Musings from the CU Suite

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Written by Anthony Demangone

I was a Little League assistant coach one year. It was a wonderful experience. I played Little League baseball nine years myself, and I think the organization does a ton of good.

One day, we had a young pitcher (11 years old) who was struggling. He had walked a few batters in a row. After the second walk, the opposing team whooped and hollered. The kid put his head down, and I could see that he was rattled. 

"Just throw strikes," bellowed our head coach. Now it was my head that dropped. 

I turned to him and asked..."Just what do you think he's trying to do out there?" 

I called time, and met the pitcher for a chat.  Which I recall involved asking him what was his favorite topping on a pizza. He seemed puzzled.  I was just trying to get him to think about anything but throwing a strike. I told him that there was nothing I needed to tell him to get him out of his rut. He knew how to pitch. My only practical advice was to tell him to look at the catcher's mitt, clear his mind, rock, and then fire. 

Telling a pitcher who is struggling to "just throw strikes" is anything but useful. Anything but.

What brings this up? This article (Psychology Today) that I recently read, which discusses the futility of telling people to think outside of the box. 

In short, here's what the article discussed. You may recall the following mind teaser.  How do you connect nine dots with four continuous lines?

As you see, the solution involves working "outside the box." Simple, right? Maybe not.  During a study, researchers worked with two groups.  One group had no instructions. But the researchers told the second group that the trick to solving the puzzle was to work outside the imaginary box boundaries.  That should have given the second group a huge advantage, right?  Well, not so much.

The second group was told that the solution required the lines to be drawn outside the imaginary box bordering the dot array. In other words, the “trick” was revealed in advance. Would you like to guess the percentage of the participants in the second group who solved the puzzle correctly? Most people assume that 60 percent to 90 percent of the group given the clue would solve the puzzle easily. In fact, only a meager 25 percent did.

What’s more, in statistical terms, this 5 percent improvement over the subjects of Guilford’s original study is insignificant. In other words, the difference could easily be due to what statisticians call sampling error.

Let’s look a little more closely at these surprising results. Solving this problem requires people to literally think outside the box. Yet participants’ performance was not improved even when they were given specific instructions to do so. That is, direct and explicit instructions to think outside the box did not help. (Emphasis added.)

How many times have we been asked to think outside of the box? Asked to be creative in a given situation? I've asked that of my colleagues more than once.  As if there's a creative on/off switch.

As if they needed to be told to just throw strikes. 

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