Names for Skills

[bcholmes]

The phrase, "think outside the box" has become common parlance. I'm pretty sure it's a reference to the classic "nine dots" puzzle -- you know the one where you have to connect nine dots using four lines without lifting your pencil?

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<p>The phrase, "think outside the box" has become common parlance. I'm pretty sure it's a reference to the classic "nine dots" puzzle -- you know the one where you have to connect nine dots using four lines without lifting your pencil? <img src="http://www.bcholmes.org/images/ninedots.gif" hspace="10 vspace="10" align="right" /> <p>I've always loved these kinds of puzzles. I thought they were great tools for discovering unconscious assumptions about problem domains. But what I like more is the idea that there is a skill that never had a name, but which can now be described. <p>The "think outside the box" skill is something that some people are good at, and other people aren't. How does one hone that skill? <p>In a recent post, I used the phrase "see the whole board". This was a reference to something that President Bartlett says to Sam in an episode of <cite>The West Wing</cite>. They're playing chess, and Bartlett is talking about a potential military conflict with China over Taiwan, and although Sam is cautioning him that Bartlett's actions are escalating the tension, Bartlett just tells Sam to "see the whole board". <p>And that's a skill, too. The ability to step back and see how things relate to each other. Can that skill be developed and honed? <p>That strikes me as a much more interesting skill than, say, knowing how to program in COBOL. Why don't jobs advertise for these skills?

Comments

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

I think you're on to it. (: As the four-line solution requires discarding the assumption that one cannot draw outside the "boundry" of the array, the three-line solution depends on discarding the assumption that the dots are dimensionless points precisely arranged rather than two-dimensional dots that occupy area. There's one-line and zero-line solutions too.