OPINION: 'Outside the box' isn't anymore

Anyone who still urges others to “think outside the box” is clearly not doing what the term purports to advocate. “Outside the box” is now clearly inside the box.

No one is more trapped in the box than retreat facilitators, consultants, and public officials who encourage the rest of us to think outside the box — but can’t come up with any way to describe innovation, creativity, resourcefulness or originality other than to use a 45-year-old phrase. Its utterance does serve one good purpose; it issues the alarm that it’s time to fake an emergency and walk out of what is going to be another uneventful and irrelevant meeting.

There is no shortage of similar words that should tip you off that the speaker has nothing new to offer. Two certain indicators are the words “collaborative” and “stakeholder,” which are used to try to sell the notion that the speaker has invited or will invite other points of view from anyone remotely interested in whatever is at hand to validate the position, strategy or conclusion he or she has already accepted as The Answer.

You know you’re in for a long day when the facilitator at your annual planning retreat advises that all stakeholders are invited to join in a collaborative effort of thinking outside the box to produce a mission statement for your organization, which has done just fine without one for 35 years. You can pretty much expect to hear the term “focus groups” in short order; it’s time to text message a friend to save you by calling in a bomb threat.

To the General Assembly, thinking outside the box gave us T-SPLOST — a sales tax that we’re expected to pass because the legislature was afraid to raise the motor fuels tax for the first time in 40 years. Except that T-SPLOST was just the latest local option sales tax. We already have three, so what is unique or original about T-SPLOST?

Another phrase overdue for retirement is “town hall meeting.” That, essentially, is a collaborative effort among stakeholders to think outside the box. Those who use the term believe it lends some gravity and democracy to what is essentially yet another meeting.

Whoever coined “thinking outside the box” was. Forty-five years later its use is an indication that the user is not. If you challenge him, he’d probably reply that “there’s no need to re-invent the wheel.” But that’s a subject for some other day.

Mark Beardsley is the editor of The Commerce News. He lives — and occasionally thinks outside the box — in Commerce.