Lots of people will exhort you to ‘think outside the box’. There are plenty of strategies for doing so and lots of them are great, productive, really helpful. What most of them fail to do, however, is to identify or describe the ‘box’ you’re supposed to be removing yourself from.

In broad terms of course we know what it is. The box represents rigid thinking along the usual furrows that will lead to the same places those furrows always lead to. But what is it, specifically – in terms of the individual project or creative exercise you’re engaged in right now?

The answer to that question is going to be different every time. But do you ask it? That’s where the strategies seem to be missing a page, and it’s an absolutely crucial question. It’s hard to describe how much easier it is to think outside a box when you know where the box actually is. So make that your starting point.

This works really well in business because it gives you a competitive edge. All the local retail bakeries round my way (and yours, I’d guess) are in towns – that’s where all the people are, so if you want to open a bakery with maybe a café attached, you open it in the middle of town. But a couple of years back someone here decided to think outside that box: they opened a bakery, with a café, on a small out-of-town trading estate. Not enough units on the estate itself to keep the business going, so you might not have great hopes for the business. However, it’s now the best-known bakery in the area and the café is regularly packed. Why? Apart from the great food, parking is way easier on the trading estate than it is in town, so it’s a much better place to meet up. Those bakers spotted the ‘be in town’ box and climbed out of it.

Don’t forget that you might be thinking inside several boxes at once (I don’t really know what that looks like – I suppose they must be like Russian dolls). Maybe you’re trying to design a wedding reception in your village hall. So there’s a box you’re stuck in that says ‘village hall’ – maybe you could hold it somewhere else? But hang on, you’re also in a box that says ‘wedding reception’. Try thinking outside that one too. And of course there’s a box marked ‘getting married’. Of course you might still end up getting married and having the reception in the village hall. But you could elope, or get married and take everyone for a slap-up meal afterwards, or go to a registry office with two friends, then have a honeymoon (that’s a box too, of course), and then throw a big party for everyone when you get back. Or not.

Just because you’ve got out of the box, it doesn’t mean you can’t climb back into it again if you choose to. But at least take a peek outside and decide if you really like the box or if you were just thinking inside it because it was there. You see, even if you get back into the box, your horizons will be wider for having spent a bit of time outside it. The box has become transparent now you know what’s beyond it. And the chances are that the ideas you generate will be more creative, interesting and exciting than if you’d sat firmly and blindly inside it from the off.