To 'think outside the box', think outside the box

[Celebration]

To 'think outside the box', think outside the box

The authors of the new paper were inspired by research that has found that many of the metaphors we use actually “work”—people who hold something warm think a stranger they meet has a warmer personality; making a fist makes men more assertive. Angela Leung of Singapore Management University and her coauthors from the University of Michigan, Cornell University, and others wondered if the same was true of metaphors about creativity. “Creativity is a highly sought-after skill,” they write. “Metaphors of creative thinking abound in everyday use.”

People talk about thinking “outside the box” or consider problems “on the one hand, then on the other hand.” So Leung and her colleagues created experiments where people acted out these metaphors. In one experiment, each participant was seated either inside or outside of a five-by-five-foot cardboard box. The two environments were set up to be otherwise the same in every way, and people didn’t feel claustrophobic in the box. Participants were told it was a study on different work environments. Each person completed a test widely used to test creativity; those who were outside did the test better than people who were inside the box.

In another experiment, some participants were asked to join the halves of cut-up coasters before taking a test—a physical representation of “putting two and two together.” People who acted out the metaphor displayed more convergent thinking, a component of creativity that requires bringing together many possible answers to settle on one that will work. Other experiments found that walking freely generated more original ideas than walking in a set line; another found truth in “on the hand; on the other hand.”

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[Why Syzygy]

2. Makes a nice case for outdoor offices.

I'm also thinking you can draw a box and write creative things around the box. In fact, there's a youtube of something just like that.
I'm looking for it.


Here it is.

[fasttense]

3. I use to work for a recruiting firm.

We would get new people all pumped up with the "think outside the box" philosophy.

They would come up with some great ideas but...the ideas were mostly already implemented and put into practice within our firm.

So many of the new people would come up with the exact same great ideas that we were already using.

So, I came up with my own slogan: You have know the box first, before you can think outside of it.

[Celebration]

4. in that case

They need to start off in a small windowless cubicle until they pass the "in the box" test.

[fasttense]

7. If a person was never inside the cubicle, how would they know they were outside of it?

I'm just saying this "think outside the box" has become a meaningless phrase.

If you don't know what you are fixing or improving, how can you fix it or improve it?

To give a useful, intelligent idea for a process fix, you have to work and educate yourself on exactly what the process is. Once you fully understand how things work, then you can think outside the box to fix it.

Defining the problem is half the battle.

Random creative thoughts are of little value.

[Jim__]

5. The problem with "Think outside the box."

A description of the problem from wikipedia:

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.[2] 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.[3]

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. ...

My experience with this phrase was that it came from the corporate concept of TQM (Total Quality Management). They used the puzzle as descibed in the excerpt from wikipedia. I think that anyone who worked for a corporation in the 1980s went through some form of this TQM training. The original puzzle is an effective educational tool.

However, by, say, 2005, every corporate project that I worked on would start with a kickoff where all the project bigwigs would get up and talk. I used to try to get people to bet me on what the minimal number of times any speaker would urge us to think outside the box. 10 was a pretty safe bet - i.e. each speaker would say it at least 10 times.

In my experience, the words became a meaningless cliche. I can see how the suggestion here, to have people actually do something like step outside of a physical box and think, could restore some meaning to the phrase.

[Celebration]

6. I'm not sure that the ultimate meaning to get from the study

Has all that much to do with the value or lack of value of thinking inside or outside the box.

It has more to do with how the literal words, and living and acting on them, actually affect our behavioral outcomes. I think another thing businesses have tended to do is have retreats where leaders take employees through a bunch of things like rope climbing, or exercises where they have to trust their fellow employees. I have never been to one of those and don't know what the research shows on stuff like that.

But there is a kind of neurolinguistic programming aspect to this.

On the other hand, trying to think inside a cardboard box of that size would pretty much drive me bonkers. I don't think I would be much good at either inside or ouside the box thinking sitting in a box like that. The puzzle piece example was more interesting to me. But, essentially athletes see the value of cross training. We need to look to more of that in learning, workplace, etc. The effect of music in the classroom or at work is one good place to start research. It bothers me tremendously that the arts have been taken out of schools to save money. Who can stare at math problems and pages in books all day long?

[fasttense]

8. Thanks for the explanation on how the phrase originated.

Very interesting.

[UnrepentantLiberal]

9. How DO you solve that Disney puzzle?

[Jim__]

10. There is an example solution at the site.

here. But just think about the statement: think outside the box. The solutions to the puzzle all encompass an aspect of that phrase.

[UnrepentantLiberal]

11. Okay, I have it without looking.

Last edited Sun Jan 22, 2012, 02:13 PM - Edit history (1)

Four lines outside the box.

I wonder how "outside the box" they really wanted in their employees.

Edit: After I looked at it, that.