cognitive inertia at workplace
NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not represent or reflect the views of the author’s current or previous employers.
My first mentor at work was a 30-something, married, chain smoker, very well-read, debater, jazz fan and a definite INTP — more of Descrates, than Jung. In 2011, before he was quitting the organization (more on that here), he called me and some other guys over for dinner, made us all a Diamondback drink, and told us some interesting things about Chartreuse. I asked him if he would have learned so much about Chartreuse if it hadn’t been for the drink that he always had to cap the weekdays. He replied “Don’t be so biased in assuming that I know it because of the drink..I know it because I heard about it in Tom Waits song (end of the article) “Til the money runs out’ from his 1980s, Heartattack and Vine”. He then told me about Charlie Munger, read some paragraphs from ‘Models of My Life’ by Herbert Simon and then went on to draw something he called as ‘the Fool-Genius matrix’, referenced in different ways across the literature. Here is how it looks —
You might have seen it previously in another form, but if you notice the quadrant, and pause for a moment to think about the people you meet at workplace (and, in life), it starts making so much sense. From, the grumpy boss you have always hated because you feel he knows nothing, to the kid in your team you always felt is a genius but would underplay himself, people start becoming dots on this 2x2.
Every dot is held by the threads of cognitive inertia held by you and the people around you. Cognitive inertia in its simplest form is the tendency for beliefs or sets of beliefs to endure once formed. In the quadrant shown, the ‘know stuff/do not know stuff” is mostly estimated by the people around you, where as “think that you know stuff/ do not think that you know stuff” is grounded in your own beliefs. Interesting things start happening when you are the one who hold both the threads. Since these two gravity lines typically lead to social perceptions and pragmatics of how you grow/should grow in your career, workplace biases easily get built upon these.
The people in quadrant A are the ones who are driven through perfectionism, are highly competitive, and inspire the people around. From the higher floor guy, who has always been an inspiration for you, to the subject matter expert who paid several grands to earn his masters, these guys are good. Arrogant, some times. Extremely frustrating, in cases where it comes to competitive benchmarking. As Toba Beta said — “ Overconfidence precedes carelessness”, these people can sometimes fall in the trap of the particularly evil lure, where they tend to touch the gulf of egocentric biases, get marred by illusion of external agencies, and influence the people around them in mysterious ways.
“Absurdity is the ecstasy of intellectualism.”
— Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile
The quadrant B has people who are either too modest or too stupidly immersed in pessimism. In most of the cases such intrinsic facets yield unpopularity and procrastination, leading to very low self esteem. Cognitive inertia plays a stronger role in this quadrant and makes it extremely difficult for people to snap out. If left without mentoring, this quadrant may move to quadrant C because of the conflicting subjectivity around their capabilities which would make them stop knowing stuff. However, since the boundaries of under-confidence and overconfidence do meet (a desultory read here), early mentoring can be a big boon here.
Quadrant C is interesting because there is a very strong interplay of this segment with quadrant A. Since the people in quadrant A are strong at declarative as well as procedural knowledge, their stronghold of metacognition helps them quickly analyse what they know versus not. So, they come very quickly to accepting the ignorance, learn things and jump back to quadrant A. Honey badgers. However, there is also a hidden segment in this quadrant that maintains a strong dynamics with quadrant D — people who thought they knew stuff but were nudged by someone who told them that they don’t know stuff. Such boundaries can easily extend to naive cynicism. Thus, in a lot of cases, from a 3rd person view, this quadrant feels very polarized — either heavily dissident flowing against the inertia or very strongly moving against it, on to quadrant A. Acceptance of ignorance defines this segment, but the secondary segmentation between the good and bad guys is defined by ‘want to know stuff/ do not want to know stuff’ , which is beyond the explicit view of this quadrant.
And, finally we have quadrant D. The people you always hoped didn’t exist. Marred in the wold of illusion of control, and displaying more than usual the planning fallacy, they never fail to amuse us at work. If these people become popular at work, they are hated. And more often than not, they end up becoming your boss. Fields said “ If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit” and they know it by heart. When these people are nudged with the reality, some tend to ignore because they are pulled too strongly by the Cognitive Inertia. But, if they change and de-bias themselves, they can go down to Quadrant C which can be good if they are then further guided by ‘Want to know stuff’ and move to quadrant A. But, if they don’t move and get whirled into quadrant C, then their confidence falters, they hedge, take longer to do things, and get pretty reluctant to take action until guided externally. How long has a person stayed in this quadrant typically defines how fast can the person change. Or even, whether the person should change.
Getting back to Chartreuse, the book The Practical Hotel Steward states that green chartreuse contains “cinnamon, mace, lemon balm, dried hyssopflower tops, peppermint, thyme, costmary, arnica flowers, genepi, and angelicaroots. The typical drink of the monks. So, grab yourself some Chartreuse like they did in The Great Gatsby, get into your Metacognition blanket, and draw people as dots. Also, cheers to Tom Waits and the first mentor — “the pointed man is smack dab in the middle of july, swingin’ from the rafters in his brand new tie, he said i can’t go back to that hotel room all they do is shout, but i’ll stay wichew baby till the money runs out, so bye bye baby baby bye bye”