Conversations in Management
Ike
was no stranger to big problems that seemed insoluble. As
America’s chief Nazi-buster, he led the campaigns in North
Africa, Sicily, Italy and Normandy. He also handled the problem
egos of Patton, Churchill, Montgomery and Stalin. Later, as
president, he faced insoluble problems like the Korean
War and a woefully inadequate transportation infrastructure. In
his quiet way, he tackled them all with bold, decisive strokes
and generally got good results. Nowadays, we’d say that
Eisenhower did and encouraged a lot of out-of-the-box
thinking—although the term had not yet been “invented.”
It seems
no one started thinking about out-of-the-box thinking
until the 1970’s. That’s when the staff development folks at the
Walt Disney Company introduced the Nine Dots puzzle in
their leadership training programs. The puzzle consists of three
rows of three equally-spaced dots. The challenge is to connect
the dots using only four straight lines and without your pencil
ever leaving the paper. Though new to Disney trainees, the
puzzle had actually been around for quite a while. It was first
published in Sam Loyd’s Cyclopedia of Puzzles as
Christopher Columbus’ Egg Puzzle (don’t ask) back in 1914.
Whether known as Christopher Columbus’ Eggs or the
Nine Dots, the puzzle baffled people for the same reason.
Because the dots (eggs) form a square, people’s first tendency
is to draw a mental line around them and, in effect, box in the
dots. Once that assumption is made, folks seek the solution
within the box where, as we all know, it can’t be found.
The
puzzle, then, is all about boundaries and assumptions.
It’s about how we limit our thinking and lower our expectations.
Each of us lives in a world of boundaries. Policies, laws and
cultural norms all fence-in our behavior—and appropriately so.
As social creatures, these tools provide the necessary structure
for us to live and work together in close quarters. They define
what we can do and suggest what we can expect. We create
problems for ourselves, however, when we think of the boundaries of
our lives as fixed. That’s because fixed boundaries
restrict our options. They force us to consider new problems in
the same old ways. They discourage creativity and instead
encourage “it can’t be done” thinking. That kind of thinking
leads to self-defeating assumptions. You stop trying because you
don’t think your voice will be heard, or that one person can
make a difference, or that you’re not smart enough to make a
meaningful contribution. Soon your life boundaries seem like
insurmountable obstacles and you figure that things are about as
good as they’re ever going to get. With those kinds of
boundaries and assumptions, there’s not a lot of incentive to
think outside the box. There’s even less incentive to take risks
or promote change.
None of
the policies, laws and cultural norms that we live by are
written in stone. All of them have evolved and will continue to
evolve. Our challenge is to determine the role we’ll play in the
process. When we take the time to enlarge our insoluble
problems rather than accept them, we’re expanding our boundaries
and assuming we can make a difference. We’re proactively shaping
our future instead of just accepting whatever comes along.
Connect the dots. The next time someone tells you it can’t be
done, take another look, push the boundaries and show them
that it can.
—Ebert
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