Thinking about a Box!!

I was recently confronted with a situation where someone ordered me to ‘think outside the box.’ Those thundering words hit me hard and all I could think of is a box. More specifically, it was a wooden cuboid box, just like the ones the movers use. I conjecture that my box was about 20 x 12 x 8 and needed some finishing and a paint job as well.

I don’t know if this only me, but I could tell you it took me some time to get out of the non-existent box and back to where I was. Essentially in the process of thinking outside the box, I created a box and found myself thinking how to get out of it!

I don’t want to dissect the box further but I realized that an effective way to impose roadblocks on a thought process is to hurl something that has a colorful metaphor attached to it. In fact you can use this technique to direct a thought process. For example, imagine that your boss asks you for a status update on one of the projects. If you don’t know what to say, you can tell him that it is about time to something be done about the entire dog and pony show as enough money was spent to choke a cow. You can also tell him that the company must embark on juggling picked onions and ensure that from soup to nuts no one is hitting the hay. It may not get you the raise that you wanted but you may have sucessfully confused him so much that now he can’t even see his nose in front of his face!

As you probably figured out, I’m not a big proponent of idiomatic conversations but when leaders of nations say on national television that they’ll hunt ‘em, smoke ‘em out of their holes and kill ‘em, it makes me rethink. Beating around the bush is not necessarily a bad idea especially when you don’t necessarily know who and where the so called "‘em" are! It is atleast better than getting the wrong "‘em" and claiming that this is what you meant!!

Before I digress too much, here is a list of idioms that you can hurl at people that you talk to. The most effective way to use them is in the middle of a heated conversation and thus control the tempo and the direction of the discussion. Even if you don’t intend to use them, it does make some interesting reading.

If your wondering what happened to me when I couldn’t think outside the box, I was subjected to a 1 hour seminar where they taught me various methods to think outside the box. I was also given a multi-page handout that illustrated the difference between thinking outside the box and thinking inside it! Well, they may have defined the box for me, but I still don’t seem to do any better. Wonder why?