Thinking Out of the Box

Thinking outside the box (also thinking out of 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. To think outside the box is to look farther and to try not thinking of the obvious things, but to try thinking beyond them.

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. 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

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.