Writing
My personal thoughts on building systems, automating work, and making better decisions.
The SCALES Method: A Practitioner's Framework for HR Automation That Sticks.
Most HR automation projects fail because people skip straight to the tool. SCALES is a six-step method for building automations that survive contact with reality: Spot, Capture, Assess, Launch, Evaluate, Share. Here's the full framework.
Claude Skills FTW.
AI tools gave HR teams a copilot. Skills give them a playbook. The difference between an AI that helps you draft an offer letter and one that drafts offer letters the way your organization actually does them is a markdown file, a clear set of instructions, and an understanding of what your team's real workflows actually look like. Most HR teams haven't figured this out yet. The ones that do will build something more valuable than any vendor can sell them: institutional muscle memory that scales.
The Skill Atrophy Trap.
AI copilots deliver genuine productivity gains – 12% more tasks, 25% faster, measurably higher quality. But the first rigorous experimental evidence shows that workers become 19% less accurate on complex tasks outside AI's capability zone, endoscopists lose 20% of their detection ability after routine AI use, and the cognitive science explaining why has been staring at us for decades. Organizations optimizing for today's speed metrics may be systematically eroding the human judgment they'll need to supervise AI tomorrow.
George Orwell's 1984 Communication Loop.
AI now writes the emails nobody wanted to write and summarizes the emails nobody wanted to read. The result isn't efficiency. It's a closed loop of performative communication where machines talk to machines and humans pretend they're involved. The organizations that break this cycle won't be the ones with better AI tools. They'll be the ones brave enough to ask why the email existed in the first place.
Let's Talk About the Self-Service Paradox.
Self-service technology was supposed to empower employees. Instead, it shifted administrative burden from HR onto the workforce, fueled digital fatigue, and contributed to a well-being crisis that $94 billion in wellness spending has failed to fix. The solution isn't more technology. It's better organizational design.
Your Org's Silent Empathy Problem.
A preregistered study of 968 people found almost no correlation between feeling empathic and communicating empathy, a gap that explains why billions spent on wellness programs and empathy training produce so little. A single AI coaching session measurably closed that gap, raising uncomfortable questions about what HR has been training all along.
Your Next Hire Doesn't Have a Pulse.
AI agents are joining org charts as digital workers. HR technology leaders who treat this as a tools problem will fail. The ones who treat it as a management problem will define the next era of work.
The AI Hiring Arms Race.
AI hiring tools were supposed to make recruitment faster, cheaper, and fairer. Instead, time-to-hire has climbed to 44 days, 67% of HR leaders say AI-generated applications are slowing the process, and the largest resume screening bias study ever conducted found AI favors white-associated names in 85.1% of tests. What emerged isn't optimization. It's an adversarial arms race where both sides deploy AI, trust collapses, and the humans caught in the middle spend more time trying to figure out what's real.
Stop Building. Start Enabling.
HR technology teams create more leverage by enabling governed self-service instead of building every ticket.
First Principles of Workplace Automation
Before you automate anything, make sure you're automating the right thing.