In-The-Box Thinking is the New Framework for Leadership, Box Clever

Guest post by Rachel Johnson, who is CEO of PiXL (Partners in Excellence) and author of Box Clever, shortlisted for Business Book of the Year 2026.

I have a confession to make. I am obsessed with quadrants. Not the polite, dip-in-and-out kind of obsession, but the sort where you start seeing four-box grids everywhere you look. It is a niche thing to be fascinated by, I know. But over the years, working with leaders across thousands of schools and organisations, I have come to believe that this simple shape holds one of the most useful tools we have for making sense of leadership right now.

How to Box Clever

For most of the last decade, “thinking outside the box” has been the default advice for anyone trying to lead well. Be disruptive. Be innovative. Break the rules. It is a nice idea, and sometimes it is exactly right. But it also assumes the box itself is the problem, when actually, most leaders I meet are not short of ideas. They are short of a way to work out where they currently stand, and what to do about it. That is where in-the-box thinking comes in.

A quadrant takes two ideas and places them against each other, creating four positions you can see and understand at a glance. That is it. No complicated model, no fifty-slide framework. Just two axes and four boxes, and suddenly something that felt abstract and slippery becomes something you can point to and say, “that is where I am, and that is where I want to be.”

I trace this obsession back further than I would like to admit. As a thirteen year old, I remember sitting through assembly after assembly about bullying, or litter, or crime, and thinking, fine, but what am I actually meant to do about it now? I have always loved big ideas, but if a big idea does not leave me with something to do, I get restless. Where am I? Where do I want to be? How do I get there? What do I need to change? Those questions have shaped how I think about leadership ever since, and quadrants are the portal I keep coming back to answer them.

This matters more than ever for anyone leading a team or a company today. Leadership is rarely about knowing what good looks like in theory. It is about diagnosing where you actually are, right now, in this context, with this team, and deciding whether that is where you need to be. That is not a fixed destination. It changes as we change, and as our circumstances change. Deliberate leadership means constantly asking “is this where I need to be right now?”, rather than drifting on autopilot.

The title of my book, Box Clever, plays on the old definition of the phrase, which is about being clever enough to get an advantage over other people. I want no part of that half of the definition. The leadership I am interested in is about giving an advantage to ourselves and to the people we lead. It is about working out what to dial up and what to dial down, depending on where we find ourselves, so that everyone benefits, not just the person holding the framework.

None of this means a box can ever fully capture a person. You are more complex than four labelled corners will ever allow, and that is worth remembering that every time you use one. The value is not in being filed neatly away. It is in the conversation a quadrant starts, the debate it provokes in your own head, and the small, deliberate change it might nudge you towards next.

So the next time someone tells you to think outside the box, my advice is simple. Get back in it first. Work out exactly where you are standing. Only then will you know which direction is actually worth breaking out towards.

Rachel Johnson is CEO of PiXL (Partners in Excellence) and author of Box Clever, shortlisted for Business Book of the Year 2026.

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