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Corporate culture isnt built by policies. Its built by momentsthe unscripted experiences that catch us off guard, bring us closer, and quietly shape how we show up for one another. But many efforts labeled culture-building, including onboarding programs, leadership retreats, and all-hands meetings, still feel like productivity theater: tightly scheduled and heavy on performance. Today, its worth asking whether that model has simply run its course. Consider this: what if the future of culture-building isnt about managing people, but about designing experiences that allow people to feel something real together? What if awe, story, and shared creativity werent treated as indulgences, but as foundational elements of how trust, courage, and belonging actually form? Beyond the Mission Statement While leaders like to bring up the idea of team culture, few can describe what theirs feels like in practice. Thats because culture doesnt live in a mission statement or a values deck. It lives in the stories people tell when no one is watching. It lives in how they feel after a team gathering. It lives in the space between intention and lived experience. The data reinforces this gap. Deloitte reports that only 23% of organizations believe their employees are strongly aligned with corporate purpose. Gallup finds that just two in ten employees feel connected to their companys culture on a daily basis. These arent engagement or communication problems; they are failures of experience design. When culture is reduced to language and artifacts, it stays abstract. When its shaped through shared experience, it becomes something people carry with them. Designing a Culture People Can Actually Feel Imagine replacing a traditional all-hands meeting with a creative exercise in which each team member contributes a visual expression of what matters most to them at work. Or imagine a leadership offsite that trades breakout rooms for a story circle, where leaders share pivotal moments that shaped how they lead today. People may forget the fourth bullet on slide 37, but they remember the moment they felt genuinely seen. Thats where culture actually forms. Across my work with teams and leaders ranging from early-stage companies to established organizations navigating change, the most durable cultural shifts dont come from tighter processes or clearer messaging. They come from intentionally designed experiences built around three elements humans have relied on for connection long before modern organizations existed: art, ritual, and awe. These lay the grounds for emotional experienceswhich can determine trust, risk-taking, and follow-through. Art as a Medium for Meaning When teams create something togetherwithout relying on wordshierarchies soften, safety increases, and unspoken dynamics surface naturally. Art invites play and perspective, two capacities most workplaces quietly suppress. At a recent leadership offsite, I facilitated a collaborative art experience where each participant expressed a core value visually, without explanation. What emerged was more than a collective artwork; it was a shared mirror. People recognized one another in new ways. Long after the offsite ended, the exercise continued to shape conversations. Art creates space for truth to surface without requiring debate or performance. Ritual as Emotional Architecture Ritual has a way of slowing us down and signaling significance. Simple, intentional gesturesopening a meeting with a shared intention, closing an offsite with a moment of gratitude, marking transitions with presenceturn routine interactions into moments of coherence. In my Campfires of Connection work, gatherings begin and end with ritual: lighting a fire, sharing a single word, or pausing together in silence. These gestures dont demand belief or explanation; they communicate something more fundamental: this moment matters. One of my clients began opening weekly meetings with a 60-second pause and a single prompt: What are you bringing here today? Over time, that slight shift deepened trust more effectively than any formal team-building program. Ritual isnt soft; its the emotional structure. It creates the container in which change becomes possible. Awe as a Catalyst for Connection Modern workplaces are loud, fast, and cognitively overloaded. Many people arent disengaged because they dont care; theyre overstimulated and starved of wonder. Awe interrupts that pattern. It resets the nervous system and expands perspective. In one of my facilitation sessions, participants were invited to sketch places from their childhood and share the stories behind them. The drawings were simple and imperfect, yet deeply personal. As each was revealed, the room changed. Colleagues who had known one another only through polished professional roles suddenly encountered one another as whole people with layered histories. That collective pause created a sense of awe. These moments dont happen accidentally. Theyre carefully designed to allow people to encounter something beyond their roles. In environments driven by metrics and deadlines, awe reminds us why collaboration matters and why people choose to stay, contribute, and stretch together rather than simply comply. When Culture-Building Falls Flat To understand why this approach matters, it helps to consider the alternative. I once observed a leadership retreat that checked every conventional box. The agenda featured well-known speakers, the breakout sessions were smartly facilitated, and participants left entertained, informed, and exhausted. But within weeks, nothing had changed. The retreat generated momentum but not meaning. What was missing wasnt effort; it was emotional resonance. There was no moment when people could set aside the performance of leadership and engage with one another more honestly. The experience was efficient, but forgettable. Months later, a much smaller intervention with the same group, a single evening structured around reflection, had a disproportionate impact. Leaders spoke openly about uncertainty, named tensions they had been avoiding, and listened without trying to fix or impress. That evening reshaped how they worked together more than any previous retreat had. Culture doesnt shift because information is delivered; it shifts when people feel something together that changes how they see one another. For leaders designing their next team gathering, the most useful questions may not be logistical at all. What do we want people to feel when they leave this room? What truth needs space to surface here? What has been rushed past that deserves reverence? What might become possible if we slowed down just enough to let meaning catch up? The organizations people love working for arent those with the slickest branding or the most polished values decks. Theyre the ones where people leave a meeting or retreat feeling more alive, more trusted, and more willing to take risks together.
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Our capacity to juggle several tasks at once is among the most important capabilities of the human cognitive system. Just consider a typical day in the life of a modern human: you glance at your phone while waiting for coffee to brew, skim headlines while half-listening to a podcast, mentally rehearse a client pitch while walking your child to school, reply noted on Slack during a meeting while updating a slide deck, check your bank balance while standing in line, and, in a moment of entirely optional productivity theatre, scroll through a friends Facebook feed to see what their cat had for breakfast (admittedly, not the most important addition to our already heavy repertoire of multi-tasks). If these familiar episodes of multitasking barely register as effort, it is because they have been absorbed into habit, woven into the fabric of daily life, quietly showing how often we coordinate competing goals, priorities, and impulses at once. For all the noise about AI agents, it is worth remembering that human agents remain remarkably capable. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-16X9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-1x1-2.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic","dek":"Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of organizational psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the co-founder of DeeperSignals. He has authored 15 books and over 250 scientific articles on the psychology of talent, leadership, AI, and entrepreneurship. ","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/drtomas.com\/intro\/","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91424798,"imageMobileId":91424800,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} That said, generative AI and AI agents add yet another layer of temptation to multitask, and a respectable excuse for doing so. Now we can draft an email while an agent prepares slides, ask a chatbot to summarize a report while we skim LinkedIn, generate code while answering Slack, or prompt three models at once while half-editing a memo. This feels like augmented productivity, but often becomes cognitive diffusion or an increase in work intensity. As I illustrated in I, Human, when machines take over fragments of thinking, we become supervisors of many shallow streams rather than authors of one coherent argument. The result is not just intellectual sloppiness, but a steady erosion of focus, as attention shifts from solving a problem to managing tools that promise to solve it for us. A bad rap To be sure, multitasking tends to get a bad rap, especially among cognitive psychologists and behavioral scientists. This skepticism is well grounded. In a widely cited meta-analysis, researchers showed that alternating between tasks produces measurable switch costs in both speed and accuracy, even when tasks are simple. Subsequent research also found that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on tests of attention control and working memory, suggesting that frequent task-switching may erode the very cognitive filters that make focus possible. A more recent synthesis including examination of social media effects linked media multitasking during studying to significantly poorer academic outcomes. More recent neuroscientific evidence also shows that habitual multitasking is associated with reduced grey-matter density in regions linked to cognitive control, and some scholars have pointed out that multitasking deducts the equivalent of 10-IQ points from our performance and is therefore more debilitating than smoking weed (presumably minus the benefits or self-perceived creativity!). Taken together, the evidence is rather compelling: multitasking is not a sign of superior efficiency but a tax on attention, trading depth for the comforting illusion of productivity. It makes us feel busy, sometimes even clever, yet especially for complex, analytical, or creative work it is usually worse than doing one thing well at a time, or learning to focus. Supertaskers And yet, that is not to say that we are all equally bad at multitasking. In fact, as in most areas of cognition, there are meaningful individual differences. A small but influential line of research has even identified a group sometimes labelled supertaskers. In a dual-task experiment involving simulated driving and mental arithmetic, researchers identified a minority of participants who showed virtually no performance drop when handling two demanding tasks at once. These individuals tended to score higher on measures of working memory capacity and executive control (proxies for higher IQ), suggesting that cognitive resources, more than motivation or confidence, set the ceiling on multitasking ability. Working memory is analogous to a computers RAM, in that it determines how many pieces of information can be actively held and processed at once. Individuals with greater working-memory capacity possess more cognitive bandwidth to manage competing demands, though the limits remain real for everyone. In line, studies consistently show that people with higher working memory capacity, stronger attentional control, and better fluid intelligence incur smaller task-switching costs. Working memory capacity predicts resistance to distraction, while Unsworth and Engle (2007) linked it to superior performance in complex attention tasks, and executive attention explains substantial variance in multitasking performance. The role of personality Unsurprisingly, personality also plays a role: most notably, traits linked to self-regulation and planning, such as conscientiousness, tend to buffer against the negative effects of multitasking, while impulsivity and related tendencies are associated with poorer performance. Broader Big Five traits such as extraversion, neuroticism, and openness show mixed effect, often influencing how people approach multitasking rather than how well they actually perform it. Even training and domain expertise matter. Air-traffic controllers, surgeons, and experienced gamers show reduced switching costs in their domains because practice automates sub-tasks, freeing cognitive bandwidth. This does not mean that people know how good they actually are at multitasking. As in most domains of competence, the share of people who claim to excel far exceeds the share who truly do. In a classic experiment, researchers found that heavy media multitaskers rated themselves as effective jugglers of attention yet performed worse on tests of working memory and attentional control. The pattern echoes a broader principle from behavioral science, familiar from the DunningKruger literature: when a skill is poorly understood and rarely measured, confidence tends to rise as competence falls. Multi-tasking, like leadership or emotional intelligence, is easy to overestimate because busyness looks like effectiveness, and we remember the rare occasions when juggling worked, not the many when it quietly degraded our thinking. Taken together, the evidence paints a nuanced picture. The average human is indeed a poor multi-tasker, especially when tasks are novel or cognitively demanding. But some individuals, by virtue of higher executive capacity (raw mental horsepower), disciplined habits, specialized training, and the right personality, are less bad at it. That distinction matters for leadership and talent assessment, because it reminds us that multitasking ability is not a universal virtue or vice. It is a measurable cognitive skill, unevenly distributed across people, and often confused with confidence, busyness, or the social theatre of productivity. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-16X9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-1x1-2.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic","dek":"Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of organizational psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the co-founder of DeeperSignals. He has authored 15 books and over 250 scientific articles on the psychology of talent, leadership, AI, and entrepreneurship. 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If you have ever interviewed for a job, there is a non-trivial probability that you have encountered tricky or quirky interview questions. These are questions that are intentionally unexpected, abstract, or only loosely related to the actual requirements of the role. Rather than systematically assessing job-relevant skills, they are designed to surprise candidates, test composure, or signal creativity. Interviewers often defend these questions as clever ways to evaluate problem-solving ability, cultural fit, or performance under pressure. The evidence tells a different story. Decades of research in industrial-organizational psychology show that unstructured, brainteaser-style interviews have low predictive validity. They generate noise, not insight. At best, they measure how comfortable someone is with improvisation. At worst, they measure how similar the candidate is to the interviewer. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-16X9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-1x1-2.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic","dek":"Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of organizational psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the co-founder of DeeperSignals. He has authored 15 books and over 250 scientific articles on the psychology of talent, leadership, AI, and entrepreneurship. ","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/drtomas.com\/intro\/","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91424798,"imageMobileId":91424800,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Cases in point To illustrate the point, here are some common examples, ordered from least absurd, or at least somewhat defensible, to most absurd: 1. What is your biggest weakness?Nominally job-related, though usually answered strategically rather than honestly. The only rational way to respond is to disguise a strength as a flaw. It is less a test of self-awareness than an audition for plausible humility. 2. Sell me this pen.Some relevance for sales roles, but still an artificial performance detached from real context. Popularized by The Wolf of Wall Street, it reinforces the myth that great sales is about fast talk rather than listening, diagnosing needs, and building trust. 3. Tell me about a time you failed.In principle, a legitimate behavioral question. In practice, often an invitation to narrate a carefully curated setback that highlights resilience, grit, and eventual triumph. It rewards storytelling ability more than learning agility. 4. How many tennis balls can fit inside a Boeing 747?A classic guesstimate puzzle meant to test structured thinking. Geeks may love it, but it predicts little beyond prior exposure to similar puzzles. If you want to measure cognitive ability, there are far more reliable and validated tools. 5. How many windows are there in New York City?Same logic, further removed from any realistic job task. For what its worth, large language models estimate the number in the tens of millions, depending on assumptions. Which illustrates the deeper point: if ChatGPT can answer it in seconds, why are we using it to judge human potential? 6. If you were an animal, which one would you be and why?A thinly veiled personality quiz. It feels like a BuzzFeed throwback disguised as talent assessment. The answer often reveals more about the interviewers projections than the candidates traits. 7. If you could have dinner with any historical figure, who would it be?A pleasant icebreaker masquerading as a values assessment. It doubles as a signaling exercise: how curious, cultured, contrarian, or provocative can you appear in under 30 seconds? Say Nelson Mandela and you signal virtue. Say Steve Jobs and you signal ambition. Say Machiavelli and you signal strategic depth. But say Stalin and suddenly the interview turns into a moral inquiry. Was that intellectual curiosity, dark humor, or deeply questionable judgment? The question reveals less about your leadership potential than about your risk appetite for reputational self-sabotage. 8. If you were a kitchen utensil, which one would you be?At this point, the exercise has drifted into sheer parody shows like The Office come to mind. Spoon suggests reliability. Knife signals edge. Spork implies versatility. The real variable being tested may simply be how badly you want the job, signaled by the fact that you havent just walked out of the room. The science So, what does the actual science of interviewing say? First, there is evidence that some interviewers are not merely misguided, but derive a certain Machiavellian pleasure from putting candidates on the spot. Research on interviewer behavior shows that individuals higher in everyday sadism or dominance are more likely to ask stress-inducing or intentionally uncomfortable questions. In other words, the brainteaser may sometimes be less about assessing you and more about interviewers enjoying the deviant power dynamic. Second, the predictive validity of unstructured interviews is consistently low. Meta-analyses spanning decades show that traditional, free-flowing interviews correlate only modestly with later job performance. The problem is not conversation per se, but inconsistency. Different candidates get different questions. Interviewers rely on intuition. Evaluation criteria shift midstream. The result is noise, bias, and overconfidence, and unfortunately, these issues often go undetected because of the subsequent confirmation bias or failure to admit mistakes by hiring managers. In essence, if an interviewer likes you, they will either continue to like you after you are hired or pretend you are doing a great job to avoid looking like a fool. By contrast, structured interviews work. The formula is hardly mysterious: define the competencies that matter for the job; ask all candidates the same job-relevant questions; anchor evaluations to predefined scoring rubrics; and combine interview data with other validated predictors such as cognitive ability or work samples. Behavioral questions about past actions and situational questions tied to realistic job scenarios consistently outperform seemingly clever riddles and quirky brain teasers. The role of AI And then there is AI, not so much the elephant in the room as the bull in the china shop, already rearranging the furniture while we are still debating the seating plan. In a world where candidates can rehearse flawless answers with generative tools, the theatrical interview becomes even more obsolete. Chatbots can generate polished responses to biggest weakness or sell me this pen in seconds. Ironically, the more predictable and formulaic the question, the easier it is to game. This raises the bar for employers: assessment must shift toward observable skills, simulations, job trials, and multi-source data. This does not mean interviews become irrelevant. It means they must evolve. When information is abundant and answers are cheap, the premium shifts from rehearsed narratives to demonstrated capability. Instead of asking candidates what they would do, employers can observe what they actually do: solve a real problem, analyze a live case, critique a flawed strategy, or collaborate with a future teammate. AI can help candidates prepare, but it cannot fully fake sustained performance in a realistic simulation. There is also a deeper irony. The very tools that allow candidates to polish their answers can help employers design better assessments. AI can assist in standardizing questions, generating competency-based scenarios, flagging bias in evaluation, and even predicting which interview questions correlate with outcomes. In other words, AI exposes the weakness of theatrical interviewing while simultaneously offering the tools to fix it. The real risk is not that candidates use AI. It is that employers fail to upgrade their methods accordingly. In sum, the future of interviewing is not about trickier questions. It is about better design. The uncomfortable truth is that quirky interview questions persist because they are fun, easy, and ego-affirming. But hiring is too important to be left to entertainment. If organizations are serious about talent, they must replace improvisational theatre with evidence-based assessments, and have the humility and self-critical honesty to truly test the outcome of their decisions to acknowledge when they are wrong, and make an effort to tweak things and improve. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-16X9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-1x1-2.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic","dek":"Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of organizational psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the co-founder of DeeperSignals. He has authored 15 books and over 250 scientific articles on the psychology of talent, leadership, AI, and entrepreneurship. ","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/drtomas.com\/intro\/","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91424798,"imageMobileId":91424800,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
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