Thinking Beyond the Box


Each of us has the potential to think more effectively. The first step is to rid ourselves of the unproductive thinking patterns and mental traps that constrain us from achieving our full potential. This provocative one-day workshop is predicated upon two key notions: that happy, successful people think differently and that you can change the way you think.

Most executives today rely on the lens of rational analysis to solve their problems and peer into the future. Unfortunately, it is no longer up to the task. Imagination is the mind’s faculty for recognizing patterns that are neither spatially contiguous nor logically related and for looking around corners to anticipate emergent challenges and high-risk events. The critical question is whether your current thinking “box” is a prison or a platform for greater accomplishments.

Brainpower is the currency of the future. The ability to think better is the most significant competitive advantage you will ever possess. Your ultimate success lies not in what you know but rather in what you do with what you know. How you think determines who you are and what you can become in the time remaining. Only one thing is certain: any comfort you may have with respect to your current job, industry or marketplace is likely misplaced.

To compete for the future and advance your agenda, you must change your traditional thinking patterns, change the way you look at problems and change the way you ask questions. You must understand and overcome the barriers that impede your creative thinking and judgement. You must change your point of view, not only of the world around you but also of yourself.   (Warning: this course may change your life.)

The best solutions to today’s complex problems already lie within you (and within your organization), provided you know how to release them. Our social conditioning and organizational cultures have produced comfort zones where thinking is habituated and creativity blocked. Only by expanding and “airing out” that frame of reference can we move from the zone of predictable thought into the zone of breakthrough thinking and the realization of inordinate potential.

Information is the enemy of intelligence. Learn new techniques for thinking through problems in a society that prizes the relentless pursuit of more information and is fundamentally risk averse. Discern between data, knowledge and insight. Discover the real meaning of intelligence and how to untap yours. Gain a deeper understanding of why the presumed obstacles to opportunity, things like insufficient time and fear of failure, are little more than self-perpetuated mental walls and myths.

Topics include:

  • Change, complexity, chaos and you
  • Happiness, success and thinking differently
  • The disciplined mind and analytical thinking
  • The box: social and organizational conditioning
  • The power of focus and becoming mindful
  • Overcoming self-imposed limitations
  • Developing one’s intuition as a skill
  • Thinking traps, barriers and constraints
  • The purpose and measurement of intelligence
  • Problem solving: a simpler and better way
  • Individual/group attention-directing techniques
  • Becoming a transformational thinker: what it takes.