Words are Important: Outside the Box

Words are Important

The business world seems to generate more jargon and buzzwords than goods and services these days. Words are being misused and abused. This is a disaster because words are important. When words can be made to mean anything, they mean nothing. Without precise meaning, we can’t form rational thought and the world is lost. So, in the interest of saving the world, I humbly present my third installment of this series on words:

Outside the Box

What it means

The phrase comes from the so-called “Nine Dots” puzzle (pictured above). The challenge of the puzzle is to connect all nine dots using only four straight lines without lifting the pencil from the puzzle. The puzzle can only be solved by drawing lines outside of the bounds of the “box” defined by the nine dots.

In order to solve the puzzle, it is necessary to think “outside the box.”

How it’s used

This puzzle was used as a metaphor by management consultants since the 1970′s, reaching it’s heyday in the early 1990′s. Though the “Nine Dots” puzzle is rarely heard about anymore, the phrase “outside the box” remains a vague synonym for “problem solving.” The implication is that our creativity is “boxed-in” by conventional thinking.

Why it’s important

The reason why the “Nine Dots” puzzle was so effective, and why the phrase caught on as widely as it did, was because it functioned at two levels. The first level was the frustration people felt at trying to solve the puzzle, and the catharsis after seeing that the simple answer was right in front of them the whole time. “Why didn’t I see it?” they would ask themselves. The second level was that it served as a powerful visual metaphor. Our minds were boxed-in by our own preconceptions. There is no box around the dots, but our brain drew one for us anyway, and we were confined by it. It was a powerful Zen-like answer, “I didn’t see it because I didn’t let myself see it.”

Knowing that you have to think outside the box is a very different thing than being able to think outside the box. Our education system is set up to eschew the notion of questioning anything — the class materials, the teacher, the principal, the whole system. While certainly knowledge begins by learning the known problems and the known solutions, mastery comes when you gain the ability to unlearn what you know and solve new problems in new ways. But our school lives lead directly into our work lives. The institutions operate under the same credo — keep your head down and your mouth shut and do what you are told. So, if management was saying “think outside the box,” they were doing something very different. Nobody ever got promoted for throwing company policy out the window or telling the boss that his idea wasn’t going to work.

The promise of thinking “outside the box” was only so much talk. Schools didn’t prepare people to think that way, and companies were compounding the issue in their yearly employee reviews. Commonly, the phrase was shortened to “out of the box”, which to me rather connotes something more like “off the shelf” — the opposite of the intended meaning. Inevitably, the call to think “outside the box” became a mere platitude until finally the phrase became a cliché and collapsed under the weight of its own irony.

It’s a shame because the world is getting weirder and weirder, and we need unconventional thinkers now more than ever. But, our educational system is in shambles, and our corporations keep breeding cultures where conventionality is a merit. The situation seems dire and intractable. How can we fix it?

I guess we’re going to have to think outs… nah, I can’t say it.

Images by me