Depending on how your brain is wired, challenges before us are either impossible or impossibly delicious. Either way, you’re reacting to context and direction. I can do that is a close cousin to No chance in hell I could do that. They’re related by the purpose within the context. You’ll either find aspiration, and express yourself successfully, or you’ll find constraints and bail.

Take this thing. It’s made of brass. You buzz your lips against its opening like you’re a child making a farting sound. Fairly tricky to do, you can’t just blow. Do it right, and you’ll create a vibration in the bent tube, which makes a sound that can be used in the creation of music.

Context and direction give us purpose to achieve. As creative-mind types, our right brain-directed worldview demands that we find new ways of thinking about things. Make a difference with new approaches. Break rules. Challenge.

The trumpet has limitations. It has a certain bore to its tubes that produce a certain texture to the sound, different from other things like it. We’re using this mash of tubes because its texture is sexier than our other options. You can change the flex in your lips, and that changes the overtones coming out of it. (Makes the whole situation sexier even.)

It has three valves which, when depressed, lengthen the tubes a bit, thus deepening the sound, just the opposite of plucking a rubber band. Once you do the math, you can use the valves in combination to create all twelve notes on the western musical scale. The first valve lowers the pitch one-step down on the scale, the second valve one-half, and the third by one-and-a-half. Not all that easy to get the hang of.

So you can create a fair amount of different sounds, notes, and tones. But you’re limited to around three octaves (sing “do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti-do,” then sing it again higher, then again higher – you’ll get pretty close to a feeling of three octaves).

Without clear boundaries, like that which the trumpet gives us, we improvise aimlessly. React to any opportunity that presents itself. Poorly shuffle along too many initiatives. Ineffectively manage people by providing unclear expectations.

Or write out-of-brand copy because we didn’t have a brand platform. Launch ineffective media campaigns because the budget didn’t allow for appropriate frequency. Pitch the wrong story to the wrong reporter and ruin a relationship. Generate conversations on the social web and do nothing with the feedback. Build and attract equally aimless groups and tribes who won’t move our efforts forward.

We need boxes. The boxes we create for ourselves, our work, and our brands provide context and purpose. There’s nothing wrong with thinking inside them. In fact, it creates greatness. Remarkability.

Now say I give you some music. It has a prescribed melody. You’ll play that, in tight coordination with a piano player who’ll play a progression of chords. The melody isn’t just any grouping of notes – the composer wrote the melody to agree with the chords in much the same way a rhyming poem has agreement in its words. When a note doesn’t agree, anyone listening will notice it like Roses are red/violets are blue/I can play the trumpet/and so can Mitch.

After you play the melody once through, you’ll improvise a new one in agreement with the same chords. The rules for this are clear: (1) The notes you play must agree with the chords. (2) You only have a certain amount of them at your disposal due to the limitations of the instrument. (3) You only have a certain amount of time, since the song is chugging along whether you’re on board with it or not. (4) The notes must be organized in some semblance of musicality, otherwise your output will be boring and we might as well just listen to the written melody again.

I think our challenge as creative minds is to build boxes so that they embrace and align the values of as many people as possible who’ll be thinking, working, and engaging inside them. Valuing individual expression by way of realizing that there is no message control, and that culture (that is, the degree to which we believe in the box as it’s been prescribed) eats strategy for lunch.

The great jazz drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts said “great rhythm section players are those able to deliver their personal expression in conjunction with a high level of performance of their prime function.” A jazz musician talking about a box within which to express? Oh no you just didn’t.

The great business leader Jim Collins said “Disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and who take disciplined action — operating with freedom within a framework of responsibilities — this is the cornerstone of a culture that creates greatness” (emphasis mine). A business guy recognizing the need for individual expression? Jump back.

Miles Davis picked up a trumpet one day. He said he played it because of all the instruments it sounded most like a human voice. He improvised some of the most enduring melodies over structured forms that we will ever know. He was a key driver of 20th century music innovation, leading the creation of at least five different musical categories. I’d argue he was always inside a box. But when he felt he could do no more within it, he created a new one. And another one. And another.

Box is strategy. Use it.

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Aaron Templer (AT) is a free agent mashing up leadership, branding,  strategy, marketing, and communications. A seemingly dichotic background (a technical trainer at a graphic design software company,  a marcom director at a business school, a Berklee College of Music student with an MBA) is driving his interest in better understanding the importance and balance between right- and left-directed brains. Connect with him on Twitter: @aarontempler.

Tagged in: expectations, miles davis, strategy, the box, trumpet