<ul><li>Create new questions or approaches.</li><li>Invite different groups. </li><li>Conduct a different type of meeting to break through the “group think”.</li><li>Change the venue, add music and invite different and fresh perspectives. </li><li>Find ways of tapping into the right brain of the participants.</li></ul>

Stimulating Outside The Box Thinking

Problem Solving

As we age, our brains become increasingly more ingrained into familiar patterns and routines.Our acquired patterns and routines virtually confine us to our thinking to "the box", or more precisely, to a more left-hemisphere dominant style of handling information. But learning to tap into the more creative right hemisphere of the brain can generate new insights, enabling you to think in a unique manner about both the problems and opportunities.&nbsp;

The Brain And The “Box”

How do you think outside the "think outside the box" box? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by William Alan Donius, Author, Thought Revolution-Ideation + Innovation Facilitator, on Quora: Most business people operate inside the proverbial "box" most of the time.

Everyone Tells You To Think Outside The Box. Here's How To Actually Do It

Challenge conventional wisdom and make nonconformity the expected conversation. Ask "Why? " "How might we. .. ?" and "What if. .. ?" to come up with new ideas.Ask your team to imagine they are the competitors and to plan an attack on your vulnerable spots. This challenges the strategic status quo and identifies new issues from a different perspective.

Question The Status Quo Regularly

However bad it looks, draw a picture of your challenge and possible ways to solve it. Drawing engages your right brain and can release the hold your logical left brain has on thinking about the issue or "the box" the same way.

Draw a Picture as a Team

Breakthrough thinking and creativity often come from making unusual connections.Oscillate between seemingly unrelated topics, concepts, or issues to find the connection that makes an idea to move "outside the box. " Don't discount anything as unrelated or unconnected.

Widen Your Perspective

One of the most well-worn business clichés is " thinking outside the box." It seems that everyone is obsessed with thinking outside the box. However, if the concept is well worn, why is the practice so uncommon in our companies today?

3 Ways to Think Outside the Box More Often

Pick some media from different industries. You may find that other industries have problems similar to yours but maybe they were solved in a different way.You may also find new linkages between your own industry and another, linkages that may lead to innovative partnerships in the future.

Study Another Industry

Anecdotal evidence links shower to creativity. So maybe when the status quo response to some circumstance just isn’t working, try taking a shower.

Take a Shower

Children think and speak with ignorance of convention and that can be helpful.&nbsp;Ask one how they might tackle a problem, or imagine how you might reformulate a problem so that a child could understand it.

Ask a Child For Advice

To stimulate your mind, read something you’d never have touched otherwise. Pay attention not only to the story but to the particular problems the author has to deal with.Try to connect those problems to the problems you face in your own field.

Read An Unfamiliar Genre

Religions are a way for us to understand our relationships with the supernatural and with each other. Learning how such relations are structured can teach you a lot about how people relate to each other and the world around them.Seeing the reason in other religions can also help you develop mental flexibility.

Learn About Other Religions

Embrace mistakes and incorporate them into your projects. Developing strategies that allow for random input, working amid chaotic juxtapositions of sound and form – all of these can help to move beyond everyday patterns of thinking.

Invite Randomness

Turning something upside-down, whether physically or just by re-imagining it, can help you see new patterns. The brain has pattern-making habits that may obscure other, more subtle patterns at work; changing the orientation of things can hide the more obvious patterns and make other patterns emerge.

Turn It Upside Down

Drawing a picture is a right-brained activity, and can help break the hold of your logical left part of the brain on a problem the same way a poem can. Also, visualizing a problem engages other modes of thinking that we don’t normally use, bringing you another creative boost.

Draw a Picture

Learning gives you new information and ways of looking at and understanding aspects of your life and the world.&nbsp;And this helps you expand how you look at problems and the breadth of possible solutions you can come up with.

Take a Class

Working backwards breaks the brain’s normal conception of causality. You can start with a goal and think back through the steps needed to reach it until you get to where you are right now.

Work Backwards

Poetry bridges between our emotional and rational capacities. Though it may feel foolish (and getting comfortable with feeling foolish might be another way to think outside the box), try writing a poem about the problem you’re working on.Your poem doesn’t necessarily have to be seen or propose a solution – the idea is to let the more creative part of the brain work on the problem instead of the more rational one.

Write a Poem

The hardest part of socializing, for many people, is how to start a conversation. However, it is a big mistake to go about life not making the first move and waiting for someone else to do it [in conversation or anything].

Thinking Outside The Box

11 Ways to Think Outside the Box

There are only so many ways you can solve a problem when you are unwilling to consider unorthodox solutions. You limit yourself and your opportunities by doing so.When you allow for any and every possible solution, you may in fact end up coming up with more creative ways to solve problems.

Creative Problem-Solving

Some companies offer benefits and perks that attract and retain better employees.&nbsp;By thinking outside the box with their company culture, they ultimately get a better caliber of employee and work, which makes it well worth the expenditure they put out with these offeringsHappy and&nbsp;healthy employees tend to be more productive, loyal and harder-working.

Higher-Quality Work

If you view things as unchangeable, then nothing can change for the better. By thinking outside the box and questioning the status quo, you’ll constantly be considering how you could improve something.

Gain Flexibility

Thinking outside the box can expand your worldview, allowing you to have a greater perspective on the events in your life. When you’re willing to consider alternative ways and points of view, you can find more potential solutions.A greater perspective can make you more receptive to different ideas, which means that you won’t be limited by a small worldview.&nbsp;

Greater Perspective

Careers and markets change over time, and you’ll need to be able to change in kind to remain relevant.Thinking outside the box will help you stay adaptable. Your mind won’t be closed off to new ideas or situations, and therefore you’ll be better at navigating the ever-changing landscape of business.

Stay Adaptable

When you are able to approach your business and career from an out-of-the-box point of view, you are in essence allowing yourself to think differently. And that may be all that’s needed to positively make you stand out among the competition.

It Helps You Stand Out

5 min read Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. You've undoubtedly heard that it's a good thing to think outside the box. But what exactly does that mean, why is it a good thing and how can it benefit your career?

Why You Need to Think Outside the Box

To find solutions you would otherwise ignore, train yourself to not just focus on the issue at hand but also to think more expansively about everything that led to that issue.&nbsp;Consider every possibility and hypothetical alteration of that reality, never being dismissive of anything before you have thoroughly thought it through.&nbsp;

Finding Innovative Solutions

<ol><li>Identify the issue.</li><li>Determine if a typical solution to the problem exists.</li><li>Map out everything that went into creating the issue.</li><li>Look for ways to address the situation in the more outlying areas that were unconsidered.</li><li>Don’t dismiss possible solutions because tradition stands against them. Go through every possibility until you know for a fact its feasibility.</li></ol>

Getting Outside The Box 

Sometimes when you are losing in a game you have to stop playing by the rules, switch it up, and change the game itself. You have to think outside the box.The key is to define the box in any given situation and then to seek alternatives, which are often unconventional solutions that would be considered beyond the norm.

A few years back our litigation team was faced with a seemingly insurmountable task: how to defend our client's trademark rights against a Fortune 500 company with a massive litigation budget. They had the facts on their side. Moreover, they had money.