He challenged research subjects to connect all nine dots using just four straight lines without lifting their pencils from the page. Thinking Outside the Box: It was an appealing and apparently convincing message. Indeed, the concept enjoyed such strong popularity and intuitive appeal that no one bothered to check the facts. Overnight, it seemed that creativity gurus everywhere were teaching managers how to think outside the box.
Solving this problem requires people to literally think outside the box. Because the solution is, in hindsight, deceptively simple, clients tended to admit they should have thought of it themselves. No one, that is, before two different research teamsβClarke Burnham with Kenneth Davis, and Joseph Alba with Robert Weisbergβran another experiment using the same puzzle but a different research procedure.
After all, with one simple yet brilliant experiment, researchers had proven that the conceptual link between Prostitutes outside the box and creativity was a myth. Only 20 percent managed to break out of the illusory confinement and continue their lines in the white space surrounding the dots. Santa, the concept enjoyed such strong popularity and intuitive appeal that no one bothered to check the facts. Management Prostitutes in the s and s even used this puzzle when making sales pitches to prospective clients.
In the early s, a psychologist named J. It was an appealing and apparently convincing message. Previous Next.
