Think outside the box

19 July 2021
To think outside the box is to disregard artificial constraints on creativity, to engage in unconventional thought processes. The phrase as we know it arises from a puzzle used as an exercise in creative thinking. The phrase also has a precursor with slightly different wording: think outside the dots.
In the puzzle, nine dots are arranged on a 3×3 grid, and the participants are asked to connect the dots with four straight lines and without lifting the pencil from the paper. Most participants will keep their lines within the box defined by the grid, but the only solution, as shown in the accompanying illustration, is to extend the lines beyond the boundaries of the grid. The point being the restriction of keeping within the boundaries is an artificial one, imposed by the participants themselves and by extension that other, real-world, problems can be solved if only people disregard analogous artificial constraints.
While the phrase arose in the middle of the twentieth century, the metaphor underlying it is quite old, older than the puzzle itself. For example, there is this from an 1888 account of the British Parliament that uses think outside the lines:
He said that, having changed at Mr. Gladstone’s signal, from all but unanimous repudiation of Home Rule in 1885, to its enthusiastic support in 1887, the Liberal party became a one-man party, which scarcely ventured to think outside the lines prescribed by its dictator.
Other such framing of the metaphor can undoubtedly be found.
The earliest reference to the puzzle that I have found is in a religion column by the Rev. John F. Anderson in the Dallas Morning News of 30 October 1954. Anderson relates an account, real or imagined, of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor using the puzzle in a class with graduate students. He uses go outside the dots; the think would come a bit later:
“But prof,” one student protested, “that is not fair. You went outside the dots.”
“Who said you couldn’t?” was his disarming reply.
“Young men,” he continued, “we are not here to go through old routines. Don’t let your thinking be contained in a small square of knowledge. Learn to go “outside the dots” and you may be the one to solve some of man’s most puzzling problems.
A later use (see below) of the phrase by another preacher, makes me think the anecdote may have circulated in volumes of sermon illustrations that provide preachers with ideas for sermons.
But within a decade the puzzle and its accompanying lesson starts appearing in business management courses. From an article about just such a course in the 18 April 1963 Springfield Union:
We must ask ourselves: “What are the actual boundaries of the problem?” Perhaps, some of you have seen this little problem before. Here are nine dots, arranged in a square[.]
The problem is to connect all the dots by drawing four straight lines without removing the chalk from the black board and without retracing. Try it!
Did you first attempt to draw the lines within the boundaries of the nine dots? There is no rule that requires it. The solution demands that some of the lines extend into the space outside the dots.
And again from the Dallas Morning News, this time of 15 May 1964, is this list of courses at a conference of women accountants:
Speakers and their subjects will be Miss Ouida Albright of Fort Worth, Effective Use of Your Time; Mrs. Lauer, Managerial Accounting; Miss Ruth Reynolds of Tulsa, Okla., Internal Controls; Mrs. Engel, How to Conduct a Conference; Mrs. Mary Crowley, Going Outside the Dots, and C.L. Bateman of Tulsa, Cost Reduction in the Office.
But we don’t have the full think outside the dots. That comes by 23 May 1970 in a column in the Ottawa Journal. It uses the phrase, but the column makes no explicit reference to or explanation of the puzzle. The writer assumes the reader is familiar with it, or at least with the concept:
The problem, says William Davd [sic] Hopper, is to think “outside the dots” about questions of how to feed a hungry world.
He means that the need is to think imaginatively, creatively about the development of less-developed countries, and not merely to keep pouring more money and technology into patterns of foreign aid established, not very successfully, over the past 20 years.
While the column co-locates all the words in the phrase, its use of quotation marks separates think from outside the dots, indicating that the think was not yet part of the standard phrasing.
We get the complete phrase by 6 July 1980, when it appears in another newspaper column, this time in the Miami Herald:
Mrs. Roe was my English teacher in junior high school in Miami. One dictum ruled her classroom—and, I suspect, her life—and occasionally in a fit of passion she’d scrawl on the blackboard in letters a foot high: THINK OUTSIDE THE DOTS!
More often she uttered it—hurled it, really—and everyone came to know the pattern, to watch for it, to even relish it. She’d ask a question, get no response. A minute would pass while she still stared at us: a hush would fall. Then all at once she’d cry, “Think outside the dots! Think outside the dots!”