The Three Boxes Nobody Wants to Open

I’ve spent the last quarter coaching five very different clients through remarkably similar problems. These include:

- A marketing director paralysed by platform choices. 

- A sales leader drowning in quarterly targets whilst his industry shifts beneath him. 

- A newly appointed college AI lead tasked with embedding technology across departments. 

- A long-standing educator who is transitioning into a new leadership role.

- An EdTech trainer looking to develop a strong brand presence and generate leads.

Different contexts, identical trap: they were all living entirely in Box 1.

Vijay Govindarajan’s Three-Box Solution has been knocking around business literature since 2016, but I’m convinced most people misunderstand it. It’s not a sequential process. It’s not about innovation theatre. And it’s definitely not another framework to stick on a PowerPoint and promptly ignore.

It’s a diagnostic tool for strategic honesty. And when you apply it through coaching conversations, it reveals uncomfortable truths about where organisations actually invest their energy versus where they claim their priorities lie.

Let me show you what I mean.

Box 1 Feels Like Progress

The marketing director came to me with a classic presenting problem: “We need a comprehensive digital strategy. Should we focus on LinkedIn, Instagram, or TikTok? What’s our content calendar going to look like? How do we measure engagement?”

Perfectly reasonable questions. Also, completely beside the point.

We spent the first session not discussing platforms at all, but mapping where her team’s time actually went. The answer was depressing but predictable: 80% of their hours went to optimising existing campaigns, tweaking creatives, analysing metrics, and producing content for channels they’d committed to eighteen months ago.

This is Box 1 in its purest form. Managing the present. Optimising current operations. Getting incrementally better at what you’re already doing.

There’s nothing wrong with Box 1. In fact, it’s essential. You need to excel at your current business model. The problem emerges when Box 1 becomes all-consuming, when “continuous improvement” becomes a euphemism for “we’re too scared to question whether we should be doing this at all.”

Daniel Kahneman’s work on loss aversion helps explain why this happens. We overweight potential losses relative to equivalent gains. In organisational terms, this translates to: “Let’s perfect what we know works rather than risk what we don’t.” A long quote from Thinking, Fast and Slow is appropriate for context:

“Loss aversion refers to the relative strength of two motives: we are driven more strongly to avoid losses than to achieve gains. A reference point is sometimes the status quo, but it can also be a goal in the future: not achieving a goal is a loss, exceeding the goal is a gain. As we might expect from negativity dominance, the two motives are not equally powerful. The aversion to the failure of not reaching the goal is much stronger than the desire to exceed it. People often adopt short-term goals that they strive to achieve but not necessarily to exceed. They are likely to reduce their efforts when they have reached an immediate goal, with results that sometimes violate economic logic. New York cabdrivers, for example, may have a target income for the month or the year, but the goal that controls their effort is typically a daily target of earnings. Of course, the daily goal is much easier to achieve (and exceed) on some days than on others. On rainy days, a New York cab never remains free for long, and the driver quickly achieves his target; not so in pleasant weather, when cabs often waste time cruising the streets looking for fares. Economic logic implies that cabdrivers should work many hours on rainy days and treat themselves to some leisure on mild days, when they can “buy” leisure at a lower price. The logic of loss aversion suggests the opposite: drivers who have a fixed daily target will work many more hours when the pickings are slim and go home early when rain-drenched customers are begging to be taken somewhere.” Daniel Kahneman

The marketing director had fallen into what I call the excellence trap. Her team was getting phenomenally good at tactics that were becoming less relevant by the quarter. They were winning battles in a war that had shifted to different terrain.

Box 1 feels productive because it generates measurable outputs. You can track improvements. You can demonstrate value. You can show progress in quarterly reviews. It’s quantifiable, defensible, and utterly insufficient for long-term survival.

Box 2 Requires Courage Nobody Mentions

This is where Govindarajan’s framework gets interesting and where most implementations fall apart. Box 2 isn’t about innovation or creation. It’s about selective forgetting. Deliberately abandoning practices, approaches, and assumptions that served you well in the past but will constrain your future.

This is psychologically brutal.

The sales leader I mentioned? His team had built their entire approach around face-to-face relationship building, industry conferences, and lengthy consultative sales cycles. It worked magnificently for fifteen years. They were objectively excellent at it. Then COVID accelerated trends that were already emerging. Buyers expected self-service research, digital demonstrations, and faster decisions. The old playbook wasn’t just less effective; it was actively alienating potential customers who found the approach outdated.

We spent three coaching sessions just creating space for him to acknowledge this reality. Not because he was stupid or stubborn, but because letting go of what made you successful requires mourning what psychologist William Bridges calls “the psychological transition” before you can embrace the external change.

Box 2 isn’t about forgetting everything. It’s selective. Strategic. The challenge is distinguishing between timeless principles worth preserving and time-bound practices worth discarding.

For the sales leader, the principle was “deeply understanding customer problems before proposing solutions.” That remained valid. The practice of “always meeting in person to build trust” needed to be selectively forgotten. The principle could express itself through different methods.

Most organisational culture makes Box 2 particularly difficult. We prize institutional memory, respect for tradition, and learning from experience. All admirable qualities that become strategic liabilities when they prevent necessary forgetting. The great philosopher Nietzsche understood this when he wrote about the importance of forgetting in On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life. Too much historical consciousness, he argued, paralyses action. Sometimes you need to forget in order to act decisively.

“The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything from the past... will never know what happiness is.” Friedrich Nietzsche

Most coaching conversations never reach Box 2 because clients want to talk about adding new initiatives, not abandoning old ones. They want to discuss what to start doing, not what to stop doing. Box 2 requires admitting that past success doesn’t guarantee future relevance, which is cognitively and emotionally uncomfortable.

The new AI lead faced this most acutely. She inherited a departmental structure designed for a different era, staffing models built around assumptions that no longer held, and quality processes that consumed enormous energy whilst providing diminishing insight. Everyone knew the structure was problematic. Nobody wanted to be the one to dismantle what previous leaders had carefully built. Box 2 felt like betrayal.

Box 3 Isn’t What You Think

Most organisations claim to operate in Box 3. They have innovation initiatives, R&D budgets, digital transformation programmes, and strategy away-days where people throw around words like “disruption” and “blue ocean.”

This is almost always theatre.

Real Box 3 work - genuinely creating the future - requires allocating significant resources to experiments with uncertain outcomes. It means funding projects that might fail. It means senior leadership spending time on activities that won’t show results for years. It means accepting that some of your smartest people will work on things that go nowhere.

Very few organisations actually do this. They give Box 3 lip service whilst starving it of resources.

The marketing director wanted to “explore emerging platforms” but couldn’t free up anyone from the team to actually do the exploring. The sales leader wanted to “experiment with new approaches” but the team were measured on hitting quarterly numbers using existing methods. The AI lead wanted to “reimagine experiential and personalised learning” but had zero budget for anything that didn’t fit the current academic year’s operational plan.

This isn’t hypocrisy. It’s the reality of finite resources and genuine constraints. But it does mean most Box 3 talk is strategically dishonest.

Govindarajan argues that creating the future requires “planned opportunism.” You can’t predict exactly what will emerge, but you can create conditions where productive experiments happen and promising directions get resources.

For the marketing director, this meant explicitly allocating 20% of one person’s time to testing new platforms without any expectation of immediate ROI. Not as a side project squeezed into evenings, but as a legitimate part of their role with protected time. For the sales leader, it meant identifying two team members willing to experiment with entirely digital sales approaches for a subset of prospects, with success measured differently than the rest of the team. For the EdTech trainer, it meant ring-fencing a small amount of time for learning about a different operating system even if that didn’t fit existing work patterns.

None of these are revolutionary. But they’re genuine Box 3 work because they involve actual resource allocation to uncertain outcomes, not just strategic planning documents that claim to value innovation.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger distinguished between “calculative thinking” and “meditative thinking.” Calculative thinking optimises known variables. Meditative thinking questions the framework itself. Box 3 requires meditative thinking backed by calculative resource allocation. Most organisations do the inverse.

The Integration Problem Nobody Solves

Govindarajan’s framework is both genuinely useful and genuinely difficult because all three boxes must operate simultaneously. It’s not a sequence. It’s a portfolio. You need to excel at managing today’s business whilst selectively forgetting yesterday’s constraints whilst creating tomorrow’s possibilities. With the same people, the same hours in the day, and finite cognitive bandwidth.

This is where I have found that coaching becomes essential, because leaders instinctively default to Box 1. It’s measurable, urgent, and immediately satisfying. Quarterly results live in Box 1. Shareholder expectations live in Box 1. Performance reviews live in Box 1.

Box 2 and Box 3 require deliberate, protected attention. Without structured reflection, they get perpetually deferred.

In coaching sessions, I use what I call the “allocation audit.” Not what you say you prioritise, but where time and money actually go. It’s uncomfortable but clarifying.

The marketing director discovered that despite claiming digital transformation was a strategic priority, her team allocated 85% of time to Box 1, 12% to firefighting, and 3% to anything resembling Box 2 or Box 3. Once we made this visible, the conversation shifted from “what should our strategy be?” to “what are we willing to stop doing to make room for it?”

The sales leader realised he was personally spending zero hours per month on Box 3 thinking. Not zero percent. Zero hours. Everything was either optimising current approaches or dealing with immediate customer issues. No wonder he felt reactive rather than strategic.

The educator-becoming-leader found that her team meetings consumed four hours monthly reviewing operational metrics (Box 1), ninety minutes discussing problems with current systems (frustrated Box 1), and essentially no time on either Box 2 or Box 3. Their agenda structure guaranteed they’d never allocate attention to creating the future. It’s not that people lack good intentions. The structure of their days, meetings, and accountability systems makes certain activities nearly impossible regardless of intention.

Coaching Through the Boxes

When I work with clients on strategic thinking, the Three-Box framework provides a diagnostic before it provides a prescription. The questions that unlock insight are:

• Where does your actual time go across the three boxes? Not aspirationally, but literally tracking hours over the past month.
• What are you refusing to forget? What past approaches, structures, or assumptions are you protecting even though they constrain your future?
• What would genuinely creating the future require? Not what sounds good in a strategy document, but what actual resources would need redirecting?

These aren’t comfortable questions. The marketing director had to confront the reality that her “digital transformation initiative” was actually just optimising existing digital channels. Real transformation would require abandoning some of those channels entirely to free up capacity for experimentation.

The EdTech trainer has to admit that they were succeeding despite their lead generation approach, not because of it. They’d already selectively forgotten the old playbook but were doing it covertly because the official metrics still rewarded Box 1 behaviour. 

The AI lead faced the hardest conversation: explaining to long-serving staff that structures they’d built with genuine care and commitment now needed fundamental rethinking. Box 2 conversations feel like invalidating people’s contributions. They’re not, but they feel that way.

Again, Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset becomes crucial here. The ability to see past approaches as “what worked then” rather than “what defines us” creates space for Box 2 thinking without threatening identity. But Dweck’s framework needs a strategic dimension she doesn’t explicitly address. It’s not just about individual learning but organisational unlearning. Can we maintain respect for what got us here whilst abandoning what will prevent us getting there? 

The Resource Allocation Truth

Govindarajan’s most provocative claim is that leaders should allocate resources roughly 70% to Box 1, 20% to Box 2, and 10% to Box 3. These aren’t rigid prescriptions, but they’re shockingly different from how most organisations actually operate.

Most default closer to 95% Box 1, 5% talking about Box 2 and Box 3, 0% actually doing them.

The allocation question forces strategic honesty. If creating the future genuinely mattered, what would you stop funding? Which current initiatives would you deliberately starve to feed experimentation?

For the marketing director, this meant acknowledging that they couldn’t maintain their current content volume across all platforms whilst also genuinely exploring new ones. Something had to give. Box 3 doesn’t happen in spare time; it happens instead of something else. For the sales leader, it meant accepting that if two people were genuinely experimenting with new approaches, they couldn’t also be hitting the same quarterly targets as everyone else. The metrics needed to reflect the different game they were playing. For the educator-becoming-leader, it meant getting explicit about which operational practices they need to ditch in order to become more strategic. Not “we’ll find efficiencies.” Not “we’ll do more with less.” Actual reallocation.

These are leadership decisions, not coaching decisions. But coaching creates the space for honest conversation about them.

As an economist, Vijay Govindarajan himself notes that most organisations fail at innovation not because they lack ideas, but because they lack the discipline to allocate resources against the gravitational pull of the present.

“The innovator’s job cannot be to deliver a proven result; it must be to discover what is possible, that is, to learn, by converting assumptions into knowledge as quickly and inexpensively as possible.” Vijay Govindarajan

This captures the essence of Box 3. You’re not investing in guaranteed outcomes. You’re investing in learning what might be possible.

The Meeting Test

I’ve developed a simple diagnostic that reveals whether an organisation genuinely operates across all three boxes: audit your meetings.

Leadership team meetings are where resource allocation actually happens, where trade-offs get made, where attention gets directed. If your regular meetings never discuss what to selectively forget or how to create the future, you don’t actually operate in those boxes regardless of your strategy documents. The AI lead’s revelation came when we analysed three months of their team agendas. Every item fit into one of three categories: reviewing current performance, solving current problems, or planning current activities. Not a single agenda item in twelve weeks addressed Box 2 or Box 3. We restructured their meeting rhythm. Monthly operational reviews stayed focused on Box 1. But they added quarterly sessions specifically structured around Box 2 questions (what should we selectively forget?) and Box 3 questions (what experiments should we resource?).

The first Box 2 session was painful. Suggesting that any current practice should be abandoned felt like criticism of colleagues who’d designed those practices. It took explicit framing that this wasn’t about past decisions being wrong, but about present conditions being different.

The first Box 3 session was scattered. Without the discipline of optimising current operations, the conversation sprawled across dozens of possibilities without landing anywhere concrete. They needed to learn how to have productive conversations about uncertain futures.

But by the third quarter, the rhythm started working. They’d identified three practices to selectively forget, redirected those resources to two genuine experiments, and maintained their operational performance. Not revolutionary change, but actual movement across all three boxes.

What Coaching Can and Cannot Do

Coaching can create space for honest reflection about resource allocation. It can surface the gap between espoused strategy and actual behaviour. It can help leaders recognise which box they’re trapped in. Coaching cannot override organisational structures that reward Box 1 thinking exclusively. It cannot manufacture resources that don’t exist. It cannot make Box 2 conversations emotionally comfortable.

None of the people I am working with have achieved perfection. Govindarajan’s framework doesn’t promise perfection. It promises strategic honesty about the inherent tension between managing today, abandoning yesterday, and creating tomorrow.

The ancient Greek concept of kairos captures something relevant here (and something I don’t apologise for repeating from other articles). Not chronological time (chronos), but the right moment for action. Box 1 operates in chronos - continuous, measurable, sequential. Boxes 2 and 3 require sensitivity to kairos - the recognition that certain moments demand different thinking.

Coaching helps leaders develop that sensitivity. To notice when they’re optimising when they should be forgetting. To recognise when they’re planning when they should be experimenting. To see when Box 1 excellence has become Box 3 paralysis.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

Most organisations worship at the altar of Box 1. They optimise, measure, improve, and incrementally enhance what they’re already doing. They get demonstrably better at approaches that are becoming steadily less relevant. They know this, intellectually. But knowing isn’t the same as acting.

Box 2 requires letting go of what made you successful. Box 3 requires investing in what might make you successful. Neither provides the comfortable certainty of Box 1.

Govindarajan’s framework doesn’t solve this dilemma. It names it. And in naming it, creates the possibility of different choices.

The marketing director now asks “what platform should we abandon?” before asking “what platform should we add?” The sales leader now protects time for experimentation even when quarterly pressure mounts. The AI lead now budgets time for uncertainty. The EdTech trainer now plays with different tools that what she was used to. The educator-becoming-leader is working from home one day per week so as not to get bogged down in the weeds of operations.

Small shifts. But shifts nonetheless.

Because here’s the truth nobody wants to hear: if you’re only operating in Box 1, you’re not building for the future. You’re just getting very good at the past. And in a world that keeps shifting beneath us, excellence at yesterday’s game is tomorrow’s obituary.

Key Takeaways

‍Audit where time actually goes. Not where you claim it goes or where you’d like it to go. Literally track how many hours this month went to managing the present, selectively forgetting the past, and creating the future. The numbers will be uncomfortable.

Name what needs forgetting. Box 2 doesn’t happen through vague talk about “staying nimble.” It requires explicitly identifying practices, structures, or assumptions to abandon. Make a list. Pick one. Actually stop doing it.

‍Protect resources for uncertainty. Box 3 doesn’t happen in spare time. Allocate actual budget, actual people, actual hours to experiments with unknown outcomes. If everything must prove ROI, you’re not really doing Box 3.

Change the meeting rhythm. Add explicit Box 2 and Box 3 sessions to your regular cadence. If your leadership meetings only discuss current operations, you’re guaranteeing strategic stagnation. Elon Musk has an interesting take on meetings. Look it up if you’re curious!

Measure differently across boxes. Box 1 succeeds through optimisation metrics. Box 3 succeeds through learning metrics. Applying Box 1 measurements to Box 3 work kills experimentation before it starts.

Make peace with discomfort. Box 2 conversations feel like betraying past success. Box 3 conversations feel like wasting resources on uncertainty. This discomfort is a feature, not a bug.

Start small, start now. You don’t need to transform your entire organisation overnight. Take 10% of one person’s time, allocate it explicitly to Box 3, protect it fiercely, and see what happens. Real allocation beats strategic planning every time.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Three boxes won’t solve every problem in your organisation but it might help you to pick your head up and see things beyond what you have always done. Perhaps that engineering of Box 1, the elimination of Box 2 and experimentation of Box 3 is just what you need to remain agile and in business!