Ego wrote:
How does one know to look beyond the menu?
Step 1: Realize that the menu/box is not all there is.
However, even with much experience in this, the first reflex is still to survey the box first. I would even go so far to say that there are three ways of thinking about issues. By far the most normal way is rationalization-after-the-conclusion in which rationality is used exclusively to justify the conclusion. In short, conclusions lead to rational arguments. This is the default mode of thinking for 80%+ of humanity and this preference causes the dozens of so named biases in thinking. (Fallacies are more due to logical errors, biases are different.) The next step is to flip this process around so that rational arguments lead to conclusions. This is the scientific process as it is defined and it is trainable. Scientists consistently think this way at least when it comes to science. Even if they may start with some intuition about the conclusion, they are not particularly attached to it and will easily change their beliefs if rationality contradicts it. Compare to normal people who are more apt to try to stick with their conclusion and make up a new argument instead. When it comes to the real world, the only people I've consistently seen who isn't particularly attached to any kind of conclusion are good traders. I'm frankly amazed at just how good some of them are. The very best are down to hacking/reprogramming their personal psychology if their current one is losing money. Not only are they self-aware (unlike people in the default mode which are rather self-oblivious) but they are capable of self-change. The third way to to reflexively think outside the box as the first choice rather that something that occurs to one later in a doh-moment. IOW, it's not a question of knowing when or where to look outside the box. The default here is to always look outside the box. The question is how ...
(Of course consumer-society makes it so very easy not to given how all solutions are presented in ready-made products.)
Step 2:
There ERE book is quite full of such tactics---or maybe more accurately, several suchs tactics have been used in writing it. One way is to consider whether you have the entirety of the distribution of choices. E.g. shelter is not just a choice between a house or an apartment. It goes all the way from cardboard box to palace. If you have two variables, another way is to map them out and see if you have any white areas of the map. E.g. the quadrant og business man, salary man, and working man are obvious when you consider coupling and leverage ... but what is the missing quadrant? Ahh, Renaissance man.
A more generic strategy for out of the box thinking is interdisciplinary work where you take a method (tactic) from one discipline and attempt to apply it in another field. This is out-of-the-field but it isn't quite out-of-the-method. However, interdiscipliary attempts are rich in terms of opportunities. This is also why I favor the renaissance approach. Learning a new skill is not just going from N to N+1, it's going from N^N to (N+1)^(N+1) which is a superexponentially larger number. Just try inserting a small number like 3 in those equations. Of course those skills must be materially different. Learning physics followed by learning chemistry is not going to add much. However, learning physics followed by learning biology is a much more value-added proposition.
Distilling all these tactics for thinking has a name and it's a well-known concept. It's called lattice-work.
Lattice-work is still on the pre-zoology stage of things. Few people have even tried to catalogue all there is.
Gregory Bateson speculated that there is an even higher meta-stage in which all the components of lattice work are explained by a super-principle. He also thought that humans might not be capable of discovering this super-principle. The analogy would be to discover evolution to explain the zoology of biological species.
