Free Range Chicken Thinking

Many people will have a blank stare when you tell them you subscribe to Free Range Chicken Thinking. They might even look at you and laugh and say “You’re crazy! I love how you are creative”. Free Range Chicken Thinking boils down to a way to interact with life in general. Any person, organization or entity can do it. You must simply let go of “they way it has always been done”, and start thinking like a Free Range Chicken.

A Free Range Chicken is no different than any other chicken, with one main exception. In a free range environment, the chicken has no constraints and is able to freely make its own choices. Those choices must be made wisely due to the fact that many more obstacles exist, but the reward is a free life with many less limitations. The free range method was widely used until the invention of barbed and/or chicken wire. Farmers now use this method of containment as a way of helping keep their livestock on a certain diet, to keep them safe from wild animals and to help mitigate risk of disease.

In a creative or business environment, being contained or restricted is detrimental to future growth as an entity or individual. As cultural boundaries become more and more prevalent it is easy to fall into the practice of being constrained by others’ limitations. Just because some one tells you that you can’t take a thought further, because it will not work in their mind, does not mean it will not work. It does not give them the right to stop your ideas from moving forward. Stopping those ideas is the methodology behind putting up fences, to keep things (chickens or your creative thoughts) contained.

The Free Range Chicken lives a completely different life. It does not know that a river exists in its path to find fresh water. It gets thirsty, and instinctively knows it must find water to survive. Until the farmer constrained the chicken, the chicken had to use its own resources to find water, and survive. And it did. Now that society has set up borders and fences around ideas, people know that “water” will be provided. They no longer use their creativity and problem solving skills to find the “water”. Fences and boundaries were designed to keep assets safe but they also create boundaries on creativity and survival. This fenced way of life is detrimental, but it is still the accepted method in this country.

Free Range Chicken Thinking is a way to make these boundaries disappear. If you have no limitations, and no one telling you that your method will not work, great freedom ensues. Granted, some things will not work and many things might never gain traction, but more often, you will find creative and profitable solutions. You must not be afraid that you will not find the “water”, because that search is instinctive.

Everyday in corporate America, workers are told that they must use the accepted channels, and do things the way the were taught. There are consequences if they do not stay nicely in their pen. We call this process “DeBeaking”. DeBeaking is used in poultry farming to help reduce the cannibalism of the chickens in tightly confined areas. The process of trimming the beak helps improve the livability of the chickens but there is certainly pain involved.

We see this in many aspects of business today. When individuals are “DeBeaked” they are being stopped from individual growth. Perhaps their boss thinks that they will cannibalize the business, a thought process, or “the way we have always done it”. A functional, free range chicken can be scary for other chickens in the pen, so they are “DeBeaked” quickly and efficiently.

A Free Range Chicken should never be DeBeaked as they must use what ever means necessary to survive. It is also interesting to note that there is no need to DeBeak a free range chicken, as they feel no need to cannibalize their fellow chickens. In a free range environment the use of DeBeaking is obsolete because ideas should never be “cut off”.

As you can see Free Range Chicken Thinking is a totally different way of doing things. It is more challenging, and you may get funny looks from those around you. But in the end, what you create will be much more authentic and attention getting.

Listen to the guys from Pixelspace discuss Free Range Chicken Thinking on The Mesh, a local media online network, or visit their Facebook Page.