#472  from Innovative Leader Volume 9, Number 6          June 2000

Thinking Out of the Box
by Michael Michalko

Mr. Michalko is a creativity expert and author of Thinkertoys (A handbook of business creativity), ThinkPak (A brainstorming card set), and his newest book, Cracking Creativity (Ten Speed Press, Churchville, NY, 1998).  He can be reached through www.creativethinking.net/ or phone 716-293-2957.

The dominant factor in the way our minds work is the buildup of patterns that enable us to simplify and cope with a complex world. These patterns are based on our past experiences. We look at 6 x 6, and 36 appears automatically without conscious thought. We examine a new product for our company and know it’s a good design at an appropriate price. We look at a business plan and know that the financial projections make sense. These things we do routinely, because of our thinking patterns, based on our past experiences. In addition, these thinking patterns enable us to perform routine tasks, such as driving an automobile, rapidly and accurately. But this same patterning makes it hard for us to come up with creative solutions to problems, especially when confronted with unusual data.

Creativity implies a deviance from past experiences and procedures. For example, cutting a cake into eight slices, using no more than three cuts. Most people have trouble coming up with a solution because of their past experience in cutting cakes. To solve this, you need to change the way you think about cakes, a piece of cake and how to cut a cake. One solution is to cut the cake in half and stack the one half on top of the other. Cut this piece in half, stack the pieces on top of one another and cut them. Or cut the cake into quarters and then slice the cake horizontally through the quarters. You’re likely now to think of many other ways.

You can also manipulate any subject into something new by manipulating or changing it in some fashion. Every new idea is some addition or modification to something that already exists. You can take any subject and change it into something else.

Reverse It

Consider the Walkman radio. Sony engineers tried to design a small, portable stereo tape recorder. They failed. They ended up with a small stereo tape player that couldn't record. They shelved the project. One day, Masaru Ibuka, honorary chairman of Sony, discovered this failed product and decided to refashion it into something new. He remembered an entirely different project at Sony where an engineer was working to develop lightweight portable headphones and asked, "What if you combine the headphones with the tape player and eliminate the recorder function altogether?"

Ibuka took a failed idea, and by combining it with headphones and eliminating the recorder function, created a brand new product. The Walkman radio became Sony's leading selling electronic product and introduced us to the "headphone culture."

Ibuka reversed the common assumption that a play-back machine must also record and, therefore, created something new.

Reversals break your existing patterns of thought and provoke new ones. You take things as they are and then turn them around, inside out, upside down, and back to front to see what happens. The same perceptual changes occur when we reverse our conventional thinking patterns about problems and situations. When Henry Ford went into the automobile business, the conventional thinking was that you had to "bring people to the work." He reversed this to: "bring the work to the people" and accomplished this by inventing the assembly line.

When Al Sloan became CEO of General Motors, the common assumption was that people had to pay for a car before they drove it. He reversed this to you can drive the car before you pay for it and, to accomplish this, he pioneered the idea of installment buying.

Reversals destabilize your conventional thinking patterns and permit information to come together in provocative new ways. For example, suppose your town wants to control parking of automobiles. The common assumption is that drivers control the parking time of their cars.

Reverse this to cars control parking time. This triggers the idea of letting drivers park anywhere as long as they leave their lights on.

Don’t Think About It

Another interesting way to get ideas, is, paradoxically, not to think about your subject. When people use their imagination to develop new ideas, those ideas are heavily structured in predictable ways by the properties of those existing categories and concepts. Expertise in an area can hinder creativity by making us fixated along a certain line of thought. If you want to produce something creative, say a new automobile design, don't think of automobiles--at least not at first. Instead, create several abstract compositions of bodies in motion and then use the compositions as stimuli for a new design.

Much evidence suggests that a more abstract definition of a problem can lead to greater creativity and innovation that the more typical definitions. Making your problem more abstract helps eliminate barriers that result from preconceived notions of what an idea or solution should be. It forces you to test assumptions and expands the possibilities.

Suppose your problem is how to protect rural designer mailboxes from theft and vandalism. You would first describe an abstract definition of your problem. Ask: What is the principle of the problem? What is its essence?
1. Example: The principle of our problem is protection.
2. Next, think of ways to protect things.
•  Place in a bank.
•  Rustproof it.
•  Provide good maintenance.
•  Get an insurance policy.
•  Hide it.
3. After you've generated a number of different ideas, restate the problem so that it is slightly less abstract. Again, generate as many solutions as you can.
Example: Think of ways to protect things that are outside and vulnerable.
•  Hire a guard.
•  Watch it constantly.
•  Drape it with camouflage.
•  Put a fence around it.
•  Keep it well lighted.
4. Finally, consider the real problem. Review the ideas and solutions to the two previous abstractions and use these as stimuli to generate solutions.
Example: The real problem is how to protect rural mailboxes from theft and vandalism. The idea triggered from "get an insurance policy" is for the mailbox company to offer an insurance policy to owners of rural mailboxes: $5 a year or $10 for three years to cover the mailbox from theft or destruction.

Are Your Ideas Crazy Enough?

Another way to break up your rigidity of thinking is to deliberately explore the absurd and unusual. This gives you the freedom from design or commitment and allows you to juxtapose things which would not otherwise have been arranged in this way and to construct a sequence of events which would not otherwise have been constructed. Suppose, for example, you work for a greeting card company that wants new products and markets.
1. You would first list several odd, unusual or absurd ideas about the problem.
Absurd ideas:
• Send greeting cards to dead people.
• Send heavy stones as greeting cards.
• Send cards COD.
• Send the person money with the message to "go out and buy your own greeting card."
• Send a spider.

2. Select one of the absurd ideas.
Absurd Idea: Send greeting cards to dead people.

3. Extract the principle. What is the principle of the absurd idea?
Principle: Communicating with the departed.

4. List the features and aspects of the absurd idea.
Features, aspects:
• People communicate with the dead through seances.
• People leave flowers at cemeteries.
• People leave poems, letters and other artifacts.
• People publish personal poems, messages, etc., in newspapers to the departed.
• People pray for the departed.
• Seances, Ouija boards, etc.

5. Extract the principle, or one of the features and aspects, and build it into a practical idea.
Example: We decide to work with "Leaving items at the cemetery."
Idea: Publish memoriam cards on sticks so they can be inserted in the ground at the gravesite. Sell the "cards-on-sticks" in florist shops that are located near cemeteries.

Creative-thinking techniques, like the ones described here, get you thinking out of your box by breaking up your conventional thinking patterns and stimulating new thinking patterns. These new thinking patterns lead to new ideas and concepts that you cannot get using your usual way of thinking.