Creating Inside the Box
Living Happy
You have a problem. You need to solve it. Now what do you do?
Chances are, more than once, you’ve heard some well-meaning person (maybe you’re great aunt, maybe your seventh-grade English teacher) say, “Just think outside the box.”
That’s the way to solve it, they’ll reiterate. Just think outside the box.
It turns out that for a lot of us and a lot of problems, that might not be the best way to solve it.
As researcher Drew Boyd writes in Psychology Today,
“Our comprehensive study of the most successful innovations, and our practice with some of the most successful companies in the world, proves just the opposite. More innovation—and better and quicker innovation—happens when you (1) work inside your familiar world, (2) generate solutions independent of any specific problem, and (3) use just five simple techniques to generate those solutions—subtraction, unification, multiplication, dependency, and division.”
This doesn’t seem to fit all that well with our notion of being a creative artist, does it?
Creativity is a process. It isn’t just the novel; it’s getting to the novel. It isn’t just the painting hanging on the wall; it’s the process of preparing a canvass, having a vision, putting brush or palette knife to surface, spreading color and image and line.
A lot of us focus pretty hard on the end goal. Some of us focus so hard on the end goal that we lose the joy of creating. But worse than that, we sometimes get so used to the steps of our process, of our work, that we stop our own inventive thinking.
“Inventive thinking is actually a mind-set of looking at challenges in a positive way,” says Aliamat is quoted as saying in an article at SingTeach. “In my research, my focus is about changing students’ perspectives, to be innovative and inventive in daily life.”
Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) is a way to do that.
Back in the 1990s, Amnon Levav, Haim Harduf, Haim Peres, Jacob Goldenberg and Roni Horwitz developed SIT from work by Genrich Altshuller. Basically, Althshuller created the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving based on the belief that innovations had common patterns.
“Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) is a thinking methodology where creativity takes centre stage. It contains five thinking patterns that humans have used for thousands of years. It directly contradicts the principle of ‘thinking outside the box’ and uses ‘thinking inside the box’ as a guiding principle in order to prove that creativity is not the prerogative of only a few,” explains a Toolshero post.
That’s a lot of abstract words, isn’t it?
But basically, SIT is about fixing problems by brainstorming. This brainstorming has no structure. It is like improv by the stage is your brain or a piece of paper or a blank computer file.
As toolshero says,
“Systematic Inventive Thinking does things differently. According to Systematic Inventive Thinking, innovation takes place when:
· Thinkers work within a familiar world;
· Solutions are invented by good ideas that are independent of a specific problem;
· And when the following five methods are used: subtraction, multiplication, division, attribute dependence, and task unification.”
But, of course, there are some ways to go about this. It’s not as loosey-goosey as it alleges to be. The tools pr techniques that are used for SIT are pretty easy.
Boyd writes,
“Using these patterns correctly relies on two key ideas. The first idea is that you have to re-train the way your brain thinks about problem solving. Most people think the way to innovate is by starting with a well-defined problem and then thinking of solutions. In our method, it is just the opposite. We start with an abstract, conceptual solution and then work back to the problem that it solves. Therefore, we have to learn how to reverse the usual way our brain works in innovation.
This process is called “Function Follows Form,” first reported in 1992 by psychologist Ronald Finke. He recognized that there are two directions of thinking: from the problem-to-the-solution and from the solution-to-the-problem. Finke discovered people are actually better at searching for benefits for given configurations (starting with a solution) than at finding the best configuration for a given benefit (starting with the problem).
The second key idea to using patterns is the starting point. It is an idea called The Closed World. We tend to be most surprised with those ideas “right under noses,” that are connected in some way to our current reality or view of the world. This is counterintuitive because most people think you need to get way outside their current domain to be innovative. Methods like brainstorming and SCAMPER use random stimulus to push you “outside the box” for new and inventive ideas. Just the opposite is true. The most surprising ideas (“Gee, I never would have thought of that!”) are right nearby.
We have a nickname for The Closed World…we call it Inside the Box.”
There’s something so interesting about being surprised by the “ideas right under our nose,” and the fact that our solutions are closer than we realize, and that we just need to look at things a bit differently and use techniques and principles to do so.
Yes! Principles! How cool is that?
There are also five principles that ToolHero really nicely explains.
I’m the first to admit that I have SO MUCH to learn about this and the resources aren’t as plentiful as I’d hoped, but it’s intriguing, right? So many thanks to one of my writing students at The Writing Barn, Tracy, for bringing this up in her presentation yesterday.
It gave me an idea for my own business in one hot second. And that sort of thing? That’s magic.
RESOURCES
North Central Regional Educational Laboratory. (2003). enGauge 21st century skills. Naperville, IL: Author.
Sokol, A. (2008). Development of inventive thinking in language education (PhD thesis). Retrieved from https://www.jlproj.org/this_bibl_e/books/TA_thesis_ch2.pdf
Trilling, B., & Fadel, C. (2009). 21st century skills: Learning for life in our times. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Barak, M., & Goffer, N. (2002). Fostering systematic innovative thinking and problem solving: Lessons education can learn from industry. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 12(3), 227-247.
Barak, M., & Mesika, P. (2007). Teaching methods for inventive problem-solving in junior high school. Thinking skills and creativity, 2(1), 19-29.
Wang, Y. H., Lee, C. H., & Trappey, A. J. (2017). Modularized design-oriented systematic inventive thinking approach supporting collaborative service innovations. Advanced Engineering Informatics, 33, 300-313.
Janse, B. (2019). Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT). Retrieved [insert date] from toolshero: https://www.toolshero.com/problem-solving/systematic-inventive-thinking-sit/
https://singteach.nie.edu.sg/2012/06/29/issue37-languageed/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inside-the-box/201304/systematic-inventive-thinking