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

[angilong.livejournal.com]

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?

Puzzles are good for that. And games like Zendo and the situational logic puzzles where you have to ask questions about a situation to try to figure out what happened. We used to have an exercise/game in the "gifted" program I was in in school, too, called "flu, flex, & orig", where we'd have a category, such as "soft, white, and floats", and have to list as many things in that category as we could in a set amount of time. Then we'd read them off and get points in three areas: fluency (one point per item), flexibility (one point per "type" of item -- frex, if you listed a bunch of foods, and then a bunch of cloth/clothing-type things, that would be two types of items. Clouds would be a third), and originality (0-2 points per item, depending on how original they are -- the kid who listed "Cheryl Tiegs" for "soft, white, and floats" got 2 points for originality). Or we'd be shown an item, preferably something obscure which we probably wouldn't recognize (such as an artificial hip joint), and have to list uses for it.