Here is an excerpt from an article written by Peter Bregman for the Harvard Business Review blog. To read the complete article, check out other articles and resources, and/or sign up for a free subscription to Harvard Business Review’s Daily Alerts, please click here.

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I was stuck. Not in the “I have writer’s block” or “What next action should I take?” kind of way, but in the literal sense. I was riding an ATV (All Terrain Vehicle), which looks like a motorcycle but with four huge, balloon-like nubby tires, and I was stuck in mud, with my two rear wheels spinning hopelessly in the glop.

What surprised me is that my two front wheels were solidly planted on dry land, just sitting there, motionless and unhelpful.

I looked ahead at my friend Joseph who had made it through the mud with ease on his ATV and who owned the one I was on.

“Hey Joseph,” I yelled over the roar of the motors, “are ATVs only two-wheel drive?”

“Yours is.” He laughed. “Most were, until a few years ago.”

That struck me as more than odd. I mean, even my minivan is four-wheel drive. Why would anyone make an All-Terrain Vehicle — whose main purpose is to travel through rocky, muddy, slippery woods — that’s only two-wheel drive?

The answer, I discovered, is simple yet profound: ATVs evolved from motorcycles, and motorcycles are powered solely by their rear wheels.

If the ATV had been derived from a Jeep — a scaled down, minimalist, sit-on-top version of a Jeep — there’s no question the first one out the door would have been four-wheel drive. And far more suited to the task of an ATV.

Which got me thinking: if you want to be original — to really think out of the box — you might be better off starting from a different box than you’re in.

But that’s easier said then done: how can we escape the confines of our own history?

Michael Newcombe is the general manager of the Four Seasons in Dallas. I wrote about him in The Real Secret of Thoroughly Excellent Companies. The recession has hit the hospitality industry hard since I wrote that post and yet, when I stayed at the hotel recently, I was pleasantly surprised by how little the downturn seemed to affect the hotel’s atmosphere. The quality of everything was impeccable, the staff was warm, and morale seemed high.

So I sat down with Michael again, this time to discuss how he’s managed to keep morale high in the midst of the downturn. What I learned was a lesson in out-of-the-box thinking.

In the hotel business, jobs are specialized: maids clean the rooms, golf attendants prepare the golf carts, and gardeners do the landscaping. Historically, in a downturn, you cut each of those positions to the minimum necessary to keep things moving at normal demand.

But demand is rarely normal. During a golf tournament, you need more golf staff; during a corporate event, you need more dining staff. When there’s a spike, the skeleton staff in a particular area get overworked, and performance, as well as morale, suffers.

Entering this downturn, there were two things that were most important to Michael and his executive committee: remaining fiscally responsible and maintaining a high-quality guest experience. So their goal was to reduce staffing costs while keeping morale high — an almost impossible combination. Almost.

That’s where they got creative. Rather than following history, they started from their goal and worked backwards, questioning everything else.

Which is how Michael and his executive committee decided to ignore the silos. They focused on retaining their highest performing core staff — the ones who’d been with the hotel for 15 to 20 years — no matter what department they were in. That left gaps in certain departments. Then, they aggressively cross-trained their core staff. The people in laundry learned to clean golf carts. Housekeeping learned to landscape. And room service learned how to work in the restaurant.

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Peter Bregman speaks, writes, and consults on leadership. He is the CEO of Bregman Partners, Inc., a global management consulting firm, and the author of Point B: A Short Guide To Leading a Big Change. Sign up to receive an email when he posts.