We’ve all had the meeting where somebody in the meeting says, “Come on guys, we need to think outside the box here.” If I have to hear “think outside the box” one more time, I’m going to cram the box down the throat of the person saying it.

While the saying is losing its edge and has become somewhat annoying, its meaning is still valid. Too often we get caught in the rut of doing things the way they have always been done, and we don’t take the time to look at things a bit differently.

Recently I had the pleasure of helping my father sell his house. Tired of lowering the price of his house, my father and I sat down to brainstorm.

We realized that there simply had not been enough people who had actually been in the house to look at it. Therefore, we gladly agreed that the price should not be lowered any further, and instead we were determined to think of a way to get more people to come out and see the beautiful home out in the country.

What we came up with was a way to get media coverage, as well as get rid of his sports car that he had no use for in the mountainous area where he was moving. We were going to give the car away for free with the purchase of the house.

While the idea was not anything that would shake the market up, it was something that wasn’t being done anywhere else. When the idea was presented to the real estate agent, she replied that she thought the idea was illegal. When asked why she thought the idea was illegal, she replied “because nobody else had done it before.”

Amazing. Her justification was because nobody had done it before, it must be illegal. Now if that is not thinking inside the box, then I don’t know what would be.

Well, the plan went off without a hitch. We picked up two local news stations to cover the open house, an article in the Toledo Blade, and several real estate blogs covered the interesting way of tempting a buyer.

Within one week, my father had an offer on his house. Albeit not a very good offer, but an offer.

The lesson here is that we looked at a situation, boiled it down to the basics (getting more people to be aware of a unique house), and we came up with a way to get some attention on the situation. It worked.

The same “out of the box” thinking can be applied in many business situations. Many business problems can be solved simply by sitting down and evaluating the situation.