Professional Documents
Culture Documents
#02 - 05-Challenging The Myth of Thinking Outside The Box
#02 - 05-Challenging The Myth of Thinking Outside The Box
.Take a look at this puzzle. It's called the nine dot puzzle
It's a puzzle, because you have to take your pencil and draw four straight lines and connect all nine
.dots
.It's tricky. And if you would like to try it, you can pause the video right here before I show the solution
Now, you may have seen this puzzle before. And if you have, you know that there was a trick to solving
.it. Let me show you
First you draw your line here. Then on your second line, instead of stopping on the last dot, you have to
extend your line out to here, you do the same on your third line extending outside the boundaries to
.here. And then you complete the puzzle like this
Pretty clever. This famous puzzle was used by a researcher in the 1970s, who found that on average,
.only 20% of participants could solve it. And so he concluded that it was obvious
To be more creative, we have to think outside the box. I'm sure you've heard that phrase many times.
But guess what? Soon after that research, two other researchers repeated the study, but told
.participants they had to draw the lines outside the box created by the nine dots
In other words, they were given the solution, you would think most everyone could solve it. Yet, only
about 20% could solve it. There was no improvement. thinking outside the box is a myth. thinking
outside the box sends your mind on a wild cognitive goose chase, searching for an idea that you may
.never find
You open your mind to a vast, wide open space that can overwhelm you. Yet the most popular creativity
methods are based on this idea of thinking in an unconstrained way. The most famous of these is
.brainstorming a technique that was created in the late 1940s
If you're like most people, you've participated in many brainstorming sessions. But did you know that
.over 50 years of scientific study into brainstorming shows conclusively, it doesn't work
Researchers compared a group of people brainstorming to the same number of people ideating on their
own, working on the same task. When they combine the ideas of the individuals and compare them to
the ideas from the brainstorming group. The individuals produced 80% more ideas and better ideas than
.the brainstorming group
brainstorming has many limitations and it can actually hold back your creative potential. So why do
?people still use brainstorming if it doesn't work
From my experience, people either don't know about the research or they don't have a better technique
.to replace it
My advice is to avoid using brainstorming as a way to generate ideas. Use it instead as a team building
.tool or perhaps as a way to get a quick snapshot of what people are thinking about
The best innovators are always looking for the best tools. Find those techniques that give you the best
.result and then master them