Making The Box Bigger

Funny things happen in dialogue. I was interviewed by a student in entrepreneurship for her thesis, and when asked the question whether I was an “out-of-the-box-thinker” I replied like this:

“Rather than thinking outside the box, I prefer finding ways to make the box bigger – that is, expanding the frameworks and the playing field.”

I hadn’t really thought about it like this before, but to me the sentence above kind of sums up my view on lateral and integral thinking. When it comes to having an entrepreneurial attitude towards what’s new, different, unknown, mysterious and even strange or weird… I always want to be able to go beyond the initial response of surprise and awe or even shock, into a state of exploration and embrace.

When Ken Wilber talks about holarchic progression of organisms and organisations, his elegant term is that each further level of development “transcends and includes” the former. I guess I just had an epiphany about what that feels like in the smallest, most incremental sense – because expanding our boxes is something we can strive for in small steps at a time and not only in a “quantum leap” way.

What are your thoughts on this?