Think outside the box has to be one of the most overused pieces of business jargon out there. In my less than decade-long career, I’ve lost count of the number of times someone has encouraged me to “think outside the box.”
In researching a separate post about metaphor, I was reading a blog post on the ABC Copywriting website—“Twenty business metaphors and what they mean”—and stumbled across this tried-and-true cliché:
Received ideas = boxes
As in ‘thinking outside the box’, of course. Apart from its crushing familiarity and over-use as an exhortation to ‘think different’, this one isn’t really all that bad. Its main downside is its implied slight on all the troubleshooters, fixers and convergent thinkers who do invaluable service by making sure the stuff ‘inside the box’ is neatly arranged. While important, innovation rarely involves a total break with tradition.
But something about this struck me as a little off.
Now, I’m not suggesting that ABC is wrong here—I think that their interpretation is pretty accurate as to how this metaphor functions in present use. But, surely, that can’t be origin? Where did we ever get this metaphor of ideas as boxes?
Turning to the OED, I found the entry for think outside the box enlightening:
(a) outside the box: outside or beyond the realm of normal practice or conventional thinking. Usually in to think outside the box: to think creatively or in an unconventional manner.
In quot. 1970 with allusion to a puzzle in which the aim is to connect the nine dots of a square grid with four straight lines drawn continuously; the solution is only possible if some of the lines extend beyond the border of the grid.
[1970 Lethbridge (Alberta) Herald 2 June 4/3 The problem..is to think ‘outside the dots’ about the questions of how to feed a hungry world.]
1971 Data Managem. Sept. 77 (heading) Think outside the box. If you have kept your thinking process operating inside the lines and boxes [of organization charts], then you are normal and average, for that is the way your thinking has been programmed.
1975 Aviation Week & Space Technol. 14 July 9 We must step back and see if the solutions to our problems lie outside the box.
1984 Fortune 6 Feb. 114/3 He tells his managers to be ‘cross-functional’ and to ‘think outside the box’ of their own specialty.
2016 Courier (Dundee) 2 Jan. (Perth & Perthshire ed.) 29/1 You start to think outside the box as far as your future is concerned.
I’ve bolded the quotation in the entry above that jumped out at me. The 1971 quotation suggests that the “box” we are always being asked to think outside of is the “box” of an organization chart.
To fully draw out the story, it helps to have a little background on organization charts. While these charts go back to the 19th century, it wasn’t only in the mid-20th century that organization charts came into widespread use as a management tool, partly in response to the rapid growth of so many US industries in the post-war era.
From a management standpoint, there are immense upsides to organization charts: managers are able to quickly and easily identify lines of authority (who reports to whom) and understand who is responsible for what within a large team of employees. These charts made it a whole lot easier to administer companies, especially large corporations.
But solid administrative practices are no guarantee of growth or profit. When a company places too much value on the (metaphorical) organization chart, people begin using it to contextualize their careers, contorting themselves to fit its predefined structure, thinking “inside the box,” as it were. Innovation—the real engine of organization growth—has no place when the organization is ruled by an organization chart.
We can interpret the 1971 quotation as indicating a shift in management style, one that recognizes how the placement of an employee within an organization chart may result in “programmed thinking,” where employees unintentionally limit their thoughts to what their assigned role demands of them. Suddenly, management is willing to, perhaps ironically, recognize the value of employees who are willing to look past their place in a chart and think outside the prescribed boundaries of their role.
You can see how this newfound value translated into the phrase we have egregiously been overusing for decades: think outside the box.
The metaphorical expansion of think outside the box that followed—defined by the OED as “to think creatively or in an unconventional manner”—is interesting because the “box” has expanded beyond the “idea” of the organization chart, as ABC points out, to encompass any “received idea” at all. In other words, we are all trapped in a multitude of metaphorical boxes. We are slotted into predetermined roles and modes of thinking that, if we have any interest in real innovation, we must think our way out of.
Taylor Coe 