There are many ways you can waste time on the Internet, and there are times when you find something handy. Now and then, I will go and look at something called Ted Talks. You can Google that name, and many different ones will pop up. They range from “What if you could trade a paperclip for a house?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8s3bdVxuFBs to talks on quantum physics. All are on YouTube. I was looking at videos of Ted talks on the topic of thinking outside the box. There are over 50 of them to choose from! I was interested in the percentage of people who practice thinking outside the box. The most significant number was just 3% down to “hardly anyone.” The ones I found most interesting explained how we create our boxes. Most also pointed out how hard it is to escape the boxes we created. The boxes pointed out in the videos could be defined as norms or practices, particularly when applied to our professions. If you’re an electrical engineer, you know enough about the field to understand what’s not possible and until someone does it. “Geez, I should’ve seen that,” is what you think after the fact.
I saw several methods suggesting ways to escape your box and think outside of it. Most of them were rather standard, but underlying them was a straightforward rule. Start with the absurd! Here’s an example I came up with – inventing a new way to control the temperature in your home. For most of the 20th century, a thermostat consisted of a bimetallic spring and a mercury switch. Let’s start with the absurd. We could hire someone who turned the thermostat up say an hour before we get up each morning and at night turned it down. The answer is a rather expensive way, and I’m sure the person would soon be bored. How about a central location where you subscribed to have your thermostat turned up in the morning remotely? They could have many many clients making it a profitable business. We could think of a more technological means. How about a beam of light shining through a glass thermometer, and when the temperature rises enough to cut off the light, the heat will shut down? If the light is not cut off by the fluid in the thermometer, the heat will turn on. That would work, but it wouldn’t know the time of day so that heat would stay constant day or night. I’m sure you are getting the idea of using the absurd to solve the problem.
Is there a problem in your home or business that drives you crazy, but you told there is no way to solve the problem? Start by thinking outside the box – any absurd way to solve the problem. You might be surprised to find there is a rather simple solution. For instance, you want to make furniture, but you don’t assemble it. It sounds stupid until you realize that’s what IKEA is doing!
