Issue 99: A Bulletin for Big Ideas and Better Business
You can’t think outside the box. Dan Sherwood argues you are the box - and the only way to think differently is to deliberately seek out new ones.
Willem Martin
December 16, 2025
ISSUE 99/
A BULLETIN FOR
BIG IDEAS AND
BETTER BUSINESS.
OPINION / Creativity
You can’t think outside the box.
💬 Dan Sherwood
Dan Sherwood is Marketing Director at Santander UK. He is also on the ISBA executive committee, and listed in the Marketing Week Top 100 and Campaign Power 100 Hall of Fame. He is on the Children’s Hospital Charity Advisory Board, and is co-founder of 11Iron Indoor Golf. |  |
It’s among the greatest clichés applied to creativity. To imagine your incumbent thinking as a box full of stale ideas, and to come up with something truly fresh, we need to – somehow – think outside of it.
Of course you can’t. Coming up with a truly original idea that has no link to what you’ve considered or dreamed up before is impossible.
What’s more, it ignores the truth of how your mind generates one thing from another. You can’t think outside the box – you are the box. Or more precisely, a sequence of different boxes, formed from your experiences and biases, prejudices, things you’ve seen, the stuff that’s affected the way that you think.
You are the box.
So when we say to think outside the box, we never really achieve it. We just jump between the boxes that are already formed. The only way to achieve it is to get new boxes, and the only way to get new boxes is to speak to people who don’t think like you.
Painting by Jos van Riswick
We asked Dan a couple of questions on how he personally relates to creativity, here’s what he had to say…
TBOC: What is your creative North Star?
DS: If it doesn’t make you uncomfortable, it isn’t interesting enough. If you aren’t having some fails, you aren’t pushing the boundaries far enough. The enemy is vanilla.
TBOC: What has inspired you lately?
DS: Simone Biles: Rising on Netflix – it is always the sports stories that inspire me the most and with 2 young girls, this is even more relevant.
Follow us on Instagram for your weekly creative round up…
Last week in Creativity:
Turner Prize 2025 - Nnena Kalu’s powerful win. Could this be a nudge to rethink what the art world counts as “serious” and prize-worthy?
McDonald’s AI Christmas ad fiasco - This time the problem might not be AI.
Australia’s under-16 social ban - Will this change childhood for the better, or complicate it further?
Martin Parr tribute - Celebrating an extraordinary eye.
“Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking...”
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