Thinking Outside the Box

How to Escape Cognitive Ruts and Solve Business Problems with Clarity, Context, and Collaboration

By Kevin McDonnell

You’re Not Stuck—Your Thinking Is

We all like to believe we’re innovative thinkers. But in reality, most executives fall back on familiar strategies, frameworks, and processes—especially under pressure. Experience becomes a filter. Instead of helping us see problems more clearly, it often narrows our field of vision.

Cognitive psychology has a name for this: functional fixedness, mental set, and cognitive entrenchment—three common thinking traps that can quietly undermine strategy, integration, and innovation. And in high-growth companies or complex transformation environments, those traps become particularly costly.

The good news? There are proven ways to break out of them—and it starts with hiring for context, promoting diversity of thought, and bringing in perspectives beyond your own four walls.

The Science Behind Why Leaders Get Stuck

A growing body of research helps explain why even high-performing professionals often struggle to see novel solutions:

1. Functional Fixedness

When people are unable to see alternative uses for familiar objects or methods, they miss better solutions. In Duncker’s classic Candle Problem (1945), participants were less likely to solve the puzzle because they couldn’t think of a tack box as anything other than a container.

2. Mental Set

Once a solution has worked in the past, we tend to apply it again—even when the context has changed. Abraham Luchins (1942) demonstrated this in his Water Jar experiments, where people continued to use inefficient methods even after simpler ones became available.

3. Cognitive Entrenchment

Expertise can backfire when it leads to rigid thinking. Researchers have found that experts often struggle to adapt when conditions change because their mental models are over-optimized for past success (Dane, 2010).

4. The Einstellung Effect

This trap is especially prevalent among highly trained professionals. In chess, for example, grandmasters sometimes overlook better moves because they’re locked into familiar patterns (Bilalić et al., 2008).

The lesson: your brain values efficiency over innovation. Unless you actively challenge your own assumptions, your default approach will be “what worked before.”

Think Experience, Not Prestige

In high-velocity business environments—especially those growing through acquisition—companies need more than just smart people. They need people who have solved similar problems in similar contexts.

Rather than defaulting to candidates from big-name firms or traditional verticals, consider hiring executives and advisors who have:

• Scaled companies at your current growth curve (e.g., $200M to $2B)

• Integrated multiple systems or functions under time pressure

• Led through ambiguity, not just stability

• Worked in cultures where collaboration was essential—not optional

These individuals bring frameworks and mental models that fit your size, speed, and complexity. They’re more likely to see the problem clearly—and solve it more efficiently.

Build Diversity of Thought—Not Just Diversity

Diversity of thought is the antidote to groupthink. The best-performing teams blend perspectives: operators and strategists, insiders and outsiders, generalists and experts. This kind of heterogeneity expands the solution space.

To foster diversity of thought:

• Encourage cross-functional collaboration. Create forums where finance, operations, engineering, and sales leaders share assumptions and challenge each other.

• Bring in external advisors. Consultants, analysts, and board members can introduce perspectives unfiltered by company history.

• Benchmark beyond your industry. Explore how analogous challenges were tackled in different domains.

• Cultivate a reading culture. Promote exposure to new ideas through books, articles, and case studies—especially from outside your vertical.

Even within expert teams, the best ideas often come from the intersection of different perspectives. As Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser (1981) observed in their work on problem categorization, experts outperform novices only when they focus on deep structure, not surface-level features. That kind of framing requires deliberate contrast and debate.

From Insight to Action: Avoiding the Same Mistakes Twice

If your organization is undergoing a strategic transformation—scaling up, integrating systems, launching a new go-to-market strategy—cognitive traps can derail even the most well-designed plans.

Here’s how to avoid them:

1. Hire people who’ve “been in the movie.” Look for leaders who have tackled complexity at your current stage, not just at companies 10 times your size.

2. Diagnose the problem structure. Before leaping into solutions, ask: Are we treating this like a familiar problem? Is it actually novel?

3. Break the mental model. Use deliberate reframing exercises, scenario planning, or devil’s advocacy to widen the lens.

4. Blend inside and outside voices. Combine institutional knowledge with fresh perspectives through consultants, advisory boards, and peer benchmarking.

Final Thought

Creativity in business isn’t about raw genius—it’s about resisting the gravitational pull of what’s worked before. Innovation requires structure, yes—but it also demands space for reframing, dissent, and learning from outside your mental frame.

If you want better answers, you need better framing. And if you want better framing, you need to challenge the very experience that made you successful.

That’s how you think outside the box.

References

1. Bilalić, M., McLeod, P., & Gobet, F. (2008). Why good thoughts block better ones: The mechanism of the pernicious Einstellung (set) effect. Cognition, 108(3), 652–661. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.05.005

2. Chi, M. T. H., Feltovich, P. J., & Glaser, R. (1981). Categorization and representation of physics problems by experts and novices. Cognitive Science, 5(2), 121–152. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0502_2

3. Dane, E. (2010). Reconsidering the trade-off between expertise and flexibility: A cognitive entrenchment perspective. Academy of Management Review, 35(4), 579–603. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2010.53502832

4. Duncker, K. (1945). On problem-solving. Psychological Monographs, 58(5), i–113.

5. Gentner, D. (1983). Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework for analogy. Cognitive Science, 7(2), 155–170. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0702_3

6. Luchins, A. S. (1942). Mechanization in problem solving: The effect of Einstellung. Psychological Monographs, 54(6), i–95.