Thinking outside the box

For the album by Skream, see Outside the Box (Skream album).

"Thinking outside the box" and "thinking beyond the box" (also called "thinking out of the box" or "thinking outside the square" ) is to think differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective. This phrase often refers to novel or creative thinking.

This is related to the process of lateral thought. The catchphrase, or cliché, has become widely used in business environments, especially by management consultants and executive coaches, and has spawned 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 beyond them.

The "nine dots" puzzle. The goal of the puzzle is to link all 9 dots using four straight lines or fewer, without lifting the pen and without tracing the same line more than once. One solution appears below.

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

One of many solutions to the puzzle at the beginning of this article is to go beyond the boundaries to link all dots in 4 straight lines.

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.

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 conundrum is easily resolved, but only if you draw 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 we imagine a boundary around the edge of the dot array. The heart of the matter is the unspecified barrier which is typically perceived.

Christopher Columbus's Egg Puzzle as it appeared in Sam Loyd'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's egg puzzle." This was an allusion to the story of Egg of Columbus.

The "Youngman Technique" for problem solving

A less well known but equally viable origin for the term relates to a problem solving technique devised by HE Robert Sabga in 1979-80 by exercising what he referred to as 'parallel thinking'. He called it 'the Youngman Technique' because it was inspired by a joke told by the Vaudeville comedian Henny Youngman, and it has been a staple in his victimology training programs ever since (he has trained hundreds of groups in 3 countries in his techniques). Sabga did his undergraduate studies and some post graduate work at Erindale College, University of Toronto (now known as University of Toronto at Mississauga or UTM) in Ontario, Canada, where he spent much of his time with his mentors Dr. Lester Krames and the late Dr. Mike Spigel in the Psychology Department's PUMP Room. Both Krames and Spigel were Henny Youngman fans, and Sabga credits them for introducing him to the comedian's humour. The inspiration for the 'Youngman Technique' was the following joke (paraphrased): At the US/Mexico border a guard sees a man crossing into the United States. The man is riding a bicycle and has a box balanced on the handlebars. The guard pulls the man aside, tells him to get off his bicycle and opens the box, but all he finds inside is sand. This goes on every day for two months: the man comes across the border on his bicycle with a box balanced between the handlebars, and every day they open the box but find nothing but sand. One day, the guard sees the man at a store and says, "Look buddy, you drove us crazy. Everyday for 2 months you came in on your bicycle with that box of sand...what were you smuggling?" The man says, "Bicycles." The point of the joke in illustrating parallel thinking in problem solving, said Sabga, was to always say to yourself "OK, I see the sand. Now, where's the bicycle?", and his punch line was 'Learn to think outside the box'.

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:

(a) positive— fostering creative leaps as in generating wild ideas (the conventional use of the term); and

(b) 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.

On the other hand, Bandrowski argues that the process of thinking "inside the box" need not be construed in a pejorative sense. It is crucial for accurately parsing and executing a variety of tasks — making decisions, analyzing data, and managing the progress of standard operating procedures, 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:

He is going to be "thinking outside the box," you know, and usually when we use that cliche, we think outside the box means a new thought. So we can situate ourselves back in the box, but in a somewhat better position.

The phrase can be used as a shorthand way to describe speculation about what happens next in a multi-stage design thinking process.

See also

• Einstellung effect
• Seven Bridges of Königsberg
• Eureka effect
• No-win situation
• Kobayashi Maru
• Gordian Knot
• Endless knot
• Workaround
• Lateral thinking

Further reading

• Adams, J. L. (1979). Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 978-0-201-10089-1.  ISBN 0-201-10089-4 (more solutions to the nine dots problem - with less than 4 lines!)
• Scheerer, M. (1972). "Problem-solving". Scientific American 208 (4): 118–128. 
• Golomb, Solom W.; Selfridge, John L. (1970). "Unicursal polygonal paths and other graphs on point lattices". Pi Mu Epsilon Journal 5: 107–117. MR 0268063. 

External links

• Out-of-the-box vs. outside the box citing Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary (OALD), Word of the Month