Inside-the-Box Ideas about Outside-the-Box Thinking
Some people don’t get outside-the-box thinking. The idea is not to do things the same old way, but as this definition puts it, to do “thinking that moves away in diverging directions so as to involve a variety of aspects and which sometimes leads to novel ideas and solutions.”
A good starting point is to think of the box as a frame representing the traditional step-by-step, procedure-driven way of thinking about a problem. Getting out of the box entails shifting the frame. Using a wonderful example of how a company dealt with calls from headhunters, this Huffington Post article proposes that to think outside the box, all you need to do is ask “Is there another way to think about this?”
To help you strengthen your outside-the-box thinking skills, lifehack.com suggests eleven things you might do, such as take a class, study another industry, draw a picture, or ask a child for advice, which is certain to get you thinking more unconventionally. Or, my two favorites: to help you break out of familiar patterns of thinking, turn the problem upside down, whether physically or metaphorically, or work backwards.
There’s a problem with outside-the-box thinking, though, and that is that we often do a dismal job of thinking inside the box. We fall victim to familiar traps, such as doing things the same old ineffective way or discounting the ideas of colleagues. Among the ideas that reside smack dab inside the box and that would help us be more successful are listening to each other’s suggestions, identifying assumptions, asking better questions, and considering what we’ve learned in other projects like (or unlike) this one.
Furthermore, outside-the-box thinking implies that somewhere outside the box lies the solution to our problems. Outside-the-box thinking can trigger innovative, wow-generating ideas. But the ideas will flop when the people involved ignore inside-the-box ideas. Our challenge is to look around from our perch inside the box and ask, “What opportunities are right here for the taking?”
