A thought came in my mind, when I misplaced my keys yesterday. You know that feeling when you lose your keys? – That little jolt of panic.
My first reaction is always the same, I check the same two or three spots over and over. The living area counter, the hook by the door, my pockets. And again, counter, hook, pocket…..
It’s like I think they’ll magically appear if I just look hard enough in the places where they should be. But obviously – they never do.
The real search begins when I pause from this loop. When I finally take a breath and ask a different question –
Okay, where haven’t I looked yet?
It’s a simple question, but it changes everything. It forces me to think about the problem differently. Suddenly, I’m checking in kitchen, the bag from the grocery store, or that one weird drawer where things go to disappear. And that’s usually where they are. In the place I didn’t think to look at first.
It hit me how much our work is like this.
We start a search, and we check the obvious places. The core classifications, the main keywords, basic strategies etc. We run the searches that should give us the answer. And when they don’t, it’s easy to get stuck in a loop, running the same searches over and over, feeling that same rising panic.
But our real value, our breakthrough moment comes when we’re brave enough to ask that simple question: “Where haven’t we looked yet?”
Leadership, isn’t always about having the right answer immediately. It’s about being the person who recognizes we’re stuck in a loop. It’s about having the courage to pause and say to the team, “Okay, let’s stop checking the same pockets. What’s the one weird drawer we haven’t opened yet?”
That’s how we find the results that didn’t appeared initially. Not by looking harder in the same spots, but by also looking in new ones.