The concept of thinking outside the box is a metaphor for thinking differently, unconventionally, or from a new perspective. It’s also a cliché about clichéd thinking. You can’t actually think outside the box, anyway, since you are constrained by the mental model your brain constructs and maintains for you. The mental model is the box, and you are always inside it. Contrary to some branches of popular thought, that’s not a bad thing.
Here’s a story that’s meant to illustrate thinking outside the box but that’s actually an excellent example of just the opposite—thinking inside the box.
Island of Safety*
On August 5, 1949, 15 firefighters and their foreman, Wag Dodge, were airlifted to Mann Gulch in Montana to extinguish what they thought would be a relatively small brush fire on one side of the gulch. They parachuted onto the opposite side of the gulch, joined one fire guard, and began descending with the wind at their backs.
Suddenly and unexpectedly, the wind reversed, and the fire jumped over to ignite the grass on their side. As the flames rapidly approached them, the men began to climb the slope to try to outrun the fire, pausing only to drop their heavy equipment.
But Dodge, the foreman, realized the fire was moving too quickly for that to work. He stopped and lit the grass in front of him with a match. The dry grass immediately caught fire and the wind blew the fire up the side of the gulch, away from him. That left a patch of charred ground Dodge crawled onto. When the advancing fire arrived, it flowed around and then away from his island of safety.
The other men misunderstood what he was doing and in spite of his exhortations for them to join him, continued up the slope. Only two, who had found shelter in a narrow crevice, survived.
Notice that it was the foreman who had the idea to fight fire with fire.
As the foreman, Dodge presumably had more experience and knowledge than the men he was supervising. The other firefighters not only didn’t come up with the idea, they also didn’t understand it when he showed it to them. The “box” Dodge was thinking inside was different from the boxes of the other men.
While you can’t escape thinking from inside your own box, you can continually remodel and expand it, thereby increasing your possibilities for original, innovative, and creative thinking.
Here’s another thinking-inside-the-box example.
WALL-E*
Andrew Stanton of Pixar Animation Studios was working on the screenplay for WALL-E, about the last robot left on a hopelessly polluted earth abandoned by humans. He was struggling with the design of WALL-E’s face, which he wanted to be both machinelike and expressive.
At a baseball game one day, he borrowed binoculars from someone sitting next to him. When he mistakenly turned them around so that the lenses were on the wrong side, he realized the binoculars looked like a face. After flexing the inner hinges several times to create different facial expressions, he decided WALL-E would look like a “binocular on a stem.”
Stanton had been writing and directing animated films for 20 years by the time he started working on WALL-E. He had already framed—and attempted to solve—the problem of WALL-E’s appearance before his binocular incident. And just as Wag Dodge did, he had a vast reservoir of experience and knowledge to draw upon.
The contents and the connections inside his box made it possible for him to come up with the solution.
The best things you can do for yourself to live a healthy (on every level) life also happen to be the best things you can do to expand your mental model: learn, move, create, challenge yourself; repeat.
*The two stories were drawn from The Eureka Factor by John Kounios and Mark Beeman.
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