“Understanding ourselves, navigating the world around us, making sense of others, and recognising the impact we have on them. Because who are we, really, if not shaped by one another?“
Happy Thursday, everyone. I’m Shaida Darian, a Business and Organisational Psychologist. I’m fascinated by three questions: Why does this happen? What can we do about it? And when should we act? Join me down the rabbit hole. With any luck, we’ll find Wonderland.
Four recent essays, all circling the same question from a different angle: are the systems we have built at work actually doing what we think they are? Hiring, attention, management, and AI. Catch up below.
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Are we getting better at hiring the right people, or simply getting better at filtering them?
Applicant Tracking Systems are designed to identify the best candidates. In practice, they tend to optimise for what is easiest to measure. Years of experience, qualifications, keywords: all look reassuringly objective on a screen, and all have a weaker relationship with actual job performance than most hiring teams realise. This piece looks at the century-old criterion problem in selection science, and what it costs when organisations perfect their aim before deciding where the target should be.
What constant stimulation is doing to the way we work.
We tend to blame ourselves when we cannot focus: more discipline, more willpower, a better system. This piece is more interested in the structural forces at play. The tools built to make work faster may also be changing how the brain evaluates effort. What looks like a personal failure of concentration may be something we have collectively learned to do, and something organisations could change if they chose to design for it.
Why we must stop treating the management role as an infinitely elastic buffer for organisational friction.
If you manage a team, your weekend probably does not start on Friday. It likely begins on Sunday afternoon when the low-grade anxiety of the week ahead coaxes you to open your laptop. This piece is direct: that exhaustion is a structural problem, not a personal one. Too much organisational pressure has been pushed into a role never designed to absorb it all. Asking managers to become more resilient is not the answer when the role itself exceeds its capacity by design.
When organisations attribute job cuts to AI, they blur the line between technological capability and executive choice.
Another announcement drops. Another round of AI-driven restructuring. This piece pauses at that phrase. AI does not make decisions. It creates capacity. The technology changes what an organisation can do with a given headcount. What leadership does with that capacity is still a choice. When a company says AI caused the job losses, it may be confusing a technological option with a leadership outcome.
How's the depth of today's edition?
Until next week,
Shaida
P.S. If you manage a team, where does the pressure land most heavily for you? Reply and tell me.
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