‘to think outside the box’: meaning

and origin
Pascal Trégueretymology, USA & Canadanewspapers & magazines, phrases, USA, William
SafireLeave a comment

Of American-English origin, the phrase outside the box means outside or beyond the realm
of normal practice or conventional thinking.

It is chiefly used in to think outside the box, meaning to think creatively or in an

unconventional manner.

In Among the New Words, published in Vol. 70, No. 4 (Winter, 1995), of American Speech
(Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press), John Algeo and Adele Algeo explain that
both to think outside the dots and its synonym to think outside the box

refer to a puzzle consisting of nine dots arranged in the form of a square or box of three rows
with three dots each. The challenge of the puzzle is to join all nine dots with four straight
lines drawn without lifting the pencil from the paper. The puzzle can be solved only by
extending three of the lines outside the box implied by the three-by-three arrangement of the
dots. Most would-be puzzle solvers are foiled by the invisible limitations of the form.

Both the phrases to think outside the dots and to think outside the box occur in ‘Outside the
Box’, by the U.S. political columnist Eugene Joseph Dionne Jr. (born 1952), published in The
Washington Post (Washington, D.C.) of Tuesday 10th January 1995:

Speaker Newt Gingrich 1, fond as ever of futuristic management consultant-speak, addressed

the Ways and Means Committee last week on the importance of “thinking outside the dots.”
This maxim is also often rendered as “thinking outside the box.” The idea is to encourage
people to junk their preconceptions. If you want to change the way the world works, you
often have to abandon your ideas about how the world works.
1
The U.S. politician Newton Leroy Gingrich (born McPherson, 1943) was the 50 th Speaker of
the United States House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999.

In his column On Language, published in The New York Times (New York City, New York)
of Sunday 21st May 1995 (Section 6, pages 20 and 22), William Safire 2, after quoting E. J.
Dionne Jr., gave the following explanations:

The dots and the box are related. A brain teaser used in 1984 by Development Dimensions
International, management consultants, showed eight dots forming a square, or box, with a
dot in the middle. “Without lifting your pencil from the paper,” the teaser went, “join all the
dots with only four straight lines.” It looks like this:
(I have tried to solve this and conclude that you have to be a liberal.) “To connect the dots,”
wrote DDI’s Nancy Hrynkiw to Anne Soukhanov, an inquiring lexicographer, “you must go
outside the nine dots, but most people automatically think that they have to stay within the
nine dots.” (See page 22 for the way it’s done by visionary public servants and executives
destined for the top or soon to be fired.)
Thus, thinking outside the dots or outside the box, Ms. Hrynkiw explains, means “thinking
about a problem without the constraints that ‘how things are now’ sometimes imposes.”
According to a list of current corporate catch phrases assembled in the Nov. 4, 1994,
Management magazine, thinking out of the box can be defined as “creating new processes,
not just refining old formulas.” The magazine adds, “However, challenging your bosses’
processes is risky.”

This is the diagram that