Speculating beyond its restrictive confines the box can be both: 'The 'box' in the phrase 'outside the box' is not only a metaphor-it is real, measurable. Sam Loyd's original formulation of the puzzle entitled it as 'Christopher Columbus's egg puzzle.' This was an allusion to the story of Egg of Columbus. In the 1951 compilation The Puzzle-Mine: Puzzles Collected from the Works of the Late Henry Ernest Dudeney, the puzzle is attributed to Dudeney himself. It appears in Sam Loyd's 1914 Cyclopedia of Puzzles. The nine dots puzzle is much older than the slogan. The heart of the matter is the unspecified barrier which is typically perceived.Ĭhristopher Columbus's Egg Puzzle as it appeared in Sam Loyd's Cyclopedia of Puzzles. The puzzle only seems difficult because we imagine a boundary around the edge of the dot array. The phrase 'thinking outside the box' is a restatement of the solution strategy. The conundrum is easily resolved, but only if you draw the lines outside the confines of the square area defined by the nine dots themselves. The puzzle proposed an intellectual challenge-to connect the dots by drawing four straight, continuous lines that pass through each of the nine dots, and never lifting the pencil from the paper. Management consultant Mike Vance has claimed that the use of the nine-dot puzzle in consultancy circles stems from the corporate culture of the Walt Disney Company, where the puzzle was used in-house. The origins of the phrase 'thinking outside the box' are obscure but it was popularized in part because of a nine-dot puzzle, which John Adair claims to have introduced in 1969. The notion of something outside a perceived 'box' is related to a traditional topographical puzzle called the nine dots puzzle. Rather just get out of the box.' Nine dots puzzle One of many solutions to the puzzle at the beginning of this article is to go beyond the boundaries to link all dots in 4 straight lines. He argues 'I have never understood the saying 'To think outside the box.' Why would anyone sit inside of a box and then think outside of it.

What is encompassed by the words 'inside the box' becomes analogous with what we know or what we assume.Ĭonservationist Lawrence Anthony acknowledges and rejects the paradigm analogy. A simplified definition for paradigm is a habit of reasoning or a conceptual framework.Ī simplified analogy is 'the box' in the commonly used phrase 'thinking outside the box'.

To connect 9 dots with 4 lines