the transparent box syndrome

We live surrounded by catalogued cognitive biases—nearly 200 at last count. I’ve spent delightful hours studying Buster Benson’s 2016 Cognitive Bias Codex, illustrated by John Manoogian III, marveling at the creative ways our minds deceive us. The codex organizes these biases around four fundamental problems: we filter information aggressively, we fill in gaps to create meaning, we need to act fast, and we try to remember what matters. Yet among all these biases, one reigns supreme: the conviction that we ourselves are unbiased. Our own box is transparent to us, its walls invisible, while everyone else’s boxes appear not just visible but glaringly obvious.

It’s rather like those people who complain about traffic while sitting in their cars. “You’re not stuck in traffic,” as the saying goes, “you ARE traffic.” Similarly, we’re not observing boxes from some neutral vantage point—we’re peering through the walls of our own conceptual container, which we’ve mistaken for the universe itself.

The result? A peculiar form of intellectual evangelism where we feel compelled to liberate others from their obvious limitations while remaining blissfully unaware of our own. “Think outside the box!” we cry, using the exact same phrase as millions of others who consider themselves original thinkers.

neither good sense nor consensus

“Good sense,” we say approvingly when someone makes decisions we agree with. They demonstrate prudence, reasonableness, wisdom. But notice the massive subjectivity lurking in that little word “good”—one of the most relative terms in any language. The asymmetry is revealing: we don’t accuse someone of having “bad sense” but of lacking sense entirely. Good sense is a presence; its absence is… well, absence.

This becomes even more slippery when we consider “common sense”—that collection of opinions generally accepted in a specific time and place. Common sense and consensus are linguistic cousins, both suggesting a kind of collective feeling-together. “Consensus” literally means having the same sense, thinking and feeling identically.

Corporate culture adores both common sense and consensus, often confusing them with wisdom. But here’s the rub: common sense resists change precisely because it emerges from daily experience. Why revise what seems to work? In this way, it risks killing curiosity, which springs from non-conformity with existing explanations.¹ And consensus? In my experience, getting everyone to think and feel the same way is not just difficult—it’s undesirable. Different ideas and perspectives are riches, if we know how to build from them rather than flatten them into agreement.

The pursuit of consensus often produces what I observe in the business world: aggressive agreement, where everyone nods to avoid the discomfort of productive disagreement. We mistake consensus for harmony, common sense for good sense. Meanwhile, those who consider themselves blessed with particularly good sense feel entitled to diagnose others’ obvious lack of it—especially their failure to think outside their boxes or leave their comfort zones.

the comfort zone that wasn’t and the stonemasons’ wisdom

“Leave your comfort zone,” they insist, usually from podiums in climate-controlled conference rooms. This advice carries the whiff of Protestant work ethic—the notion that value correlates directly with suffering. If it doesn’t hurt, it can’t be growth. If you’re comfortable, you must be stagnating.²

But here’s what intrigues me: what if our so-called comfort zones aren’t prisons but laboratories? What if they’re the accumulated wisdom of our experience, the domain where we’ve developed what Félix Ravaisson beautifully termed “obscure intelligence”: the things we know without knowing how we know them?³ It’s a possible definition of intuition.

When everyone gazes into the future for answers, I find myself looking backward—not from nostalgia but from practicality. The future remains stubbornly unknowable, while the past at least offers evidence.

Aristotle observed the stonemasons of Lesbos facing a practical problem: how to measure circular columns. They didn’t abandon their rulers or seek to transcend the very concept of measurement. They bent their rulers, creating what became known as the “Lesbian rule”—a flexible measuring tool made of lead that could conform to curves. In his Nicomachean Ethics (Book V, Chapter 10), Aristotle used this as a metaphor for flexibility in equitable justice. True wisdom lay in understanding their constraints so thoroughly they could adapt them.

This is what we miss in our haste to escape boxes and abandon comfort zones: wisdom isn’t embedded in our DNA. Like habit, it depends on time. It requires patient cultivation through practice.⁴ The image of a wise person often coincides with age not because years automatically confer wisdom, but because wisdom emerges from sustained engagement with reality—including the reality of our limitations.

a modest proposal for box dwellers

So here’s my suggestion for those distributing advice like party favors: before telling someone to think outside the box, could you first describe your own box? Its dimensions, its décor, its specially installed features? Before commanding anyone to leave their comfort zone, might you map your own zones of comfort? I suspect you’ll discover your box is more spacious than you imagined and your comfort zone includes regular opportunities to tell others to abandon theirs.

The banalization of these expressions reveals intellectual laziness disguised as wisdom. Advice becomes useful when it contains substance in its foundation and precision in its indication. Why, specifically, should this particular person think outside their box? Which aspects of their supposed box limit them? What evidence suggests the person you’re addressing is actually comfortable?

Perhaps with questions like these, we might help ourselves and others better understand the boxes we inhabit, recognize the precious things we’ve stored there, and determine which walls actually need expanding. Sometimes radicalism isn’t thinking outside the box but thinking so deeply inside it that you understand its every corner.⁵

Different ideas and perspectives are riches—if we know how to build from them. One way forward is refining our senses, individual and collective, and reforming common sense when it offends more than supports. Because wisdom requires time, practice, and patience to understand our constraints before attempting to transcend them. The most questionable wisdom arrives pre-packaged, demanding immediate application without regard for context. Sometimes innovation means simply knowing when to bend the ruler.

Of course, I write all this from within my own comfortable box of skepticism about boxes—a self-reflexive irony I can’t help but appreciate. My box has lovely windows, thank you very much, and I’ve furnished it with questions rather than answers.

And sometimes, just sometimes, the most revolutionary act is admitting that we all live in boxes—and that maybe, just maybe, that’s perfectly fine.

This essay synthesizes reflections originally published in Portuguese in 2021–2022 on the questionable wisdom of corporate platitudes and the unexamined assumptions of those who preach transformation. In a world where thinking outside the box has become the ultimate box, perhaps it’s time to think inside the box about why we’re so desperate to escape.

1. This connects to themes explored in “The Curious Middle,” where I examine how curiosity requires tolerance for ambiguity rather than the false certainty of consensus. ↩︎
2. As I explored in “For a New Definition of ‘Work’,” this equation of suffering with value represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how meaningful work emerges. ↩︎
3. Félix Ravaisson, De l’habitude (Paris, 1838), translated as Of Habit by Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair (Continuum, 2008). Ravaisson’s concept of “obscure intelligence” describes how habit transforms conscious actions into intuitive knowledge. ↩︎
4. This temporal dimension of wisdom aligns with what Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe explore in Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing (Riverhead Books, 2010), where they argue that true expertise comes from experience within constraints, not from escaping them. ↩︎
5. This echoes themes from “Good Enough: Challenging the Tyranny of Excellence,” where sustainable achievement often emerges from working skillfully within constraints rather than perpetually seeking to transcend them. ↩︎