I came across the term “tokenmaxxing” the other day. The idea is to treat the number of AI tokens somebody consumes as evidence of productivity.
At first I thought it had to be a joke dreamed up by someone trying to generate views. It turns out it is quite real. For a moment I wondered whether the AI companies had invented it themselves. It would certainly be good for token sales. But no conspiracy is required. A bad metric is enough.
Tokens measure consumption. They do not tell you whether anything useful happened. Counting them as productivity is activity dressed up as outcome. It is throwing things at the wall and rewarding whoever throws the most.
That led me back to another management favourite: thinking outside the box. We repeat the phrase so often that it has become a mantra rather than an instruction. Tokenmaxxing is a useful reminder that something does not become intelligent merely because it is novel or excessive.
But what is the box?
If we define it as our area of competence—our knowledge of the work, its constraints, its failure modes, and the people affected by it—then thinking outside the box in a positive sense means making that box bigger. It means connecting genuine expertise to new ideas, tools, and possibilities.
That only works if you understand what is already inside.
What if you do not yet understand your own box? What if you do not know how the work really happens, where it breaks, or why experienced people make the decisions they do? What exactly are you thinking outside of? In that situation, “outside-the-box thinking” can become a substitute for learning the job.
I have met plenty of supervisors and operational managers who know their part of a business in extraordinary detail. They know where the work jams, where the official process diverges from reality, which shortcuts are dangerous, and which apparently small problem is costing everyone hours. These are prime candidates for expanding the box.
Those are the people I want to tell: I will invest in you. I will help you learn how to use AI inside your area of expertise—not to replace what you know, but to extend what you can do with it. Once they get the hang of it, step aside and watch them run.
Unfortunately, I have also met CXOs whose appetite for thinking outside the box is far greater than their appetite for understanding what is inside it. AI gives them the ideal shortcut. It can be mandated, announced, purchased, and implemented by fiat. Everybody is told to transform, and outcomes are expected to appear.
Three months later, somebody is asking how the organisation managed to spend, say, $250,000 on API tokens and get bupkis in return.
That is not thinking outside the box. It is trying to skip the box.
AI is most useful when it gives leverage to real competence. Before asking an organisation to think outside the box, find the people who genuinely understand what is happening inside it. Invest in them first. Help them enlarge the box.
Then watch them run with it.
Just a thought.