Think Outside the Box

Charles H. Duell, Director of the US Patent Office once said, ‘Everything that can be invented has been invented.’ That was in 1899: clearly he was in the box!

Thinking outside the box is to think differently, unconventionally or from a new perspective. The basic idea is that to be creative you need to challenge your own assumptions and look at things from a fresh angle. You need to break out of conventional thinking formed by past experience. The phrase is generally held to have originated with the classic ‘nine-dot’ creativity puzzle.

Get a pen and some paper and copy the nine dots arranged in a square above. To solve the problem, you need to join all nine dots by drawing no more than four straight lines. The straight lines must be continuous – i.e. you must not lift your pen from the paper once you start drawing.

If you’re like most people, you will have tried to solve the problem by keeping your lines inside the ‘box’ created by the dots. But if you look at the instructions, there is no requirement to do this. So have another go at solving the problem, allowing yourself to draw outside the box.

The lesson of this exercise is that we can’t solve the problem as long as we are thinking ‘inside the box’ created by our assumptions. Once we start to think ‘outside the box’ we open up many more possibilities and it becomes easy to solve the problem. This is true in so many areas of life – our education, past experience and habitual thinking patterns keep us trapped in limiting assumptions. It takes a real effort to challenge the assumptions and think 'outside the box'.