I hate the phrase “thinking outside the box,” mainly because of its misuse in business environments.
But I have noticed that a lot of people just get…stuck. Inexplicably. Where I work, there is an entire team of people when one thing goes wrong, they get stuck for hours. Irrevocably, until someone effectively reboots them.
Something I’d just skip over and try to find the answer later (or make my own), everything on that team comes to a dead halt, like a car out of gas on the edge of the highway.
Often I’m not even the closest to the smartest in the room but I rarely if ever get halted like that. I’m expert at dodging around, finding another answer, doing something a different way, even charging ahead where someone has told me I could not go. And I don’t care much about rules or breaking them, so that helps too I guess.
Increasingly I’ve observed that people objectively much smarter than me have trouble doing what I do because they just got immediately mired in quicksand that I dance over without even realizing it’s there.
Don’t think any IQ tests can measure that, even as much as I believe they are measuring something.
Box related questions to vagueblogging:
Does this have to do with the team’s function or particular people on that team? Are the blocks technical or political in nature? How much of this is linear analysis paralysis?
I can’t go into specifics because it is about work.
The team’s cultural environment at the country/region level is very much attuned to not rocking the boat, which would include not thinking of anything innovative or if thinking of it, not practicing it.
In addition, this tendency has been locally reinforced by emphasis on ticket-punching rather than solving problems.
There are a few who do the right thing anyway, but it leads to them being near-pariahs in their group. But many of them are like me, and don’t really care as long as we retain employment, so we get along well.