‘Think outside the box’ is one of the biggest creativity cliches. 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 and take off the blinkers formed by past experience.
But is that really how creativity happens? And will learning to ‘think outside the box’ help you become more creative?
The phrase is generally held to have originated with the classic ‘nine-dot’ creativity puzzle. If you haven’t seen this problem before, try to solve it before scrolling down and reading the rest – you’ll get a lot more out of this article.
Get a pen and some paper and copy the nine dots arranged in a square below. 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. Don’t read any further until you’ve tried to solve the problem.
How did you get on? If you managed to solve it, give yourself a pat on the back and read on. If you’re not there yet, here’s a clue to help you. 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. Again, don’t read any further until you’ve either solved it or given up.
OK if you’ve either solved it or had enough, click here to see two of the usual solutions.
What did you make of that? Could you solve the problem the first time? Did it make any difference when I said you could go outside the box?
The Conventional Explanation
The usual way of presenting this problem is for a creativity trainer to only give the first set of instructions – i.e. without mentioning the fact that you allow to go outside the box. And nearly everybody (including me, when I first saw it) completely fails to solve the problem. But most creativity trainers don’t bother with the second stage – they simply reveal the solution to cast of astonishment and protest from the audience: “that’s not fair! You didn’t tell us we could go outside the box!” To which the trainer typically responds “Aha! But I didn’t tell you you couldn’t go outside the box!”.
The trainer then trots out the conventional explanation of the puzzle: 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. Most of us are very poor at doing this and have to work hard at it – unlike creative geniuses to whom this kind of thinking comes naturally.
In case you think I’m having a go at creativity trainers I’ll confess that a few years ago, on a couple of occasions, I was that trainer. Never again.
Challenging Creative Convention
The trouble with the usual way of presenting the nine-dot problem is that it contains (ahem) an unexamined assumption. I.e. that all we have to do is tell people they can go outside the box and they will find it easy to solve the problem. But most of the time people are not given the chance to find out – they are simply given the solution and told that the problem was their limited thinking. They are usually so astonished to discover that they are allowed to draw outside the box that they readily accept this explanation.
A few researchers have been sceptical and curious enough to test this assumption. In Creativity – Beyond the Myth of Genius Robert Weisberg describes two experiments in which people were told that the only way to solve the problem was to draw lines outside the square. Contrary to the ‘outside the box’ school of thought, this did not make problem easy to solve. In fact, only 20-25% of subjects were able to solve the problem, even though all of them allowed themselves to draw outside the box. And even the ones who did solve the problem took a long time to do so, and used trial and error, making many different drawings, rather than any special form of ‘creative thinking’.
Researchers went on to show that the success rate could be improved by giving subjects prior training in solving simpler line-and-dot problems, and also by giving them “detailed strategy instructions” about how to solve the problem:
Lung and Dominowski’s strategy instructions plus dot-to-dot.training facilitated solution of the nine-dot problem, but still only a little more than half of the subjects solved the problem, and they did so not smoothly in a sudden burst of insight, but only after a number of tries. This study provides particularly graphic evidence that insightful behaviour, contrary to the Gestalt view, is the result of expertise.
Robert Weisberg, The Myth of Genius
So the research evidence suggests that thinking outside the box fails to produce the expected creative solution. And far from being a hindrance, past experience and training can actually be the key to creative problem-solving.
What Do You Think?
If the problem was new to you, could you solve it just by following the original instructions?
Did it make any difference when you were told you could go outside the box?
Is ‘thinking outside the box’ a useful way to approach creativity or does it deserve its status as the most despised piece of business jargon? Or is it simply that, as Brian likes to say, there is no box?
About the Author: Mark McGuinness is a poet and creative coach.
View Comments (87)
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1 2 3 … 9 Next »You guys have definitely opened up a can of worms on this one, and I'm loving the interactive blog posts lately, definitely setting you guys apart.
On one hand I agree with you, to be creative we don't always need to look for a far-fetched or out there angle. However, I think the phrase gives meaning to help people try something different, after-all not everything has been done
Stumbled!
Cheers,
Glen
Creativity - you are born with or you are not. No amount of training helps. Also, what you fail to mention is risk. Unless you are willing to take risk, you can't be creative. Lastly, over the past many centuries, you can probably count on two hands the truly creative. Discussions of creativity are folly.
Only if you insist on making sweeping statements without an argument or evidence to back them up. Or even putting your name to your comments.
Interesting post, very good food for thought.
I really liked your last little bit about past experience and training.
I always figured it depends on how you define "outside the box" or how you define "box".
Quite often where I work now, if I "think outside the box" that really only requires me to draw on past experience and/or past training, just as was suggested!
-Brett
I have to agree with Weisberg's observations. I was previously aware of the puzzle and that the solution entailed drawing outside the box. However it took me quite some time and considerable trial and error before I found a solution.
I believe there is no box. Period- my opinion of course. I do believe in persistence though...
I also think that creativity depends on mindset. Eienstein said that he wasn't smarter than anyone else, he was just more persistent than most. It can be easily argued that he was pretty smart however.
Without a box, persistence is the key as far as I am concerned. In order to be persistent, one has to actually believe they can solve problems with new solutions.
Biggest obstacle I find in dealing with people in the business world is their inability to do anything outside of what they have done in the past. They do live in a box. Successful leadership is dependent on innovation and creativity. "Waiting for things to get better" is not creative or innovative...
Creativity starts with an idea. If the result of the idea is not within tolerance (standards) developed through previous achievements (or lack thereof), it is often rejected by the mind.
This is a can o' worms; a paradox?
Great topic for discussion though- I love this stuff!
Not too long ago, I saw another solution that only requires one line. But to do this, you have to think "outside the box" but think about a solution IN the box. I wish I could give credit to the author who described the (I think) 12 year old girl who solved the problem with one line, but I just don't remember the article.
Hint: there is no requirement to use thin pencil lead.
Solving the puzzle with one broad stroke of a thick brush over the 9 dots is not the solution. "There is no requirement to use thin pencil lead", but there is something as an accepted definition of a line. According to geometry, a line has length but no width.
Hi Sunigbo,
Would it be ok to cut up the paper and put the dot's in a line ;)?
what about the assumption that when connecting dots, you can't intersect a previously drawn line? what about the assumption the dots are points, so the 3 line solution can't work?
these so called brain teasers are often fraught with inconsistent assumption violations...
so if the 3 and 4 line solutions are acceptable, so is the one
the formulation should be "connect these spheres with four lines; you may make the lines arbitrarily long and you may intersect lines"...
i think the intersection is the real misleader here...
these trick questions need to be called out...
my other favorite is the fox-chicken in boat... most places in the world, you woudn't leave a chicken unattended while you go back for the fox...
"how many animals did moses put on the arc"; the important part of the q is how many animals not who did it, so the correct answer is 2, not "It wasn't moses"
is there such thing as a good brain teaser? or should one just solve math/physics problems?
@Marvin - That's actually my favorite solution, and I was going to include it. But then I just knew we'd get a ton of "that's cheating" comments :) .
There's a box. There is no box. Which I choose to follow depends on which situation faces me.
Tell me that my house is burning and that solving the puzzle will put out the fire and save my belongings, and I'll bet I could solve it faster.
Present it to me in the morning when I'm still working on coffee, and I'll see it as a frustrating, unsolvable challenge. Then I'll yell, "NO FAIR!" and think dire thoughts about the person who tricked me.
So, my take is that it's all relative to our motivation, inspiration and desire to find the solution to the challenges we face.
Or maybe I need more coffee. :)
The concept that "thinking outside the box" often requires training and practice to do effectively intrigues me. I was able to think of a couple different examples in my own experience (in chemical formulation and in art) where practice in simpler forms made my solution to complex forms more creative, but I'd never looked at it that way before. Thanks for the insight.
This reminds me of the recent opinion of group brainstorming that has surfaced over the last few years. It was commonly thought that getting a large group together and throwing out ideas was the best way to solve a problem or come up with a good idea.
Generally, you get a bunch of bad ideas and waste time and effort wading through them to get to a mediocre one at best.
When I first encountered such an idea, that brainstorming like this was useless, I was troubled, but the more I thought about it, I realized that the best ideas I have had have come through my own brainstorming or a session with just one other person.
Your entry about this was spot on. Real creatives find new rules to the equation and aren't bound by what is present. Using lines to connect the dots even "outside the box" isn't really that creative, especially with all the trial and error.
Here's my solution to the problem: (and it only took one line - no one said how thick the line was supposed to be :) )
http://www.kbennion.com/Clients/Misc/line.gif
The reason I like this site is that it challenges all this conventional "wisdom" and "rules" that our society seems to have imposed on us even within our own industries. Beethoven was genius because he "broke" the rules of music at the time. Stravinski did the same.
So, my suggestion to creatives is to know the rules so you can break them in way that presents real solutions and genius.
It's about time more people came out and trashed this cliche.
Sure, thinking outside the box is creativity. But people forget the basics, the fundamentals. They try to go to 10 without counting 0, 1, 2.
How can you think outside the box if you don't know what the box looks like? How about understanding how the box looks like and *then* you draw your *own* box?
You can't just pull ideas out of thin air. Boxes often contain presents inside. That's what they're for.