think-piece
Goodhart's Law at Work
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Wells Fargo showed how far that goes. The fix is to watch the signals nobody can push on directly.
decision-design
think-piece
You Cannot Kill Your Own Project
Handed $20 million and a failing project, the people who made the original call put $13 million behind it. Everyone else put in $9 million. The person best placed to see a failure is the one who can least afford to name it.
think-piece
Most Decisions Are Reversible
Teams deliberate small, reversible decisions as if they were permanent. Bezos called these two-way doors. Treating them like one-way doors is why your organization is slow.
research-drop
The Mere Urgency Effect
People chase urgent tasks even when an important one pays far more. The deadline, not the value, drives the choice. Here's how to defend your team's real priorities.
think-piece
The Myth of the Ideal Candidate
The search for the perfect-on-paper hire quietly optimizes for the wrong thing: people who resemble the people already in the room. "Fit" usually means comfortable, not capable.
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.
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.