The Three-Box Solution

3

Forget the Past

Box 2 is where obstacles to the Box 3 future go to die. As I briefly touched on in chapter 1, Box 2’s most transformative role is to help organizations shake free of the inhibiting ideas and structures that have arisen around past successes. As one executive, Hylke Faber, the founder of Constancee, told me, “As soon as I find the courage to say good-bye to a past that no longer serves—not looking back, flexing my Box 2 muscles—I’m ready to take my first step into my new future. Then the magic of Box 3 begins.”

Indeed, there is really nothing quite so powerful as an entrenched set of obsolete values and practices. They can easily come to seem as immutable as the laws of physics. But where the laws of physics are generally helpful, ...