Happy Tuesday, everyone. I'm Frank Richardson, an organisational psychologist observing the workplace with curiosity and care. Each week, I share insights to help HR leaders better understand the people behind the processes and build cultures where both individuals and organisations can thrive.
This week in workplace whiplash 🌀
AI was supposed to make work faster, but this week's HR news suggests it's also making work stranger:
🤖 AI Could Be Making Us Worse at Thinking
Researchers are warning about "cognitive debt", the gradual erosion of our judgement when AI takes over the thinking we used to do ourselves. Like relying on GPS until you can no longer remember how to get home, the concern is that removing too much cognitive effort may leave organisations with fewer experts.
👉HCA Mag💼 LinkedIn Wants AI to Apply for Jobs for You
LinkedIn is rolling out an AI-powered Apply Assistant that can identify suitable roles, pre-fill applications and even draft cover letters for Premium users. Recruiters won't know which applications were AI-assisted, raising an interesting question: if AI is writing applications and AI is screening applications, at what point are the humans ever actually talking to each other?
👉HR Dive😶 AI Is Making Work... Lonely?
Anthropic engineering leader Fiona Fung says the growing use of AI agents has made work feel surprisingly isolating, with fewer day-to-day interactions between colleagues. The article also highlights a new workplace behaviour dubbed "tokenmaxxing", where employees burn through AI credits chasing marginal gains.
👉HR Grapevine
All of which brings me to this week's behavioural rabbit hole...
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Watching the World Cup has reminded me of one of my least favourite workplace personalities: the person who becomes a strategic genius approximately three minutes after a project fails.
“The timeline was always unrealistic… The risks were obvious… The whole thing was doomed from the start.”
Curiously, these insights only seem to emerge after the deadline has been missed, the client has left, or the launch has fallen flat.
Football fans are exactly the same.
The final whistle blows and suddenly everyone knows which player should have started, which substitution should have happened twenty minutes earlier, and who should never have been allowed anywhere near the penalty spot.
I'm guilty of it too. I've never managed a professional football team, but give me ninety minutes on the couch and I become strangely confident that I could have done a better job than someone who's dedicated thirty years of their life to the sport.
Behavioural science has a name for this: hindsight bias.
Looking back and reflecting is one of the most valuable things a team can do. But looking back and rewriting history are two very different things. The first helps us improve. The second convinces us the answer was obvious all along.
Be honest... have you ever become an expert after the project was already over?
🧠The behavioural science lens
Hindsight bias becomes a problem when our brains edit the uncertainty out of the story:
Hindsight bias rewrites yesterday: Once we know the outcome of an event, our brains naturally overestimate how predictable it was. Psychologists call this hindsight bias. It's why failed projects suddenly seem full of "obvious" warning signs that hardly anybody recognised beforehand. The uncertainty hasn't disappeared, we've simply forgotten it was ever there.
We end up judging the result instead of the decision: Good decisions don't always produce good outcomes, and bad decisions occasionally get lucky. Outcome bias describes our tendency to judge the quality of someone's thinking by what happened afterwards rather than by the information they actually had at the time. That distinction is the difference between organisations that learn and organisations that blame.
We massively underestimate how hard decisions are: Every difficult decision looks much simpler from the sidelines. Hiring someone, choosing a strategy, setting a deadline, selecting a football team. Research on the illusion of explanatory depth shows we consistently overestimate how well we understand complex decisions, especially once someone else has already made them.
Hindsight quietly changes behaviour: This is where it becomes a workplace problem. If every decision is picked apart with the benefit of perfect hindsight, people lose their feeling of safety, and learn that taking ownership is dangerous. They ask for another meeting, another approval, another opinion. Eventually, nobody wants to be the person who actually makes the call.Source:
🚀What this means for leaders
The best leaders know the difference between learning from a decision and rewriting it with the benefit of hindsight:
Recreate the decision before judging it: The easiest mistake in a retrospective is forgetting what people actually knew at the time. Before deciding whether someone made the wrong call, rebuild the world they were operating in. What information did they have? What assumptions were reasonable? What constraints were they working under? That's where the learning sits.
Ban the phrase "I always knew": If someone insists the outcome was obvious, ask a simple question: "What did you say before the decision was made?" There's a big difference between recognising a pattern early and recognising it after the scoreboard has already told everyone the answer. Organisations should reward the first far more than the second.
Judge the thinking, not just the ending: If you want people to take ownership, you have to judge the quality of their thinking, not just the quality of the outcome. Otherwise, you're asking people to make bold decisions while teaching them they'll be evaluated as though the future should have been obvious. Instead of creating accountability, it creates hesitation.
💬 Final thoughts
Hindsight has a remarkable ability to make us all feel just a little bit cleverer than we really are.
Apparently, we'd all have picked a different strategy, hired a different person, and definitely chosen a different penalty taker.
But when hindsight becomes the dominant way we evaluate decisions at work, people quickly learn that making the call is riskier than commenting on it afterwards.
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If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Until next week,
Frank
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