Frank Lloyd Wright (I’ll refer to him later as FLoW), one of the most prominent architects of the first half of the 20th century, admitted that his professional work was influenced significantly by playing with the so-called Froebel Gifts during his childhood. These toys, developed by German educationalist Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel, became popularly known as Froebel’s blocks.

Wright spent a lot of time as a child with these educational, geometric blocks, which could be assembled in various combinations to form three-dimensional compositions, and one can imagine that Wright used them to simulate architectural designs well before creating habitat structures became his life’s work. Fröbel would have been proud — he was an advocate of the importance of free play in childhood.

Here’s what I call the Wright-Fröbel Paradox:

[playful mindset] + [structured tools] = revolutionary product

Why a paradox? When it comes to innovation, most people don’t associate structure with experimentation. Consider the phrase “think out-of-the-box” – it encourages people to get out of a structure in order to free their mind. That phrase has certainly been helpful for breaking the keep-the-status-quo inertia that traps so many of us, but it implies not only forgetting what you already know, but also the exclusion of structure. You need both the open mindset and the structure to get the most from your experimentation. In other words, don’t just think “out of” the box…think in the box, on the box, include the other boxes and geometric shapes that make up your domain in business – and do it all systematically.

I put mindset first because if you’re not open to a new, unexpected outcome, then you’re not likely to find one through experimentation. Your mind will automatically filter out what it doesn’t expect or doesn’t want to observe unless you prepare it to do otherwise. Once you have an open mindset, you can apply discipline to your exploration in the form of designed experiments. As any statistician worth his/her salt can tell you, a disciplined approach to experimentation allows you to extract the effects of random factors you can’t control, and hone in on [estimates of] the real impact of the factors you’re evaluating on your desired outcome(s).

Here’s my challenge: Are you budgeting time and money for playing with the Froebel’s blocks of your business? Do you have the FLoW mindset necessary to get something insightful out of your compositions?