“Just think outside the box.” It’s such a staple saying whenever you have a problem or crisis that can’t be solved with just common sense or basic intuition. We live in a society where thinking of creative new solutions that haven’t tested before on the fly is supposed to be the norm. Contrarily, though, more than a fair share of people don’t have that level of creativity-at least not immediately. But even so, anybody can learn the baseline for creative problem solving with the proper knowledge.
The first path towards solving a problem creatively is to use what to you do know to figure out something you don’t. Here’s an anecdotal example:in almost all of my high school experience so far, my math classes have made me write assessments solely consisting of solving math problems with in a given timeframe. These assessment are rather straightforward when they’re about the material and topics I’ve studied for, but on every test my math teachers implement what they call “reach questions”-problems from a certain topic that weren’t featured in our textbook. Essentially speaking, one can’t directly study for them. The way I managed to solve such problems on the fly was by using a conjunction of formulas I’d already memorized during studying to solve the assessment by parts. In the same way, anybody can use prior knowledge about concepts pertaining to the issue at hand in order to solve specific parts of the problems. Eventually every subset can be dealt with, culminating to the problem being solved by multiple remedies. But that’s only a singular method. Even in my own math classes, there was at times an even simpler way to think outside the box: reinterpretation.
Sometimes, I would luck out on my math exam and see an even faster pathway to a solution. Instead of plugging in multiple formulas, I could instead view the “reach” problem in a different format altogether; this could be seeing division by a whole number as multiplication by a decimal or adding a positive number as subtracting a negative one. If and when you reinterpret a problem, you can view it as something you are more accustomed or predisposed to solving. Changing perspective can also simplify the crisis at hand by construing it in more basic terms and/or ideas that it was presented in. It can even help one relay the problem to others so that they can also contribute to a solution despite possibly having less knowledge or experience, further accelerating the formulation of a proper remedy.
Most people haven’t necessarily learned to breakthrough the box which represents simple intuition and ordered, predetermined, processes which are drilled into one at a young age. Nevertheless, its essential to remember that anybody can learn how to think outside the box as long as they know the specific techniques to do so and have the time to practice them. We may all have our struggles, so learning how to speed past them is something that should be taught and known by everyone.
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