Think Out of the Box: Study another industry.

Tuesday, 19 March 2013

Study another industry.

THINK OUT OF THE BOX

Jagriti Srivastava

Thinking outside the box (also thinking out of the box or thinking beyond the box) is a metaphor that means to think differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective. This phrase often refers to novel or creative thinking. The term is thought to derive from management consultants in the 1970s and 1980s challenging their clients to solve the "nine dots" puzzle, whose solution requires some lateral thinking.

The catchphrase, or cliché, has become widely used in business environments, especially by management consultants and executive coaches, and has been referenced in a number of advertising slogans. To think outside the box is to look farther and to try not thinking of the obvious things, but to try thinking beyond them.

ANALOGY

A simplified definition for paradigm is a habit of reasoning or a conceptual framework.

A simplified analogy is "the box" in the commonly used phrase "thinking outside the box". What is encompassed by the words "inside the box" is analogous with the current, and often unnoticed, assumptions about a situation. Creative thinking acknowledges and rejects the accepted paradigm to come up with new ideas.

NINE DOTS PUZZLE

The notion of something outside a perceived "box" is related to a traditional topographical puzzle called the nine dots puzzle.

The origins of the phrase "thinking outside the box" are obscure; but it was popularized in part because of a nine-dot puzzle, which John Adair claims to have introduced in 1969.Management consultant Mike Vance has claimed that the use of the nine-dot puzzle in consultancy circles stems from the corporate culture of the Walt Disney Company, where the puzzle was used in-house.

Christopher Columbus's Egg Puzzle as it appeared in Sam Loyd's Cyclopedia of Puzzles.

The nine dots puzzle is much older than the slogan. It appears in Sam Loyd's 1914 Cyclopedia of Puzzles.In the 1951 compilation The Puzzle-Mine: Puzzles Collected from the Works of the Late Henry Ernest Dudeney, the puzzle is attributed to Dudeney himself.Sam Loyd's original formulation of the puzzle entitled it as "Christopher Columbus's egg puzzle." This was an allusion to the story of Egg of Columbus.

One of many solutions to the puzzle at the beginning of this article is to go beyond the boundaries to link all dots in 4 straight lines.

The puzzle proposed an intellectual challenge—to connect the dots by drawing four straight, continuous lines that pass through each of the nine dots, and never lifting the pencil from the paper. The conundrum is easily resolved, but only by drawing the lines outside the confines of the square area defined by the nine dots themselves. The phrase "thinking outside the box" is a restatement of the solution strategy. The puzzle only seems difficult because people commonly imagine a boundary around the edge of the dot array.The heart of the matter is the unspecified barrier which is typically perceived.

Ironically, telling people to "think outside the box" does not help them think outside the box, at least not with the 9-dot problem. This is due to the distinction between procedural knowledge (implicit or tacit knowledge) and declarative knowledge (book knowledge). For example, a non-verbal cue such drawing a square outside the 9 dots does allow people to solve the 9-dot problem better than average.However, a very particular kind of verbalization did indeed allow people to solve the problem better than average. This is to speak in a non-judgmental, free association style. These were the instructions in a study which showed facilitation in solving the 9-dot problem:

While solving the problems you will be encouraged to think aloud. When thinking aloud you should do the following: Say whatever’s on your mind. Don’t hold back hunches, guesses, wild ideas, images, plans or goals. Speak as continuously as possible. Try to say something at least once every five seconds. Speak audibly. Watch for your voice dropping as you become involved. Don’t worry about complete sentences or eloquence. Don’t over explain or justify. Analyze no more than you would normally. Don’t elaborate on past events. Get into the pattern of saying what you’re thinking about now, not of thinking for a while and then describing your thoughts. Though the experimenter is present you are not talking to the experimenter. Instead, you are to perform this task as if you are talking aloud to yourself.

METAPHOR

This flexible English phrase is a rhetorical trope with a range of variant applications.

The metaphorical "box" in the phrase "outside the box" may be married with something real and measurable — for example, perceived budgetary or organizational constraints in a Hollywood development project. Speculating beyond its restrictive confines the box can be both:

(a) positive— fostering creative leaps as in generating wild ideas (the conventional use of the term); and

(b) negative— penetrating through to the "bottom of the box." James Bandrowski states that this could result in a frank and insightful re-appraisal of a situation, oneself, the organization, etc.

On the other hand, Bandrowski argues that the process of thinking "inside the box" need not be construed in a pejorative sense. It is crucial for accurately parsing and executing a variety of tasks — making decisions, analyzing data, and managing the progress of standard operating procedures, etc.

Hollywood screenwriter Ira Steven Behr appropriated this concept to inform plot and character in the context of a television series. Behr imagined a core character:

He is going to be "thinking outside the box," you know, and usually when we use that cliche, we think outside the box means a new thought. So we can situate ourselves back in the box, but in a somewhat better position.

The phrase can be used as a shorthand way to describe speculation about what happens next in a multi-stage design thinking process

WAYS TO THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX

1. Set parameters to focus your ideas. Ironically, too much freedom can hinder your creativity. Boundaries help your memory function, giving your ideas more depth and breadth. "Too many times, people start off really broad," Rossi says. "That's a lot of pressure. It's easier to anchor an idea somewhere."

As you brainstorm, focus your thinking by asking specific questions. For example, if you're looking for new marketing strategies, list ten things you could do on Facebook or five ideas that involve crowdsourcing. Play with a variety of prompts and write down whatever comes to mind, no matter how loosely associated.

2. Search for random inspiration. To think outside the box, you need to trigger your brain to make connections it normally wouldn't make. To do that, look for inspiration that seems entirely unrelated to the problem.

Rossi often prompts his team with unexpected words, like pineapple or sparkles for a car company. "Nine times out of 10, the ideas people are excited about are generated by the ridiculous random prompt," he says. To find prompts, look at popular photos on Pinterest and trending words on Twitter, or click 'I'm Feeling Lucky' in a Google search.

3. Aim for quantity, not quality. While you're generating ideas, turn off your internal editor. Exhaust your good ideas and start throwing out suggestions that seem absurd or wrong. Remember, you can always make a bad idea better after the fact.

Rossi finds that speed and friendly competition help people churn out ideas without judgment. Once, he put 100 one dollar bills in the center of a table and told his team they could take one every time they said an idea. "In 15 minutes, we came up with 100 ideas," he says. "Fifty of them were really interesting."

THE NEED FOR THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX

The person at the top feels that the quality of solutions, services or ideas in vogue is not great. This stems from frustration. It also comes from people working in teams who feel that the contribution of others is not helping find new and original solutions to the challenges of the modern world.

CHARACTERISTICS

Thinking outside the box requires different characteristics:

One should be willing to take new perspectives to day-to-day work.

One should be capable of thinking differently with an open mind, think about stuff with substance, and do things differently.

One must focus on the value of finding new ideas and acting on them.

One must strive to create value in newer ways.

One must be capable of listening to, supporting, nurturing and respecting others when they come up with new ideas.

Out-of-the box thinking requires openness to new ways of seeing the world and a willingness to explore. 'Out of the box' thinkers know that new ideas need nurturing and support. They also know that having an idea is good, but acting on it is more important. Results are what count.

MORE WAYS TO THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX

1. Study another industry.

Go to the library and pick up a trade magazine in an industry other than your own, or grab a few books from the library, and learn about how things are done in other industries. You might find that many of the problems people in other industries face are similar to the problems in your own, but that they’ve developed really quite different ways of dealing with them. Or you might well find new linkages between your own industry and the new one, linkages that might well be the basis of innovative partnerships in the future.

2. Learn about another religion.

Religions are the way that humans organize and understand their relationships not only with the supernatural or divine but with each other. Learning about how such relations are structured can teach you a lot about how people relate to each other and the world around them. Starting to see the reason in another religion can also help you develop mental flexibility – when you really look at all the different ways people comprehend the same mysteries, and the fact that they generally manage to survive regardless of what they believe, you start to see the limitations of whatever dogma or doxy you follow, a revelation that will transfer quite a bit into the non-religious parts of your life.

3. Take a class.

Learning a new topic will not only teach you a new set of facts and figures, it will teach you a new way of looking at and making sense of aspects of your everyday life or of the society or natural world you live in. This in turn will help expand both how you look at problems and the breadth of possible solutions you can come up with.

4. Read a novel in an unfamiliar genre.

Reading is one of the great mental stimulators in our society, but it’s easy to get into a rut. Try reading something you’d never have touched otherwise – if you read literary fiction, try a mystery or science fiction novel; if you read a lot of hard-boiled detective novels, try a romance; and so on. Pay attention not only to the story but to the particular problems the author has to deal with. For instance, how does the fantasy author bypass your normal skepticism about magic and pull you into their story? Try to connect those problems to problems you face in your own field. For example, how might your marketing team overcome your audiences normal reticence about a new “miracle” product?

5. Write a poem.

While most problem-solving leans heavily on our brain’s logical centers, poetry neatly bridges our more rational left-brain though processes and our more creative right-brain processes. Though it may feel foolish (and getting comfortable with feeling foolish might be another way to think outside the box), try writing a poem about the problem you’re working on. Your poem doesn’t necessarily have to propose a solution – the idea is to shift your thinking away from your brain’s logic centers and into a more creative part of the brain, where it can be mulled over in a non-rational way. Remember, nobody has to ever see your poem…

6. Draw a picture.

Drawing a picture is even more right-brained, and can help break your logical left-brain’s hold on a problem the same way a poem can. Also, visualizing a problem engages other modes of thinking that we don’t normally use, bringing you another creative boost.

7. Turn it upside down.

Turning something upside-down, whether physically by flipping a piece of paper around or metaphorically by re-imagining it can help you see patterns that wouldn’t otherwise be apparent. The brain has a bunch of pattern-making habits that often obscure other, more subtle patterns at work; changing the orientation of things can hide the more obvious patterns and make other patterns emerge. For example, you might ask what a problem would look like if the least important outcome were the most important, and how you’d then try to solve it.

8. Work backwards.

Just like turning a thing upside down, working backwards breaks the brain’s normal conception of causality. This is the key to backwards planning, for example, where you start with a goal and think back through the steps needed to reach it until you get to where you are right now.

9. Ask a child for advice.

I don’t buy into the notion that children are inherently ore creative before society “ruins” them, but I do know that children think and speak with a n ignorance of convention that is often helpful. Ask a child how they might tackle a problem, or if you don’t have a child around think about how you might reformulate a problem so that a child could understand it if one was available. Don’t run out and build a boat made out of cookies because a child told you to, though – the idea isn’t to do what the child says, necessarily, but to jog your own thinking into a more unconventional path.

10. Invite randomness.

If you’ve ever seen video of Jackson Pollock painting, you have seen a masterful painter consciously inviting randomness into his work. Pollock exercises a great deal of control over his brushes and paddles, in the service of capturing the stray drips and splashes of paint that make up his work. Embracing mistakes and incorporating them into your projects, developing strategies that allow for random input, working amid chaotic juxtapositions of sound and form – all of these can help to move beyond everyday patterns of thinking into the sublime.

11. Take a shower.

There’s some kind of weird psychic link between showering and creativity. Who knows why? Maybe it’s because your mind is on other things, maybe it’s because you’re naked, maybe it’s the warm water relaxing you – it’s a mystery. But a lot of people swear by it. So maybe when the status quo response to some circumstance just isn’t working, try taking a shower and see if something remarkable doesn’t occur to you!

CONCLUSION

In an effort to introduce the concept of thinking outside the box, I have tried my best to explain the relevance and how it is being used in companies to deliver best-in-breed solutions. Any company that was, is and will be successful, if it spends some time in nurturing and supporting thinking out side the box.

The best part is that the concept can be introduced in any industry segment, any domain and in any department of an organisation, without any limitations.

At the end of the day, it is not only Porter's laws or new terms that are introduced that will drive the economies of the global world, but also the ability to create, cultivate and carry the concept of 'thinking outside the world.'

I think, it is fair enough to say that, Porter applied the 'thinking outside the box' concept to existing strategies and competitive forces to devise his visionary statements. How many of us could do that? Not many, I would say.

Regards,