CFC Blog #119: Life Inside the Box

Wow.. I love this analogy. What a creative new way to look at and steer a popular saying towards a new direction that one might not normally consider - very thought provoking and something I will take with me in my own education career. Thank you Rob! 

- Amanda

Life Inside The Box

 Aren’t we always looking for new ideas?  Do you believe you should think outside the box more often?

 I’ve always had this weird aversion to that idea – outside the box.   It seems like just useless advice. So, I looked up the origin of it.

 The phrase was popularized in the 1970s based on a puzzle used by researchers and management consultants. The puzzle challenged people to look at nine dots arranged in a 3X3 square and connect all the dots with just four straight lines – and without lifting the pencil from the page. If you’d like to try it yourself  - you can stop reading a moment. I’ll wait.

 If you’re frustrated, you can watch a video of one solution. As you can see, the key (and the source of the trope that comes out of it) is that you have to draw lines outside the boundaries of the original nine-dot box. On average, only about 20% of people get to a solution.

 But here was the most interesting thing to me. Further experiments have shown that even if someone explains beforehand that going “outside the box” is allowed, the number of people who solve the puzzle jumps only to about 25%.

 In other words, simply telling people to think outside the box doesn’t give them the ability, or even desire, to do so.

 Whatever our career, we’re constantly challenged with innovating and creating all kinds of new ideas for our companies. In my experience, one of the biggest frustrations that I hear from people is that even if the leaders encourage us to “think outside the box”, we never actually do.

 In business we basically live life inside a box. We create inside-the-box ideas and inside-the-box strategies for our inside-the-box brand.

 But – what I’ve found is that if we just change the direction a bit – we can actually make some interesting changes. Instead of trying to go “outside the box”, if we can reshape and recast the existing box and perhaps push on its edges a bit.

Instead of encouraging our teams to think outside the box – and work where there are no constraints – we might think about what’s possible within a reshaped box filled with constraints. In other words, we can give ourselves permission to create different things inside the constraints of our box.  Let’s acknowledge the box as a starting idea – and then attempt to brainstorm all the challenges that solution might solve.

In my experience, you just might find that you design something new and better that fits inside your box perfectly.