A team of researchers at MIT and Carnegie Mellon put 699 people into small groups and tested them on tasks from brainstorming to complex problem-solving. They assumed the groups with the highest individual IQs would perform best. They were wrong.…
If you check your calendar and see 30.9% of your meeting time involves email multitasking, you are not an outlier. You are the average. A 2021 study analysing remote meetings found that precise figure. The odds of it happening increase…
When you feel ‘office politics’ at work, that is not a vague irritation. It is a measurable stressor. Research that consolidated 79 independent samples found a clear correlation: the more political employees perceive their workplace to be, the lower their…
Close to nine out of ten people hold at least one bias against women. The United Nations Development Programme’s data covers 85% of the world’s population. This is not a matter of individual opinion; it is a measurable social norm.…
Consider it a weekly tax, but paid in mental energy, not money. A 2021 report by Acas estimated the cost of workplace conflict to UK employers at roughly £28.5 billion per year. For context, that is over £1,000 per employee.…
A person forms an initial judgement of trustworthiness from your face in 100 milliseconds. That is less time than it takes to blink. Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov’s study found the correlation between impressions formed in that time and those…
Over 347 billion emails are sent globally every day. The average professional spends 28% of their working life dealing with them. This is not a commentary on modern work; it is a fact of it. I know my own screen…
Your LinkedIn connection count is a vanity metric. Robin Dunbar’s research on human social capacity shows the brain can only maintain about 150 stable relationships. We pour roughly 60% of our social energy into just 15 people. A 2025 study…
You probably think you’d be a modern, supportive boss. Most people do. The issue is that we are generally bad at judging our own competence. In the Dunning–Kruger study, participants in the bottom quartile for skills like logic placed themselves…
You probably think you’d be a modern, supportive boss. Most people do. The issue is that we are generally bad at judging our own competence. In the Dunning–Kruger study, participants in the bottom quartile for skills like logic placed themselves…