research-drop
The Gut-Feel Penalty
Structured interviews predict job performance about twice as accurately as the free-flowing kind. The difference isn't the questions. It's whether every candidate answers the same ones.
decision-design
research-drop
The Peltzman Effect at Work
Mandatory seatbelts cut driver deaths. They raised pedestrian deaths. Drivers drove faster when they felt safer. The same pattern runs through workplace safety programs.
behavior-hack
The Zoom-Out Ritual
Teams accumulate meetings, rituals, and processes that stopped making sense six months ago. Nobody removes them because nobody is asked to. One 45-minute meeting a month, with a single question, fixes that.
behavior-hack
The Decision Journal
We remember the decisions that worked and revise the ones that didn't. Neither pattern makes us better judges. One four-line entry per decision, read back monthly, does.
research-drop
The Planning Fallacy
Knowing you underestimate how long things take doesn't stop you from doing it. The only known fix isn't better planning. It's using someone else's past, not your own.
research-drop
The Cognitive Load Tax
Judges grant parole 65% of the time in the morning and nearly 0% by late afternoon. The same decision fatigue is draining your team's best thinking before lunch.
research-drop
The Temporal Discounting Trap
People consistently choose $100 today over $120 next month. The same bias explains why teams skip strategy for urgent busywork, and why quarterly goals beat annual ones.
think-piece
The Best Practices Trap
Best practices are survivorship bias with a PowerPoint deck. They tell you what worked for someone else in a context you'll never fully understand. Here's what to do instead.
behavior-hack
The Question Nobody Asks in Exit Interviews
Most exit interviews ask "why are you leaving?" The better question: "what almost made you leave before?" It surfaces fixable problems instead of post-hoc rationalizations.
behavior-hack
The Pre-Mortem
Gary Klein's pre-mortem technique flips planning on its head. Instead of asking "how will we succeed?" you ask "it failed, why?" Teams that do this catch 30% more risks.
research-drop
The Loss Aversion Tax
Kahneman and Tversky proved people work twice as hard to avoid losing something as they do to gain something equivalent. Most HR programs ignore this completely.
think-piece
The Unlimited PTO Trap
Unlimited PTO sounds generous but often reduces time off. Without a clear number, people guess wrong. And they almost always guess low.