A few weekends ago, I found myself standing in an escape room with a group of middle-schoolers — my son and his friends — as the “adult in charge.” My job was to keep time, make sure nothing broke, and let the kids solve the puzzles. Within minutes, they were seeing patterns I couldn’t.
They spotted Jenga boxes arranged like numbers. They noticed that one row of tiles broke the symmetry of the rest — every shape was a square except one with rectangles, which turned out to be the key clue. The kids didn’t deliberate or analyze. They tested, guessed, failed, and tried again. Meanwhile, I stood back, realizing I would have needed hints at every turn.
That moment lingered with me. It made me wonder — when do we stop seeing what’s in front of us?
The Brain’s Transition from Explorer to Executor
Children approach the world as an open network of possibilities. Adults see it as a system of known rules. Somewhere along the way, we trade exploration for efficiency.
Psychologists call this functional fixedness: the tendency to see an object only in the way we’ve used it before. Once we learn that a Jenga block is for building towers, we stop asking if it could represent a number or a clue. Experience narrows our field of view.
In neuroscience, this shift has a clear biological explanation. Children’s brains are built for exploration. Their neural connections are more distributed and less specialized, meaning that when they face a new challenge, multiple regions of the brain activate together. Studies from MIT have shown that children display broader neural activation during problem-solving tasks — their brains “light up” across hemispheres, not just in one focused region. Adults, in contrast, show more modular, efficient activation patterns. We get faster, but less flexible.
This is the result of neural pruning — a process where the brain strengthens connections that are used frequently and trims away the rest. It’s an evolutionary advantage. It helps us master complex, repeatable tasks and adapt to stable environments. But it comes with a cost: we lose the ability to notice the unexpected.
A study published in ScienceDirect demonstrated that when exploring complex environments, children outperform adults precisely because they are less constrained by prior knowledge. Adults tend to exploit what they know. Children explore what they don’t.
The Bias of Experience
Another classic example of this trap is the Einstellung effect, first identified by psychologist Abraham Luchins in the 1940s. Once people learn a familiar way to solve a problem, they reuse that same method automatically — even when a simpler or better solution exists. The more expertise we build, the more we rely on it.
For executives, this pattern appears everywhere. A pricing problem becomes a “optimization” problem because that’s how it was solved last time. A slowdown in engagement becomes a “messaging” problem because we’ve seen it framed that way before. Experience sharpens instinct, but it also hardens boundaries.
The human brain is designed to filter distractions. But sometimes, the filter hides the signal.
There’s an irony here. As adults, we are surrounded by patterns — but we only see the ones that fit our domains. Product leaders see user behavior loops. CFOs see financial correlations. CTOs see system dependencies. We are experts at pattern recognition inside our professional sandbox. But outside it, we stop looking.
It’s not that we lose the ability to connect dots. We just build stronger neural pathways for the dots that matter to our work. That’s why innovation so often comes from the edges — from people who connect fields that don’t usually intersect.
The economist Richard Florida once described creativity as “the ability to make connections between seemingly unrelated things.” The most transformative innovations — from Jobs’ fusion of design and engineering to Netflix’s use of machine learning in entertainment — emerged because someone crossed a boundary most others never saw.
The Escape Room as a Mirror
In that escape room, the kids weren’t optimizing for speed or logic. They were simply playing. They were open to being wrong. Their curiosity wasn’t burdened by reputation or productivity.
Watching them, I realized curiosity isn’t the opposite of expertise. It’s what keeps expertise alive. It’s the willingness to ask “what if” even when you already know “what works.”
Executives often operate in environments that reward predictability and precision. But creativity lives in the moments when we suspend that precision.
In technology and business, the equivalent of “functional fixedness” shows up as organizational inertia. Teams become locked into familiar success patterns — the quarterly metric, the proven framework, the familiar KPI. Over time, the same focus that drives efficiency limits the range of discovery.
In many ways, leadership is the art of creating room for pattern rediscovery. The best teams I’ve seen combine the speed of execution with the looseness of play. They leave time for the unexpected.
Seeing Again
Every once in a while, moments like that escape room remind us what our filters hide. They challenge the bias of experience and make us see that pattern recognition is not just a cognitive skill — it’s an act of curiosity.
Children remind us that discovery begins where certainty ends. Their minds aren’t yet optimized; they are exploratory systems in motion. They remind us that curiosity isn’t about knowing less — it’s about being willing to be wrong more often.
Perhaps the real test of growing up, or of leadership, isn’t how efficiently we solve problems, but whether we can still see the invisible.