I LOVE that story!
It reminds me of the time I went to one of those leadership meetings, and one of the exercises was to pair up people to work as a team.
One person would be bindfolded and given a pen. The other person would be given a piece of paper with a maze on it, and was tasked to talk the blindfolded person with the pen through the maze.
Something like “bring the pen towards me...stop. Now, go to your right...stop. Bring it back towards you...stop.”
That kind of thing. There was a prize for the team that got all the way through the maze first.
When the exercise started, there was a chorus of voices intermixed saying “right...no...stop...now, towards me...”
Suddenly a team stood up, waving their completed maze in the air to signal they finished first, and the rest of us weren’t even any distance into the maze...we were all thinking (I am sure) “What? How the HELL did they do that so quickly?”
Well.
It involves thinking unconventionally.
What they did is the blindfolded person with the pen would hold the pen perfectly motionless, and the un-blindfolded person holding the maze who was supposed to talk them through the maze...simply moved the maze under the pen...
I loved that. Just loved it. So simple. Yet so incomprehensible until you knew the trick. One of them had apparently done this exercise before...