Think Outside The Box

STRANGE BUT TRUE

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX. - Think Creatively, Unimpeded By Orthodox Or Conventional Constraints.

Think outside the box originated in the USA in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Various authors from the world of management consultancy claim to have introduced it. The earliest citation that I have found comes from the weekly magazine of the US aviation industry - Aviation Week & Space Technology, July 1975. We must step back and see if the solutions to our problems lie outside the box.

The BOX, with its implication of rigidity and squareness, symbolises constrained and unimaginative thinking. This is in contrast to the open and unrestricted out of the box or blue-sky thinking. This latter phrase dates from a little earlier, for example, this piece from the Iowa newspaper the Oelwein Daily Register, April 1945:

Real thinking. Speculation. Pushing out in the blue. Finding out [the facts] was what put me onto the theory of blue-sky thinking.

The encouragement to look for solutions from outside our usual thinking patterns was championed in the UK by Edward De Bono, the British psychologist and inventor, who coined the term Lateral Thinking in 1967 and went on to develop it as a method of structured creativity.