<P> The origins of the phrase "thinking outside the box" are obscure; but it was popularized in part because of a nine - dot puzzle, which John Adair claims to have introduced in 1969 . Management consultant Mike Vance has claimed that the use of the nine - dot puzzle in consultancy circles stems from the corporate culture of the Walt Disney Company, where the puzzle was used in - house . </P> <P> The nine dots puzzle is much older than the slogan . It appears in Sam Loyd's 1914 Cyclopedia of Puzzles . In the 1951 compilation The Puzzle - Mine: Puzzles Collected from the Works of the Late Henry Ernest Dudeney, the puzzle is attributed to Dudeney himself . Sam Loyd's original formulation of the puzzle entitled it as "Christopher Columbus's egg puzzle ." This was an allusion to the story of Egg of Columbus . </P> <P> The puzzle proposed an intellectual challenge--to connect the dots by drawing four straight, continuous lines that pass through each of the nine dots, and never lifting the pencil from the paper . The conundrum is easily resolved, but only by drawing the lines outside the confines of the square area defined by the nine dots themselves . The phrase "thinking outside the box" is a restatement of the solution strategy . The puzzle only seems difficult because people commonly imagine a boundary around the edge of the dot array . The heart of the matter is the unspecified barrier that people typically perceive . </P> <P> Telling people to "think outside the box" does not help them think outside the box, at least not with the 9 - dot problem . This is due to the distinction between procedural knowledge (implicit or tacit knowledge) and declarative knowledge (book knowledge). For example, a non-verbal cue such as drawing a square outside the 9 dots does allow people to solve the 9 - dot problem better than average . </P>

How to do the 9 dot puzzle with 4 lines
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