AI decision rights are becoming one of the most important questions in AI transformation. Major advisory firms have published frameworks for redesigning organisations around AI. Each one addresses who owns which decisions, how authority moves between humans and agents, and how oversight should work. But none of them names what they are really helping organisations do. Redesigning decision rights means redesigning power. It determines who can act, whose judgment carries weig

“Hello, is there anybody in there?” In 1979, Roger Waters wrote that line about someone present but unreachable, switched off to what was happening around them. In 2006, Adam Galinsky and colleagues published experimental evidence that power produces exactly this condition. High-power participants were less accurate at reading others' emotions, anchored more heavily on their own vantage point, and failed to adjust for information others didn't share. Power, the research foun

The phrase 'best person for the job' has come to imply that structured processes and diverse shortlists are in conflict with finding the most capable candidate. The assumption is that organisations already select on merit, and that adding process or broadening the pool dilutes it. That assumption is wrong. Merit is a property of a process, not a person. And the processes claiming to select on merit are failing to do so - at three distinct points. The criteria are written to

The premise of a team is that it outperforms a collection of individuals doing the same work separately. That premise depends on the people in the team contributing what they actually know - their real assessment of the situation, their genuine concern about the risk, the idea they haven't heard anyone else articulate yet. When that contribution happens, teams make better decisions than any individual member would alone. They surface problems earlier. They generate options th

McKinsey's "Diversity Wins" series - the most-cited source for the business case for diversity - has failed independent replication. Jeremiah Green and John Hand, working across S&P 500 firms using McKinsey's own diversity measures, found no statistically significant relationship between executive diversity and financial performance across six different performance metrics. They published their findings in 2024. Oddly, the response from organisations has been to keep citing t

Return-to-office mandates are being announced as productivity and culture interventions. New research from the Wharton School suggests the real driver is neither. After surveying thousands of executives and running controlled experiments, Adam Grant and colleagues found the only personality trait that consistently predicted opposition to remote work was narcissism. Not productivity concerns. Not trust in employees. Not a desire for collaboration. Ego. That finding reframes ev

Australia's Productivity Commission settled something in May 2025 that should have ended a decade of argument: flexible and hybrid work is not detrimental to productivity. So what's the question that should have followed? If flexible work doesn't harm productivity, why do so many leaders and organisations still treat it like it does?The honest answer isn't about output. It's about power and control - who decides how work happens, when, and where. That's the conversation that’

Australia's national gender pay gap is 21.1% on total remuneration. That's $28,356 per year that the average woman in full-time employment earns less than the average man, according to WGEA's 2024-25 Gender Equality Scorecard. The debate around this number is almost always framed as a fairness issue. Fairness is the right starting point. The commercial argument is the one that tends to stall - and it deserves more rigorous treatment than it usually gets. The gender pay gap is

The window closes on 31 May 2026. This week, all designated employers are due to lodge their three mandatory gender equality targets with WGEA - the first time any national jurisdiction has legislated employer-level target-setting of this kind and scope. The mechanics are well documented: employers choose three targets from a menu of nineteen options spanning workforce composition, remuneration, flexible working, parental leave, sexual harassment prevention, and employee cons