27 Outside-the-Box Thinking

“We need to think outside the box!” someone passionately shouts during a meeting. The statement conveys the sense that the current thinking isn't yielding satisfactory solutions. Either they're not unique enough, or they won't produce the desired results.

When I hear this statement, I always ask, “What's outside the box?” The responses I get typically involve “away from the norm,” “new and improved,” “innovative,” “radical,” “no constraints,” and “no preconceived notions.” I nod and ask, “But what is the norm? What's the normal way we reach solutions?”

I'm happy to say that someone in our workshops usually remembers the prior hours' teachings and says, “Inductive reasoning, a premise yields conclusions. Facts, observations, experiences, beliefs, and assumptions.”

I rejoice, “Yes!”

Your box is bound by your facts, observations, experiences, beliefs, and assumptions, so if you want to think outside of it, you have to think outside those boundaries. You'll still be using inductive reasoning, but with new or modified premise elements. You do this, as shown Figure 27.1, by pushing those boundaries.

Try the puzzle shown in Figure 27.2. (You may wish to copy this page so that you don't give away the solution to someone who may read this book after you.) Place your pen or pencil on one of the dots, and without lifting your pen or pencil off the paper, without folding, mutilating, or destroying the paper, draw four straight lines connecting all the dots. Do this in the next 30 seconds. (Hint: Think outside the box.) The answer is at www.headscratchers.com/ThinkingOutsideTheBox.html.

When we conduct this exercise in our workshops, only a few people out of 20 or 25 are able to solve it. Some people think they solved it, only to realize they lifted their pens off the paper. The reality is that we like boundaries, and we like to stay inside our box—because boundaries are familiar. We have experiences with them and form strong premises with them that result in high-confidence conclusions. Going outside the boundaries feels unnatural to us. However, to solve the dot puzzle—and to innovate—you have to go beyond those boundaries and draw outside the box.

Ask What If and What Other

Now back to the real world. You go beyond the boundaries of your box by pushing on them with questions such as “What if?” What if I'm making an untrue or invalid assumption? What if I had your assumptions? What if both our assumptions are invalid? What if I'd never had that experience before? What if I did not read that memo? How would that affect my thinking? When thinking outside the box, you challenge the very premise that defines your box.

There was an accomplished financial investment analyst in a workshop I was conducting a few years ago. This was about a year after the financial collapse, now known as the deepest recession since the Great Depression. I invest in a few stocks, so I was eager to hear his view on what was happening. He had all kinds of data and charts, and his analysis was very thorough—comparing the recent stock market collapse to several prior collapses, steep drops, and recoveries over the past 80 years, including the Great Depression. He had comparisons that predicted when to sell, when to hold, and when to start buying, among other things. Like many other analysts at the time, he was determined to compare the 2008 crash to prior crashes, assuming that he could do so and make predictions for the future. His investment strategy for his clients followed that model. Of course, I was only a novice in stock investing, so who was I to question his thinking? However, I did ask one question: “What if your assumption about the current socioeconomic environment being comparable to the past is incorrect? What if this is the first of a new kind of financial collapse? What then?” Silence. Continued silence, followed by what looked like deep, deep thought. That one question pushed the financial analyst clear outside his box. As a result, he eventually came up with some new ideas with respect to managing his clients' portfolios. Of course, I didn't have the answer to the question I asked; I just asked the question as a thinking coach to provoke an outside-the-box view of the situation.

Follow the question “What if the assumptions are incorrect?” with “What other assumptions can I make?” and “How do those other assumptions change my thinking?” Follow “What if I've never had that experience?” with “What other experiences have I had that might change my thinking?” Follow “What if that memo I read is not accurate?” with “What other sources of information might provide me with new ideas?”

Getting Started with Thinking Outside the Box

Here are a few examples of when thinking outside the box is appropriate:

• When someone says, “We need to think outside the box”: Clarify what the current box is, and then ask questions, such as “What if our assumptions are not correct?” or “What if we'd never had that experience?”
• When solutions aren't forthcoming from the premise: When the premise and its components are yielding more of the same—what you are doing or have tried already—that's the time to have an innovation discussion, starting with thinking outside the box.
• When current solutions are fine, but you want to explore for a more significant result: Use outside-the-box thinking to achieve a superb level of quality or increase revenue beyond expectations.
• When there's a significant change: When your competition introduces a significant threat (perhaps a major price reduction or new product), outside-the-box solutions might be warranted. Perhaps you're fortunate to encounter a huge opportunity and wish to take advantage; or you recently signed a hefty contract, and you'll need to hire a large number of people in a short period. The usual recruiting methods aren't going to fulfill that need in the allotted time. You need another solution.
• When there is a crisis: If a crisis occurs and you don't have a contingency plan already laid out, you'll probably need some outside-the-box ideas.