Using Frames of Reference to Think out of the Box

How would a thinking out of the box process look/feel/sound like? Would it be akin to an aimless search? I let my mind wander and see what emerges.

What is the end objective of a brainstorming exercise– thinking out of the box or innovating? Innovating is the end objective. Thinking out of the box is just a way to push people towards innovating.

A few weeks back I was a participant in a workshop facilitated by Judith Katz and Fred Miller from Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group. Judith was talking about an experiment carried out by researchers in Harvard School of Education. The experiment was about what kind of play behaviour do kids exhibit in different kinds of parks. The researchers discovered something interesting.

When kids played in parks that had no fencing/boundary, they tended to all congregate and play close to each other. No kid seemed to veer out too much from the group.

When kids played in parks that had fencing/boundary, they tended to be dispersed and even go right up to the fencing/boundary. The presence of the fence seemed to give comfort to the kids to venture further out than they had before. Play behaviour in this case was more pronounced.

What can we infer from the results of this experiment for thinking out of the box?

When we tell a group ‘Let us think out of the box’ but nothing else, we probably are giving rise to conditions akin to a park without a fence/boundary. People would venture out, but not too much.

When we tell a group ‘Let us think out of the box’ and then give frames of reference, we probably are giving rise to conditions akin to a park with a fence/boundary. People would venture right up to the fence/boundary.

Hence’ frames of reference’ should be used to facilitate teams in thinking out of the box. The first discussion in any brainstorming meeting should be around what frames of reference should we use today.

Let me illustrate through an example.

Let’s say we are trying to come up with the name for a new HR initiative that we are going to rollout. We tell the group ‘Let us come up with an unconventional name. But first let us decide what frames of reference would we use.’ We can then go ahead and say that we would use the 5 senses as the frames of reference. Hence we would first look at names which would describe how the initiative would look like. We would repeat the process for the other frames of reference; how the initiative would sound like, how the initiative would feel like , how the initiative would taste like (if it were to be a food :)); how the initiative would smell like (if it were to have an odour :)).

In this way we would have encouraged the group to have ventured further out than they would have without frames of reference. My sense is we would have come up with more creative alternatives than we would have come up with if we had just focussed on thinking out of the box.

-

Sourav