suppliers, independent board members, consultants, etc.

External stakeholders’ role can span from rating and commenting divergent ideas themselves using the Box platform, to a Workshop during which they challenge divergent ideas, select the most promising, and envisage pathways to practical implementation (feasibility study, business plan, etc.).

The Box should constantly be fed with novel, divergent ideas.

Some forms of rewards can be connected to the process (badges, stickers, special mentions, money), to publicly acknowledge the value of divergent thinking.

This step is optional, and it is probably more important for the organization than for the individual that has proposed the idea. For him or her, in fact, the best reward is recognition and appreciation, and the incomparable satisfaction that only trailblazers experience.

“The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security and stake their own lives in order to do what they themselves think worth doing”

Walter Lippmann's ode to Amelia Earhart, 1937