What does the phrase "outside the nine dots" mean? To find out, a
note was sent on 18 February 1999 to the ADS-L e-list of the American
Dialect Society. Following is the query and a selection of responses
received within the next few hours.
Dear All,
Could anyone help with the meaning of the phrase 'outside the nine
dots'? This appears in a speech by Lawrence Perlman of the Ceridian
Corporation titled "A Pregnant CEO: In Whose Lifetime" (1992), which was
reprinted in Vital Speeches of the Day. It is being translated
here, and I have been asked about the phrase, which is new to me.
The paragraph in which the phrase appears is:
Maintaining barriers to women is an example of how we are not playing to
our strengths as a nation, the greatest of which is a workforce that is
flexible, adaptable, able to think outside the nine dots. A
workforce that has an abundance of initiative, a can-do attitude and a
passion for being first. America is a competitive culture and is at its
best in the way it respects and values individualism and individual
differences....
The entire speech is on the web at
<www.ceridian.com/speech_04.28.92.htm>. There is no other
reference in the speech to this phrase. Nor is it in any reference works
here. Is anyone familiar with the meaning of "outside the nine dots"?
Replies from ADS-L Members (order 'as received')
This may be related to beyond the box as a variant. See the
enclosed entry from a forthcoming issue of The Barnhart Dictionary
Companion. The nine dots refers, I believe, to the psychological test
in which a rectangular array of nine dots is to be connected and which
requires the lines to extend beyond the array in order to perform this
test properly.
box, n. {U} In the phrase outside the box. 1.a. from beyond the normal
range of thinking or acting. Also called beyond the box. Nonstandard
(used in technical contexts dealing especially with business management
and planning; frequent)
- "The skill gap is causing a lot of the companies to lose a lot of
money," marvels Nicholas Lento, chief operating officer of Select
Appointments, but "not a lot of them are really going outside the box to
find people. That creates opportunity a little, anyway, for companies
that do go outside the box. Some of the areas in which a little creative
thinking helps." George J. Church, Personal Time; Your Work Force,
Time, June 22, 1998, p 85
- "But distilling the quintessence of markets into strategy requires a
streak of madness, the ability to think beyond the box. Structure lies at
the other end of the spectrum. Co-ordinating the activities of several
functions requires systems and procedures that will balance the objectives
of the individual departments." R. Sukumar, Management Notes: The Market
Organisation,Business Today (Nexis), Aug. 22, 1998, p 125
b. outside-the-box. Attributive use.
- "In the advertising profession, our primary reason for being is our
creativity. Clients joke about those flaky, weird ad guys, but they
also admire the way we come up with outside-the-box stuff. They want
to be knocked off their feet and we do it day in and day out." Bob
Lamons, Focus on saving relationship, not all the break-ups,
Marketing News (Nexis), Aug. 17, 1998, p 6
- "But Green's outside-the-box management style is warming up both staff
morale and customer relations. And that's her mission, starting with
team-building camaraderie." Rick Alm and Sue Dye Babson, Career
ladder, The Kansas City Star (Nexis), Aug. 4, 1998, p D16
2....(a sports sense)
- 1975 (for def. 1); 1980 (for def. 2). Semantic shift (specialization):
from box (OED: a1000). Perhaps derived from the popularity of boxes in
planning presentations or from the psychological test for creativity which
requires the connection of dots arranged in a box by extending lines
outside the area of the dots.
David K. Barnhart, Editor
The Barnhart Dictionary Companion
Copyright: Merriam-Webster, Inc.
There's a logic problem in which you have 9 dots arranged in a square
grid. You have to connect them all with four straight lines... and you
can't pick up your pencil from the paper. It's harder than it sounds.
Anyway, to solve the problem, you can't just stay within the grid... you
have to draw one of the lines so that it extends beyond the grid.
This is very hard to figure out the first time you see it. I don't
remember how to do it now. But I see how "thinking outside the 9 dots"
could mean that you have to think creatively enough to realize that even
though you can't pick up your pencil, you can extend the line beyond the
grid.
Johanna N Franklin
For anyone not familiar with this problem, here's a hint. The problem
is given as below left; let's number the dots as below right. The object,
as Johanna says, is to connect all 9 dots (or all 9 integers) by 4
straight lines without removing your pen(cil) from the paper, or doing the
computational equivalent thereof ..
. . . 1 2 3
. . . 4 5 6
. . . 7 8 9
Here's the hint: One version of the correct answer is to connect 1 to
2 to 3 and KEEP GOING with that same line. Hence, "outside the nine
dots". I've never heard the phrase but once you solve the problem or see
the solution, its reference is obvious.
Laurence Horn
This problem was given to me in high school over 40 years ago, and when
I got to college the phrase "thinking outside the nine dots" was VERY
common among my math and science friends. Even back then I had the
understanding that this was a very old illustration of a rather
fundamental issue.
To solve the problem in four straight lines without lifting the pencil
or retracing, start at 2, go to 3 until at an angle for 6 and 8, go
through 6 and 8 until on line for 7, 4, and 1, go through to 1, then from
1 to 5 and 9.
The phrase "thinking outside the nine dots" arises from the fact that
when given the problem most people will keep the pencil inside the area of
the nine dots. It's more of a psychological problem than a logical
problem.
Grant W. Smith, President
American Name Society
Prof. English/Coord. Humanities, Eastern Washington University, MS-25
Of course, even if "thinking outside the box" comes from "thinking outside
[the box made by] the nine dots," I'll bet most people don't associate the
phrases (I didn't) and will recognize what the former means but not
necessarily the latter. Without knowing the connection to the puzzle,
even though I knew the puzzle, I simply thought of "the box" in the phrase
as any kind of restrictive form that stifles creativity and creative
solutions, so "thinking outside the box" would be comparable to "coloring
outside the lines." I'd be surprised to find that "thinking outside the
nine dots" is as commonplace and familiar as "thinking outside the box."
But I'm easily surprised.
Alan Baragona
THINK OUTSIDE THE NINE DOTS has several variants, e.g., THINK OUTSIDE
THE BOX. The phrase and its congeners arose historically among educated,
professional Americans, at the latest in the early 1980s, as a
metaphorical vogue phrase used to indicate creativity and originality in
practical problem-solving. Its earliest provenience would have been the
intersection of the fields of business, government, and education.
One of the earliest examples that I have found to date is in the
preface to Edward Prestwood's 1984 book, THE CREATIVE WRITER'S
PHRASE-FINDER (Palm Springs: ETC Publications); in explaining the
difficulties people have in finding solutions to seemingly difficult
problems, Prestwood introduces (p. vii) the now-famous nine-dot puzzle, in
which the responder is asked to connect all of nine dots that are arranged
in the shape of a box (i.e., in three rows of three dots each) using only
four straight lines, without retracing.
As Prestwood notes, the puzzle cannot be solved at all unless one draws
the lines "outside the boundaries established by the dots"--that is, one
must respond unconventionally, thinking outside (of) the box formed by the
nine dots to find the (actually quite simple) solution. Prestwood does not
claim to have invented either the puzzle or the metaphor, and he indicates
(p. vii) that he presented it to other persons and discussed it with them
for some time before his book was written ("Some people have remarked that
the given solution is cheating").
One can thus conclude that the phrase in question was in use no later
than the time the book was written (i.e., 1983 or earlier). Prestwood's
book was aimed at a small audience (namely, those who were interested
enough in creative writing to buy his book), and it was published by a
little-known publisher. It is thus extremely unlikely that the American
pubic at large learned about the nine-dot puzzle and associated phrases
from Prestwood's book. Rather, the phrase would have had its source in
previous (unidentified) usage which Prestwood appropriated, as did many
other persons who came upon the phrase independently. Indeed, the great
weight of linguistic evidence indicates that the phrase think outside of
the box and its congeners was in widespread use by the earlier 1980s. I
have found numerous cites from the period shortly after Prestwood's book.
Ron Butters
The grid looks like this:
. . .
. . .
. . .
You begin with any corner dot. For example, start at the top right
hand and go straight down well below the bottom dot, so that you can go
back up at an angle through the two dots replaced by hyphens below:
. . .
- . .
. - .
Continue the diagonal line up to the top level, then move horizontally
back to the starting point, so that all the dots replaced by hyphens below
have been intersected:
- - -
- . -
. - -
Then just draw a diagonal from the upper right through the middle to
the lower left, and you've intersected all the dots with 4 lines more or
less in the shape of an arrowhead.
My question is how useful "outside the 9 dots" is as a phrase. I was
just reading the Variorum _As You Like It_ commentary on Touchstone's
difficult speech about degrees of insult, in which the editor argues that
probably no book about quarreling would have been widely known enough by
Shakespeare's audience to be a source for the speech: "The very essence of
a popular allusion is that what is alluded to, should be popular." Is
this logic puzzle done so widely among corporate employees that this CEO
can assume his audience will instantly recognize it? Are there any other
instances of its use outside the corporate culture?
Alan Baragona
When I saw the original question, I immediately thought of Martin
Gardner's old column of puzzles, mathematical oddities, and the like in
Scientific American, which is where he first published his version of
the nine-dot puzzle. (It was just one of those teasers that stuck in my
mind forever . . . ) I'm pretty sure that Gardner used the phrase
"think outside of the box", not "outside the dots"....
I am pretty well convinced that Gardner first published that puzzle
many years before reprinting it in his book. That impression comes from
some memory tricks I had to develop long ago as compensation for
dysgraphia. (If you don't know the word, dysgraphia is a learning
disability marked by great difficulty in "writing" --i.e., making
letter-shaped marks on a piece of paper. It's a close relative of
dyslexia, great difficulty in learning to read and in reading. To put it
another way, dyslexia is about read/write input; dysgraphia is about
read/write output. I can't do things as simple as signing my own name
without making a major effort. Thank God for computers!)
One of those memory tricks helped me recall the Scientific American
article containing the puzzle. When it came back to me, I also "saw"
the place where I read it: the library in my old high school. That
would date it to the mid 1940s. . . most likely 1945 or 1946, but I
can't guarantee that.
(and in a followup note a few hours later....)
I haven't run across the cited volume of Martin Gardner's puzzles yet --
but I did find his "Mathematical Carnival", the seventh volume in his
series of similar collections. Full citation:
Gardner, Martin 1975 Mathematical carnival: A new round-up of
tantalizers and puzzles from Scientific American. New York: Knopf.
(Paperback version, 1977: New York, Vintage Books division of Random
House.)
The book revealed the problems with my memory tricks: on my way to
remembering the datum I seek, I also get false memory clues to real
data. All I can say is my mnemonics are not supposed to be as real as
the stuff I'm really trying to remember.
What Gardiner says that convinces me that my date HAD to be wrong is
this:
" . . . a book for laymen that offers nothing but puzzles is . . .
ineffective in teaching significant math. Obviously there must be an
interplay of seriousness and frivolity. The frivolity keeps the reader
alert. The seriousness makes the play worthwhile. That is the kind of
mix I have tried to give in my Scientific American columns since I
started writing them in December, 1956." Gardner 1977: xii.
Mike Salovesh