Happy Monday, 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.
Most organisations believe they're reasonably good at spotting talent, rewarding the right people, and learning from failure. The research consistently suggests otherwise. Four essays on the gap between how rational those judgements feel and how much distortion is actually shaping them.
Overconfidence in professional judgement is one of the most replicated findings in psychology. It shows up differently in senior people, but it still shows up.
People with limited knowledge in an area tend to overestimate their competence. What's less discussed is that this applies equally to experienced professionals — it just becomes harder to see from the inside. This piece looks at what overconfidence actually looks like in skilled roles, why seniority makes people more vulnerable to it rather than less, and what it means for the decisions leaders make about other people's performance every single day.
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The idea is compelling. Concentrate your best people, remove the rest, and performance improves. The evidence is more complicated.
Netflix popularised talent density as an organising principle: keep only exceptional people and the bar raises itself. It's a seductive idea. It's also built on assumptions the research doesn't consistently support. This piece looks at what happens when organisations try to apply it in practice, what the evidence actually says about how high-performing teams work, and what tends to disappear when "the best people" becomes the only thing leaders are optimising for.
💬 Where does your organisation's performance judgement feel most unreliable?
Around a quarter of the population are natural evening types. The standard working day asks them to do their hardest thinking at exactly the wrong time.
Chronobiology is clear: people's cognitive peaks vary by hours depending on their natural sleep-wake cycle. Morning people built the 9-5. It works well for them. For everyone else it means doing their sharpest thinking during their biological off-peak, every day, without anyone acknowledging it's happening. This piece looks at what the evidence says about how working hours affect performance, who the current structure consistently advantages, and what organisations could actually change if they chose to.
Every failed project eventually produces a room full of people who knew it was going wrong. They didn't say anything at the time. That's not a coincidence.
Hindsight bias is one of the most powerful distorting forces in how organisations learn from failure. Once an outcome is known, people reconstruct their memory of what they believed beforehand to match it — and feel genuinely certain they saw it coming. This piece looks at what that does to post-project reviews, how it shapes who gets credit and who gets blame, and why the people best at narrating what happened tend to come out looking better than they should.
How's the depth of today's edition?
If something here speaks to you, I’d love to hear it.
Until next time,
Frank
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