Your Planet Sustainable?Your Tribe Harmonious?Your Life Vibrant?
Future Proof Ideas since 2005, by Erwin van Lun

When does my out-of-the-box thinking stop?

Thinking out of the box is an often-used term in creative sessions. Thinking outside existing boundaries. This is especially important in a changing world. Consider the following sentence:

"How can our department of our organization reach our target audience better?"

It's filled with assumptions. What is an organization? Does that organization stay? What is a target audience? Are those people? Should we see them as a target audience, as a group we want to inform? Or do we want to involve them? And more importantly: what do they want from us? And then the organization? What is that weird term? Is that some statistic we draw with a little rake? How do informal relationships play a part? But do we want to organize everything neatly so we can report success at the highest level: to the stock holders? Stocks, another weird term. And relationships with those people in the target audience? And with people on the site? And with former employees? And people who write about as? And then we haven't even discussed department? There once was a reason to put us in a separate cubicle. But is that still true? If we could do everything over again, would we still organize it the same way? Would we organize it at all or would good communication tools be enough?

And then this is still very practical. You can think further on humans. How do you view people? Are people relationships? Are people like bouts in the sea, bobbing along with the rest? How do I undertake things then? Or should I undertake nothing at all and just constantly feel when something should happen? And how do I do that?

But however far you want to think out of the box, it always has a limitation, and I'm looking for mine. Who can help me?

In my ongoing attempts to think further and further out of the box, I always wonder when my thinking will stop. When you’ve truly thrown out all societal assumptions. Even stop taking the body in time as starting point, if everything in the universe is connected, and time is merely the definition we want to give it, then for me those are the boundaries of my box.

My thesis is: everyone has their own box and everyone has their own limitation. So that also goes for me.

And I wonder, how can I think outside of my box? Anyone have an idea? Where are the limitations of my thoughts?

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