‘A podcast by Hiran de Silva, narrated by Charlie.’
After sharing some thoughts on creative thinking on LinkedIn, I was struck by the responses I received. It made me question whether we need creative thinking just to understand what creative thinking truly is. It’s a bit ironic, but stay with me.
The topic I wanted to raise was the nature of creative thinking, especially as it relates to problem-solving in business environments. Often, we refer to it as “thinking outside the box,” but in business, strategic thinking is at the heart of problem-solving, and this tends to focus on issues within business processes and operations—not within the confines of a spreadsheet.
However, to my surprise, many of the comments I received interpreted creative thinking with Excel as doing something creative with Excel, rather than thinking creatively about the problem itself and developing the most appropriate solution. This led me to realize that there’s a distinction between creative thinking inside the box and creative thinking outside the box. So, simply referring to all creative thinking as “thinking outside the box” isn’t enough. It seems we need to be more specific about the type of creativity we’re discussing.
Let me illustrate this with a metaphor:
Imagine you’re in a classroom full of kids, and you hand them paintbrushes, telling them to “do something creative with the paintbrushes.” You leave the room, and when you return, you find that the kids have beautifully decorated the paintbrushes themselves. They’re colorful and vibrant, perhaps more beautifully painted than any brush you’ve ever seen. But you were expecting the kids to use the paintbrushes to create a painting, not paint the brushes themselves.
The kids followed your instruction literally—they did something creative inside the box—but they didn’t go beyond that to create something outside the box. This is the same distinction I want to make when we talk about creativity in problem-solving.
In the world of Excel, we often see the same misunderstanding. If you look at the vast amount of Excel-related content on social media—YouTube tutorials, blog posts, training courses—you’ll see a lot of clever techniques and demonstrations. People are doing impressive things with Excel. But often, this is where the creativity stops. These demonstrations focus on showing off the tool itself rather than solving the broader, real-world business problems that Excel is meant to address.
This is a crucial distinction. It’s the difference between painting a paintbrush and using a paintbrush to create a painting.
Let’s take a more practical example: I’ve posted about the “Employee of the Week” demonstration using dynamic array formulas. A dynamic array expert can show you, step by step, how to accomplish a task within a spreadsheet using dynamic arrays. But when you expand the problem to a larger, more collaborative environment, the technique often falls short. Why? Because the problem exists outside the spreadsheet, in the larger business process that involves multiple people, systems, and workflows. Thinking inside the box—even if you’re very clever with dynamic array formulas—won’t solve the problem at scale.
To succeed in an enterprise environment, you need to think beyond the spreadsheet. You need to see the bigger picture, to understand the full scope of the business process. In many cases, the tool you’re using within Excel won’t be enough, no matter how skillfully you wield it. You need scalable, adaptable solutions that account for the entire environment where the problem exists.
Here’s the thing: Excel is already capable of addressing these larger, more complex problems. So, my question is, why is the conversation still focused almost entirely on the narrow, in-the-box functionality of Excel, when the tool itself has the ability to tackle problems on a much larger scale?
This leads me to wonder: is the content being created around Excel driven by real-world problems that need solving, or is it more about showcasing clever uses of Excel’s features? Are we painting the paintbrush instead of creating the painting?
The sheer volume of content focused on limited, workbook-specific solutions is staggering. It makes me question whether the creators of this content are addressing real-world needs, or if they’re stuck in a fantasy where they showcase what’s possible inside the box, without acknowledging that most real problems exist outside of it.
Creative thinking, particularly in the business world, requires us to go beyond the tools we use. It’s about understanding the broader context and applying strategic thought to solve real, meaningful problems. And that, I believe, is where the real creativity lies.
This is a podcast by Hiran de Silva, narrated by Charlie.
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