Everyone’s heard the phrase “think outside the box” trotted out in a meeting by someone who’s run out of ideas. Fair enough. But here’s the question nobody actually stops to answer: what is the box now? Because it isn’t the one from twenty years ago.
The old box was corporate thinking. Rigid marketing. “This is how it’s always been done.” Traditional advertising that played it safe because safe felt sensible. Stepping outside of that used to mean something specific: creative, disruptive (a word I still love), original.Here’s the problem. The box changed shape and nobody updated the advice.
The new box is algorithms. It’s AI sameness. It’s optimisation culture: test this, test that, which I’m all for as a marketer, right up until everyone’s testing the same three things and the results all start to look identical. It’s trend copying, where one brilliant person does something genuinely good and forty other brands copy it until it isn’t good anymore, just familiar.
Automated Creativity, Accidental Conformity
There are things that can be handed to a machine and things that need to come from an actual person. Hand the whole lot over and you don’t get creativity. You get conformity with better spelling. Everyone has access to the same tools now, which means the tools stopped being the advantage a while ago.
You can usually tell when someone hasn’t put themselves into it. Someone messages you with “great point about [topic], can we jump on a call?” and you know, instantly, that no human read your point. That reaction, the instant three-second no, isn’t rudeness. It’s a fair response to being sold to by something that isn’t a person.
Humans are good at spotting patterns. The same phrasing, the same rhythm, the same handful of tics turning up across hundreds of posts written by the same tool. Once you’ve noticed the pattern, you can’t unsee it.
Why Imperfect Beats Polished
Ten years ago, marketing rewarded polish: perfect grammar, perfect letterheads, perfect everything. Now the opposite is closer to the truth. Too polished reads as suspicious. People don’t trust perfect. They trust believable.
That’s the whole idea behind the handwritten letters we send: real pens, real indentation on the page, lines that aren’t perfectly straight because a real person was holding the pen, not a machine simulating one. We send handwritten notes to businesses, to donors, through doors for people selling driveways and windows. Small local jobs, and increasingly, big national ones too, because more brands are working out that sounding like a person is worth more than sounding polished.
I’ve had clients hand me a pitch that was clearly typed into ChatGPT with a single prompt. I’ve said no, we can do better. Not to be difficult. Just because the version with a person actually behind it is the one that gets read.
The Actual Risk Isn’t AI
The tool isn’t the problem. What people choose to hand over to it is. When you outsource the thinking, the empathy, the actual point you were trying to make, you’re not writing anymore. You’re editing something a machine generated and hoping nobody notices.
That’s the bit that should worry people. Not that AI exists. That humans are stepping out of their own communication without quite noticing they’ve done it.
So what does thinking outside the box actually mean now? It means sounding like yourself instead of sounding like every other polished, careful, safe version of a brand. It means having an actual opinion and being willing to say it, even if it’s not the popular one. And it means making people feel something real, not just informed.
A few months ago I rescued a mouse from next door’s cat, nursed his leg back to health in a cardboard box, and named him Howard. That post got 44,000 views. Not because I’m trying to be an influencer. Because it was true, it was mine, and nobody else could have posted it.
Being Human Isn’t a Weakness. It’s the Strategy.
The box didn’t disappear. It filled up with algorithms, automation, and everyone sounding like everyone else. Getting outside of it now doesn’t mean being loud or clever for its own sake. It means being recognisably, unmistakably a person, because in a world flooded with machine-generated sameness, that’s the one thing a machine still can’t fake.
