Think outside the box! How often do we hear this advice encouraging us to be more creative, to bring disruptive ideas and unconventional methods, to shake things.

But what if the we’re in a strict environment enforcing us to follow the processes, to be compliant and go with the flow?

You would believe that thinking inside the box is bad. It can be indeed if we always stick to the same box, not allowing us room to grow, not trying new perspectives within the same boundaries. If we just stick to the rules blindly all the time, yes it can become a routine, limiting our thinking and transforming us into people who just follow “what is right”.

I often felt I was put in a box with clear rules and policies. Social rules, relationship constraints, job related policies and so on. I often felt that when I tried to do things differently, when I tried new methods or challenged the status quo, I have been put back to my place, back to my corner, the corner of a small box of what it was generally acceptable to do. But this did not discourage me. On the contrary…

From an early age, my parents, my teachers and the entire former communist ecosystem did not encourage or even allow me to think “outside the box”. I had to comply, to follow the well established rules and policies. And if I was not permitted to think “outside the box” , the choice I had was to push the boundaries of my box, making it bigger and bigger each time I was sent back to my corner. My corner became therefore the place from where to push the boundaries for my box to grow. With each precedent created, with each small win, the area of my box increased allowing me to do more things, slightly unconventional, reinterpreting the rules and creating myself space to breath.

Fast forward couple of decades into 2017. I was having early discussions for a role to scale up and run the Digital Practice of a Big4. Nothing clear, just some targets of headcount, projects and different other business KPI’s. No clear job description, no clear role and responsibilities, no RACI matrix, nothing. Which I really loved. It provided me the ground to define my own box and create the structure to shape the box according to the business and my team’s needs.

But a Big4 has rules and processes. And a Big4 implementing software projects in Financial Services or Public Sector in different countries across EU and non-EU has more rules and processes. Internal processes and the ones from our clients. And these put quite a lot of constraints around the box and around what someone could do.

I was initially afraid. I felt too constrained and I could not see myself successful in such an environment. My own created job description was falling apart when I started to understand the setup. But the lessons I’ve learned across the years, the resilience I started to master and the skills I acquired to navigate through multiple constraints gave me hope. Needless to say that after more than 6 years in the role, I managed to scale up my teams to ~700 brilliant engineers, delivered multiple successful projects across industries, geographies and technology stacks. And leaving behind a culture of learning, helping each other and caring for one another while having the client’s need at our core.

So, sometimes working with the processes, the rules and the constraints and thinking inside the box is not that bad. It can actually challenge your creativity even more than stepping out of the box. With a bit of resilience, a bit of business acumen, a bit of stubbornness, a bit of creativity and some people skills to navigate an organization we can make wonders within our boxes.

Photo credits: bizjournals.com