You’ve probably encountered the famous image “My Wife and Mother-in-Law” before.

Which woman do you see first: the young or the old?

“My Wife and Mother-in-Law”

Our minds initially fixate on one interpretation, and it can be difficult to recognize the other. You might need someone to point out to you that the necklace on one is the mouth of the other, and the ears are the eyes. Eventually, you get it. With a little practice, you can train yourself to switch back and forth between the two, but it takes effort.

“My Wife and Mother-in-Law” is what’s called a multistable image, and the funny thing our minds do when looking at it is called multistable perception.

Multistable Perception in Business

Management involves similar multistable perception. You can look at an organization and see a system of quantifiable resources: machines, software, cash, and human resources with skills and a level of morale. As a manager looking through the resource lens, you can imagine yourself in a cockpit, with a bunch of levers and buttons. You feel that you are pulling and pushing controls, shifting resources into different configurations to maximize quantifiable outcomes like sales, profits, and customer acquisition costs. But you can also look at an organization and see a web of relationships, with connections between people forming, strengthening, and sometimes rupturing. You can nurture those connections, but you cannot control them, both because you yourself are one of the nodes in the web and because the other people are just as busy nurturing and pruning connections as they see fit.