ATD Blog
Wed May 31 2017
The Penrose Staircase is an illusory structure resembling a staircase that seems to ascend forever around the perimeter of a square. An artificial construct of the human mind, it provides insights into the nature of the cognitive economy. To climb the Penrose Staircase, a physical impossibility, is to be stuck in an infinite loop, depleting one’s energy and sapping the will from the bones of the most willfully resolved person.
Cognitive loads are growing—both in quantity and complexity—faster than our ability to master them and cognitive distortions lead us to underestimate the gap between what we know and what we think we know. So we charge ahead, on a steep climb, in pursuit of mastering our own domains, a goal that always stays just out of reach. Success in the cognitive economy, it seems, is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of us as we hike it.
But the human mind is a powerful problem solver. It can reflect on this conundrum, and turn to mathematics for ideas, about how certain facts follow inevitably from others, about how certain structures imply the occurrence of particular phenomena. Imagine, drawing two parallel lines on a deflated balloon. As you inflate the balloon, the lines no longer seem parallel. By deforming the underlying fabric, a rule of geometry, “parallel lines never cross”, is rewritten.
Now consider the case of two successful journalists on two parallel tracks. Heather Stewart was The Observer’s economics editor and a perfect fit for the political editorship of The Guardian, a position vacated by Patrick Wintour in October 2015. But as a mother of two children, Stewart felt she couldn’t do it alone. She reached out to her friend, Anushka Asthana, political correspondent at Sky News and mother of two children, and suggested they apply for the role together as a job share. The pair submitted a joint application and got the job. Their boss, Katharine Viner, The Guardian’s editor-in-chief, basically said to them, “You set it up. You make it work.” And they did.
Job sharing is about caring for ourselves and those who share our cognitive burdens. “Job sharing gives you solidarity,” says Asthana. “You are always looking out for each other and, on the days when you are worrying about something or slagging yourself off, the other person is there to pick you up.”
“We work very differently to traditional journalists,” adds Stewart. “We share all our contacts and conversations and many of our stories have joint bylines. There are no sharp elbows in this relationship.”
Job sharing is about conquering cognitive challenges. More senior jobs in the cognitive economy require higher energy input, both physically and mentally, to manage the forces shaping the work environment and engage the risks emerging across the business landscape. Job sharing translates into having a relay of two sprints instead of a week-long middle-distance run. Contradictions that stymie one creative mind can be conquered at the confluence of two creative minds.
Most of our knowledge resides outside of our heads—in our bodies, in the environment, and most importantly, in other people. We need to leverage all of that knowledge to unlock our potential and defeat the paradoxes of the cognitive economy, the self-defeating holding patterns that take many of the best and brightest, one by one, into psychological quicksand.
Progress, to soar above the “Cognitive Penrose Staircase,” demands cooperation—to care and conquer by the power of the pair. And that requires trust. Only then can parallel lines cross.
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