- What is the next letter in this sequence: A E I. And what is the next number in this sequence: 1 5 9 13? How about this one: B C D G J?
- A boy and his mother got into a terrible car accident. They are taken to the emergency room, but on the way to the hospital, the mother dies. Upon their arrival to the hospital, the nurse exclaims: “But that boy is my son!”. How can that be?
- You’re in the ground floor of a house. There are three light switches. Upstairs, there are three light bulbs. The door on the top of the stairs will be locked behind you when you leave the ground floor. How can you determine which switch goes to which light bulb?
That kind of puzzles is often proposed as an exercise in “thinking outside the box”. However, if I were to “think outside the box”, I would bore a hole in the ceiling of the ground floor so I would be able check the light bulbs. Clearly, my solution is not the meant solution, and most people wouldn’t find it a fair solution, either. The purpose is to declare what “requirements” are real, and what requirements are imagined by the solver of the puzzle.
Same technique applies when it comes to solving software problems. For example, one of my clients who wanted a chat application, asked for a link directing to the help information in the status bar. This addition would require some layout changes that I considered a bit risky. Now, if I had suggested that the users won’t need the help information link, I would really be thinking outside the box. Instead, I ended up giving privileged users the right to send URLs in a normal chat box, which was a piece of cake. This way, the privileged users would be able to help other users to find the rules. I consider this thinking inside a larger box.
That’s why I don’t really care about thinking outside the box. Instead, I care about looking for the larger box.
PS: Finding the larger box is often easier if you work with others. I spent a huge embarrassing amount of time trying to solve the Petals Around the Rose puzzle. But when I decided to sit down with my friend (who didn’t know it, either), we solved it in about 15 minutes (yeah, yeah, yeah, she was done with it in about 10 minutes and smiled cleverly until I finished it 5 minutes after her).