Get Rid Of The Box

Removing the boundary conditions that limit our thinking can lead to entirely different outcomes.

- Chuck Swoboda

Innovation is fundamentally about solving difficult problems. The advice a team gets when tasked with finding an innovative solution to a new challenge is invariably to ‘think outside the box’. The phrase has become a mantra to think differently and try and look at things from a new perspective.

According to an article in Psychology Today, the idea originated with the work of psychologist J P Guilford, who in the 1970s was one of the first academic researchers to study creativity through his use of the ‘nine-dot puzzle’. His work showed how people often limit their thinking as to what is possible, as their thinking gets stuck inside a metaphorical box.

Thinking outside the box seems like a logical starting point for anyone looking for new ideas —but it is not. In fact, it creates an unintended mind trap that prevents people from seeing what might really be possible.

Wrong starting point

One observation from Guilford’s research is that people apply boundary conditions to their thinking that, while they appear very real, do not actually exist. In his nine-dot study, they assumed the dots on the paper represented a box within which they had to try and solve the problem. But that was not the case; they just assumed it to be so.