The other day, I hit a mental block over something as light as The Economist’s daily quiz. Each day of the week there’s a question, and the real challenge is to find the connection across the answers.

The answer I had for Thursday’s clue was, ‘The Muppets Take Manhattan’. I knew that answer was correct. But my brain refused to accept that the simple word ‘take’ could possibly matter.

Until that point, I’d thought the connection for the week was boy bands.

Surely, I thought, the Economist wouldn’t use ‘take’ as the clue. ‘Take’ is such an unimaginative, everyday word. I was judging the word – and The Economist.

I dismissed that word and kept looking for answers linked to ‘Manhattan’. (Let’s face it, ‘Manhattan’ seems far more consequential than ‘take’.)

But ‘take’ was the word. And the connection was boy bands – Take That.

I had already solved the puzzle, but I rejected it. I was stuck – because I’d decided in advance what could and could not be important.

When I took a moment – after seeing the ‘winners’ announced – and after letting go of the annoyance I felt with myself, I realized how we often do this in work and life.

• We continue to fixate on the ‘big’ ideas, dismissing small or simple ones.
• We get attached to a single interpretation of a situation and shut out alternatives.
• We close our minds to possibilities because they don’t fit our assumptions.

And in doing so, we miss the obvious connection.

I experience this in leadership coaching conversations quite frequently. A leader gets locked into one definition of success, one way of solving a problem, one assumption about what a colleague ‘must’ be thinking. They draw hard lines between right and wrong, creative or mundane, promising or irrelevant.

In these situations, what’s the real leadership shift required?

Possibly learning to stay open. And to ask: What if the answer is simpler than I think? What if the clue is right there in front of me?

This isn’t about lowering standards. It’s about loosening the grip of our own assumptions.

The Economist quiz isn’t a high stakes situation, but many of the decisions you make do involve high stakes.

The next time you feel stuck, maybe notice if you’re doing what I did with the word ‘take’. Maybe the block isn’t the problem itself. Maybe it’s the story you’ve told yourself about what the solution ‘should’ look like that’s the issue.

Sometimes the simple explanation, or the everyday word, the overlooked clue, is the key.