Thinking Outside The Box

There is a common issue in working with people — they can think using only known patterns and can not take a step further. This issue is especially important in the R&D areas where the main goal is to invent new and better approaches. What can we do about it?

Source Of Issue

The main reason people use known patterns is that it does not require any additional effort. This is fine when you are doing some regular activities — like driving a car or cooking food (unless you are a professional cook). However, doing it all the time is not good because the ability to think outside the box requires a certain level of flexibility. The pattern thinking does not need it, so people can simply forget how to do it.

The next big reason partly related to the previous one is laziness. No matter how good you can be — only actual results count. To achieve these results you have to work hard and practice a lot — only then you can gain enough experience for creative and fruitful thinking.

One less obvious reason is the lack of professionals in the social circle. If you can not learn from the best then you simply can not achieve great results. Thinking outside of the box requires experience, and it is extremely hard to get it without learning and support from a more experienced person. Just do not forget to return the favor — you should teach the beginners to grow the community.

How To Prevent It

The main recommendation is to avoid routine as much as possible. You may also switch to new projects / technologies / tasks from time to time to do not stuck with the same context for a long time. By doing that you can always keep your mind in shape and be ready to do non-trivial activities that require non-trivial thinking.

Another way to keep up the required level of flexibility is to visit classes to learn something new from time to time. This approach not only gives you more experience and knowledge but also allows to maintain learning speed and overall speed of thinking. You may visit several classes on multiple topics to extend your knowledge even more.

In general, constant progress in the best solution for this issue and perfect countermeasure against the pattern thinking. It may be progress in the main area, related areas or even completely separate areas. The important part is to be able to see things differently and think differently. Each new area may give your mind a new dimension to check the task and so a hint for an alternative solution — and this is the main idea of thinking outside the box!