Thinking outside the box
Thinking outside the box is a metaphor that means to think differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective. This phrase often refers to novel or creative thinking. The term is thought to derive from management consultants in the 1970s and 1980s challenging their clients to solve the "nine dots" puzzle, whose solution requires some lateral thinking. This phrase can also be found commonly in dance, as encouragement to move creatively, beyond simple, geometric box steps and their basic variations, to literally step outside the box into more complex patterns of expression.
The catchphrase, is widely used in business environments, especially by management consultants and executive coaches, and has been referenced in a number of advertising slogans. To think outside the box is to look further and to try not thinking of the obvious things, but to try thinking of the things beyond them or even other than them.
Analogy
A simplified definition for paradigm is a habit of reasoning or a conceptual framework.A simplified analogy is "the box" in the commonly used phrase "thinking outside the box". What is encompassed by the words "inside the box" is analogous with the current, and often unnoticed, assumptions about a situation. Creative thinking acknowledges and rejects the accepted paradigm to come up with new ideas.
Nine dots puzzle
The notion of something outside a perceived "box" is related to a traditional topographical puzzle called the nine dots puzzle.The origins of the phrase "thinking outside the box" are obscure; but it was popularized in part because of a nine-dot puzzle, which John Adair claims to have introduced in 1969. Management consultant Mike Vance has claimed that the use of the nine-dot puzzle in consultancy circles stems from the corporate culture of the Walt Disney Company, where the puzzle was used in-house.
's Cyclopedia of Puzzles
The nine dots puzzle is much older than the slogan. It appears in Sam Loyd's 1914 Cyclopedia of Puzzles. In the 1951 compilation The Puzzle-Mine: Puzzles Collected from the Works of the Late Henry Ernest Dudeney, the puzzle is attributed to Dudeney himself. Sam Loyd's original formulation of the puzzle entitled it as "Christopher Columbus' egg puzzle." This was an allusion to the story of Egg of Columbus.
The puzzle proposed an intellectual challenge—to connect the dots by drawing four straight, continuous lines that pass through each of the nine dots, and never lifting the pencil from the paper. The :wikt:conundrum|conundrum is easily resolved, but only by drawing the lines outside the confines of the square area defined by the nine dots themselves. The phrase "thinking outside the box" is a restatement of the solution strategy. The puzzle only seems difficult because people commonly imagine a boundary around the edge of the dot array. The heart of the matter is the unspecified barrier that people typically perceive.
Telling people to "think outside the box" does not help them think outside the box, at least not with the 9-dot problem. This is due to the distinction between procedural knowledge and declarative knowledge. For example, a non-verbal cue such as drawing a square outside the 9 dots does allow people to solve the 9-dot problem better than average.
The nine-dot problem is a well-defined problem. It has a clearly stated goal, and all necessary information to solve the problem is included. Furthermore, well-defined problems have a clear ending. Although the solution is "outside the box" and not easy to see at first, once it has been found, it seems obvious. Other examples of well-defined problems are the Tower of Hanoi and the Rubik's Cube.
In contrast, characteristics of ill-defined problems are:
- not clear what the question really is
- not clear how to arrive at a solution
- no idea what the solution looks like
The single straight line solution
Another well-defined problem for the nine dots starting point is to connect the dots with a single straight line. The solution involves looking outside the two-dimensional sheet of paper on which the nine dots are drawn and coning the paper three-dimensionally aligning the dots along a spiral, thus a single line can be drawn connecting all nine dots - which would appear as three lines in parallel on the paper, when flattened out.If solving the four line solution is called lateral thinking, then solving the one line solution could well be called orthogonal thinking, as it requires two distinct phases: drawing the line and assembling the line.
The Nine Dots Prize
The Nine Dots Prize is a competition-based prize for "creative thinking that tackles contemporary societal issues." It is sponsored by the Kadas Prize Foundation and supported by the Cambridge University Press and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge. It was named in reference to the nine-dot problem. Annie Zaidi, an Indian writer won this $100,000 prize on May 29, 2019.Metaphor
This flexible English phrase is a rhetorical trope with a range of variant applications.The metaphorical "box" in the phrase "outside the box" may be married with something real and measurable — for example, perceived budgetary or organizational constraints in a Hollywood development project. Speculating beyond its restrictive confines the box can be both:
- positive— fostering creative leaps as in generating wild ideas ; and
- negative— penetrating through to the "bottom of the box." James Bandrowski states that this could result in a frank and insightful re-appraisal of a situation, oneself, the organization, etc.
Hollywood screenwriter Ira Steven Behr appropriated this concept to inform plot and character in the context of a television series. Behr imagined a core character:
The phrase can be used as a shorthand way to describe speculation about what happens next in a multi-stage design thinking process.
Sherlock Holmes reference
An older reference to thinking outside the box appears in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's, The Hound of The Baskervilles. In chapter 3, "The Problem", Holmes is telling Watson under what circumstances that he thinks best: "...It is a singular thing, but I find that a concentrated atmosphere helps a concentration of thought. I have not pushed it to the length of getting into a box to think, but that is the logical outcome of my convictions..."One interpretation can be framed as a reaction to criticism of Holmes since Doyle had killed him off in the previous novel five years earlier. Holmes is not a purely logical machine, simply running algorithms to deduce answers. But rather, he uses abductive reasoning to find creative solutions. His "outside the box" solutions, account for his high rate of success.