Thinking Outside the Box: 11 Tips on Shifting Perspectives

Thinking outside the box is more than just a business cliché. It means approaching problems in innovative ways, conceptualizing problems differently, and understanding your position in relation to any particular situation. Ironically, it is a cliché that means to think of clichéd situations in other ways.

We’re told to “think outside the box” all the time, but how exactly do we do that? How do we develop the ability to confront problems in ways other than the ways we normally confront problems? How do we cultivate the ability to look at things differently from the way we typically look at things?

Thinking outside the box starts well before we’re “boxed in” – that is, well before we confront a unique situation and start forcing it into a familiar “box” that we already know how to deal with. Or at least think we know how to deal with.

Make an effort to push your thinking beyond its limit every now and again – the talents you develop may come in handy the next time you face a situation that “everybody knows” how to solve.

11 Ways to Think Out of the Box

Here’re the tips on how to think out of the box:

1. Think Outside the Box by Studying Another Industry

I’ve learned as much about teaching from learning about marketing as I have from studying pedagogy – maybe more. Go to the library and pick up a trade magazine in an industry other than your own, or grab a few books from the library, and learn about how things are done in other industries.

You might find that many of the problems people in other industries face are similar to the problems in your own, but that they’ve developed really quite different ways of dealing with them. Or you might well find new linkages between your own industry and the new one, linkages that might well be the basis of innovative partnerships in the future.

2. Learn About Another Religion

Religion is how humans organize and understand their relationships not only with the supernatural or divine but with each other. Learning about these relationships can teach you a lot about how people relate to one another and the world around them.

Observing the beliefs of another religion can also help you develop mental flexibility. When you really look at all the different ways people comprehend the same mysteries, this experience can be very eye-opening and can help you start to see the limitations of whatever dogma or doxy you follow. It’s a revelation that will transfer quite a bit into the non-religious parts of your life.

3. Take a Class

Learning a new topic will not only teach you a new set of facts and figures, but it will also teach you a new way of making sense of aspects in your everyday life or of the society or natural world you live in. This in turn will help expand both how you look at problems and the breadth of possible solutions you can come up with.

Here’s a list of the 29 Best Online Learning Platforms to Try.

4. Read a Novel In An Unfamiliar Genre

Reading is one of the great mental stimulators in our society, but it’s easy to get into a rut. Try reading something you’d never have touched otherwise – if you read literary fiction, try a mystery or science fiction novel. If you read a lot of hard-boiled detective novels, try romance.

Pay attention not only to the story but to the particular problems the author has to deal with. For instance, how does the fantasy author bypass your normal skepticism about magic and pull you into their story? Try to connect those problems to problems you face in your own field.

5. Write a Poem

Problem-solving occurs heavily on our brain’s frontal lobe and is responsible for our higher cognitive skills including thinking, planning, and problem-solving. ^[1]. Poetry neatly bridges our more rational left-brain thought processes and our more creative right-brain processes. Though it may feel foolish (and getting comfortable with feeling foolish might be another way to think outside the box), try writing a poem about the problem you’re working on.

Your poem doesn’t necessarily have to propose a solution – the idea is to shift your thinking away from your brain’s logic centers and into a more creative part of the brain, where it can be mulled over in a non-rational way. Remember, nobody has to ever see your poem.

6. Draw a Picture

Sometimes thinking outside the box means going back to the things we used to do all the time as a child. Drawing a picture is even more right-brained, and can help break your logical left-brain’s hold on a problem the same way a poem can. Also, visualizing a problem engages other modes of thinking that we don’t normally use, bringing you another creative boost.

7. Turn It Upside Down

Turning something upside-down, whether physically by flipping a piece of paper around or metaphorically by re-imagining it can help you see patterns that wouldn’t otherwise be apparent.

The brain has a bunch of pattern-making habits that often obscure other, more subtle patterns at work; changing the orientation of things can hide the more obvious patterns and make other patterns emerge. For example, you might ask what a problem would look like if the least important outcome were the most important, and how you’d then try to solve it.

8. Work Backwards

Just like turning a thing upside down, working backward breaks the brain’s normal conception of causality. This is the key to backward planning, for example, where you start with a goal and think back through the steps needed to reach it until you get to where you are right now.

9. Ask a Child for Advice

I don’t buy into the notion that children are inherently more creative before society “ruins” them, but I do know that children think and speak with ignorance of convention which is often helpful.

Ask a child how they might tackle a problem, or if you don’t have a child around think about how you might reformulate a problem so that a child could understand it if one was available. Don’t run out and build a boat made out of cookies because a child told you to, though – the idea isn’t to do what the child says, necessarily, but to jog your own thinking into a more unconventional path.

10. Invite Randomness

If you’ve ever seen a video of Jackson Pollock painting, you have seen a masterful painter consciously inviting randomness into his work. Pollock exercises a great deal of control over his brushes and paddles, in the service of capturing the stray drips and splashes of paint that make up his work.

Embracing mistakes and incorporating them into your projects, developing strategies that allow for random input, working amid chaotic juxtapositions of sound and form – all of these can help to move beyond everyday patterns and think outside the box.

11. Take a Shower

There’s some weird link between showering and creativity. Who knows why although science says it’s the flow of dopamine when we’re relaxed. ^[2] But a lot of people swear by it. So maybe when the status quo response to some circumstance just isn’t working, try taking a shower and see if something remarkable doesn’t occur to you!

Conclusion

Think out of the box – This is a statement that has been overused by millions of people across the world. Thinking outside the box is not easy because we are creatures of habit. We enjoy staying in our comfort zones.

To think out of the box might mean giving up our beliefs and increasing our chances of failure and rejection. However, when you start thinking differently, you’ll grow on a business and personal level.

If you’ve been struggling to stay ahead of the crowd, using the tips that we’ve shared here will help you achieve your goals easily. And live happily. Don’t hesitate to seek help when you need it. You’ll be amazed at the number of people who are willing to help you grow and prosper.

Featured photo credit: jose aljovin via unsplash.com