I’ve started having trouble with my cat. She’s starting to think outside the box.
Well, except for that I do believe in thinking outside the box. I’ve been doing it for most of my life. Matter of fact, my career depended on it, and if you are to be a successful manager, especially of a small business, your life and the life of your company depend on it.
I am convinced that in the competitive world of small business, it is imperative to keep thinking outside the box to stay ahead of the competition. Some words of wisdom that I’ve said before about how to beat the competition are, “Change the rules and don’t tell them what the new rules are.”
But exactly what does it mean to think outside the box? It means to think unconventionally about the problem. One way to do that is by brainstorming, which is a method of coming up with all sorts of crazy solutions to the problem — sometimes the crazier the better. This works especially well in a group of people in which one person’s ludicrous idea will often trigger another, more feasible idea.
Here’s an example of thinking outside the box. Niels Bohr was a nuclear physicist who was a contemporary of Albert Einstein, Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922.
It was while he was a young student at the University of Copenhagen that one of his professors decided to test the class with an interesting problem. He gave each of his students a simple barometer and told them they were to devise a way to determine the height of the building using the barometer.
Surely what he had in mind was for the students to measure the barometric pressure at the ground level and then again at the top of the building, and then using that information, calculate the height of the building. But he hadn’t figured that Bohr was a student who loved to think outside the box. Bohr came up with no less than nine ways to use the barometer to measure the building’s height.
One way Bohr suggested was to tie a string to the barometer and lower it to the ground from the roof. Then he measured the length of the string. A really simple solution, but not what the professor had in mind.
Another way was to drop it off the roof and use a stopwatch to measure how long it took to smash on the ground. Then, using Isaac Newton’s formula for a falling body — distance = ½ Gt2 — Bohr could calculate the height of the building. Not what the professor had in mind.
Still another way that Bohr proposed to use the barometer, and the one that tickles me the most, was to go to the office of the superintendent of the building. Bohr proposed to use the barometer to knock on his door, then ask him how tall the building was. Then Bohr would give him the barometer as payment for the information. Don’t you just love that? Again, not what the professor had in mind.
So thinking outside the box means to train your mind to think differently from the way you normally would think. After all, why not ask the superintendent how tall the building is?
P.S. If you are thinking that finding the height of the building by using the barometer as described in Bohr’s third method is ridiculous, you’re right — but you’re missing the whole point about thinking outside the box.
— Paul Burri is an entrepreneur, inventor, columnist, engineer and iconoclast. He is not in the advertising business, but he is a small-business counselor with the Santa Barbara chapter of Counselors to America’s Small Business-SCORE. The opinions and comments in this column are his alone and do not represent the opinions or policies of any outside organization. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
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