The AI Empathy Choice Paradox
An AI chatbot’s response to someone in distress was rated as more compassionate than a message written by a human professional. Given a genuine choice between the two, people chose the human anyway. That is the finding from new research out of Penn State and the University of Toronto, published this year in Communications Psychology. […]
Categorisation,Prediction and Social Safety (Barrett & Miller, 2026)
In my work I often hear leaders describe walking into a room and knowing within a second or two whether it is safe to say what they actually think. I have always described that as fast processing, the brain moving quickly through information it already has. New research from Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University […]
The Adult Version of Childhood Experience
You’ve rehearsed exactly what you’re going to say in that hard conversation. You haven’t thought about whether they can actually hear it. Connection before content. That’s a mantra one of our Advanced Diploma students shared with me. I now hear it repeated back to me constantly, because it names something leaders keep getting backwards. The […]
Compliance vs Capability
If your psychosocial risk plan and your leadership development plan live in two different folders, you have already built the gap the next audit or the next exit interview will find. Most organisations don’t fail here because they lack a hazard register or a training budget. They fail because they treat compliance and capability as […]
NSW Psychosocial Code Enforceable
Last Wednesday, something changed for every psychosocial safety strategy in NSW. Almost nobody has noticed. On 1 July, section 26A of the WHS Act came into effect. The Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work Code of Practice stopped being guidance and became an enforceable benchmark. Before that date, a SafeWork NSW inspector needed to point to […]
Organisational Culture Pandemic
Your culture isn’t broken. It’s been spreading. By the time your engagement survey flags the damage, transmission has already been occurring for months. Think about the most capable person on your team right now. The one who joined full of ideas and genuine confidence. Notice what’s changed. Have they started hedging their language? Stopped […]
Neurodivergence and Workplace Design
A translational neuroscientist at the Queensland Brain Institute said something to me a few weeks ago I haven’t been able to shake. If everybody was neurotypical, we would still be in caves having parties, because it is the neuro-spicy ones that push the world forward. That was Dr Susannah Tye, Ph.D., and she said it […]
Don’t Let Your Brain Boss You Around
A conversation with one of our Advanced Diploma students recently changed the way I have been thinking about something I thought I understood. This student was generous enough to share a personal experiment with the cohort. Every spare moment of the day had been filled with content. Podcasts on the walk, articles on the commute, […]
HEAD OF EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE AND SAFETY
We have all heard the saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Have we been naming the role responsible for it after the wrong thing? Culture is a lag indicator. It is the accumulated outcome of thousands of interactions, decisions, and daily experiences that have already happened. You cannot manage it directly any more than […]
Graduate Impact Post: The Brain Does Not Clock Off
Last week I shared something vulnerable on this page. I told you I was worried about whether my attempts to change the world one brain at a time are having the impact I am hoping for, and I asked you to tell me I was not alone in this. You did not let me be […]