I wish I had a five-dollar bill (or even a dollar bill) for every time I have encountered a reference to “out of the box thinking.” The background to this phrase, briefly, is that it was popularized by motivational speaker Mike Vance. Citing a box puzzle that Disney employees were encouraged to solve by “thinking outside the box,”,Vance started delivering speeches about “out-of-box thinking” 30 years ago.
Here’s the puzzle: Without lifting your pen or pencil from the page, connect all nine dots with only four lines.
“He didn’t coin the term but he popularized the phrase,” his son, Mark, said.
Vance co-founded the Creative Thinking Association of America, which presents annual awards for creative achievements and conducted staff training for corporations. His clients included AT&T, General Electric, Motorola, Johnson & Johnson, and Coca-Cola.
After one of Vance’s talks, Steve Jobs excitedly told him about a computer he was creating in his garage. His book Think Out of the Box was co-authored with Diana Deacon and published by Career Press (1995).
Here’s my take:
1. Many times, we focus on a symptom rather than a root cause. That is, we focus on the wrong question to answer or the wrong problem to solve.
That may well be the worst mistake to make when making a decision.
2. If the given question or problem was created by thinking inside the box, it cannot be resolved by the same thinking that created it. Objective and well-informed perspectives are best.
3. Also, keep in mind that the given question or problem may be in the wrong box (i.e. context, environment) and may need to be repositioned where it belongs.
4. My own rather extensive experience with brainstorming suggests that collective judgment works best if members of a group (at least three and no more than ten) are provided guidelines and a question to answer or problem to solve, then are convened to share their suggestions.
In one of Tom Davenport’s recent books, Judgment Calls, he and co-author Brooke Manville offer “an antidote for the Great Man theory of decision making and organizational performance”: [begin italics] organizational judgment [end italics]. That is, “the collective capacity to make good calls and wise moves when the need for them exceeds the scope of any single leader’s direct control.”
5. Please re-read #1.
For some excellent advice on brainstorming, please click here.
Here’s the puzzle’s solution:
