Something that I have done for many years is to carry out strategic planning sessions for companies.

These sometimes last a couple of hours, but at other times they last for three days. Even three days usually turns out not to be enough.

In doing this, I have been to a huge spread of companies, ranging from cement plants and food canning plants to mines, aircraft factories, banks and more. I have even ended up in Zambia, conducting a strategy session for the Zambian central bank, the Bank of Zambia. The bank’s governor took an entire game lodge for a week, and he and over 50 bank staff filled it. I really enjoyed staying there and interacting with those fellows. They could not have been more friendly and cooperative.

I like, ideally, to run such a session away from head office. If it is possible, staying somewhere overnight is even better. The reason is that people move into a different frame of mind when they are out of the office.

If you ask a group to ‘think outside the box’ but you are inside the box of their head office boardroom, the boardroom box tends to press inward on people’s thoughts. If you are somewhere off site, it is much easier to get people to unwind and to start to think in a different way. If one can stay over and adjourn to the pub in the evening, then even better. I have often found that, in the pub, people come up with great ideas that they think are too way out to mention during the serious daytime sessions.

Way-out ideas are good. Even if an idea is incredibly way out, it can serve the purpose of stimulating new lines of thought. Some of the most way-out ideas ever came from Albert Einstein. A century ago, he said that time is not constant; it changes, depending on how fast you travel. So, if you travel very fast in a spacecraft, you age at a slower rate. He said that it was possible for an older brother to end up being younger than his younger brother, if the older brother travelled fast enough. The establishment of the day said that Einstein was nuts, but it turned out that he was right.

Einstein came up with an impossible-looking equation that predicted that one could get massive nuclear energy out of atoms. He was right with that too, but almost nobody believed him at the time. Today, we have nuclear reactors, thanks to Einstein’s crazy thoughts.

In companies, quite often, problems that appear to be very simple can have rather complex answers. Or, perhaps, I should rather say that the pathways to the answers can be more complex than they may first appear.

In one case I was involved with, a factory sold directly to buyers, both private and business. The factory had a constant stream of buyers queuing up well into the night. There were large trucks which loaded thousands of items and also private guys who came to buy in dozens. The company wanted to improve loading, so it asked me how that could be achieved. That was one of a number of issues on the strategic session agenda.

One night, what happened was that there were about a dozen very big trucks lining up to buy thousands of items. Then a guy in a little bakkie arrived to get a few items. He lined up in the queue for a while before he figured that he could just drive in front of the queue and get his dozen because it would take only a couple of minutes to load him up. So, he pulled out and overtook nearly all the big trucks. But, as he got near the front, a truck driver jumped out with a gun and held it to the head of the bakkie driver, yelling that he was jumping the queue. Security guys arrived. The bakkie driver argued that his queue jumping did not matter because he was going to be only a few minutes. The truck driver asked who was the more important person to the factory owners; he, who was buying thousands of items, or the bakkie driver, who wanted only a dozen. He argued that important people went first.

So, the simple logic to the bakkie driver was not the same outlook to the truck driver. The solution took a lot more thought than one would first imagine.

Having an outside person carry out such strategic planning sessions is often a good idea, for a number of reasons. The outsider can ask apparently silly questions that may have more depth than they first appear. The outsider can pose difficult questions. On one occasion, two sons of the owner and CEO of a company asked me to get their father to step down. He had started the company with half a dozen employees, but the company had grown to hundreds of employees. The CEO was still acting in small-company mode in that he was issuing orders directly to people and, quite frequently, overriding company policy. He was breaking company rules and greatly messing things up, but he could not see that. I got him to stand down. I have had to do that more than once.

Getting a management group to think outside the box is much more difficult than it may first appear. Some free-form mental exercise is really important.