Collaboration
When Mentoring Goes Wrong
When an opinionated senior engineer and a hesitant junior engineer clash, the real problem isn't attitude; it's two brains doing exactly what evolution designed them to do.
Organizational Navigation
Stress & Regulation
Your Manager Can't Fix Your Anxiety (And That's Not Her Job)
When a project is in crisis, employees instinctively look to their manager for reassurance, but the relief they're seeking is something only they can provide for themselves.
Conflict & Resolution
When "He Makes Me Uncomfortable" Is Actually About You
When a colleague's bluntness feels threatening, the real work isn't changing them but understanding why your nervous system is treating direct feedback as a personal attack.
Conflict & Resolution
Why We Love to Hate Our Manager's Decisions
When managers make unpopular calls, tribal bonding and amygdala threat responses make group indignation feel like safety, but often at the cost of clear thinking.
Collaboration
The Promotion You Didn't Get and the Story You Told Yourself About It
Self-serving attribution bias turns career setbacks into missed learning opportunities; the fix is reframing feedback requests from backward-looking judgments to forward-looking behavioral predictions.
Stress & Regulation
What Happens in Your Brain When You're Being Micromanaged
Micromanagement degrades performance not because it's unpleasant but because it removes the autonomous action loop the brain needs to function.
Stress & Regulation
The Burnout Nobody Saw Coming
Burnout isn't a workload problem; it's what happens when the brain's predictions about effort and reward chronically fail to match reality, until the system shuts down to protect itself.
Collaboration
The Colleague Who Takes Credit: What's Actually Happening
Credit-taking is a threat response driven by self-model protection, and understanding that mechanism gives you a strategic advantage in how you respond.
Conflict & Resolution
Process Arguments Are Really About Deeper Disagreements
Process disagreements that never resolve are usually proxy battles over deeper conflicts about values, status, or purpose — and the fix is surfacing what each side is actually trying to protect.
Collaboration
Why Meeting Consensus Often Leads to Zero Action
Apparent agreement in meetings is often social performance rather than genuine belief change, and forcing people to state explicit predictions before decisions are finalized makes hidden skepticism visible and harder to quietly abandon.
Collaboration
The Performance Review That Wasn't About Performance
Performance feedback conversations go sideways not because people can't handle the truth, but because the brain instinctively defends its self-narrative against what it perceives as a character attack rather than a factual data point.