Thinking inside the box or outside the box?

The recent Biennial Conference on Education, Training and Professional Practices addressed the issue of conventional thinking and creativity.

If we want a society of independent-minded citizens, should we think inside the box (within the company, within the institution), or outside it?

Thinking inside the box means accepting to limit oneself to the packaging, to theories that shift with the trends and repaint the box in new colours – a box that remains unchanged beneath its glittering exterior. It means conforming and passing on, time and time again, within the imposed pattern, without thinking about what all this really means.

Thinking outside the box means not being inside it, not knowing what goes on inside, telling oneself stories about what’s inside.

Anyone who wants to think must be outside the box while remaining in contact with it. It means moving from the inside to the outside in a dual, fluid motion; it means cultivating flexibility but, above all, observing what is.

Dogmas and theories are developed inside the box; creativity requires daring to step outside the box, out of one’s comfort zone. It demands taking a risk: that of having to deconstruct one’s certainties in order to stand on the ground of reality. And to humbly remember that today’s discoveries will no longer hold true elsewhere or tomorrow.

I have heard researchers who have walked the devastated lands of the homeless and victims of incest speak of their ordeal as a transformative experience, in short, of everything that can sow the seeds of education and healthcare; who opened a door onto what is silenced, yet is very much part of our society; who were willing to let themselves be transformed by the ordeal and who left us wondering.