What exactly does thinking outside the box mean? 

There is a tendancy to think humans have original thoughts when in fact we tend to gravitate to things we feel safe with.  With that said is the 'box' our comfort zone?  I have heard this statement from desperate business people who are at a loss to explain why their company is doing poorly.  As if thinking outside the box will solve the immediate problem and bring about some critical change.  Could it really be that thinking outside the box is really the road to destruction?  Is daydreaming any replacement for knowledge and skill?

Is modern business being run by guessing and 'brainstorming' with no qualification for ideas or execution?  If skill and years of knowledge don't count vs. out of the box thinkers (usually just out of college or MBA school) then no wonder the Unites States has such serious problems.   Thinking outside the box economically has meant taking shortcuts and exploitation of the system. 

First you must know what is in the box before you can think 'outside the box'.  It's astonishing how many do not even understand the problem and feel there is some strategic reason for being ignorant.  We are not born with a lifetime's worth of knowledge so it's important to learn about the foundation of the particular  issue. 

Nothing is an extreme.  It's great to be creative but like a painter it takes skill to be creative.   Practice, failure, success, these are the steps to learning and not a 10 minute meeting on paint or worse, all day, fixated on one or two superficial concepts and not digging into the causes.  If one is really thinking outside the box: think about  the effects.

We can look at the accident in the Gulf of Mexico as a true lesson in thinking outside the box.  No, not in how to solve it but how we got to the point where we created a problem we can not solve. 

That is truly where 'thinking outside the box" gets us.  Innovation and creativity are built on knowledge and skill, not blind luck.  I've always  thought of it in the view of given infinite time, a thousand monkeys with typewriters would eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare.

Don't be a monkey.