The box that taught us to zoom out: Optimization lessons from container shipping

A few weekends ago, during the summer holiday, my wife and I had a little romantic getaway in Amsterdam. As hotels were a bit pricey in the city center, we decided to take a hotel in the harbor instead. On our walk back to the hotel one evening, I saw a container ship float by and I had one of my moments of childlike curiosity: “How did we end up using containers for shipping?”

As it turns out… “optimization” is a big part of the answer to that question.

# Old days of shipping

Before shipping containers became a thing, shipping looked a lot different. Every item was shipped separately and stored on deck or in the cargo hold. While sometimes kegs or crates were used to keep items together, there was no single uniform shape.

In those days, there were also *optimization experts* called “stevedores”. Stevedores were responsible for loading and unloading cargo from boats. This wasn’t just a very physically intense job, but also one which required good insights into how to load the boat as efficiently as possible.

In essence, stevedores were solving giant 3D jigsaw puzzles to fill the boat to the max, except in this case, the puzzle pieces were all odd shapes, and the boat might capsize if they fail to balance the weight correctly.

Parents who go with their young children on a holiday know exactly what that puzzle game feels like. Minus the capsizing of course! 😊

Not only was this a difficult and dangerous job, it was also very slow. Every item had to be loaded and unloaded individually which sometimes caused them to spend more time docked than actually traveling at sea. It wasn’t much better for the rest of the logistics either, as the same inefficiencies were also present when transporting the goods by train or truck.

Despite all that, it felt “optimized” at that time, there just seemed to be no better way to transport items across the world. Especially not by adding big square boxes to the mix! That seemed like an awful idea. A square metal box couldn’t possibly compare to the artistry of a skilled stevedore who could wedge a piano next to a barrel of whiskey and three sacks of potatoes! Or could it?

# Containers and throughput

What initially looked like inefficiency turned out to be revolutionary. After some early examples of containers failing to gain widespread adoption, Malcolm McLean, a US trucking entrepreneur dubbed the ‘father of containers’, came up with a prototype container in the 1950s which could be used across boats, trains, and trucks.

While the idea sounds simple, its innovation was because of its holistic approach. Where previously the focus was on *optimizing what can be loaded on a boat*, that focus shifted to *optimizing the throughput of goods.* From the narrow view of getting better at transporting items by boat to the holistic view of *transporting items as best as possible from origin to destination.*

At least initially, containers mainly reduced the transfer time between modes of transport. It wasn’t until some time later that those modes of transport began optimizing for transporting as many containers as they could in a single go, making transporting goods faster than ever before.

# Optimization lessons contained in containers

The history of containers holds a simple truth about optimization: you rarely fix everything at once. In shipping, containers didn’t eliminate the stevedore’s Tetris problem, they just shrank it. Instead of balancing pianos with whiskey barrels and potato sacks on a whole ship, the challenge became fitting goods neatly into a 40-foot steel rectangle. Similar puzzle, smaller board.

And that was enough to change the world. By zooming out from “how do we cram more onto a single boat?” to “how do we move goods from origin to destination faster?”, containers unlocked opportunities across the entire supply chain.

The same applies today. You may not be able to optimize every process in your organization at once. But even tackling a small segment, a schedule, a route, a workflow, can free up time and resources that ripple outward in unexpected ways.

In the end, real innovation happens when we stop obsessing over micro-efficiencies and allow human ingenuity to focus on the bigger picture. Optimization isn’t about doing the same thing better, it’s about creating space for us to ask better questions.