Thinking outside the box
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Thinking outside the box (also thinking out of the box[1][2] or thinking beyond the box and, especially in Australia, thinking outside the square[3]) is a metaphor that means to think differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective. The phrase also often refers to novel or creative thinking.
History
The origin of the phrase is unclear. An early allusion is a 1969 newspaper article by Norman Vincent Peale, quote:[4]
- There is one particular puzzle you may have seen. It's a drawing of a box with some dots in it, and the idea is to connect all the dots by using only four lines. You can work on that puzzle, but the only way to solve it is to draw the lines so they connect outside the box. It's so simple once you realize the principle behind it. But if you keep trying to solve it inside the box, you'll never be able to master that particular puzzle.
- That puzzle represents the way a lot of people think. They get caught up inside the box of their own lives. You've got to approach any problem objectively. Stand back and see it for exactly what it is. From a little distance, you can see it a lot more clearly. Try and get a different perspective, a fresh point of view. **Step outside the box** your problem has created within you and come at it from a different direction.
- All of a sudden, just like the puzzle, you'll see how to handle your problem. And just like the four lines that connect all the dots, you'll discover the course of action that's just right in order to set your life straight.
The specific phrase "think outside the box" has been attested since at least 1984 in a Fortune magazine article.[5][6]
Beyond the above attestations, there are several unconfirmed accounts of how the phrase got introduced. According to Martin Kihn, it goes back to management consultants in the 1970s and 1980s challenging their clients to solve the "nine dots" puzzle.[7] According to John Adair, he introduced the nine dots puzzle in 1969, from which the saying comes.[8] According to The Creative Thinking Association of America, Mike Vance popularized the phrase "thinking out of the box".[9] Moreover, it is 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.[citation needed]
Nine dots puzzle
The nine dots puzzle appears in Sam Loyd's 1914 Cyclopedia of Puzzles.[10] 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.[11] Sam Loyd's original formulation of the puzzle[12] 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 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.[13] The heart of the matter is the unspecified barrier that people typically perceive.
The inherent difficulty of the puzzle has been studied in experimental psychology.[14][15]
The single straight line solution
Thinking outside of the sheet of paper, we can connect the dots with a single straight line. To do so, cone 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.[16]
The Nine Dots Prize
The Nine Dots Prize, named after the puzzle,[17] is a competition-based prize for "creative thinking that tackles contemporary societal issues."[18] 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.[19]
See also
- Egg of Columbus
- Einstellung effect
- Eureka effect
- Functional fixedness
- Gordian Knot
- Kobayashi Maru
- Lateral thinking
References
- ^ "box - definition of box in English - Oxford Dictionaries". Retrieved 21 November 2016.
- ^ "think outside the box - Definition, meaning & more - Collins Dictionary". Retrieved 21 November 2016.
- ^ "Thinking Outside The Square". Retrieved 21 November 2016.
- ^ Peale, Norman Vincent (1969-10-25). "Blackmail Is the Problem". Chicago Tribune. p. 13.
- ^ "Unknown". Fortune. 1984-02-06. p. 114.
- ^ "box". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
- ^ Kihn, Martin. "'Outside the Box': the Inside Story," FastCompany 1995
- ^ Adair, John (2007). The art of creative thinking how to be innovative and develop great ideas. London Philadelphia: Kogan Page. p. 127. ISBN 9780749452186.
- ^ Biography of Mike Vance at Creative Thinking Association of America.
- ^ Sam Loyd, Cyclopedia of Puzzles. (The Lamb Publishing Company, 1914)
- ^ J. Travers, The Puzzle-Mine: Puzzles Collected from the Works of the Late Henry Ernest Dudeney. (Thos. Nelson, 1951)
- ^ Facsimile from Cyclopedia of Puzzles - Columbus's Egg Puzzle is on right-hand page
- ^ Daniel Kies, "English Composition 2: Assumptions: Puzzle of the Nine Dots", retr. Jun. 28, 2009.
- ^ Maier, Norman R. F.; Casselman, Gertrude G. (1 February 1970). "Locating the Difficulty in Insight Problems: Individual and Sex Differences". Psychological Reports. 26 (1): 103–117. doi:10.2466/pr0.1970.26.1.103. PMID 5452584. S2CID 43334975.
- ^ Lung, Ching-tung; Dominowski, Roger L. (1 January 1985). "Effects of strategy instructions and practice on nine-dot problem solving". Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 11 (4): 804–811. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.11.1-4.804.
- ^ W. Neville Holmes, Fashioning a Foundation for the Computing Profession, July 2000
- ^ "The Nine Dots Prize Identity". Rudd Studio. Retrieved 19 November 2018.
- ^ "Home". The Nine Dots Prize. Kadas Prize Foundation. Retrieved 19 November 2018.
- ^ "Nine Dots Prize". CRASSH. The University of Cambridge. Retrieved 19 November 2018.
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. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0463-118. PMID 13986996.
- 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