Happy Thursday, 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 year, people are renegotiating their relationship with work on their own terms, without asking permission. Who they are when they show up. How much they're willing to give. Whether the structure of the day was ever built for them. And who gets to write the story when things go wrong.
Four essays that circle that same shift from different angles. Read one, read all four.
What happens when a break changes who you are, and work still expects the old version.
A long break changes what you want. Work, when you return to it, mostly hasn't changed to meet you. Research on identity consistently shows that who we are shifts when our context does. Stepping back into the same desk is a different thing from stepping back into the same person. This piece looks at why returning feels harder than expected, and what to do when the version of you that left is not quite the one that came back.
🤝 In partnership with Metaview
Two years ago, AI agents started shipping production code. Engineering teams stopped scaling through headcount and started scaling through leverage. Now the same shift is reaching recruiting.
Metaview's new autonomous agent, Fillmore, researches candidates, writes personalised outreach, manages follow-ups, and books screening calls on its own. You tell it who you're looking for. It handles the rest.
Key Takeaways:
🤖 Outbound recruiting that runs itself: Fillmore sources candidates, writes personalised outreach, manages follow-ups, and schedules calls end-to-end with no human coordination required
🚀 You delegate outcomes, not tasks: Give Fillmore a role and it delivers conversations, operating across email, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp while your team focuses on hiring
💬 No templates, every message is personalised: Outreach is written specifically for each candidate, not pulled from a library
🎯 Already making hires: Cognition, Rippling, Luma, and Replit are testing it, and Luma AI has reportedly already made hires sourced through Fillmore
Join the waitlist 👉 metaview.ai/fillmore
More employees are keeping their options open. None of it mentioned at work.
A growing number of people are keeping their LinkedIn updated, their network warm, and their options open, none of it mentioned at work. Career cushioning is what happens when people stop assuming their current role will be there indefinitely. This piece looks at what's driving it, what it tells us about how much people trust the employment relationship right now, and what leaders should read into it when the signs start appearing.
💬 Which of these feels most true for you right now?
Around a quarter of the population do their best thinking in the afternoon. The 9-5 asks them to perform at exactly the wrong time.
Morning people built the working day. It works well for them. For roughly a quarter of the population whose cognitive peak arrives later, the standard structure means doing their sharpest work during their biological off-peak, every day. This piece gets into what chronobiology says about performance and working hours, who the current structure favours, and what organisations could change if they decided to take it seriously.
Every failed project eventually produces a room full of people who knew it was going wrong. They didn't say anything at the time.
Once an outcome is known, people reconstruct what they believed beforehand to match it, and feel certain they saw it coming. It has a name: hindsight bias. And it quietly shapes who gets credit, who gets blamed, and how organisations read their own failures. This piece looks at what that does to post-project reviews, and why the people best at telling the story of what happened come out of it rather well.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Until next week!
P.S. If you want to get a feature about your own story, reply to this email. If you’d like to reach our newsletter audience (founders, creators, and marketers), click the button below.
If you’re new here, I’m over the moon you’ve joined us! To help me craft content that’s actually useful (and not just noise in your inbox), I’d love it if you took 1 minute to answer this quick survey below. Your insights help shape everything I write.
✨ Insane Media is more than one voice
💡 Dive into our other newsletters - where psychology meets the founders, creator economy, e-commerce marketing, and AI founders.
