A group of senior engineers stare at the screen.
The shape is simple.
A square.
Everyone agreeds.
Confident nods.
No hesitation.
Except it isn’t a square. It’s a cylinder, lying on its side, lit from above.
They all got it wrong.
Not one of them questioned the shape.
Not one of them paused.
These aren’t amateurs. They are sharp.
Experienced.
Senior.
They were all wrong.
We were running a workshop.
This wasn’t a trick. It was an honest challenge.
The purpose wasn’t to catch people out.
It was to show how smart people can still miss something obvious.
And they did. Why?
Because the brain cheats.
It fills in gaps.
It guesses.
You don’t see what’s in front of you.
You see what you expect.
And that expectation is built from past success.
But past success is not a guarantee of accuracy.
That’s the problem.
How often does this happen in your team?
- People jump to the first obvious answer
- No one spots the simple error
- Everyone agrees too quickly
- No one hears the quiet voice
- The same kind of ideas keep winning
This isn’t a training issue.
It’s not a competence gap.
It’s a pattern trap.
Your people are matching what they see to what they’ve seen before.
In engineering, project management and leadership, this is dangerous.
It looks like speed.
It’s actually a short cut.
The best engineers think in systems.
But systems only work if you challenge them.
And that takes effort.
It means deliberately doing what most people avoid:
- Disagreeing with a respected colleague
- Asking someone outside the team for input
- Inviting multiple wrong answers
- Running two or three ideas in parallel before making a decision
- Letting a junior member explain their thinking fully
You don’t get innovation by repeating.
You get it by looking again.
You get it by stopping yourself mid-thought and asking, what else could this be?
Next time you’re in a meeting, try this:
- Before you agree, ask “what are we missing?”
- Before you speak, ask “what would someone outside this room say?”
- Before you decide, ask “what if we’re wrong?”
These three questions shift the whole room.
They give space for the challenge.
They open the door to better thinking.
At TEG, we teach these habits.
Not as theory.
Not as a slide deck.
We run real-time, live-action learning.
You do the thinking.
You lead the challenge.
And you get better, not by being right.
But by seeing how often you’re wrong and using that to improve.
Want to build sharper thinkers?
We’ll show you how.
Get in touch.
Let’s get started.
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