The Outside Of The Box Fallacy

There’s a classic story about a truck that had become wedged at the entrance of a tunnel, and it goes something like this:

One day, traffic had come to a stop in a metropolitan tunnel. A huge 18-wheel truck exceeded the clearance of the tunnel and got stuck. It couldn’t move forward or backward. The emergency crew were at a loss, scratching their heads as tempers began to fray. Finally a little boy on the sidelines spoke up: “Why don’t you just let air out of the tires?” They promptly did exactly that, allowing the truck to be free.

The moral of the parable is intuitive enough: fresh and simple thinking can dramatically win over entrenched and complex thought processes. I first heard the story back in the late 80’s, which is just about when the business management establishment started using the expression “think outside the box”. While the expression served its purpose for a few years, like all overused jargon it finally lost its meaning. Yet the real problem with this particular jargon lies not in its overuse, but in the logic contained within the jargon itself. 

The box represents a process that has already been designed, tested, and under execution for some time. Clear thinking, or a good strategy, actually created the process and therefore the box. Managers and employees are hired to mind the box – until bugs in the process begin to appear. These bugs can be internal (design) issues, or external (competitive) threats. Corrective pressures ensue, and suddenly everyone in the box is asked to think outside of it. This might be akin to building a house for your family, then when things start to go wrong with the house you ask your family to step outside and pretend the house does not exist. Sounds more like a Chinese fire drill than strategic thinking.

Take one example of “boxed” strategic thinking: Iridium was a $5 billion satellite-telephone venture investment by Motorola that filed for Chapter 11 less than a year after the wireless phone system went live. Pundits have been all over the Iridium case study, for the most part agreeing that it was a case of falling in love with a technology idea at the expense of a market reality: Motorola was betting on a wireless technology that had been proven for more than 30 years, with a guarantee to cover the entire globe, regardless of what the market need was for businessmen in the middle of the Sahara desert desperately needing to make a call.

If there is something that Motorola was good at – and still is to be fair – it is boxes. Radio boxes, more precisely: from the first automobile radios, to RF (Radio Frequency) communication devices for the military and for commercial use. But it didn’t just master the production of communication boxes; it also pioneered the Six Sigma process, the mother of all operational quality control processes. So given this track record in strategic as well as process excellence, what went wrong with Iridium? Had Motorola fallen blindly in love with the promise of satellite communications technology, or with its own capability to build the perfect box?

My bet is that neither of those two indictments is as relevant as the fact that Motorola had lost sight of how to think -- never mind where to think. Motorola’s founder Paul Galvin came from the Michelangelo Buonarotti school of visionary thinking: when guys like Michelangelo stand in front of a huge block of marble, they don't see a chunk of rock like the average mortal, they see the David inside of it; Galvin looked at a car radio and didn't just see an RF receiver box, he thought about the driving experience inside the car. Almost seventy years later, Galvin’s successors looked up to the skies and dreamed of sixty-six satellites covering wireless communications for the entire surface of our planet. Apparently they forgot to look back down at earth and find their David, or at least, the ultimate communication experience. 

If only there had been a little boy standing in the sidelines to remind Iridium guys that not much more than 10% of the surface of our planet is actually inhabited -- 1% if you consider only urban areas.