Thinking Outside The Box Is So Yesterday. The World Isn't flat (anymore)...

Ever since management consultants in the 1970s started telling us to "think outside the box" we have been following their advice trying to think differently, changing perspectives, finding unconventional solutions. Well, not everyone; some people apparently have been thinking 'beyond the box', and I've learned that Australians actually think 'outside the square'. And then there are those who insist on thinking 'out of the box' - I find it hard to understand if those people are inside of a box and come out of it in order to think, or if they grab into a box to find a good thought and take it out to think it through... Bad jokes aside, they basically stand for the same idea, and come from the same puzzle with nine dots.

This topographical 'nine dots puzzle' goes back to way earlier than the 70s, as it was mentioned in the 1914 Cyclopedia of Puzzles. It asks you to link all nine dots using four straight lines or fewer, without lifting the pen and without tracing the same line more than once. I guess we have all been presented this puzzle at some point in our lives and learned to solve it by -(spoiler alert if you haven't) - thinking outside the box, leaving it and using the space around it. It is, of course, a metaphor for the restrictive constraints that we often put on ourselves and that hinder us from solving problems. We tend to categorise, put everything neatly in drawers, and boxes, and end up missing the forrest for the trees. While the general idea of 'thinking outside the box' is obviously still being applied today, many might wonder why they still haven't mastered it. Here's my thought, and please hear me out without rolling your eyes: the world isn't flat (anymore)... Relying on a two-dimensional concept of a piece of paper with nine dots and four lines, does not reflect our world in the time of the internet. We need some updating.

The internet has found its way into our lives over the last decades, at first slowly, but with an exponentially growing speed. Everything is linked, interconnected, making many things much easier than before, but at the same time many other things much more complex. Our world isn't 2D anymore, more dimensions have been added, with even more being invented literally as we speak - well, to put it more accurately (and actually literally): as you read. Our task today and even more tomorrow is not to link nine dots on a piece of paper, but to link thousands of dots in a multidimensional space, in the world wide web. Instead of 'thinking outside the box' we are actually 'living inside the net', being connected 24/7. I can't even remember when I last spent even just one hour without knowing where my cell phone was, my precious key to a cosmos of knowledge and wisdom, ready to be scanned for answers and solutions at any time.

My admittedly slightly provocative question is: do we really need to think outside the box anymore? Will we even have the need to think at all in the future or will all the answers and solutions be accessible anyway in the blink of an eye? Until that day comes we have to stay sharp, though, and keep 'linking the dots' or even 'linking the boxes' from different dimensions. So would we be 'thinking beyond the links' or 'thinking beyond the net'...? Let's see what phrases you can come up with...