“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
With rapid changes in our ecosystem, the climate conditions and depletion of natural resources, we are facing the challenges of finding innovative solutions to new sets of problems almost on daily basis. While fast growing technologies and their applications help us in finding such solutions, they have a tendency of introducing us to new problems related to those very same technologies.
Due to new technologies or not, humans, throughout the history, seem to have managed to create problems faster than solving them. Therefore, creative problem solving has become one of the most ‘in-demand’ skills in the 21st century, irrespective of one’s field of interest.
Sometimes people find out that the ‘common sense’ approach is the best and most simple way to solve problems. Though it sounds like an easy thing to do, that approach may even be more difficult since it is becoming more and more uncommon to find ‘common sense’ in the society. There are ‘formal’ education systems in the world where ‘creativity’ is being taught and even tested, evaluated and ranked so that employers can easily pick the best possible candidates for employment.
One of the catchy phrases used by teachers, professors, business consultants and motivational gurus is: ‘think out of the box’. Most of the people use it to encourage the listeners to think different from their usual patterns of thinking. Can one really do it? Can one change the pattern of thinking just because someone asked them to think out of the box? What is this box they are talking about? If one doesn’t know the box one is in, how would one recognise what is outside?
More often than not, even the people who use this phrase don’t have a clue what it really means and whether it will help the listener. The greater danger is that the moment one says ‘think out of the box’ even the people who had no idea that there was a box will start imagining a box. It almost prompts the listener to think inside the box of thinking outside of the box.
Thinking out of the box is not really an action but a mindset. It is just the way the world is being perceived. The box is the limitations and boundaries we have created in our own minds. Once it is created it will not be that easy to go out just to solve a problem and come back in again. In a school setting, the art teacher will ask the students to think out of the box and be creative but then in the next period the biology teacher will come and just draw the human reproductive and read the lesson out of the book without answering any questions.
Adults destroying child’s creativity
Babies are born with creativity programmed into them but the adults they come in contact with gradually will put them in these boxes. By the time they leave school or university their minds are well packed in a nested series of boxes just like in a set of Russian Matryoshka Dolls, thinking outside of them is unthinkable. Educators and psychologists have been trying to study human creativity for centuries. In the early 1970s, a psychologist named J. P. Guilford conducted a study of creativity using the now famous nine-dot puzzle.
He challenged the research subjects to connect all nine dots (arranged in a rectangular array) using just four straight lines segments without lifting the pencil from the page and also without going back on any of the segments already drawn. Though about 20% of the subjects were successful in doing that during the first trial, almost all of the participants said that their thinking was limited to possible solutions within the imaginary rectangular box the dots seemed to have been arranged in. They failed to see unlimited space outside the nine dots.
The researcher said that if the subjects were able to ‘think out of the box’ they would have solved the puzzle much faster and hence the birth of the popular phrase. It is being used by teachers, professors, business consultants, marketing gurus and all the motivational speakers around the world but not very many people stopped to think about what it really means.
A couple of other researchers who were curious about the effectiveness of the phrase conducted another experiment using the same puzzle but a different methodology. Participants were divided into two groups and the first group was given same instructions as in the original experiment except the second group was told that the solution requires the lines to be drawn outside the imaginary box bordering the array of dots. Still only 25% of the subjects in the second group were able to come up with the solution.
This improvement from the 20% success in the original experiment was not statistically significant to say that the additional information the second group had helped enhance their performance. Though solving the puzzle required out of the box thinking, the performance did not improve even when the participants were given the specific instructions to do so. As the researchers say, there is no evidence to suggest that explicit instructions to think outside the box is helpful in making people solve problems in creative ways.
How to get out of patterns
That is why the famous motivational speaker Dr. Deepak Chopra says instead of thinking outside the box just get rid of the box. First identify what these boxes are. Whether we realise it or not we have been boxed in from our childhood by programing the compilers in our brains telling us what is and isn’t possible, risky, dangerous and appropriate. Even in the art class if the river was red then you will get zero marks. Just think back about life and see whether you can find out how many boxes your mind is packed in. If left to one’s own devices one almost certainly would have made different choices and enjoyed a red river under a blue moon.
Most of these boxes are made out of uncertainties of repercussions for trying something totally new and different. One will have to restructure the thinking patterns from the beginning to overcome those fears engrained in one’s minds in order to destroy the boxes imprisoning the frames of thinking. The problem is that one will have to do that while still being in the boxes. Perhaps that is why the author Terry Pratchett said: “I’ll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there is evidence of any thinking going on inside it.”
The writer has served in higher education sector as an academic over twenty years in the USA and fourteen years in Sri Lanka and he can be contacted at [email protected]