How to Think Outside the Box: The Never-3 Rule
Think outside the box! This slogan has rapidly become the rallying cry of the growing creativity literature. Admittedly, it conveys a useful message. From daily life to major engineering projects, elegant solutions and revolutionary advances, are found outside the box of established patterns of thought.
How do you actually leave the box? The walls of the box are made of our own implicit assumptions. Mostly, they are good walls, because our assumptions are often true. They keep our thinking on well-trodden paths known to lead to well-established solutions and thus prevent us from pondering the absurd and implausible. When we want to break new ground, leaving the box can be essential but difficult. Our implicit assumptions tend to be so deeply ingrained in our thinking that we are unaware of them.
While one is often advised to think outside the box, instructions on how to do this are harder to find. In fact, one might argue that any such procedure, if established, would just become part of the box. Nevertheless, there are some tricks that allow us to discover the most common walls that constrain our thinking and overcome them. One of these I call the “Never-3 Rule”.
The central insight on which the rule is based is that our universe does not seem to be fond of whole numbers. Nobody ever waited for exactly 5 minutes, perhaps just a nanosecond more or a nanosecond less, but never exactly 5. The length of the year isn’t exactly 365 days, and even the best Olympic track isn’t exactly 100m long. Still, whole numbers frequently appear; in the previous sentence I have mentioned exactly three examples. So why exactly three? Humans love whole numbers and particularly numbered lists: the ten commandments, seven deadly sins, etc. But we are especially fond of the number 3 and so the “list of three things” is a frequently employed rhetorical device used to lend credibility to a statement, the “rule of three”. So I listed exactly 3 examples, not for any fundamental reason, but to conform to established patterns, to deliberately stay in the box of established thought.
The “Never-3 Rule” says: If you are faced with a whole number, any whole number, but particularly the number 3, then try to determine why that number appears and not any other. If we enquire why a particular number occurs, we sometimes find a deep reason. More often however we find that someone, perhaps our own sub consciousness, has narrowed down a wider space of possibilities.
Suppose you are walking along a path towards an intersection. You ask yourself: “Should I turn left, right, or continue straight?” You have just constrained yourself to three choices, so let’s apply the “Never-3 Rule”: Is the three in this example rooted in the fundamental physics or mathematics of paths? Perhaps. If you want to follow a path there are fundamentally two directions. Where two paths intersect you can chose between the paths and then between the directions on the path, so the number four appears naturally. Yes, four, not three! Walking towards the intersection, we also have the choice to turn back, an option that we forgot to mention previously. Recognising this option is a small success, but considering the problem a moment longer you realise that all of these numbers only appear because we let ourselves be constrained to the paths. If we are willing to consider options ‘outside the box’, we can wander off in any direction. Now, the possibilities are limitless and defy numbering.
The ancient Greeks thought the world was composed of 4 elements. One should have asked, why exactly 4, not 3 or 5? In fact, the 5th element, literally the quintessence, was much debated. Over the centuries these debates led to a more systematic study of chemistry. In 1789 Lavoisier published a list of 33 elements. Why 33, one should have asked, and people did. The list grew and it became clear that there is no hard limit to the number of elements. In reality the chemical elements are put together from smaller sub-atomic particles. Originally only two of these were known. This number is much more satisfying. The path example showed that two can easily arise from fundamental symmetries, in this case perhaps one type of positively charged particle and one type of negatively charged particle? But history repeated itself and the number of particles grew. Today there are 17 named particles in the standard model, some of which appear in different forms. And although this model is consistent with all experiments it leaves physicists dissatisfied because of the nagging question, why 17?
Let’s finish with a tough example: If you have 3 apples, you have exactly 3, right? It’s not wrong to say this; “3 apples” is what I write on my shopping list, but I am thinking inside the box when I do this. Our implicit assumption in this case is that one apple is like the other. If the apples are truly identical “3 apples” would capture the situation perfectly, but in the real world differences between the apples exist. So we can answer the question “Why 3?” by saying “Because I chose to group 3 different objects under one label”. In this case the “Never-3 Rule” made me realise that there are differences between the apples. This may be completely useless, but it may also give me additional options, for instance if I realise that I can store them for different times, or one would work better in a particular dish.
The “Never-3 Rule” is not a deep insight, and certainly is no universal recipe for thinking outside the box. Rather, it is a cheap trick that can help us overcome one specific, but very common, type of implicit assumption. The value of the rule lies in its simplicity, which makes it easy to remember and easy to apply on the fly. I hope that in heat of the next business meeting, when somebody tells you “We have two options: take it or leave it”, you may find it easier to recognise that the speaker has tried to constrain your options, while in reality there is an infinity of possibilities.
