When we are faced with a tricky problem we are often encouraged to “Think outside the box”. The origin of this is not clear - it could come from the famous nine dot problem. Where you are asked to draw four straight lines to pass through all of the dots without lifting the pen from the paper.

This is not solvable if the lines meet inside the “box” formed by the dots.

However, in a business setting perhaps we ought to pay more attention to the efforts we focus on forcing people inside boxes. Our structures, systems and processes often cause them to think in narrow functionally based ways. To get better answers we need to remove these factors which cause silo thinking.

Is it fair to force people into boxes for most of the time and then expect them to think outside these boxes when it suits our purposes?

Is your structure like this?

Does it

• Restrict your thinking?
• Get in the way of teamwork?
• Tie up management time resolving turf wars?
• Result in narrow solutions that lead to future problems?
• Mean you get efficient working within departments but poor performance across the functions?

It doesn’t have to be this way - we can help you move forward, develop ways of working that are efficient and effective across the whole organisation and establish ways of learning from your experience so that you always stay ahead of the game.