If you’ve read the Dismantling Authenticity series so far (Prologue and Part 1), you’ll know the argument by now: there’s no fixed “real you” hiding underneath your adaptations, waiting to be excavated. There’s just alignment — the ongoing, active work of bringing your behaviour into relationship with your values, context by context.

Which is a satisfying thing to believe on a Tuesday afternoon when nothing's going wrong. It's considerably less useful on the Tuesday afternoon when something is going wrong, and you can't quite tell whether you're masking, adapting, thriving, or quietly running on empty — because from the inside, those four states can feel almost identical.

Part of why they’re so hard to tell apart is that “alignment” is actually doing two jobs at once, and most of us only ever notice one of them. There’s who you want to be in a given room — the values question. And there’s who you can actually be in that room right now — the capacity question, the bio-psycho-social reality of what you have available to spend today. A values-aligned adaptation you don’t have the bandwidth for isn’t a failure of authenticity. It’s just currently unaffordable. But it feels exactly like drift from the inside, which is precisely what makes it so disorienting.

That’s what this tool is for: separating the two questions so you can actually see which one is doing the damage.

What it actually measures

The Audit maps you across two axes.

Environmental Friction — how much the room you’re operating in is working against your natural processing style. Some rooms are genuinely difficult: rigid norms, low tolerance for difference, communication styles that don’t match how you think. Others are easier than they feel, because friction and discomfort aren’t always the same thing.

Strategic Boundary Control — how solid your interface actually is. Not how confident you feel, but whether you have real, usable structures: the ability to say no to low-value demands, the scripts and frameworks that let your ideas travel without you having to perform a different personality to deliver them.

Cross those two axes and you get four profiles — from the Exhausted Masker (high friction, low boundary control — the state the whole series exists to help you leave) through to the Anchored Professional (low friction, high boundary control — the rare, enviable spot where you’re spending very little energy on friction and have the structures ready for when it returns).

The layer that changes everything

Here’s the part that makes the Audit more than a personality quiz: sitting underneath the grid is a third measure, Values Clarity, and it doesn’t add a third axis so much as it reinterprets the other two.

The same position on the grid can mean two completely different things depending on your Values Clarity score. High clarity, and a polished, adaptive professional interface is exactly what it looks like — genuine alignment, tactical legibility, the real thing. Low clarity, and that same polished interface might just be masking with better production values: adaptation with no anchor, drift dressed up as competence.

In other words, the Audit doesn’t just tell you where you are. It tells you whether where you are is actually yours — a distinction that’s easy to lose sight of when the adaptation itself has gotten very, very good.

How to use it

Fifteen minutes, four sections, no scoring system that requires a spreadsheet. You’ll come away with:

• Your position on the Friction × Boundary Control grid, and what that profile actually means day to day

• A read on your Values Clarity, and how it changes the story your grid position is telling

• A specific, profile-matched next step — not generic advice, but the thing that’s actually relevant to your particular combination of room and interface

The full Audit is below as a downloadable PDF.

Now go find out which quadrant you’re actually in.

Authenticity Alignment Audit

86.5KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Welcome to the seventh session of the Off-Script Reading book club.

This week we’ll focus on Chapter 4.

Before we get started, a quick note for new subscribers to Off-Script At Work:

New subscribers receive both Off-Script At Work and Off-Script Reading by default.

So, if you’d want to join, just make sure you grab a copy of Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy and you’re good to go. If you don’t want to join the book club, you can easily opt-out. Here’s how:

1. Go to substack.com/settings — or click your account avatar (top right) and select “Settings”

2. Under “Subscriptions”, click on Off-Script at Work

3. Find the Off-Script Reading section and slide the toggle to OFF

That’s it. Alternatively, you can manage it directly here: svenbrodmerkel.substack.com/account

Key Ideas From Chapter 4

1. The placebo effect is a window into unconscious influence — and our reluctance to use it is revealing

Sutherland opens with the placebo effect, drawing on Nicholas Humphrey’s work to establish something that goes well beyond the familiar observation that sugar pills can reduce pain. The placebo effect is not a trick. It is a demonstration of the mind’s capacity to influence the body through meaning, expectation, and context — and understanding it is, Sutherland argues, one of the most useful ways to understand unconscious influence more broadly.

What is particularly interesting is the second part of his observation: our reluctance to exploit the placebo effect tells us something important about our wider reluctance to adopt psychological solutions. We find the placebo uncomfortable not because it doesn’t work but because it works through channels that feel illegitimate — channels that bypass the rational, conscious, explainable pathway we have decided is the correct one. This discomfort is itself a data point. It reveals how deeply we have invested in a particular model of how change is supposed to happen, even when that model is demonstrably incomplete.

2. We cannot alter subconscious processes through direct acts of will — we have to work indirectly

Timothy Wilson’s concept of the adaptive unconscious sits at the heart of this chapter. The unconscious is not a passive repository of suppressed memories and irrational impulses. It is an active, sophisticated processing system that handles the vast majority of human cognition — and it does not take instructions from the conscious mind in any straightforward way. You cannot decide to feel differently about something simply by reasoning yourself into a new position. You cannot will yourself into a new habit by understanding why the old one is counterproductive.

What you can do — and what the chapter is fundamentally about — is tinker with the things you can control in order to influence the things you can’t. The automatic camera and automatic transmission examples are illustrations of a broader principle: in any complex system, direct intervention at the point of the behaviour you want to change is often less effective than indirect intervention at the conditions that produce it. This applies to human psychology as surely as it applies to engineering. Feelings can be inherited — passed on through culture, ritual, environment, and experience — in ways that reasons cannot. You can teach someone a reason. You cannot teach them a feeling by explaining it.

3. The conscious mind post-rationalises — it is the press office, not the Oval Office

Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor arrives here with characteristic force. The conscious, rational mind is not the decision-maker. It is the press office — the part of the operation whose job is to explain and justify decisions that have already been made elsewhere. The Oval Office, where the actual decisions happen, is the adaptive unconscious: faster, older, more emotionally responsive, and largely inaccessible to direct inspection.

This reframes the entire project of rational persuasion. If you want to change what someone does, addressing their conscious reasoning may be the least efficient available approach — not because people are stupid but because the conscious mind is not where the relevant processing is happening. Sutherland’s aliens observing human sleep rituals make the point with comic precision: from the outside, the elaborate preparations for unconsciousness look completely inexplicable. From the inside, we don’t know why we do most of them either — we just know that skipping them makes sleep harder. The ritual is working on something the conscious mind cannot directly access.

4. Never dismiss a behaviour as irrational until you have considered what purpose it actually serves

This principle — stated directly and worth treating as a general rule — is one of the chapter’s most practically useful contributions. The elevator button that does nothing. The pedestrian crossing button that may or may not affect the lights. These are not design failures in the ordinary sense. They are responses to a deep psychological need for control and agency in uncertain situations — and the feeling of control, even when it is not causally connected to the outcome, measurably changes the experience of waiting.

This is oblique influence operating in plain sight. The button exists not to change the traffic light but to change the person standing at the crossing. Whether it works in the engineering sense is almost beside the point. It works in the psychological sense, which is the sense that actually matters for the quality of the experience. The reflex to dismiss this as irrational or manipulative is itself an example of the rational straitjacket Sutherland has been describing throughout the book.

5. Effective placebos require effort, scarcity, expense — and a touch of illogicality

The chapter builds toward one of its most elegant observations: for something to function as an effective self-administered placebo — or more broadly, as a meaningful intervention in one’s own psychological state — it has to involve some element of illogicality, waste, unpleasantness, effort, or costliness. The cheap, convenient, perfectly rational option cannot do this work, because it carries no signal strong enough to attract the attention of the unconscious.

Red Bull returns here as the ideal illustration. It is expensive, tastes strange, comes in conspicuously small cans, and has acquired a cultural mythology that makes it feel like something more than a drink. Each of these qualities — the qualities that make it look irrational as a hydration choice — is precisely what makes it effective as a psychological intervention. The illogicality is not incidental to the effect. It may be constitutive of it. To deviate from standard rationality, Sutherland suggests, is sometimes the only way to attract the attention of the unconscious and create genuine meaning. The rational option slides past unnoticed. The slightly strange one lands.

6. Bravery placebos and the alchemy of self-signalling

The concept of bravery placebos extends this logic into more personal territory. Rituals, talismans, routines, and superstitions that athletes, performers, and soldiers use before high-stakes situations are not simply comfort behaviour. They are sophisticated self-signalling devices — ways of communicating to the unconscious that this moment is different, that a different mode of engagement is required, and that the resources necessary for it are available. The ritual doesn’t guarantee the outcome. It changes the psychological conditions under which the person approaches it.

This is what Sutherland means by signalling to ourselves. The audience for the costly, irrational gesture is not always external. Sometimes we are performing for our own unconscious — staging a scene elaborate enough that the part of us which doesn’t respond to logical argument gets the message.

A Neurodivergent Reading

The observation that we cannot alter subconscious processes through direct acts of will — that we have to tinker with the environment rather than command the psychology — is one that many neurodivergent people have arrived at through painful experience long before reading Sutherland.

The entire apparatus of executive function support, environmental design, body-doubling, external accountability structures, and sensory regulation strategies is, at its core, an applied version of this principle. You cannot will yourself into starting a task that your nervous system is refusing to engage with. You can change the lighting, the soundtrack, the location, the social context, the physical posture — and find that the task becomes accessible in ways it simply wasn’t before. This is not weakness or workaround. It is, in Sutherland’s framework, the correct approach to influencing a complex system that doesn’t respond to direct commands.

The press office/Oval Office metaphor is also worth sitting with specifically. The neurodivergent experience of post-rationalisation often runs in a particular direction: the body or the nervous system has already decided — already shut down, already escalated, already fixated — before the conscious mind has caught up. The explanation arrives after the fact, and it is frequently wrong about the cause. Understanding that this is not a personal failing but a feature of how all human cognition works — just more visible in some people than others — is both intellectually clarifying and, occasionally, a considerable relief.

Questions for Discussion

1. Sutherland argues that our discomfort with the placebo effect reveals our wider discomfort with psychological solutions. Do you recognise this in yourself or in organisations you have been part of? What makes the indirect solution feel less legitimate than the direct one?

2. “We often cannot alter subconscious processes through a direct logical act of will — we have to tinker with those things we can control to influence those things we can’t.” Where have you found this to be true in your own life? What indirect interventions have worked for you in ways that direct effort didn’t?

3. If the conscious mind is the press office rather than the Oval Office, what are the implications for how we run meetings, make decisions, give feedback, or try to change behaviour in organisations?

4. “Never denigrate a behaviour as irrational until you have considered what purpose it really serves.” Can you think of a behaviour — in yourself, in others, or in an organisation — that looked irrational until you understood what it was actually doing?

A Thought To Carry Into Chapter 5

Chapter 4 has taken the logic of costly signalling and turned it inward, revealing that the same principles governing trust between people also govern the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self. We are not, it turns out, transparent to ourselves — and the most effective interventions on our own psychology work the same way the most effective interventions on other people do: obliquely, expensively, and with a touch of apparent absurdity.

Chapter 5 takes this further into the territory of risk and loss aversion — asking why apparently irrational caution is frequently the most rational long-term strategy available, and what we lose when we optimise it away

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There is a specific kind of tired that neurodivergent professionals know well.

It arrives at the end of a day in which the work itself was fine — the thinking, the problem-solving, the actual substance of what you were hired to do. What’s exhausting is everything around it. The calibration. The monitoring. The continuous background process of asking: Am I coming across correctly? Am I too much? Not enough? Is this the right version of me for this room?

It is, in short, the exhaustion of performing a self you were never quite sure was yours.

And yet, somewhere along the way, someone almost certainly told you to “just be yourself”.

They meant well. They may even have been right about something. But those three words likely landed with a particular kind of weight. Which self? The one who spent years performing neurotypicality so convincingly that even you lost track of where the performance ended?

Just be yourself.

Sure. Working on it.

The consistency problem

The myth goes like this: if you act differently at work than you do at home, if your presentation self doesn’t match your meeting self, if you mask in some contexts and unmask in others — then one of those versions must be fake. You must be performing somewhere. The “real you” is being concealed.

But research by psychologists Kathleen Jongman-Sereno and Mark Leary found something more interesting: people who rigidly maintained the same persona across all contexts often felt less authentic than those who adapted flexibly — as long as those adaptations were intentional and values-aligned.

In other words, being playful with friends, precise and formal in presentations, and open in a therapeutic context aren’t competing selves. They’re different expressions of the same whole person, each appropriate to its moment.

For neurodivergent professionals, this matters enormously. The exhausting performance of masking — sustaining a neurotypical presentation across contexts that demand it — gets conflated with inauthenticity in ways that are both unfair and inaccurate. But the opposite demand — be consistently, visibly, unguardedly yourself in every professional context regardless of consequence — isn’t authenticity either. It’s a different kind of performance, and often an unsafe one.

Choosing to mask to protect your energy, your psychological safety, or your livelihood in a workplace that wasn’t designed for you isn’t “fake”. It is a conscious, tactical choice. It is using a shield, not telling a lie.

Confucius understood this. In the Analects, he describes behaving differently toward his ruler, his peers, and his students — not as inconsistency, but as appropriate moral attunement to context. The self, in Confucian thought, is fundamentally relational. You are not the same person in relation to your parents as you are to your colleagues, and that isn’t hypocrisy. It’s situational wisdom. The question isn’t whether you adapt — it’s whether those adaptations remain anchored in something that holds.

There is no hidden “real you” — and philosophy got there first

The deeper myth is this: that authenticity is an archaeological project. That if you dig far enough, you’ll find the real self underneath the adaptations, the masks, the context-switching, and the years of trying to make yourself legible to rooms that weren’t built for you.

Western psychology has been quietly dismantling this idea for decades. But philosophy got there considerably earlier.

The Buddhist concept of anattā — non-self — holds that what we call the “self” is not a fixed essence but a dynamic, ever-changing process. Not a noun. A verb. The self is not something you have; it is something that arises, moment to moment, in response to conditions.

The search for the “real you” underneath the adaptations assumes there is a stable substrate to find. Buddhist philosophy suggests, with considerable rigour, that there isn’t — and that the suffering caused by clinging to that illusion is entirely predictable.

Jean-Paul Sartre arrived at something similar from a different direction. “Existence precedes essence” is his shorthand for the idea that human beings have no fixed, pre-given nature. We are not born with a true self that we then spend our lives either expressing or betraying. We become through our choices, our actions, our ongoing negotiation with the world.

Sartre famously illustrated the opposite of this — mauvaise foi (bad faith) — through the image of a café waiter. The waiter’s movements are a little too precise, a little too eager, a little too mechanised. He is performing the “essence” of a waiter because society expects it, treating himself as an object rather than a free human being.

For a neurodivergent professional, the parallel is striking. Over-indexing on eye contact, forcing yourself through exhausting neurotypical small talk, or mimicking standard office syntax is the modern workplace equivalent of Sartre’s waiter. It is a performance of an expected essence.

What Sartre called bad faith is precisely the act of pretending you have no choice but to be a fixed thing, or conversely, demanding that someone else display a singular, fixed “essence” to be considered real. The demand to express a singular true self — consistently, visibly, regardless of context or consequence — is not a call to authenticity. It is a particularly insidious form of bad faith: one that locates the fixed essence outside the person and then holds them accountable for not matching it.

Heraclitus, characteristically, said it in fewer words: you cannot step into the same river twice. The river is not less real for being in motion. Neither are you. You are a different river at the 9 AM project update than you are at the 5 PM wind-down.

What authenticity actually is

If it isn’t consistency, and it isn’t spontaneity, and it isn’t expressing a fixed true self — what is it?

Authenticity is alignment. Consciously bringing your behaviour into relationship with your values, in each moment, with each audience, in each context. Not performing a fragment of yourself while suppressing the rest. Not masking indefinitely. But also not abandoning all strategic self-presentation in the name of radical transparency.

For neurodivergent professionals navigating workplaces that were never designed for them, that definition has real teeth. It means you are allowed to adapt your communication style without betraying yourself. You are allowed to choose which parts of yourself to bring forward in which contexts. You are allowed to prepare, to script, to structure — and still be entirely, genuinely you.

What holds it all together isn’t consistency of expression but consistency of values. The river changes. The direction of flow doesn’t have to.

The goal isn’t to find the real self and silence everything else.

The goal is to stop performing a version of yourself so far from your actual values that the whole thing becomes unsustainable. Most neurodivergent professionals who have spent years masking already know what unsustainable feels like.

Authenticity — properly understood — is the alternative. Not the performance of effortless self-expression. Just the quiet, ongoing work of staying close to what you actually think, value, and mean.

That’s enough. In fact, it’s everything.

Reference:

Jongman-Sereno, K. P., & Leary, M. R. (2019). The enigma of being yourself: A critical examination of the concept of authenticity. Review of General Psychology, 23(1), 133–142. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000157

Hey there,

If you’re new here, welcome to “Off-Script At Work”. This space exists for quiet, high-processing minds—the introverts, the neuro-complex, and the late-identified professionals who are brilliant at the “work”, but find the “corporate performance” exhausting.

I’m Sven. I’ve spent nearly two decades teaching communication science, but the insights I share here don’t come from a textbook. They come from my own late-diagnosed brain and the messy, hyper-focused process of deconstructing why the corporate “script” feels so alien to people like us.

I’m here to give you communication tools and nervous-system-aware strategies that respect your cognitive reality. We focus on:

• Decoding the unwritten rules of corporate communication and culture.

• Presenting without panic by honouring your high-processing depth.

• Managing your introverted, neuro-complex, or high-processing identity so
you can navigate the office maze without losing your core essence.

My hope is that this space gives you the clarity to stop following a script that wasn’t written for you—and the tools to thrive on your own terms. You are not “difficult”; you are simply high-processing in a low-resolution world.

Rooting for you,
Sven

Share

Subscribe now

Here is a word doing an enormous amount of unpaid overtime.

Authentic. Put it in front of almost anything, and you’ve got something: Authentic leadership. Authentic self-expression. Authentic cuisine, authentic experiences, authentic connection. An authentic life — as distinct, presumably, from the inauthentic one you have been living until the retreat, the rebrand, or the very good therapist who finally ‘got you’.

We reach for this word constantly, and we rarely stop to ask what it is actually doing. It sounds like a description — like pointing to a quality in the world, the way you might call something heavy or blue. And that quality appears to be an all-around positive, in the same way that “bureaucratic” is always thought of as negative. But if you slow down and watch the word at work, a different picture emerges. It is almost never purely descriptive. It is almost always a verdict.

When someone calls a restaurant ‘authentic’, they are not just reporting. They are ranking. When a manager tells a new employee to ‘be themselves’, they are not issuing a neutral invitation — they are encoding an expectation of what ‘themselves’ should look like. When a performance review says someone ‘lacks executive presence’, what it frequently means — thinly translated — is: your authentic self is not legible as serious in this room.

Andrew Potter’s The Authenticity Hoax (2010) is an extended, occasionally infuriating, largely engaging, and — ultimately — well-considered argument about why this matters. It is the book I want to engage with to kick-off the series — not to agree with it wholesale, but to credit it with something important: it names some of the key problems with the idea of “authenticity” – and that’s an important starting point before we can do anything useful about it. Thus, this essay does not solve anything. It establishes why the solving is necessary.

Part I. What the Word Actually Does

The most useful thing you can do with ‘authenticity’ is watch it closely in a few different sentences and notice how comprehensively it refuses to be pinned down.

A leadership consultant tells a room of senior managers to ‘lead more authentically’. What they mean, unpacked: be more vulnerable, share more of your inner world, let the team see you struggle occasionally. Authenticity here is emotional transparency.

A brand strategist tells a company to ‘communicate more authentically’. What they mean: be consistent across platforms, do not say one thing publicly and another in private, let your values show in your tone. Authenticity here is consistency.

A wellbeing coach tells a client to ‘stop performing and just be authentic’. What they mean: stop trying to impress people, drop the professional persona, let your guard down, be unscripted and less self-conscious. Authenticity here is spontaneity.

A manager gives a neurodivergent employee feedback that they need to ‘come across as more natural’ in client meetings. What they mean: your processing style is visible, your eye contact is unusual, your communication pattern does not match the expected template. Authenticity here is neurotypical legibility.

Same word. Four completely different instructions. The last one is doing something the first three are not: it is not inviting someone to be more fully themselves. It is telling them that their actual self — the one they show up with — does not count as the right kind of authentic. It is using the language of liberation to enforce a norm.

This is Potter’s core argument, and it is a sharp one: the quest for ‘the authentic’ is not the innocent search for the real that it presents itself as. Rather, we can think of it as a form of status competition with better branding. Authenticity — as a concept in public life — has a suspicious tendency to locate itself wherever the speaker happens to be standing. The artisan bread is authentic; the supermarket loaf is not. The converted warehouse is authentic; the suburb is not. The spontaneous, socially fluent, linearly communicative professional is authentic; the one who scripts and prepares and communicates differently is performing.

What gives the word this peculiar flexibility? Partly its history. Literary critic Lionel Trilling traced the arc in 1972 and showed that ‘authenticity’ as a cultural ideal has a birthdate — it emerged out of Romantic philosophy, particularly Rousseau’s argument that natural man is innocent and civilisation is what corrupts him (Trilling, 1972). A word with that origin story will always be primed to frame the natural, the unmediated, the spontaneous as good, and the scripted, the prepared, the structured as suspect. That is not a law of nature. It is a historically specific prejudice — and in a professional context, it tends to penalise exactly the people who need structure most.

Part II. Where Potter Stops Short

Now the fair but critical part. Potter is a journalist and cultural critic writing about authenticity as a social phenomenon — about loft apartments and ecotourism and political branding. He is very good at this. But he is considerably less interested in what any given person is supposed to do with the insight once they have it. The Authenticity Hoax tells you that the quest is a hoax — a loft, seemingly positive concept that tends to disguise sophisticated forms of status competition. It is largely silent on what replaces it at the level of the individual, on a Tuesday, in a meeting.

More significantly for the purposes of this series: Potter’s target is a particular kind of authenticity seeker — one who has the cultural and material resources to pursue artisan cheese and slow travel and loft conversions, and whose status anxiety drives the quest. His hoax is primarily a middle-class affliction, and his critique lands most squarely on the people with enough security to make ‘being real’ an aesthetic project.

He has considerably less to say about the people for whom the authenticity demand was never an aspiration but an imposition. The introverted or neurodivergent professional who has been told to ‘be more natural’ in meetings was not chasing a lifestyle brand. They were trying to survive a professional environment that coded one specific style of processing, presenting, and socialising as the default — and called everything else a deficit.

For that person, the authenticity hoax lands differently. It is not merely a status game they can choose to opt out of. It is baked into the performance review, the promotion criterion, the offhand remark that someone ‘isn’t quite the right fit for a client-facing role’. The implicit standard of ‘authentic’ professional selfhood in most workplaces is, on close inspection, a neurotypical one — spontaneous, socially fluent, linearly communicative, comfortable with small talk, energised by open-plan offices. The demand to ‘just be yourself’ assumes a self that was already legible to the room, which is precisely the assumption that fails.

This is not a criticism Potter could be expected to have made in 2010 — the conversation around neurodivergence in professional contexts has developed considerably since. But it is the gap that makes his argument necessary but insufficient for the purposes of this series. He clears the sociological ground. He names the hoax at the level of culture. What he cannot do is tell a late-identified professional how to think about the decades they spent performing a self that felt wrong — or what to build instead.

Part III. What the Hoax Reveals When You Bring It into the Workplace

Let us be more specific about what Potter’s critique, applied to professional life, actually reveals.

First, it reveals that the demand for ‘authentic’ self-expression at work is never content-neutral. Every workplace has an implicit template of what the right kind of authentic looks like — confident but not arrogant, expressive but not overwhelming, direct but not blunt, collaborative but not needy. The template is usually presented as a description of good communication. It is, in practice, a prescription. And the people who most easily match it are not the ‘most authentic’ — they are the most neurotypically legible.

Second, it reveals why the guilt is so precisely placed. When a neurodivergent professional masks — sustains a neurotypical presentation across contexts that demand it — they typically feel guilty about it. The cultural logic of authenticity tells them they are being fake, performing, betraying their real self. But as Potter would note: the standard of ‘real’ they are supposedly failing was never neutral to begin with. It was someone else’s template, installed as the default, with the demand to be ‘authentic’ doing the enforcing.

Third, and most usefully for what follows: Potter’s critique creates permission. If ‘authenticity’ is not a fixed essence to be uncovered but a culturally constructed standard to be interrogated, then the demand to express it consistently and spontaneously is not a moral imperative. It is an invitation to conform to a particular template. And you are allowed to notice that — and to do something different instead.

That ‘something different’ is what the rest of this series is about.

Part IV. From Hoax to Framework

If authenticity as a fixed essence is a hoax — and Potter gives us excellent reasons to think it is — then the question is not ‘how do I find my real self?’ It is: what actually holds things together, if not a fixed essence?

The answer this series builds toward is not authenticity but alignment: the ongoing, active, deliberate work of bringing your behaviour into relationship with your values, in each context, with each audience. Not performing a fragment of yourself while suppressing the rest. Not abandoning all strategic self-presentation in the name of a transparency that costs too much. But also not masking indefinitely, burning through your operating system trying to mimic a template that was never designed for your hardware.

Potter is the warrant for that move. Because once you accept that ‘authenticity’ is a word doing moral and social work — sorting people into the legible and the illegible, the fitting and the unfit, the real and the performed — you can stop taking the demand at face value. You can ask instead: what are my values? What would it look like to act on them, in this room, with these constraints? What is the minimum legibility I need to build in order to get my actual work understood?

These are better questions. They do not require you to find the buried true self or perform the expected one. They require something harder and more interesting: to know what you actually think, value, and mean — and to build the structures that let it travel.

The three essays that follow take this on directly. The first dismantles the philosophical myth of the fixed true self. The second introduces Tactical Legibility — the alternative to both exhausting masking and unsafe transparency. The third reframes the guilt that arrives when you use it.

Potter does not appear again after this essay. His job was to name the hoax at the cultural level, to establish that the word ‘authentic’ has been doing far too much work for far too long, and to clear the ground for a more honest conversation.

He has done it. Now we can get to work. I hope you’ll join the journey.

References

Potter, A. (2010). The authenticity hoax: How we get lost finding ourselves. HarperCollins.

Trilling, L. (1972). Sincerity and authenticity. Harvard University Press.

Hey there,

If you’re new here, welcome to “Off-Script At Work”. This space exists for quiet, high-processing minds—the introverts, the neuro-complex, and the late-identified professionals who are brilliant at the “work”, but find the “corporate performance” exhausting.

I’m Sven. I’ve spent nearly two decades teaching communication science, but the insights I share here don’t come from a textbook. They come from my own late-diagnosed brain and the messy, hyper-focused process of deconstructing why the corporate “script” feels so alien to people like us.

I’m here to give you communication tools and nervous-system-aware strategies that respect your cognitive reality. We focus on:

• Decoding the unwritten rules of corporate communication and culture.

• Presenting without panic by honouring your high-processing depth.

• Managing your introverted, neuro-complex, or high-processing identity so
you can navigate the office maze without losing your core essence.

My hope is that this space gives you the clarity to stop following a script that wasn’t written for you—and the tools to thrive on your own terms. You are not “difficult”; you are simply high-processing in a low-resolution world.

Rooting for you,
Sven

Share

Subscribe now

Welcome to the sixth session of the Off-Script Reading book club.

This week we’ll focus on Chapter 3, Part I (3.6 – 3.12)

Before we get started, a quick note for new subscribers to Off-Script At Work:
New subscribers receive both Off-Script At Work and Off-Script Reading by default.

So, if you’d want to join, just make sure you grab a copy of Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy and you’re good to go. If you don’t want to join the book club, you can easily opt-out. Here’s how:

1. Go to substack.com/settings — or click your account avatar (top right) and select “Settings”

2. Under “Subscriptions”, click on Off-Script at Work

3. Find the Off-Script Reading section and slide the toggle to OFF

That’s it. Alternatively, you can manage it directly here: svenbrodmerkel.substack.com/account

Key Ideas From Chapter 3, Part II

1. Creativity is costly signalling — and its cost is the source of its value

The chapter opens this section with a move that reframes creativity entirely. Creative work — genuinely original, risky, difficult-to-produce work — functions as a costly signal in exactly the same way that the London cabbie’s Knowledge does. It demonstrates investment, commitment, and capability in ways that safe, conventional work cannot. You cannot fake a genuinely surprising idea. You cannot efficiently produce something that required real risk.

The Nike-Kaepernick campaign is Sutherland’s central example here, and it is a good one. Nike’s decision to feature Colin Kaepernick — knowing the backlash it would provoke, the boycotts it would generate, the revenue it might cost — was, by rational short-term calculus, a bad business decision. It was also, by the logic of costly signalling, an extraordinarily powerful one. The willingness to absorb a real cost in order to stand for something is precisely what makes the signal credible. A brand that only takes positions when it is safe to do so is, in Sutherland’s terms, producing cheap talk. Nike paid for the signal. That is why it resonated.

2. Trust, affection, loyalty, and status cannot be generated by rational self-interest alone

One of the book’s most important claims arrives here with unusual directness. It is only by deviating from narrow, short-term self-interest that we can generate anything beyond cheap talk. Trust, affection, respect, reputation, status, loyalty, generosity — none of these can be produced by simply following the dictates of rational economic theory, because rational economic theory produces behaviour that everyone can see is contingent on the calculation remaining favourable. The moment the calculation changes, the behaviour changes. And everyone knows this.

This is why the coffee shop that puts chairs on the pavement in uncertain weather signals something that the coffee shop with identical coffee but a purely interior layout does not. The chairs are a small, unnecessary gesture — they cost something, they serve no strictly rational purpose, and they communicate precisely because of this. The same logic applies to politeness and good manners, which Sutherland describes as costly signalling in face-to-face form: small investments of attention, consideration, and effort that signal orientation toward the other person rather than purely toward one’s own convenience.

3. Nature has both an accounting function and a marketing function — and we are comfortable with only one of them

The chapter’s arguably most elegant provocation is a question Sutherland poses almost in passing: why are people happy with the idea that nature has an accounting function, but much less comfortable with the idea that it also has a marketing function?

The biological examples make the point with some force. Bees and flowers are engaged in a signalling relationship of mutual benefit — the flower’s colour, shape, and scent are not decorative but communicative, evolved to attract the right pollinators. Orchids, however, have taken this logic further and darker: many orchid species offer no nectar at all, surviving entirely on the deceptive mimicry of flowers that do. They are, in Sutherland’s memorable phrase, the tourist restaurants of the floral world. The distinction between honest and deceptive signalling in nature maps directly onto the distinction between brands that have earned their meaning and those that are performing it — and the evolutionary record suggests that deceptive signalling is ultimately unstable. It works until it doesn’t, and then it fails catastrophically.

4. Fisherian runaway selection and the logic of necessary waste

The peacock’s tail is the chapter’s central image for what biologists call Fisherian runaway selection: the process by which a preference for a costly, apparently dysfunctional trait becomes self-reinforcing because the trait itself becomes a reliable signal of genetic quality. The tail is a handicap. That is the point. Only a genuinely healthy, well-resourced peacock can afford to carry it. The extravagance is the evidence.

Sutherland’s application of this logic to commerce and culture is bracingly direct. Costly jewellery worn in dangerous neighbourhoods, lavish displays of hospitality, extravagant wedding ceremonies, advertising budgets that exceed what any rational return-on-investment calculation would justify — all of these are, in his framework, instances of necessary waste. They establish valuable social qualities that efficient behaviour cannot produce: trustworthiness, commitment, generosity, seriousness of intent. The waste is not incidental to the value. The waste is doing the work.

5. Status competition is psychologically inevitable — and egalitarian systems that ignore this tend to fail

Sutherland makes a claim here that is worth sitting with rather than rushing past. The widespread conviction that human beings could be content to live without competing for status in a genuinely egalitarian society is, he argues, nice in theory but psychologically implausible. Status-seeking is not a cultural artefact that can be educated or legislated away. It is deeply wired, and it will find expression through whatever channels are available — which means that systems designed to eliminate status competition tend not to eliminate it but to redirect it into less visible and often less socially useful forms.

This is not an argument against equality. It is an argument for designing systems that take the psychology of status seriously rather than pretending it doesn’t exist. The typewriter example sits alongside the peacock’s tail here as an illustration of how functional constraints can accidentally shape aesthetic conventions — and how those conventions, once established, become signals in their own right, carrying meaning that has nothing to do with their original purpose.

6. Brands are not superficial — they may be necessary for markets to function at all

The chapter closes on a question that is more radical than it initially appears: are brands necessary to make capitalism work? The unbranded hoverboard example is Sutherland’s illustration of what happens when a product category lacks reliable signalling infrastructure. Without brand accountability, quality collapses, trust evaporates, and the market either fails or becomes dominated by whoever is best at short-term deception. The brand is not a layer of meaning applied on top of a functional product. It is part of the product’s value — the part that makes the transaction trustworthy enough to happen at all.

This explains an observation Sutherland has made over many years: economists tend to hate advertising and barely understand it, while biologists understand it immediately. The economist sees waste. The biologist sees signalling. The difference is not that biologists are more sophisticated about commerce — it is that they have a framework for understanding why costly, apparently inefficient behaviour can be the most rational long-term strategy available.

A Neurodivergent Reading

The argument that politeness and good manners are costly signalling in face-to-face form is worth pausing on here, because it cuts in more than one direction.

For many neurodivergent people, the social performance that neurotypical environments read as politeness, warmth, and trustworthiness is not experienced as a small, natural cost. It is experienced as a significant and sometimes exhausting one — a continuous investment in producing signals that the environment requires but that don’t map naturally onto one’s actual state. The person who maintains eye contact, modulates their vocal tone, remembers to laugh at the right moments, and manages the flow of small talk is, by Sutherland’s framework, producing costly signals of social commitment. But if those signals require masking rather than expressing genuine orientation toward the other person, the cost is being paid for a different reason than the framework assumes.

There is also something worth noting about the status competition argument. Sutherland’s point that status-seeking is psychologically inevitable and will find expression through whatever channels are available has a specific resonance for people who have been excluded from the primary status channels — educational credentials that didn’t suit their learning style, professional hierarchies that rewarded a particular kind of social fluency, workplaces where the signals of competence were calibrated to a narrow range of presentation styles. When the main channels are closed, status-seeking does not disappear. It goes somewhere else. Sometimes that somewhere else is creative, generative, and genuinely valuable. Sometimes it isn’t. But the energy itself is not the problem.

Questions for Discussion

1. Nike’s Kaepernick campaign worked as a costly signal because the cost was real and visible. Can you think of other examples — from brands, organisations, or individuals — where the willingness to absorb a genuine cost made a communication more credible? What distinguishes these from performative risk-taking?

2. Sutherland argues that trust, loyalty, and affection cannot be produced by rational self-interest alone — that only deviation from narrow self-interest generates anything beyond cheap talk. Do you find this convincing in your own experience of relationships, professional or personal?

3. “Costly signalling can lead to economic inefficiency, but this inefficiency establishes valuable social qualities such as trustworthiness and commitment.” Where do you see organisations or systems trying to eliminate this kind of inefficiency — and what do they lose when they succeed?

4. If status competition is psychologically inevitable and will find expression through whatever channels are available, what does that imply for how we design organisations, education systems, or communities that want to be genuinely equitable?

A Thought To Carry Into Chapter 4

Chapter 3 has done something quietly subversive. It has taken behaviours that rational models classify as waste — extravagance, irrationality, unnecessary cost, apparent inefficiency — and shown that they are, in evolutionary and psychological terms, doing some of the most important work in human social life. The waste is the signal. The signal is the meaning. The meaning is the value.

Chapter 4 takes this logic into the territory of risk, loss aversion, and the surprising ways in which apparently irrational caution turns out to be exactly the right response to a world that is more uncertain than our models acknowledge.

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Welcome to the fifth session of the Off-Script Reading book club.

This week we’ll focus on Chapter 3, Part I (3.1 – 3.6)

Before we get started, a quick note for new subscribers to Off-Script At Work:

New subscribers receive both Off-Script At Work and Off-Script Reading by default.

So, if you’d want to join, just make sure you grab a copy of Alchemy and you’re good to go. If you don’t want to join the book club, you can easily opt-out. Here’s how:

1. Go to substack.com/settings — or click your account avatar (top right) and select “Settings”

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3. Find the Off-Script Reading section and slide the toggle to OFF

That’s it. Alternatively, you can manage it directly here: svenbrodmerkel.substack.com/account

Key Ideas From Chapter 3, Part I

1. Cooperation requires a mechanism to prevent cheating — and efficiency is often the price

Sutherland opens with a principle that sounds almost paradoxical: cooperation is impossible without some way of reliably distinguishing genuine commitment from performed commitment. And the most reliable signals of genuine commitment tend to be ones that are costly, difficult to fake, and apparently irrational. Some degree of efficiency must be sacrificed in order to convey trustworthiness — because a signal that costs nothing to send carries no information about the sender’s intentions.

This is the chapter’s foundational insight, and it reframes a great deal of behaviour that rational models dismiss as waste. The lavish wedding, the expensive advertising campaign, the training programme that costs far more than the skills it delivers, the brand investment that cannot be directly tied to sales — none of these make sense if you assume that communication is purely about transmitting information efficiently. They make perfect sense if you understand that communication is also, and sometimes primarily, about demonstrating commitment in ways that cannot easily be faked.

2. Reciprocation, reputation, and pre-commitment are the three mechanisms that underpin trust

Sutherland distils the architecture of trust into three components, each doing different work. Reciprocation is the logic of mutual exchange — I do something for you, you do something for me, and over time a relationship of reliable cooperation develops. Reputation is the logic of repeated interaction — behaving well because the future value of your good name exceeds the short-term gain from defection. Pre-commitment signalling is the most interesting of the three: taking an action in the present that makes a future betrayal costly or impossible, and doing so visibly enough that others can rely on it.

The London cab driver example brings this to life with characteristic Sutherland precision. The Knowledge — the famously demanding requirement that black cab drivers memorise thousands of routes across London — functions as a signalling device as much as a practical one. The years of effort involved serve as a credible pre-commitment: a driver who has invested that much in their licence has too much to lose from a single bad interaction to risk their reputation for a marginal gain. The Knowledge, in other words, doesn’t just produce better navigation. It produces a particular kind of trustworthiness — and the cost of acquiring it is precisely what makes the signal legible.

3. Long-term self-interest often produces behaviour indistinguishable from genuine altruism

Drawing on evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, Sutherland makes a point that is easy to misread but important to get right. Behaviours that look cooperative, generous, or even selfless are frequently explained not by moral virtue but by the logic of repeated interaction over time. A business model that depends on repeat customers has a structural incentive to behave well. A pub that serves the same local community week after week cannot afford to exploit its customers the way a tourist restaurant near a major landmark can.

This is not a cynical observation but a clarifying one. It explains why the distinction between tourist economy and local economy matters so much for service quality — and why the erosion of long-term relationships in favour of short-term transactions tends to degrade the behaviour of everyone involved. It also explains one of the chapter’s more surprising findings: customers often become more loyal to a brand after it has successfully resolved a problem than they would have been if the problem had never occurred. The resolution is itself a signal of commitment — evidence that the relationship matters enough to the brand to invest in repairing it.

4. Costly signalling: bits deliver information, but costliness carries meaning

This is perhaps the chapter’s most compact and powerful idea. Information, in the technical sense, can be transmitted cheaply and efficiently. Meaning cannot. Meaning requires costliness — some investment of effort, resource, or vulnerability that makes the signal difficult to fake and therefore worth trusting.

Sutherland uses water as an unexpected illustration. Water is tasteless because it is the universal solvent — the background against which all other tastes are registered. A perfectly efficient, perfectly rational communication would be like water: clear, pure, and entirely without flavour. Effective communication requires some degree of irrationality in its construction, because if it is perfectly rational it becomes invisible. Good advertising is only good because it is difficult to produce — and the difficulty is not incidental to the value but constitutive of it. The effort signals the seriousness of the intention.

This applies well beyond advertising. Any communication that has clearly cost something — in time, attention, craft, or vulnerability — carries more meaning than one that hasn’t. The handwritten note over the printed card. The speech that was clearly written for this occasion rather than recycled from another. The apology that involves genuine acknowledgement rather than formulaic regret. In each case, the costliness is doing communicative work that the content alone cannot.

5. Social species need ostensibly nonsensical behaviour to convey meaning reliably

Sutherland makes explicit what the chapter has been building toward: as a social species, human beings require behaviours that look irrational from the outside in order to communicate reliably with each other. This is not a bug in human psychology. It is a feature — and a sophisticated one. The rituals, the gestures, the investments that seem disproportionate to their practical function are precisely the behaviours that carry the information most worth having: information about commitment, intention, and the kind of person or organisation you are dealing with.

The game theory framing — the Ultimatum Game, the Prisoner’s Dilemma — sits in the background of this section as a formal scaffolding for an intuition most people already have. We know, without being able to articulate it, that a deal that seems too good to be true probably is. We know that someone who has never paid a cost for a relationship probably won’t pay one when it matters. We know that trust is built through accumulated small signals rather than declared in a single transaction. Sutherland’s contribution is to show that this knowledge is not sentimental or irrational — it is, in evolutionary terms, extremely well-calibrated.

A Neurodivergent Reading

The chapter’s argument about costly signalling has a particular edge if you have spent time in environments where the signals being demanded are ones you find difficult to produce — not because you lack commitment but because the signal system itself is calibrated to a particular social and communicative style.

Many of the signals Sutherland describes as markers of trustworthiness and seriousness — confident eye contact, fluent small talk, the right kind of professional presentation, the social ease that reads as reliability — are not universal human behaviours. They are culturally and neurologically specific ones. For someone whose natural communication style diverges from these norms, the signal system doesn’t just fail to register genuine commitment. It actively misreads it. The person who is deeply invested but communicates that investment differently gets coded as untrustworthy or unserious, while the person who has mastered the performance of commitment may have very little of the substance behind it.

Sutherland’s insight that bits deliver information but costliness carries meaning is, in this context, worth turning around: if the costly signals being demanded are ones that require masking, performing, or suppressing your actual cognitive style, the cost is real — but it is being paid in the wrong currency, for the wrong reasons, and by the wrong people.

Questions for Discussion

1. Sutherland argues that costly signals are valuable precisely because they are difficult to fake. Can you think of a signal — in your professional or personal life — that you have produced or received that worked this way? What made it credible?

2. The tourist restaurant and the local pub operate under different incentive structures, and their behaviour reflects this. Where else do you see the logic of long-term versus short-term relationships shaping the quality of what organisations or people are willing to do?

3. “Effective communication will always require some degree of irrationality in its creation.” Do you agree — and if so, what are the implications for how we design communications, presentations, or conversations that actually need to land?

4. If the signal system for trustworthiness and commitment is culturally and neurologically specific, who gets systematically misread by it — and what would a more accurate signal system look like?

   ---

A Thought To Carry Into Part II

The first half of Chapter 3 has established that irrationality in signalling is not a failure of communication but a precondition for it. The second half pushes into territory that is stranger still — asking what happens when we apply this logic to some of the most apparently absurd human behaviours, and find that they are, underneath, making complete sense.

The dark irony of corporate self-development. (Deano)

Priya doesn’t usually say much in these kinds of team meetings.

But she’s been looking at the rollout plan for two days straight, fixating on it like she tends to do when she spots something illogical. And now, notebook placed tidily in front of her, open to a page of perfectly written bullets points and underlined numbers, she speaks up. “If we go live with it as planned, the integration will fail anyone with the old account format. That’s twenty-three percent of users. Loyal users.”

She knows she doesn’t convey much emotion when she speaks, so she attempts a smile at the end of her sentence, to show she’s being cordial.

Her colleagues look around at each other. They’re accustomed to Priya’s irritating problem-spotting. Her manager in the slick suit exhales loudly. “Well, that’s interesting, Priya. But I’m sure… the team would have appreciated knowing this well before today. So unless you have a solution to propose, I’d like to park this. The rollout is happening. And how about we all get back to doing our jobs? Hm? How does that sound?”

“But that’s twenty-three percent of loyal custom – “

“All right everyone, good job today. Let’s rock this!” her manager says while locking eyes with her.

Everyone shuffles out of the meeting, while Priya slowly gathers her notebook and pushes her chair back in its place against the table.

23% of loyal users. She has to do something about this.

By the afternoon, Priya finds herself sitting in her manager’s office.

An HR lady, Margaret, sits to her right. Margaret had spoken to her before about attitude, fitting in, and relaxing, although Priya couldn’t understand that last one.

Margaret starts “We just wanted to have a bit of an open conversation, Priya. Nothing formal.”

Priya smiles, but the smile feels off, so she stops it.

Margaret continues “Richard’s told me that you’re having a hard time – “

Richard interrupts, “Look, Priya, nobody’s saying you’re not switched on. We like that. But there’s a problematic pattern here…” He glances at HR lady, who nods, as if this has been rehearsed. “You keep… you can’t just keep spotting problems and not take ownership of trying to solve them. Being in a team is about taking initiative and getting things done. So, just go for it! I’d like less ‘here’s what’s wrong’ and more accountability…”

“I did actually have a –“ Priya starts.

Margaret says “You know that our company heavily promotes a growth mindset in all our employees. It’s actually written in our employee handb – “

Her manager steamrolls on “That’s the kind of attitude that fits in here. A mindset to… succeed.”

Margaret leans toward Priya slightly. “It’s also about psychological safety for the team, Priya. I’ve had some team members come to me and say they can’t get through to you. And when you’re with this… negative mindset, without a way forward attached, it can feel quite… heavy. For the team. For all of us.”

Priya nods. A skill she picked up along the years to get through tough situations.

Twenty-three percent of users. Loyal users. Nobody here has said anything about that number.

“So, Priya” her manager says, leaning forward “some good self-development for you. Ready to tackle these personal challenges?”

Priya nods and smiles. The nod backs up the smile and it feels like it’s working this time.

And she does understand. Initiative, ownership, solutions, just go for it. Well, she has an idea for a solution, just needs more data first.

For the next two days, Priya works nonstop. She’s zoned in to solving the system migration problem and helping those 23%. She contacts other departments, collects more data. Friday she sends out calendar invites for a Monday meeting, ‘Proposed fix for the account migration issue’. She even invites relevant people from the platform team. All accepted.

She spends the weekend creating a solid presentation. Facts, data, proposed step-by-step solution, implementation timeline. She even added an FAQ section. She spends the whole of Sunday practicing, recording herself on her phone. She rehearses her smile and her warmth, always conscious of how others tend to perceive her.

Monday morning, conference room, everyone piles in. Richard sits at the head of the table.

She delivers a good presentation. A couple of people even nod when she talks about her proposed solution, which only requires two extra days of work before the rollout. A minor inconvenience, since the project is already two months late.

Priya clicks the last bullet and asks the room “Any questions I can answer?”

Her manager exhales loudly as he stands up, and says “Thank you, Priya… for that. We’ve all taken note of it now.” He looks around the room and smiles, “Thank you everyone.”

Cue to leave, everyone shuffles out, people look at Priya with distant stares. Richard is the first out the door.

Priya disconnects, packs things up, tidies up the chairs, turns off the lights, and leaves too.

That was a tough thing to do, required all her courage, but yet again, she thought of those 23% of users. She feels she did some good. Went above and beyond and did what had to be done.

Richard’s waiting for her outside the conference room. “You went over my head with that little stunt.” He spoke quietly. “Booking meetings, talking to other departments, and not running it past me first?! That’s not how this works, Priya. This is definitely not being a team player!” he hissed.

She nods, to keep herself safe, and he leaves.

The day after her presentation, HR Margaret calls Priya into her motivationally ornamented office. Margaret hands her a folder and a form, and talks about a Performance Improvement Plan, and as Priya scans the form, it clicks, it’s a PIP. She reads through the listed concerns, among which are difficulty collaborating, going outside agreed channels, a pattern of negative framing not aligned with company values, and an attitude of disrespect and neglectful risk-taking.

She listens to Margaret talk some more. Then nods, and leaves.

Two months pass. The PIP worked its magic, and Priya gets nudged out of work.

Today, home-bound, she’s still nodding, but it’s mostly involuntary, not about keeping herself safe anymore.

The depression prescription she’s on has dissolved all need of blending in with people.

And she no longer has to worry about how her smile might land with others either.

Along with her smile, the drugs have swallowed up her initiative, resilience, and perseverance.

It’s ironic though. That Priya now medicated, flattened, numb, and totally devoid of will, would finally fit in perfectly with her prior corporate life.

What The Actual Data Says About The Growth Mindset.(Sven)

In 2014, just before Satya Nadella took over Microsoft, his wife handed him a book. The company was vast, profitable, and drifting. The book was Carol Dweck’s Mindset. Nadella read it, rebuilt the culture around its core idea — from “know-it-alls” to “learn-it-alls” — and Microsoft’s value climbed from roughly $300 billion to well over $2 trillion.

That story did a lot of work. Growth mindset escaped the lab, colonised classrooms and performance reviews, and ended up laminated by the lifts.

You know the lines: Embrace challenge. Value effort. The power of yet.

The underlying idea is simple and appealing: if you believe your abilities can grow, you’ll do better than if you believe they’re fixed. It’s neat, optimistic, and just scientific enough to feel settled. The problem is, it isn’t.

Let’s start with the strongest evidence in its favour. In 2019, researchers ran a large, pre-registered randomised trial across U.S. high schools — the kind of study this field had been missing. The result: a brief, low-cost mindset intervention produced small but real gains. Lower-achieving students improved modestly. Some took more challenging courses. For something that costs very little, that matters.

So no — growth mindset is not a myth. It does something.

It just doesn’t do nearly as much as advertised.

When you zoom out across the full body of evidence, the effects shrink. A 2023 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin put the average impact at around d = 0.05 — measurable, but tiny. The researchers concluded that “apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely attributable to inadequate study design, reporting flaws, and bias”. Rather damning. Other researchers dispute how that number was calculated and argue the effects depend heavily on context. That disagreement is real. But both sides converge on an uncomfortable point: this is not a large, universal lever on achievement.

The pattern shows up elsewhere. Across hundreds of thousands of students, the link between holding a growth mindset and actually performing well is positive but weak — and it fades with age. By adulthood, it’s often barely there.

That’s already a long way from the poster.

But the more interesting twist is where the effects do show up.

In that flagship 2019 study, the intervention worked best in schools where the surrounding culture already supported taking on challenges. Where that support was missing, the same intervention did much less.

Read that twice. The belief helps most when the environment lets it.

This doesn’t kill the theory. But it complicates it significantly. Mindset isn’t a magic switch you flip inside your head; it’s something that interacts with the conditions around you. Put differently: telling people to think like learners works better when they’re actually in a system that treats them like learners.

That is a smaller claim than the one that went viral.

Because in the wild, growth mindset rarely stays this modest. It turns into a quiet diagnosis. Struggling? Must be your mindset. Not improving fast enough? Try believing harder. At that point, the idea stops describing behaviour and starts assigning blame.

And this is where the gap between research and reality starts to bite.

People don’t operate in clean experimental conditions. They operate in jobs with clashing demands, noisy offices, unclear feedback, and roles that fit better on paper than in practice. When performance falters, belief is only one possible bottleneck — and often not the main one.

For neurodivergent professionals, this lands with particular force. Many of the real constraints are structural: working memory limits, sensory load, task-switching costs, or a mismatch between strengths and role design. Reframing those as a mindset problem doesn’t fix them. It just relocates the problem onto the person.

The growth mindset literature doesn’t focus on neurodivergence. But it does keep circling the same conclusion: context matters. Interventions are more effective in environments that reinforce them. Outcomes depend on more than belief. Yet that insight tends to disappear in translation.

Dweck herself has tried to rein it back, introducing the idea of “false growth mindset” to describe the watered-down version — the one that treats effort as inherently virtuous and insists anyone can achieve anything. Fair enough. But it’s also telling how easily the stronger claim takes over.

Because the stronger claim is useful. It’s simple. It scales. And, not incidentally, it places the burden of change on the individual. The weaker claim — the one the evidence actually supports — is harder to print on a poster:

Abilities can develop, sometimes, a bit, especially when the surrounding conditions make that development possible.

Less inspiring. More accurate.

And, in practice, more actionable. Because it shifts the question. Not just “do people believe they can grow?” but “have we built an environment where growth is actually possible?”

Growth mindset is real. It’s just not the lever we were promised.

It helps. A little. For some people. In the right conditions.

Sadly, that wasn’t the case for Priya.

Sources:

Burgoyne, A. P., Hambrick, D. Z., & Macnamara, B. N. (2020). How firm are the foundations of mind-set theory? The claims appear stronger than the evidence. Psychological Science, 31(3), 258–267. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619897588

Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.

Dweck, C. S. (2015, September 22). Carol Dweck revisits the ‘growth mindset.’ Education Week, 35(5), 20–24.

Macnamara, B. N., & Burgoyne, A. P. (2023). Do growth mindset interventions impact students’ academic achievement? A systematic review and meta-analysis with recommendations for best practices. Psychological Bulletin, 149(3–4), 133–173. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000352

Sisk, V. F., Burgoyne, A. P., Sun, J., Butler, J. L., & Macnamara, B. N. (2018). To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses. Psychological Science, 29(4), 549–571. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617739704

Tipton, E., Bryan, C., Murray, J., McDaniel, M. A., Schneider, B., & Yeager, D. S. (2023). Why meta-analyses of growth mindset and other interventions should follow best practices for examining heterogeneity: Commentary on Macnamara and Burgoyne (2023) and Burnette et al. (2023). Psychological Bulletin, 149(3–4), 229–241. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000384

Yeager, D. S., Hanselman, P., Walton, G. M., Murray, J. S., Crosnoe, R., Muller, C., … Dweck, C. S. (2019). A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement. Nature, 573(7774), 364–369. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1466-y

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Hey there,

If you’re new here, welcome to “Off-Script At Work”. This space exists for quiet, high-processing minds—the introverts, the neuro-complex, and the late-identified professionals who are brilliant at the “work”, but find the “corporate performance” exhausting.

I’m Sven. I’ve spent nearly two decades teaching communication science, but the insights I share here don’t come from a textbook. They come from my own late-diagnosed brain and the messy, hyper-focused process of deconstructing why the corporate “script” feels so alien to people like us.

I’m here to give you communication tools and nervous-system-aware strategies that respect your cognitive reality. We focus on:

• Decoding the unwritten rules of corporate communication and culture.

• Presenting without panic by honouring your high-processing depth.

• Managing your introverted, neuro-complex, or high-processing identity so
you can navigate the office maze without losing your core essence.

My hope is that this space gives you the clarity to stop following a script that wasn’t written for you—and the tools to thrive on your own terms. You are not “difficult”; you are simply high-processing in a low-resolution world.

Rooting for you,
Sven

Part 6 of a series on why (smart) organisations do strange things to smart people.

Part 1: Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity and the Invisible Professional

Part 2: How Organisations Teach Us Not To Think

Part 3: The Story Forms Before The Meeting Starts

Part 4: You’re Not Too Sensitive. The Feeling Rules Were Written Without You.

Part 5: You Solved It. The Institution Didn’t Notice.

Picture a Tuesday.

Not a dramatic Tuesday. Not a Tuesday with a crisis or a deadline or a difficult conversation you’ve been dreading. Just a regular, administrative, procedural Tuesday in a medium‑to‑large organisation.

You need to make a decision. It is not a large decision. By any reasonable measure, it is something you are qualified to make, have the information to make, and have probably already made in the sense that you know what the right answer is and why.

But before it can be enacted, it has to go through a process. The process involves a form. The form requires three signatures. Two of the signatories are in a meeting about a previous decision that also required three signatures. The third can sign, but not until the other two have signed, because that is the order in which the signatures must appear.

You sit with your completed form and your already‑made decision and think, not for the first time: what, exactly, is the point of any of this?

Here’s what I want to suggest: there is a point. But it’s probably not the point you think.

A London hospital, 1959, and a consultant who found something nobody expected

In the late 1950s, a London teaching hospital had a problem.

Nurses were leaving. Not in the usual steady trickle of staff turnover that organisations absorb, but in numbers alarming enough to worry the administration. Management brought in a consultant to find out why.

The consultant was Isabel Menzies Lyth, a British psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Institute, shaped by the Kleinian tradition and particularly interested in what happens when psychoanalytic thinking is applied to organisational life.

What she found was not what anyone expected.

Menzies Lyth published her findings in 1960 in a paper titled Social Systems as a Defence Against Anxiety. It is not a long paper. It is, however, one that, once read, tends to reframe how you see organisations.

What she found in the hospital

Nursing, then as now, is genuinely anxiety‑provoking work. You are in close, sustained contact with human suffering, with death, and with the consequences of medical decisions going well or badly. You are responsible for vulnerable people in moments of real extremity. The emotional stakes are not abstract.

What Menzies Lyth observed was that the hospital had organised itself, largely unconsciously, to manage that anxiety. The structures, rituals, and cultural norms were not only about delivering care; they also helped make the anxiety of nursing bearable.

The mechanisms were specific and recognisable:

• Depersonalisation. Patients were referred to not as individuals but as conditions and locations: not Mrs. Johnson, but “the hip replacement in bed four.” This kept the human stakes at a manageable emotional distance.

• Ritual task performance. Nurses were given lists of specific tasks across multiple patients, rather than holistic responsibility for individual patients. No one nurse had to hold the full weight of care for one person.

• Diffusion of decision‑making. Decisions were escalated, referred, checked, double‑checked, and countersigned until it was hard for any single person to own them. If something went wrong, responsibility was so distributed that it became hard to locate.

• Enforced emotional detachment. Visible emotional involvement with patients was discouraged as unprofessional. Distance was treated as the norm.

These were not just inefficiencies. They were a kind of social defence: an unconscious organisational architecture built to make difficult work feel survivable.

When the defence becomes the cost

The structures were doing something.

In the narrow sense, they were helping keep the acute anxiety of direct human contact at a manageable level. But they were also preventing nurses from experiencing the things that make nursing meaningful: connection, presence, and the satisfaction of genuinely helping someone in a difficult moment.

The defence solved one problem and created another. The work remained demanding, but much of its human reward was managed away with its emotional risk. What remained was a kind of hollowness: going through the motions of care in a system that had become organised to prevent too much caring.

Menzies Lyth’s deeper insight is that these defensive systems are self‑reinforcing. The more anxiety the organisation generates through its own structure, the more it relies on that structure to manage it. The bureaucracy produces discomfort and then points to that discomfort as evidence that more bureaucracy is needed.

That logic is not confined to hospitals.

The general pattern

Most professional work carries genuine anxiety. Not the acute existential anxiety of nursing, but anxiety nonetheless: the anxiety of consequence, of being wrong in public, of being judged, of things going badly in ways that can be traced back to a decision you made.

Organisations develop social defences around that anxiety too. Not with the same stakes, and not always with the same visibility, but with the same underlying logic.

Look again at the Tuesday you were having.

The three‑signature approval process may not exist because it produces better decisions. It may exist because it distributes responsibility so thoroughly that no one person has to own the outcome. If something goes wrong, accountability is diffuse enough that it cannot attach to any one individual.

The meeting about the meeting may not be a productive use of time. It may be a way for the group to check, collectively and repeatedly, that everyone is aligned and that no one is alone in the risk. It is a stabilising ritual.

The jargon — the frameworks, acronyms, and the elaborate vocabulary of process and methodology — may help specialists communicate. But it also creates a layer of abstraction between people and the human stakes of the work. Calling the customer “a user persona” can function a little like calling the patient “the hip replacement in bed four.” It keeps the weight of the thing at a workable distance.

None of these structures are stupid. They are doing a job. Understanding the job they do is different from endorsing them, but the distinction matters, because otherwise you spend a great deal of energy being baffled by things that have a coherent, if often unconscious, logic.

A word about neurodivergent professionals

I keep returning to this because the Menzies Lyth frame may be one of the most clarifying in the series for neurodivergent readers.

The rituals that feel arbitrary to you — the ones you mentally flag as inefficient, redundant, or inexplicable — may be relevant for your colleagues in a way you are not experiencing. Not because your colleagues are less intelligent or less capable of critical thought, but because the anxiety those rituals are managing is real, and the rituals are, however imperfectly, helping to contain it.

If you do not share the same anxiety profile — if uncertainty does not register as threatening in the same way, if the absence of rigid process feels like freedom rather than exposure, and if owning a decision alone feels energising rather than alarming — then the rituals will seem to be solving a problem you do not have.

That is exactly what makes them so baffling.

This is not an argument that the safety nets should never come down. Some should. Some are overdue for being stored away. But it is an argument for understanding what a safety net is supporting before you remove it, and for extending a kind of psychological empathy to the people whose anxiety the net was built to safeguard, even when you do not share that anxiety yourself.

What this costs you

The personal costs are real.

The first is the participation tax: being asked to perform rituals whose anxiety‑management function you do not share, and whose inefficiency you cannot stop noticing, is draining. Not just in time, but in the cognitive dissonance of participating sincerely in something you experience as meaningless while others seem to find it stabilising.

You are not performing the same ritual they are. You are performing a performance of the ritual.

The second is the disruption penalty. The person who points out, accurately and helpfully, that the three‑signature process could be streamlined is not experienced as offering useful efficiency advice. They are experienced as threatening something that is holding anxiety in place. The reaction — defensiveness, coldness, the way the room temperature seems to drop — is not really about the process. It is about what the process is doing.

What grounded confidence looks like here

Three things actually help.

Distinguish the ritual from the anxiety it is managing.

Once you can see what the ritual is doing, you have another option: engage the underlying anxiety directly, rather than arguing only with the ritual. Often the most efficient thing you can do is build confidence person by person before the form ever gets filled in.

Choose your safeguard-challenges carefully.

Some organisational defences are worth dismantling because they produce more anxiety than they manage, have outlasted the conditions that created them, or cost too much to maintain. Others are genuinely holding things together. Developing the judgement to tell the difference is not a compromise.

Build your own regulatory infrastructure.

Neurodivergent professionals often need different forms of anxiety management from those the organisation provides. The rituals that stabilise your colleagues may do little for you, or may even destabilise you. Knowing what actually regulates your nervous system, and building access to it independently of organisational structures, means you are not left without infrastructure when the official one does not work for you.

This might be physical movement, music, focused solo work, or a conversation with someone who actually understands the problem. Whatever it is, it is not a luxury but part of what keeps you functional inside a system that was not designed with your nervous system in mind.

Back to Tuesday

The forms. The signatures. The meeting about the meeting.

The organisation is not confused about its purpose. It knows what it is doing. It is just often doing a different job from the one on the org chart, and not everyone inside it is fully conscious of that job either.

Once you know what job it is actually doing, two things become possible that weren’t before.

You can stop being baffled by it. The defensiveness, the rigidity, the disproportionate reaction to sensible suggestions begin to make sense. You do not have to like the logic, but you can work with something that has logic.

And you can stop taking it personally. The system was not organised around the work alone. It was organised around helping people survive the work. That is a very human thing to do. But it is not always an effective thing to do, as Menzies Lyth’s nurses discovered at considerable personal cost.

Hey there,

If you’re new here, welcome to “Off-Script At Work”. This space exists for quiet, high-processing minds—the introverts, the neuro-complex, and the late-identified professionals who are brilliant at the “work”, but find the “corporate performance” exhausting.

I’m Sven. I’ve spent nearly two decades teaching communication science, but the insights I share here don’t come from a textbook. They come from my own late-diagnosed brain and the messy, hyper-focused process of deconstructing why the corporate “script” feels so alien to people like us.

I’m here to give you communication tools and nervous-system-aware strategies that respect your cognitive reality. We focus on:

• Decoding the unwritten rules of corporate communication and culture.

• Presenting without panic by honouring your high-processing depth.

• Managing your introverted, neuro-complex, or high-processing identity so
you can navigate the office maze without losing your core essence.

My hope is that this space gives you the clarity to stop following a script that wasn’t written for you—and the tools to thrive on your own terms. You are not “difficult”; you are simply high-processing in a low-resolution world.

Rooting for you,
Sven

Subscribe now

Welcome to the fourth session of the Off-Script Reading book club.

This week we’ll focus on Chapter 2.

Before we get started, a quick note for new subscribers to Off-Script At Work:

New subscribers receive both Off-Script At Work and Off-Script Reading by default.
So, if you’d want to join, just make sure you grab a copy of Alchemyand you’re good to go. If you don’t want to join the book club, you can easily opt-out. Here’s how:

1. Go to substack.com/settings — or click your account avatar (top right) and select “Settings”

2. Under “Subscriptions”, click on Off-Script at Work

3. Find the Off-Script Reading section and slide the toggle to OFF

That’s it. Alternatively, you can manage it directly here: svenbrodmerkel.substack.com/account

Key Ideas From Chapter 2

1. Meaning is not decoration — it is the product

Sutherland opens with the story of 25-cent coins whose value might differ based on the fact that one was once touched by Marilyn Monroe. This is not irrational. It is a precise illustration of how value actually works for human beings. Two objects can be physically identical and psychologically miles apart, and the psychological distance is what drives behaviour.

This principle has uncomfortable implications for how most organisations think about their products, services, and communications. If you are optimising for functional performance while ignoring what the thing means to the person using it, you are optimising for the wrong variable. Sutherland’s point is not that function doesn’t matter — it is that function without meaning is incomplete, and that meaning is not something you add at the end. It is something you design from the beginning, or fail to design at all.

2. Governments — and most organisations — are pulling the wrong levers

One of the chapter’s sharpest observations concerns the poverty of the standard institutional toolkit. Governments, Sutherland argues, are largely confined to two instruments: legal compulsion and economic incentive. Do this or we will punish you. Do this and we will pay you. These are blunt, expensive, and frequently ineffective — not because the intentions behind them are wrong but because they treat human behaviour as if it were a simple input-output system rather than a web of meaning, context, identity, and emotion.

The reluctance to entertain what Sutherland calls magical solutions — psychologically intelligent interventions that don’t fit neatly into the compulsion-or-incentive framework — is not just a failure of imagination. It is a structural problem. Most institutions don’t have a department for meaning. They have departments for policy, finance, and communications — and communications is usually called in at the end, after the decisions have already been made, to explain the thing rather than to shape it.

3. The alchemy of semantics: naming changes reality

Some of the chapter’s most entertaining examples involve what Sutherland calls semantic alchemy — the discovery that changing what something is called changes what it is, at least in the ways that matter for human behaviour. Cornish sardines are pilchards rebranded, and the rebrand reversed a declining market. The designated driver concept didn’t change anything about alcohol, driving, or social dynamics — it invented a role, gave it a name, and in doing so made a behaviour possible that had previously had no social script.

The Colombian lionfish example pushes this further. The lionfish is an invasive pest, mildly venomous, and not traditionally eaten. Reframing it as a luxury seafood product — rare, wild, slightly dangerous, available only to those in the know — transformed a problem into a delicacy. Nothing about the fish changed. Everything about its meaning did. Sutherland’s observation that we might achieve far more through semantic invention than we typically attempt is not a trivial point. Language doesn’t just describe reality. It shapes what we are able to imagine doing within it.

4. The nature of our attention changes the nature of our experience

Running through several of the chapter’s examples is a principle that sounds almost philosophical until you see how practically it applies: the way we attend to an experience changes the experience itself. Pictures on restaurant menus don’t just inform — they prime, frame, and direct attention in ways that alter what feels appealing, familiar, and worth ordering. The high-speed rail example makes the same point from a different angle: reducing the time spent waiting for a train may deliver more psychological value than reducing the time spent on it, because waiting is experienced as dead time in a way that travelling is not. The journey and the wait are both measured in minutes, but they are not the same psychological substance.

This is where the concept of hacking the unconscious enters the chapter. Sutherland is not suggesting manipulation in any sinister sense — he is pointing out that the unconscious is already being shaped constantly by context, framing, and design, mostly without intention or awareness. The alchemist’s move is to do this deliberately, thoughtfully, and in service of outcomes that are genuinely better for the people involved.

5. The world should be designed to work with the evolved human brain — not against it

The chapter closes on a principle that Sutherland states with unusual directness: while it is broadly accepted that physical objects should be designed around the evolved human body, it is not yet universally accepted that systems, institutions, and environments should be designed around the evolved human brain. This asymmetry is strange when you notice it. We would think it absurd to design a chair that required users to adapt their spines to fit it. We design organisations, policies, and communication systems that require exactly this kind of cognitive contortion all the time.

The Walkman, Google, and Twitter are offered as examples of psycho-logical design — products that succeeded not primarily because of their technical specifications but because they were shaped around how human attention, memory, and social instinct actually work. The Walkman gave people control over their sonic environment at a time when that control was genuinely novel. Google’s spare, uncluttered interface reduced cognitive load at the exact moment when the internet was becoming overwhelming. Twitter’s constraints — the character limit, the public timeline — turned limitations into design features that shaped a particular kind of thinking and exchange. None of these were inevitable. All of them required someone to ask what the human brain actually needs, rather than what a rational model of information consumption would predict.

A Neurodivergent Reading

The observation that the world is not yet designed to work with the evolved human brain has a specific weight if your brain works in ways that the default design consistently fails to accommodate.

Semantic alchemy is worth thinking about here. A great deal of neurodivergent experience has been shaped — and often damaged — by the language used to describe it. The difference between being told you have a disorder and being told you have a different cognitive profile is not merely cosmetic. It changes what you believe is possible, what you ask for, and how you understand your own history. Sutherland’s point that naming creates reality is, in this context, not just an interesting business insight. It is a description of something many people in this community have lived.

The attention principle cuts both ways. Many neurodivergent people experience attention not as a dial to be turned up or down but as something closer to a spotlight — intense, sometimes involuntary, capable of extraordinary focus and equally capable of missing what the environment expects it to notice. Sutherland’s argument that the nature of attention changes the nature of experience is, among other things, an argument that designing for one kind of attention and calling it universal is a form of bad design. The restaurant menu that only works if you read it linearly from top to bottom is not a neutral object.

Questions for Discussion

1. Sutherland argues that we value meaning, not things — that what something means to us matters more than what it functionally is. Can you think of an example from your own life where meaning completely overrode function in a decision you made?

2. The designated driver concept created a behaviour by inventing a name for a role. What other behaviours might become possible — in your organisation, your community, or your own life — through the right kind of semantic invention?

3. If the world should be designed to work with the evolved human brain, what is one system, process, or environment in your own experience that is clearly designed against it? What would a psycho-logically intelligent version look like?

4. Sutherland suggests that institutions are stuck pulling the levers of compulsion and incentive because they have no framework for meaning. Do you think that is changing — or does the dominance of data and measurement make it harder rather than easier?

A Thought To Carry Into Chapter 3

Chapter 2 has given us the alchemist’s core toolkit: the alchemy of meaning, the alchemy of semantics, and the alchemy of design. What connects all three is the same underlying move — stepping back from what something is and asking instead what it means, what it signals, and what it feels like to the person encountering it.

Chapter 3 takes this further into the territory of trust, signalling, and the surprisingly powerful logic of apparently irrational behaviour. Some things work precisely because they make no obvious sense — and understanding why is where the alchemy gets genuinely strange.

Somewhere right now, a grown man is lowering himself into a wheelie bin full of ice water while a phone, propped against a kettlebell, records the experience for posterity. Somewhere else, a woman is on day forty-three of a programme that demands two workouts a day, four litres of water, no alcohol, and a moral seriousness ordinarily reserved for monastic orders. The comments beneath both will contain, with great frequency, a single word. It is not “why”. It is “respect”.

We are living through a remarkable cultural reverence for doing hard things on purpose. The cold plunge, the 4am alarm, the punitively named multi-week regimen, the influencer who has discovered that suffering, properly filmed, is a personal brand. “Do hard things” has graduated from advice to identity. And if you follow the footnotes far enough back — past the podcasts, past the men with very loud opinions about discomfort — you arrive, eventually, at something surprisingly quiet: a 2016 book by a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, and a thirteen-item questionnaire.

The cold plunge, in other words, has a citation. The citation is Angela Duckworth’s Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. And the citation turns out to be far more interesting than the plunge. Why? Because of the remarkable gap between what it actually found and what we decided it meant.

I have now read Grit twice, with about half a decade between attempts, and come away both times fairly underwhelmed. The first time, I assumed I had missed something. The second time, I went looking for the thing I had missed. What I found instead was a better essay than the one I had meant to write — because the most revealing thing about grit isn’t whether it’s true. It’s who the story is for.

In fairness to the professor

Let me be fair, because the lazy move here is the hatchet job, and the hatchet job is wrong.

Duckworth’s actual research — the peer-reviewed work, not the airport paperback — found something real and reasonably narrow. In a handful of high-attrition, genuinely brutal settings, a short self-report measure predicted who would stick it out, over and above raw ability. Cadets enduring West Point’s punishing summer induction. Finalists grinding through the National Spelling Bee. In those contexts, grit added a little predictive signal that IQ and aptitude scores had missed. That is a legitimate, falsifiable, modestly useful finding. It deserves credit, and it rarely gets it — because the finding that made Duckworth famous and the finding that is actually defensible are not quite the same finding.

The defensible one says: in some specific, effortful, drop-out-prone environments, the people who keep going do a bit better, and you can see it coming with a quick survey. That’s it. That’s the science.

The unflattering arithmetic

Then there is the arithmetic, which has only grown more unflattering with time.

The two big meta-analyses tell a consistent story. Marcus Credé and colleagues, pooling 88 samples and some 67,000 people, found grit only modestly related to performance and — here is the awkward part — very strongly correlated with plain old conscientiousness, the personality trait we have measured for decades. Then Lam and Zhou, in 2022, went bigger still: 137 studies, more than 285,000 people. Their headline number for the relationship between overall grit and academic achievement was r = .19. Weak to moderate. In plain terms, grit accounts for somewhere under four per cent of the variation in how people actually do.

But it gets worse for the brand. Grit, according to Duckworth, is made of two ingredients — passion and perseverance. But when you separate them, almost all the predictive work is done by perseverance of effort (r = .21), while the passion half, “consistency of interest”, limps in at r = .08. Practically inert. And perseverance, the half that does the work, overlaps so heavily with conscientiousness — correlations up around .83 — that several researchers have concluded it cannot meaningfully be separated from it at all. There is a name for dressing an old construct in new clothes and announcing a discovery: the jangle fallacy. Two different words, one underlying thing.

So the honest summary of grit, as it stands now, is roughly this: it is mostly perseverance, perseverance is mostly conscientiousness, and the passion part barely moves the needle. Which is to say that the suspicion that the whole edifice is rather pedestrian is not exactly a failure of generosity.

The one good idea, buried

And yet. There is one genuinely interesting idea in the book which hardly anybody seems to notice, because it sits buried under the part about not quitting. Duckworth quietly redefines passion. In ordinary use, passion means heat — ardour, intensity, the stuff motivational posters are made of. She means something almost opposite: not a feeling but a direction. Passion, in her sense, is the consistency of a single top-level goal held steadily across years, the willingness to keep pointing at the same distant thing while everything beneath it changes. Passion as architecture, not emotion. Passion as a property of how your goals are arranged.

That is an interesting idea. It cuts against the entire culture’s understanding of the word, which makes it the least pedestrian thing in the book.

It is also, with exquisite irony, the precise part the data cannot support. That architectural, directional passion — “consistency of interest” — is exactly the facet that predicts almost nothing. The single most original idea in Grit is the one its own evidence most thoroughly fails to back up.

Hold that thought.

We will need it shortly.

How a correlation becomes a sermon

Here is the move that should interest us most, because it is the move that turns a quiet finding into a loud culture. A correlation of .19 is a (modest) research result. It is not a curriculum, a hiring filter, a school motto, or a sermon. And yet grit became all four. Within a few years of the book, “grit” was being taught to children, printed on gymnasium walls, folded into character-education programmes, and invoked by employers as a polite euphemism for “will tolerate things”. A modest statistical signal had been laundered into a moral demand.

And it is worth asking, in the dry tradition of following both the money and the comfort, who that demand was aimed at. The education scholar Mike Rose made the sharpest version of the point: notice who Duckworth’s original subjects were. Penn undergraduates. West Point cadets. Spelling-bee finalists. These are not people fighting for stability. They are people who already have it — fed, housed, supported, surrounded by adults who can guide them. It is comparatively easy to finish what you begin when your housing is secure and your teachers don’t keep changing. It is rather harder when the only jobs available are short-term, underpaid, and stripped of protection. Plenty of people in poverty possess ferocious, off-the-chart determination — to keep food on the table, to hold a family together — and would still score modestly on the thirteen-item grit questionnaire, because the questionnaire was never built to measure their kind of perseverance.

Yet grit was demanded loudest of precisely the people whose circumstances make grit hardest, by institutions conspicuously declining to fix the circumstances. There is an old genre here, and grit slots neatly into it: the bootstraps gospel, the cheerful insistence that character can stand in for justice. One reader noted, only half-joking, that Duckworth’s thesis is more or less Napoleon Hill’s 1908 interview with Andrew Carnegie — want it badly enough and pull yourself up — except now with a regression table attached.

The accusation in a fresh lab coat

Which brings us, at last, to the questionnaire itself — and to a quieter problem that I suspect troubles some of us more than the statistics ever could.

Read the consistency-of-interest items carefully. They ask, in various phrasings, whether you have ever become obsessed with an idea and then lost interest. Whether new projects sometimes pull you away from old ones. Whether you have struggled to keep your focus on undertakings that take months to finish. Answer “yes, that’s me” — and you lose grit points. You are scored, gently and scientifically, as someone with less of the good stuff.

Now read those same items again as a person whose attention does not run on a five-year plan — whose mind chases the live signal, lights up at the new, follows interest where interest actually goes rather than where a goal hierarchy says it ought to. For a great many minds — and I would wager a fair few reading this — that list of failings is not a character defect at all. It is simply a description of how the equipment works.

There is even a tidy circularity to it, the kind that ought to make any sceptic itch.

Consistency of interest predicts almost nothing about real achievement — but it predicts beautifully whether you will score highly on a consistency-of-interest questionnaire. We have, in effect, built an instrument that measures conformity to one specific shape of attention, and then named the conformity character. The wide-ranging, signal-following, project-hopping mind is not failing the test. The test was simply never built to recognise it as a mind that works.

What to keep, what to bin

So what do we keep, and what do we bin?

Keep perseverance of effort — conditionally, in particular domains, for people whose circumstances actually permit perseverance. It is real, it is useful, and it is mostly just conscientiousness, which we already knew was handy. Keep, too, Duckworth’s buried good idea: passion as direction rather than heat. Keep it not because the data demands it — the data shrugs — but because some ideas earn their place for reasons other than effect size, and “what is your life actually pointed at?” is a better question than most.

Bin the rest. Bin the trait-moralising. Bin the scale as a verdict on a person rather than a mildly informative survey. Bin, especially, grit-as-substitute-for-justice — the version that tells the under-supported child to dig deeper while the system that under-supports them admires its own toughness. And bin, please, the quiet defaming of every mind that declines to keep its interests in a single tidy lane for forty years.

The man in the ice bath is not wrong that hard things matter. We do get satisfaction and maybe even meaning out of doing challenging stuff. But: The research never said that suffering is virtue, or that perseverance is character, or that the people who struggle most simply want it least. It said, far more modestly, that in a few narrow settings some people keep going and do slightly better, and that the keeping-going looks an awful lot like a trait we had already named. Everything grander than that — the posters, the sermons, the test that marks some of us down before we begin — is something we added. We added it because we wanted a number that told the disadvantaged to try harder, and the differently wired to sit still.

Grit is real. It is just much smaller, much duller, and far less flattering to its admirers than the questionnaire let us hope. The honest version fits on a much shorter poster.

It simply doesn’t sell as many ice baths.

References:

Credé, M., Tynan, M. C., & Harms, P. D. (2017). Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 492–511.

Lam, K. K. L., & Zhou, M. (2022). Grit and academic achievement: A comparative cross-cultural meta-analysis. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(3), 597–621.

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Hey there,

If you’re new here, welcome to “Off-Script At Work”. This space exists for quiet, high-processing minds—the introverts, the neuro-complex, and the late-identified professionals who are brilliant at the “work”, but find the “corporate performance” exhausting.

I’m Sven. I’ve spent nearly two decades teaching communication science, but the insights I share here don’t come from a textbook. They come from my own late-diagnosed brain and the messy, hyper-focused process of deconstructing why the corporate “script” feels so alien to people like us.

I’m here to give you communication tools and nervous-system-aware strategies that respect your cognitive reality. We focus on:

• Decoding the unwritten rules of corporate communication and culture.

• Presenting without panic by honouring your high-processing depth.

• Managing your introverted, neuro-complex, or high-processing identity so
you can navigate the office maze without losing your core essence.

My hope is that this space gives you the clarity to stop following a script that wasn’t written for you—and the tools to thrive on your own terms. You are not “difficult”; you are simply high-processing in a low-resolution world.

Rooting for you,
Sven

Subscribe now

Part 5 of a series on why (smart) organisations do strange things to smart people.

Part 1: Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity and the Invisible Professional Part 2: How Organisations Teach Us Not To Think
Part 3: The Story Forms Before The Meeting Starts
Part 4: You’re Not Too Sensitive. The Feeling Rules Were Written Without You.

You solved the problem before anyone else knew there was one.

Not through the correct channel. Not by raising it in the quarterly review or flagging it in the project management system. You solved it the way you always solve things — by noticing a pattern no one else had connected, drawing on five years of accumulated context that lives nowhere except inside your head, and making a quiet adjustment that stopped something from going badly wrong.

Nobody noticed. Or rather: the institution noticed the absence of the problem, and attributed it to the system working as designed.

You have probably stopped mentioning this kind of thing. The effort of explaining how you knew, and why it mattered, and what would have happened if you hadn’t — that explanation is longer than anyone has patience for, and it ends with you sounding defensive about a contribution you shouldn’t have to defend. So you do the work and absorb the invisibility, and wonder, at intervals, whether you are imagining your own usefulness.

You are not. But the institution genuinely cannot see what you are doing.

James C. Scott wrote the explanation for this in 1998. It took him hundreds of pages and a great deal of urban planning history to get there. The short version is this: organisations don’t see you because they are not, in any meaningful sense, designed to.

How Institutions Learn to See

Seeing Like a State is not a business book. Scott was writing about governments — about how modern states redesigned forests, cities, and agricultural systems in order to make them measurable, administrable, and controllable from a distance. His examples include Haussmann’s rebuilding of Paris, Soviet collectivisation, scientific forestry in eighteenth-century Prussia. None of this sounds immediately relevant to your Tuesday morning team meeting.

But bear with it, because the underlying mechanism is identical.

Scott’s central argument is that large institutions — states, corporations, bureaucracies of any kind — must simplify complex reality into standardised, measurable categories in order to administer it. A forest of bewildering biological diversity becomes a timber yield figure. A living neighbourhood of overlapping social relationships becomes a street grid and a zoning map. A person of irreducible complexity becomes a job title, a performance rating, a set of key performance indicators.

Scott calls this process legibility. To make something legible is to make it readable — not to you, standing inside it, with full contextual knowledge — but to someone managing it from a distance, with limited time and standardised tools. Legibility is not about understanding. It is about administrability.

The simplification is not, Scott is careful to note, purely malicious. Institutions genuinely cannot function without some degree of standardisation. You cannot manage a thousand employees as a thousand irreducibly unique individuals. Categories are necessary. Measurement is necessary. The problem is not that institutions simplify. The problem is that they mistake the simplified map for the actual territory — and then make decisions based on the map while the territory quietly does something else entirely.

The Knowledge That Can’t Be Written Down

Against legibility, Scott places a concept he borrows from ancient Greek: mētis.

Mētis is practical, embodied, local knowledge. It is the knowledge of the experienced nurse who can tell something is wrong with a patient before the monitors show any change. The knowledge of the teacher who knows, right now, in this moment, that this particular student needs the explanation reframed in a completely different way. The knowledge of the long-serving employee who understands that the formal proposal needs to go to a different person than the one listed in the organisational chart, because of a history and a dynamic that predates the current structure by a decade.

Mētis is the knowledge of how things actually work, as distinct from how they are supposed to work. It accumulates through experience, attention, and genuine engagement with a specific context. It cannot be fully articulated, because much of what makes it functional is tacit — felt rather than reasoned, pattern-matched rather than deduced. Ask the nurse how she knew, and she will struggle to give you a satisfying procedural answer. She just knew.

Scott’s argument is that the twentieth century’s great institutional disasters — the collectivised farms that starved millions, the housing projects that destroyed communities, the monoculture forests that collapsed — were in large parts failures of incorporating mētis. Not failures of intention. Failures of legibility, often in combination with top-down, high-modernist planning. The institution could not see what the local farmers, the neighbourhood residents, the foresters actually knew. So it overrode them, in favour of the map.

The scale is different in your organisation. The consequences are smaller. But the mechanism is the same.

Who This Makes Invisible

Legibility failures are not equally distributed. Some kinds of knowledge translate well into institutional categories. Linear, sequential, explicitly reasoned, individually attributable, output-generating work is legible almost by definition — you can point to it, measure it, log it, reward it. Other kinds of knowledge translate poorly or not at all.

Pattern recognition across apparently unrelated domains. The ability to hold multiple layers of complexity simultaneously without collapsing them into a premature conclusion. Deep contextual knowledge accumulated through years of focused attention. The capacity to sense when something is slightly off — in a client relationship, in a team dynamic, in a proposal that looks fine on paper — before the evidence is available to justify the concern formally.

This is, recognisably, a description of how many neurodivergent professionals actually work. Not all, and not uniformly — cognitive profiles are not monoliths — but the overlap is substantial and not coincidental. The same cognitive architecture that makes standard institutional legibility difficult — the non-linear processing, the resistance to arbitrary categorisation, the discomfort with simplified maps — is often precisely what generates the richest mētis.

Which means the institution’s legibility apparatus is most blind to the people whose knowledge is most contextual, most tacit, most genuinely difficult to standardise. Not because that knowledge is less valuable. Because it is more valuable — and therefore less reducible to the categories the institution knows how to read.

This shouldn’t be confused with imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is the gap between your self-perception and your actual competence. What Scott describes is something different: a gap between your actual competence and the institution’s capacity to perceive it. The problem is not inside you. It is in the instrument being used to read you.

The map cannot see the territory. That is a limitation of the map.

Working With What the Institution Can’t See

Scott is not optimistic about institutional reform, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Organisations do not generally become better at reading mētis over time. If anything, as they grow and standardise, they become worse at it. The legibility apparatus tends to expand; the tolerance for what falls outside it tends to contract.

But there are two reframes that have genuine practical value, neither of which requires the institution to change.

The first is naming your mētis — not for the institution’s benefit, but for your own. Understanding what kind of knowledge you actually carry, and why it resists standardisation, is a form of self-knowledge that has real grounding value. Not ‘I am good at my job in a vague general sense’ but something more specific: ‘I am the person in this organisation who holds fifteen years of client context that exists nowhere in any system. I am the person who catches the second-order consequence that the proposal misses. I am the person whose pattern recognition across domains is generating value that the quarterly review cannot see.’ Articulating this clearly — even privately, even just to yourself — is not arrogance. It is accuracy. And it is a direct counterweight to the slow erosion of confidence that institutional invisibility produces.

The second is finding the people who can see it. Mētis is most visible to people doing adjacent work at the same level — peers, not managers. The colleague who has watched you work for long enough to understand how you actually think. The collaborator who has been on the receiving end of the pattern you caught before it became a problem. Recognition in organisations tends to flow vertically — upward toward those with formal authority to reward it. But understanding tends to flow laterally, between people close enough to the actual work to see what is really happening. The most useful professional relationships, for the kind of knowledge Scott is describing, are almost always horizontal.

Neither of these changes the institution. Scott spent over four hundred pages being honest about how durable these structures are. But there is something clarifying in understanding the nature of the problem you are actually facing. The institution is not assessing you and finding you wanting. It is running its legibility apparatus and finding you difficult to categorise. Those are not the same thing, even when they feel identical from the inside.

—

Scott’s book ends without a tidy resolution. Institutions will simplify. Mētis will resist simplification. The gap between the map and the territory will persist. What changes, when you have read the argument carefully, is your relationship to being misread.

The institution can’t see you. That is a fact about the institution.

It is not a fact about you.

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Hey there,

If you’re new here, welcome to “Off-Script At Work”. This space exists for quiet, high-processing minds—the introverts, the neuro-complex, and the late-identified professionals who are brilliant at the “work”, but find the “corporate performance” exhausting.

I’m Sven. I’ve spent nearly two decades teaching communication science, but the insights I share here don’t come from a textbook. They come from my own late-diagnosed brain and the messy, hyper-focused process of deconstructing why the corporate “script” feels so alien to people like us.

I’m here to give you communication tools and nervous-system-aware strategies that respect your cognitive reality. We focus on:

• Decoding the unwritten rules of corporate communication and culture.

• Presenting without panic by honouring your high-processing depth.

• Managing your introverted, neuro-complex, or high-processing identity so
you can navigate the office maze without losing your core essence.

My hope is that this space gives you the clarity to stop following a script that wasn’t written for you—and the tools to thrive on your own terms. You are not “difficult”; you are simply high-processing in a low-resolution world.

Rooting for you,
Sven

Subscribe now

Welcome to the third session of the Off-Script Reading book club.
This week we’ll focus on Chapter 1, Sections 1.10-1.19.

Before we get started, a quick note for new subscribers to Off-Script At Work:

New subscribers receive both Off-Script At Work and Off-Script Reading by default.

So, if you’d want to join, just make sure you grab a copy of Alchemyand you’re good to go. If you don’t want to join the book club, you can easily opt-out. Here’s how:

1. Go to substack.com/settings — or click your account avatar (top right) and select “Settings”

2. Under “Subscriptions”, click on Off-Script at Work

3. Find the Off-Script Reading section and slide the toggle to OFF

That’s it. Alternatively, you can manage it directly here: svenbrodmerkel.substack.com/account

Key Ideas From Chapter 1, Part II

1. The ensemble perspective is not the same as the time-series perspective — and confusing them is expensive

One of the chapter’s most clarifying ideas is a distinction that sounds technical but turns out to have enormous practical consequences. What happens on average when a thousand people do something once is not a reliable guide to what happens when one person does something a thousand times. These are different mathematical situations, and treating them as equivalent — which most organisational decision-making quietly does — produces conclusions that are subtly but seriously wrong.

Sutherland’s examples make the point vivid. Russian roulette is not made safer by averaging the outcomes across many players — the individual faces a discrete, catastrophic risk that the average obscures entirely. Airline fees for luggage look rational in aggregate but create individual experiences of friction and resentment that erode loyalty in ways the spreadsheet never captures. Online shopping recommendations built on population averages consistently fail individual users. In mathematics, ten times one always equals one times ten. In human life, it almost never does — and the difference between the two is where a great deal of bad decision-making lives.

2. Designing for the average means designing for nobody

The cockpit example from Part I returns here in fuller form, and it is worth exploring further. When the US Air Force measured 4,000 pilots across ten physical dimensions in the 1950s, they expected to find a cluster of men who fit the average profile. They found none. Not a single pilot fell within the average range on all ten measures. The average pilot, it turned out, did not exist — and the cockpits designed for him fit nobody well.

The same logic applies everywhere organisations use aggregated data to make decisions about individuals. Hiring processes that optimise for the most consistently impressive single candidate may produce conformity rather than complementarity — a team of people who are individually strong in the same ways, rather than a group whose different strengths cover each other’s blind spots. University performance metrics create a choice between grade inflation and failing nearly half of all graduates, because the metric was never designed to accommodate the actual distribution of human ability and circumstance.

3. Innovation happens at the extremes, not the average

This follows directly from the previous point. If you design systems, products, and processes around the average user, average candidate, or average outcome, you systematically exclude the edges — and the edges are where the interesting things happen. Sutherland doesn’t labour this point, but it sits quietly underneath the chapter’s argument about metrics and diversity: the people and ideas that don’t fit the measure are not failures of the system. They are frequently the system’s most valuable inputs, rendered invisible by the wrong kind of counting.

4. We may be more biased against individuals than against groups

Drawing on evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban, Sutherland makes a counterintuitive argument about prejudice. Racial bias, he suggests, may be a relatively weak force in evolutionary terms — our ancestors simply didn’t encounter different races often enough for strong categorical responses to develop. Accent and other markers of local group membership may be more deeply wired. More interesting still is the question of individual difference: are we biased against minorities of one? Against the person who is simply unusual in ways that don’t fit the categories we know how to evaluate?

This connects to the chapter’s broader argument about hiring and the decoy effect. The famous Economist subscription example — where adding an expensive print-only option makes the combined print-and-digital option feel like better value, even though nothing about the digital option has changed — illustrates how context shapes perceived value in ways that have nothing to do with the thing being evaluated.

5. Reason may have evolved not to find truth but to win arguments

The chapter’s deepest move comes near the end, and it reframes everything that precedes it. Sutherland draws on what researchers call the argumentative hypothesis: the idea that reason did not evolve primarily to help individuals make better decisions but to help them explain and defend decisions to others.

This explains a great deal. It explains why confirmation bias is so persistent and so difficult to argue people out of. It explains why the most articulate people are not necessarily the most accurate ones. And it reframes the entire rational/irrational debate: if reason evolved for social persuasion rather than truth-seeking, then the rational explanations we produce for our behaviour are not windows into our actual motivations. They are performances. Cause, context, meaning, emotion, and effect are all operating beneath the surface of the reasons we give.

6. Free markets are not efficient — and admiring them for efficiency misses the point entirely

Sutherland closes the chapter with a provocation that is worth quoting directly:

It is to hold a reasonable opinion for an entirely wrong reason. Free markets are not efficient in the way a machine is efficient — they are wasteful, redundant, and full of apparent irrationality. What they are, Sutherland argues, is psychologically intelligent: they allow for the kind of diversity, experimentation, and context-sensitivity that planned, optimised systems systematically destroy. The London West End theatre example makes the point neatly — price-reduced tickets, which should attract more buyers on rational grounds, performed worse in an email campaign than standard-price ones, because price carries psychological signals about value and desirability that logic alone cannot account for.

A Neurodivergent Reading

The argument that metrics destroy diversity by forcing everyone toward the same narrow goal has a particular resonance if your brain has spent its life being measured by instruments that weren’t designed for it.

The cockpit that fits nobody is a useful metaphor for a great deal of neurodivergent experience in education and work: systems calibrated to an average that doesn’t exist, producing the consistent finding that the person in question doesn’t quite fit — without ever asking whether the instrument rather than the person might be the problem. Sutherland’s point that innovation happens at the extremes is not just a business insight. It is, quietly, a vindication of everyone who has been told that the way they think is too much, too unusual, or too difficult to accommodate.

The argumentative hypothesis is worth sitting with for a different reason.

They may simply be the most practised advocate for whatever they already believe. This is a useful thing to remember in meetings, in hiring decisions, and in any situation where articulacy is being mistaken for insight.

Questions for Discussion

1. Sutherland argues that what happens on average when many people do something once tells us very little about what happens when one person does something repeatedly. Where have you seen this confusion cause real problems — in organisations, in policy, or in your own experience?

2. The cockpit designed for the average pilot fit nobody. Where else do you see systems, processes, or products built around an average user that quietly fail the actual people using them?

3. If reason evolved primarily to justify decisions rather than to make them, what does that imply for how much trust we should place in our own explanations of our behaviour — and other people’s?

4. Sutherland says free markets are not efficient but psychologically intelligent. Do you find that distinction convincing — or does it let capitalism off the hook too easily?
   

A Thought To Carry Into Chapter 2

The first chapter of Alchemy has done something quietly radical. It has not just argued that we should think more psychologically. It has argued that the tools we use to think rationally — our metrics, our averages, our logical frameworks, our carefully constructed reasons — are themselves unreliable in ways we don’t fully acknowledge.

Which raises an uncomfortable question to carry into the rest of the book: if the rational straitjacket limits our freedom to solve problems, and the reasons we give for our behaviour are largely post-hoc justifications, what exactly are we left with?

Sutherland’s answer, developed across the chapters ahead, is not despair. It is alchemy — the disciplined practice of taking seriously the things that logic would dismiss.

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Part 4 of a series on why (smart) organisations do strange things to smart people.
Part 1: Why Competent People Disappear: Functional Stupidity and the Invisible Professional Part 2: How Organisations Teach Us Not To Think
Part 3: The Story Forms Before The Meeting Starts

Picture a moment you’ve probably had more than once.

A meeting. A presentation. A conversation with a senior colleague about a decision you have significant reservations about. And in that moment, you had the wrong feeling.

Not a dramatic wrong feeling. Not a visible outburst or a tearful exit or anything that would show up in an HR record. Something quieter and more insidious than that. The genuine enthusiasm that landed as unprofessional — too much, too loud, too unfiltered for the register the room was operating in. The honest concern that read as negativity. The flat, focused concentration that was interpreted as disengagement. The difficulty — real, not performed — manufacturing warmth for a process you found genuinely pointless.

Nobody said anything directly. They rarely do.

But you felt it. The slight temperature change in the room. The look exchanged across the table. The feedback that arrived later, framed carefully as observations on your “communication style”, “executive presence” (meaning: lack thereof) or “bringing the (wrong) energy”. The performance review comment about “emotional intelligence” that you read three times trying to locate what it was actually pointing at.

The message was clear even when the words weren’t: you had the wrong feeling. Or the right feeling at the wrong intensity. Or the right feeling expressed in the wrong register at the wrong moment in the wrong meeting.

What you probably didn’t know is that there’s a name for the system that produced that judgment. And a Berkeley sociologist who spent her career documenting exactly how it works — and who pays when it doesn’t.

Enter Arlie Hochschild

Arlie Hochschild is a sociologist at UC Berkeley, and the author of The Managed Heart, published in 1983 — one of the most quietly influential books in the social sciences of the last half century, and almost certainly the most important book about work that most working people have never heard of.

Her original research focused on two groups: flight attendants and debt collectors. Two jobs that couldn’t look more different, but that shared a structural feature Hochschild found fascinating: both required, as a formal part of their professional function, the management of emotional display. Flight attendants were required to feel — or at minimum, convincingly appear to feel — warmth, patience, and care, regardless of their actual emotional state at any given moment. Debt collectors were required to project authority, detachment, and implacable calm.

Both were being paid, in part, to manage their feelings as a professional performance.

Hochschild called this emotional labour. And her insight — the one that makes The Managed Heart still essential reading four decades later — was that emotional labour is labour in the full economic sense of the word. It has a cost. It can be extracted. It can be exhausted. And its burden is not distributed evenly across the workforce.

It never was.

Feeling rules — the hidden curriculum nobody gave you

Here is the concept at the heart of Hochschild’s framework that I want to spend some time with, because it’s the one that I think most directly illuminates the experience of the readers of this newsletter.

Feeling rules.

Feeling rules are the largely unspoken norms that govern emotional display in any given social context. They tell you — not in writing, not explicitly, not in the onboarding pack — what you’re supposed to feel in a given situation, at what intensity, expressed in what way, for how long.

Enthusiasm is appropriate, but not too much enthusiasm. Concern is acceptable, but it should be framed constructively. Frustration exists, but it should not be visible in a client meeting, or before a certain point in a project’s lifecycle, or in front of people more senior than you. Warmth is expected as a baseline in most professional interactions — not performed warmth, ideally, but genuine warmth, generated reliably and consistently regardless of whether you are having a good day or a bad one or a catastrophically difficult one.

Nobody tells you any of this. You are expected to absorb it from context. From observation. From the subtle, consistent feedback of rooms that warm or cool depending on whether you got the temperature right.

And here is the thing about feeling rules that matters most, and that Hochschild was precise and honest about: they are not neutral.

Feeling rules are not a universal human standard, transcribed from some objective account of appropriate professional emotion. They were written — unconsciously, collectively, over decades — to reflect the emotional norms of the people who had the most power to set them. In most professional environments in the English-speaking world, that means: neurotypical, broadly extroverted, emotionally regulated in a specific register, comfortable with the performance of warmth and enthusiasm on demand, and able to modulate emotional display fluidly in response to social cues that others are reading in real time.

If that description fits you reasonably well, the feeling rules probably feel less like rules and more like common sense. You’re not performing compliance — you’re just being normal.

If it doesn’t fit you — if your emotional register runs differently, your responses arrive on a different timeline, your face does something other than what you’re experiencing, or your ability to generate warmth on demand is genuinely limited rather than merely untrained — then the feeling rules are a system you are constantly negotiating, at a cost that is real and largely invisible.

Surface acting, deep acting, and the exhaustion of neither

Hochschild distinguished between two modes of navigating emotional labour, and both are worth understanding because both are genuinely costly in different ways.

Surface acting is managing the outward display without changing the inner feeling. Smiling when you don’t feel warm. Projecting enthusiasm for a decision you think is wrong. Performing patience in a meeting that is testing yours beyond its actual limits. The display is managed; the feeling behind it is not. This is the emotional equivalent of holding a difficult yoga pose — you can do it, for a while, but it costs something, and you cannot do it indefinitely.

Deep acting is more ambitious and more draining: actually working to change your inner feeling to match what’s required. Genuinely trying to locate the warmth, to talk yourself into the enthusiasm, to find the equanimity that the situation seems to demand. Method acting for the professional context. This is more sustainable than surface acting in the long run — a feeling you’ve actually worked yourself into is less effortful to display than one you’re purely performing. But the work of getting there is considerable, and it carries its own risks: the gradual loss of clarity about what you actually feel, as distinct from what you’ve trained yourself to feel.

Both modes have been written about at length. But there is a third mode that Hochschild didn’t quite name, and that I think many readers of this newsletter will recognise with something between wry recognition and genuine relief at being seen.

The exhaustion of being unable to do either convincingly.

The person who cannot manufacture the required feeling on the surface — whose face simply does not produce the expected display — and who also cannot talk themselves into genuinely feeling it, because the gap between what’s required and what they’re actually experiencing is too wide and too honest to bridge. Who is simply, visibly, feeling something different from what the feeling rules require.

This person pays the highest cost of all. Not just the labour of the performance, but the social consequences of the performance failing — visibly, repeatedly, in ways that accumulate into a narrative about their professional character. The feedback about executive presence. The concern about cultural fit. The sense, persistent and demoralising, that something about them at a fundamental level is not quite calibrated for this environment.

They are not wrong about the mismatch, but about what it means.

A particular word about neurodivergent professionals — again

I have returned to neurodivergent professionals in every essay of this series, because every framework we’ve looked at illuminates something specific and important about that experience. Hochschild’s is possibly the most direct hit of all.

Many neurodivergent professionals experience feeling rules as a genuinely alien system. Not because they don’t have feelings — that is one of the more persistent and more insulting myths about neurodivergent people, and we can set it aside immediately. But because their feelings don’t always arrive at the right moment, at the right intensity, in the right displayable format, via the right facial and tonal channels that neurotypical feeling rules assume.

The enthusiasm is real but arrives three beats after the moment the room expected it. The concern is genuine but expressed with a directness that reads, through the lens of the feeling rules, as aggression or coldness. The flat affect in the meeting is not disengagement — it is concentration, which neurotypical feeling rules do not have a legible display for and therefore interpret as its nearest available equivalent. The inability to generate warmth on demand is not emotional poverty — it is the absence of a particular performance skill that the feeling rules have decided is a basic professional competency.

For autistic professionals in particular, the concept of feeling rules explains something that years of feedback about “social skills” and “reading the room” often didn’t: the issue was never the absence of feeling. It was the mismatch between how feelings are experienced and processed internally and how they’re expected to be displayed externally — a mismatch that the feeling rules make invisible by treating neurotypical emotional display as the universal human standard.

This is not a communication deficit. It is a category error built into the system.

And the exhaustion that comes from navigating it — daily, invisibly, without acknowledgment that there is anything to navigate — is real labour. It should be named as such.

Who pays — and why it was never evenly distributed

Hochschild’s original research made a point that is worth restating because it remains true: emotional labour burdens fall disproportionately on women, who are expected to perform more warmth, more care, more emotional management as a baseline professional requirement — and who are penalised more severely when they fail to perform it.

This is a structural observation, not an individual one. It is about what the feeling rules require of different groups, not about the emotional capacities of any individual person.

The series lens adds a further dimension to that observation. Emotional labour burdens also fall disproportionately on professionals whose natural emotional register diverges from the dominant feeling rules — for neurological reasons, for cultural reasons, for temperamental reasons. The compliance cost is not the same for everyone. For some people it is low or invisible — they’re not performing, they’re just being themselves, and themselves happens to match what the feeling rules require. For others, compliance is a constant, effortful, depleting act of translation.

The difference in cost is real. It is structural. And it is almost never acknowledged — because the people for whom compliance is effortless tend to assume, with complete sincerity, that it is effortless for everyone, and that those who struggle with it are simply not trying hard enough.

This assumption is wrong. But it is very difficult to correct from inside a system that has built it into its foundations.

What grounded confidence looks like here

Four things — the last four of this series — that I think actually help.

Name the feeling rules you’re operating under.

Distinguish between the feeling and the display.

Know your surface-acting budget — and manage it.

Actively seek environments where your register is closer to the norm.

Back to that meeting

The wrong feeling. The temperature change. The feedback about executive presence.

You were not too sensitive. You were not emotionally underdeveloped. You were not, at some fundamental level, not quite right for professional life.

You were operating in a system with feeling rules that were not written with your emotional register in mind — and paying the compliance cost of that mismatch, every day, without anyone acknowledging that there was a cost being paid at all. Because the people for whom the feeling rules are effortless have no reason to notice the rules. They just call it being professional.

This is what this series has been, at its core, about.

Not the individual failures of individuals. Not the communication deficits of people who think differently, or the attitude problems of people who ask inconvenient questions, or the cultural fit issues of people who can’t quite perform the required feelings at the required intensity on demand.

But the structural conditions — documented by rigorous researchers over decades of careful work — that make certain kinds of professional experience systematically harder for certain kinds of people. Conditions that have names. Mechanisms that can be understood. Histories that can be learned from.

Alvesson showed us that organisations suppress the thinking that would help them. Argyris showed us the machinery they use to do it. Weick showed us that the story of what happened is written by the people who got to the narrative first.

And Hochschild shows us that underneath all of it — underneath the structures and the defences and the sensemaking and the politics — there is a daily, embodied, exhausting act of emotional performance being required of people who were never asked whether they could afford it.

You can afford a lot less self-blame than you’ve been spending.

Spend it on something else.

Share

Hey there,

If you’re new here, welcome to “Off-Script At Work”. This space exists for quiet, high-processing minds—the introverts, the neuro-complex, and the late-identified professionals who are brilliant at the “work”, but find the “corporate performance” exhausting.

I’m Sven. I’ve spent nearly two decades teaching communication science, but the insights I share here don’t come from a textbook. They come from my own late-diagnosed brain and the messy, hyper-focused process of deconstructing why the corporate “script” feels so alien to people like us.

I’m here to give you communication tools and nervous-system-aware strategies that respect your cognitive reality. We focus on:

• Decoding the unwritten rules of corporate communication and culture.

• Presenting without panic by honouring your high-processing depth.

• Managing your introverted, neuro-complex, or high-processing identity so
you can navigate the office maze without losing your core essence.

My hope is that this space gives you the clarity to stop following a script that wasn’t written for you—and the tools to thrive on your own terms. You are not “difficult”; you are simply high-processing in a low-resolution world.

Rooting for you,
Sven

Subscribe now

There is a particular kind of stuck that has nothing to do with lacking information. You have done the research. You have made the spreadsheet — the one with the pros and cons, the five-year projections, the risk assessment column you added at 11pm because it felt responsible. You have talked to people who have done the thing you are considering. You have read the think-pieces. And you are still stuck. Not because the data is insufficient … but because the data, it turns out, is not what the decision is actually about.

This is the stuck that feels all-to-familiar and thus deserves its own essay.

The dominant model for making big decisions is some version of rational-choice theory. It goes like this: you enumerate your options, estimate likely outcomes, assign value to those outcomes based on your current preferences, and choose the option that maximises what you stand to gain. It is tidy. It is legible. It has the aesthetic of rigour. And for a certain class of decisions — which health insurance plan, which laptop, which route to the airport — it works reasonably well.

The problem is that we tend to apply this framework to decisions it was never equipped to handle. Decisions about whether to leave a career. Whether to move countries. Whether to step into or out of a life that no longer fits. These decisions get the spreadsheet treatment because the spreadsheet is what we have. And then we wonder why the spreadsheet doesn’t help.

Philosopher L.A. Paul has a precise diagnosis for why it doesn’t — and it is a bit unsettling, yet more clarifying, than most of what the productivity literature has to offer.

Paul’s argument, developed in her 2014 book Transformative Experience, begins with a deceptively simple observation: some experiences cannot be known from the outside. You can research parenthood exhaustively — read the memoirs, talk to every parent you know, absorb the data on sleep deprivation and relationship strain and the specific texture of unconditional love. And none of it will tell you what it is like for you to become a parent. The experience is epistemically closed until you are inside it. The only way to know is to do.

She calls these epistemically transformative experiences. They are not unusual edge cases. They include becoming a parent, yes, but also: emigrating, leaving a long career, coming out, losing your faith, acquiring one — any decision that will substantially change who you are.

The problem for rational-choice models is structural. To weigh your options rationally, you need to know what you value, so you can assign value to possible outcomes. But transformative experiences don’t just change your circumstances. They change you — including what you value. The person who emerges on the other side of the decision is not the same person who made it. And that future self, with their reshaped values and redrawn priorities, cannot be consulted in advance. They don’t exist yet.

This is why the spreadsheet doesn’t help. Not because spreadsheets are bad. But because you are being asked to make a decision on behalf of a person you have not yet become, using the preferences of the person you currently are. The two may not agree. You have no way of knowing in advance. The rational framework, which depends on stable preferences and anticipatable outcomes, breaks down at exactly the moment the decision matters most.

But Paul goes further. It is not just that you cannot predict outcomes accurately. It is that you cannot even trust your current preferences as a reliable guide to what your future self will care about. Someone who highly values independence and autonomy before becoming a parent may find, afterwards, that those values have not disappeared but have been fundamentally reordered — displaced, supplemented, or transformed by something they had no prior concept of. They did not make a bad decision. They made a decision that made them into someone with different criteria for what counts as a good decision.

This is what Paul calls personal transformation — and it compounds the epistemic problem. You are not just uncertain about what will happen. You are uncertain about who will be doing the experiencing, and what that person will care about. Standard decision theory has no good answer to this. It assumes a stable self moving through time, gathering information and updating preferences. But the self is not always stable. Sometimes the decision is precisely what destabilises it — and that destabilisation is the point.

Paul’s answer to the impasse is not a technique. It is a reframe. She suggests that for transformative decisions, the relevant question shifts. Instead of asking what is the best outcome? — which you cannot know — you ask: do I want the revelation of this experience? Do you want to be the kind of person who found out? Not what you will find, but the finding itself — the becoming, the discovery of a self you cannot currently see.

This is not irrational. It is differently rational. It takes seriously the fact that you are not a fixed entity optimising across a stable value function. You are a person in process, and some decisions are less about choosing an outcome than about choosing a direction of becoming.

The practical implication is less radical than it first appears, though. It does not mean abandoning careful thinking about big decisions. It means recognising what that thinking can and cannot do. Research the practicalities — the finances, the logistics, the likely shape of the transition. But hold the research in its proper place, which is not the place where the actual decision lives.

The actual decision lives somewhere closer to: what kind of person am I trying to become, and does this move toward or away from that? It is a question about trajectory, not destination. And unlike the question of outcomes, it is one you are actually equipped to answer — not with certainty, but with enough honesty to move.

The spreadsheet is not the enemy. It is just not the court of final appeal. The court of final appeal, for a genuinely transformative decision, is quieter, and less legible, and has been waiting for you to stop optimising long enough to hear it.

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Hey there,

If you’re new here, welcome to “Off-Script At Work”. This space exists for quiet, high-processing minds—the introverts, the neuro-complex, and the late-identified professionals who are brilliant at the “work”, but find the “corporate performance” exhausting.

I’m Sven. I’ve spent nearly two decades teaching communication science, but the insights I share here don’t come from a textbook. They come from my own late-diagnosed brain and the messy, hyper-focused process of deconstructing why the corporate “script” feels so alien to people like us.

I’m here to give you communication tools and nervous-system-aware strategies that respect your cognitive reality. We focus on:

• Decoding the unwritten rules of corporate communication and culture.

• Presenting without panic by honouring your high-processing depth.

• Managing your introverted, neuro-complex, or high-processing identity so
you can navigate the office maze without losing your core essence.

My hope is that this space gives you the clarity to stop following a script that wasn’t written for you—and the tools to thrive on your own terms. You are not “difficult”; you are simply high-processing in a low-resolution world.

Rooting for you,
Sven

Subscribe now

Welcome to the second session of the Off-Script Reading book club.
This week we’ll focus on Chapter 1, Sections 1.1-1.9.

Before we get started, a quick note for new subscribers to Off-Script At Work:

New subscribers receive both Off-Script At Work and Off-Script Reading by default.
So, if you’d want to join, just make sure you grab a copy of Alchemy and you’re good to go. If you don’t want to join the book club, you can easily opt-out. Here’s how:

1. Go to substack.com/settings — or click your account avatar (top right) and select “Settings”

2. Under “Subscriptions”, click on Off-Script at Work

3. Find the Off-Script Reading section and slide the toggle to OFF

That’s it. Alternatively, you can manage it directly here: svenbrodmerkel.substack.com/account

Key Ideas From Chapter 1, Part I

Sutherland opens Chapter 1 with a provocation disguised as an observation: food, which should have become more efficient as technology improved, has instead become stranger, more varied, more expensive, and more emotionally loaded than anyone predicted. This is not a failure. It is a clue. When a system behaves in ways that rational models consistently fail to anticipate, the problem is usually not the system but the model.

The chapter’s opening argument is built around a simple but powerful image: broken binoculars. If market research and economic theory are the only lenses we use to understand human behaviour, we are not seeing clearly — we are just seeing confidently. Behavioural economics and evolutionary psychology offer wider lenses, Sutherland concedes, not perfect ones. But a wider field of view is exactly what you need when the territory keeps surprising you.

1. The problem with rational problem-solving is that it ignores the actual problem

Sutherland introduces what he calls the tendency to interpret consumers literally rather than laterally. A delayed flight is, literally, a scheduling problem. But the actual experience of waiting — the anxiety, the helplessness, the feeling of lost control — is a psychological problem, and it responds to psychological solutions. Knowing roughly how long you will wait changes the experience of waiting entirely, even if the wait itself is identical.

This distinction — between the literal problem and the experienced problem — runs through almost every example in the chapter. Painted faces on metal shutters reduced vandalism more effectively than CCTV in some contexts, not because they were more technically sophisticated but because they changed the psychological environment. The technique used to solve a minor problem of urban nuisance turns out to be scalable: the same logic applies to public health, policy design, and organisational culture.

2. Problem-solving is a strangely status-conscious job

One of the chapter’s sharpest observations (in my opinion) is that the prestige attached to a solution shapes which solutions get considered. Expensive, technically complex interventions attract funding, credibility, and serious attention. Cheap, psychologically intelligent ones tend to get dismissed as trivial — until they work.

Sutherland uses John Harrison, the clockmaker who solved the longitude problem, as a historical example of this dynamic. Harrison’s solution was mechanical rather than astronomical, which made it deeply unwelcome to the scientific establishment of his time. The solution was right. The solution was also, by the standards of the people evaluating it, the wrong kind of right. Status-consciousness in problem-solving doesn’t just slow things down. It actively filters out the answers most likely to work.

3. Psychological moonshots are as valuable as technological ones — and far cheaper

Google X, Sutherland notes, is built around the idea of technological moonshots: ambitious, expensive, engineering-led solutions to large problems. But there is an equivalent category that almost nobody funds or celebrates: psychological moonshots. Solutions that don’t require better technology, more data, or larger budgets — just a fundamentally different understanding of what the problem actually is.

The Uber map is his signature example here. Uber did not make taxis faster. It made waiting feel different by replacing uncertainty with information. The psychological effect was enormous. The engineering cost, relative to building faster cars, was negligible. We spend very little time looking for solutions like this, Sutherland argues, because we have a near-automatic tendency to default to the rational explanation whenever one is available — which means we dress our unconscious motivations in rational clothing and never examine what is actually driving behaviour.

4. Advertising agencies may be valuable for entirely the wrong reasons

In one of the chapter’s more mischievous moments, Sutherland suggests that the real value of advertising agencies may have nothing to do with strategy, craft, or creative excellence. It may be simply that they create a professional culture in which it is acceptable to ask daft questions and make foolish suggestions — and that this permission structure, which most organisations systematically destroy, is where the genuinely useful ideas come from (sidetone: does anyone remember that I do have a soft spot for court jesters? ;-)).

This connects to a cluster of examples that seem trivial until you press on them. Why do people mostly buy ice cream in summer? Why do people go to the doctor when they do? Why do we clean our teeth? These questions sound silly. They also turn out, on examination, to reveal that the reasons people do things are rarely the reasons they give — or the reasons rational models assume. You don’t need reasons to be rational, as Sutherland puts it. Rationality and conscious justification are not the same thing, and confusing them is a significant source of bad decisions.

5. How you frame a question changes the answer you are capable of finding

The chapter closes this section with a deceptively simple observation: how you ask a question affects the answer you get. Smoke detectors. Still or sparkling water. These are not just examples of framing effects — they are illustrations of a deeper principle. The questions we ask constrain the solutions we can imagine. And most organisations, most of the time, are asking questions that were designed by and for a rational model of human behaviour that doesn’t quite describe the humans they are dealing with.

A Neurodivergent Reading

There is something worth pausing on in Sutherland’s observation about daft questions. In most professional environments, the permission to ask them is carefully rationed — and the rationing tends to fall hardest on people whose thinking already looks lateral, associative, or tangential to those around them.

Neurodivergent thinkers often ask the daft question not as a creative technique but as a genuine expression of how they process. The question that seems to come from nowhere. The connection that skips several steps. The refusal to accept that the stated problem is the real problem. These are not departures from rigorous thinking. In Sutherland’s framework, they are precisely the cognitive moves that produce psychological moonshots.

Questions for Discussion

1. Sutherland argues that we consistently default to rational explanations even when the real drivers of behaviour are psychological. Can you think of a recent example — from your own organisation, industry, or life — where this happened? What was the cost?

2. The Uber map didn’t solve the problem of slow taxis. It reframed the problem as one of uncertainty rather than speed. What other familiar problems might look different — and more solvable — if the frame shifted?

3. If problem-solving is status-conscious, as Sutherland suggests, who in your experience gets to ask the daft questions — and who doesn’t? What determines that?

4. “You don’t need reasons to be rational.” What do you make of this claim? Does it change how you think about decision-making — your own, or other people’s?

   ---

A Thought To Carry Into Part II

Sutherland’s argument in this section is not that reason is the enemy. It is that reason has been given a monopoly it hasn’t earned — and that the cost of this monopoly is paid in solutions we never find, questions we never ask, and ideas we dismiss before they have a chance to work.

Part II of Chapter 1 pushes further into the mathematics of this problem — and into what happens when we design systems around averages that don’t exist.

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Rory Sutherland’s book Alchemy starts with a scene-setting conceptual “bang”:

He is talking about Red Bull. Expensive, packaged in a can deliberately smaller than its competitors, and an absolute disaster in pre-launch taste tests (quote: “I wouldn’t drink this p*ss if you paid me to”). By every rational metric, a product that should have failed spectacularly. It didn’t. And Sutherland’s explanation is the one that unsettles MBAs to no end: Red Bull succeeded not despite its strangeness, but because of it. The premium price signals value. The unusual taste suggests something chemical and serious is happening. The small can implies potency — this drink should only be consumed in a small dosage.

None of this is logical. All of it is, as Sutherland puts it, psycho-logical — operating on the unconscious associations and perceptual shortcuts that actually drive human behaviour.

Sutherland is not the first person to notice this particular blind spot. As we have seen in a previous essay, Mats Alvesson has spent much of his career documenting how organisations generate the appearance of rationality while mostly running on habit, status, and performance. And Karl Weick showed us that sense-making in organisations is largely retrospective — we act first, then construct a rational story to explain what we did. And now Sutherland arrives from the world of behavioural economics and advertising to make a closely related argument: the frameworks organisations use to evaluate ideas are systematically biased against the solutions most likely to work.

Together, they are pointing at the same structural failure from different vantage points. Which makes Alchemy feel less like a provocation and more like the latest piece of a much larger picture.

Most organisations have a built-in filter for ideas. It is the spreadsheet, the cost-benefit analysis, the proposal that can survive a room full of people asking “but where’s the evidence?” Sutherland’s argument — developed across the Foreword and Introduction of Alchemy and sustained for the entire book — is that this filter is not just incomplete. It is systematically biased against the solutions most likely to work.

The reason is simple, even if its implications are uncomfortable: human beings do not experience reality directly. We experience it psychologically.

You can either, as Sutherland argues, spend billions of pounds on making a train journey actually shorter. Or, as he quips, for far less money you could have supermodels walk down the aisles and serve champagne, making the journey more enjoyable and feel shorter (or make customers wish it was, in fact, longer).

This is, of course, slightly tongue-in-cheek. But his overall point is serious: organisations that treat perception as a soft, secondary concern — something to address after the real, measurable work is done — are not being rigorous. They are being naïve.

Sutherland is particularly sharp on what he calls the irrationality of rationality: the way that logical optimisation, applied consistently, produces solutions that are efficient on paper and baffling in practice. Logical thinking asks: what is the most efficient answer? Alchemy asks: what changes the way people experience the situation? These are not always the same question. The gap between them is where most of the interesting solutions live.

Here is an observation in Alchemy that took me a while to fully realise — but now I can't unsee it.

Sutherland argues that breakthroughs frequently emerge from intuition, playfulness, lateral association, unexpected connections — the kind of thinking that looks, from a distance, like distraction or indiscipline. He notes, without labouring the point, that institutional environments are often deeply suspicious of this kind of thinking, right up until it produces something nobody else saw coming.

I am, among other things, a late-identified neurodivergent professional. Pattern recognition, associative leaps, unconventional framing, a tendency to find the connection everyone else walked past — these are not peripheral cognitive styles. They are precisely the modes of thinking Alchemy argues the world needs more of. The fact that these same tendencies are routinely treated as problems to be managed, in education and in organisations, is not a minor irony. It is a structural failure with real consequences.

Alchemy is not a book about neurodivergent thinking. But it is, quietly, a book about whose thinking gets taken seriously — and whose gets dismissed before it has a chance to prove itself.

That, I think, is why this particular book felt right for Off-Script Reading, the book club associated with Off-Script At Work. Not because it confirms what we already believe, but because it approaches the same territory from a completely different angle. Sutherland is a behavioural economist and advertising strategist. He has spent decades watching organisations systematically reject the ideas that would have served them best, in favour of the ones that looked safest in a meeting room. His diagnosis is different from mine. His conclusions are not.

We are reading Alchemy chapter by chapter over the next several weeks — and tomorrow, the Reading Notes for Chapter 1 go out to book club members.

If you’re interested, here is how the club works, and how to join.

I hope to see you there.

How it works — the low-pressure version

We are all busy, and we are scattered across different time zones. This club is built to be highly interactive but entirely manageable:

• Weekly Micro-Notes: Each week I’ll publish a short, punchy set of reading notes covering a defined section of the book. The weekly reading commitment will be genuinely bite-sized.

• The Big Question(s): I won’t give you a textbook syllabus. Instead, each post will end with one or two provocative, practical questions to kick off the conversation.

• Asynchronous Dialogue: We’ll use the comments to share real-world examples, debate, and swap ideas — in our own time zones, on our own schedules.

• Occasional Live Sessions: Once we find our rhythm, we’ll add a couple of live virtual sessions at key milestone points, alternating the times so our global members all get a chance to connect in real time.

How to join (action required)

To keep this space focused and intimate, I’m not subscribing everyone to the book club by default. If you want in, you need to opt in — and I’d love for you to.

If you’re ready to challenge the tyranny of logic and explore the power of ideas that don’t make sense, here’s how to join:

If you’re a new subscriber: Welcome! You’re already in — new subscribers receive all sections by default. Just make sure you grab a copy of Alchemy and you’re good to go.

If you’re an existing subscriber: You’ll need to activate the section manually — Substack leaves this in your hands, not mine. Here’s how:

1. Go to substack.com/settings — or click your account avatar (top right) and select “Settings”

2. Under “Subscriptions”, click on Off-Script at Work

3. Find the Off-Script Reading section and slide the toggle to ON

That’s it. Alternatively, you can manage it directly here: svenbrodmerkel.substack.com/account

And if you want a copy of Alchemy — which I genuinely recommend — your local independent bookshop is the right place to start.

Share

Hey there,

If you’re new here, welcome to “Off-Script At Work”. This space exists for quiet, high-processing minds—the introverts, the neuro-complex, and the late-identified professionals who are brilliant at the “work”, but find the “corporate performance” exhausting.

I’m Sven. I’ve spent nearly two decades teaching communication science, but the insights I share here don’t come from a textbook. They come from my own late-diagnosed brain and the messy, hyper-focused process of deconstructing why the corporate “script” feels so alien to people like us.

I’m here to give you communication tools and nervous-system-aware strategies that respect your cognitive reality. We focus on:

• Decoding the unwritten rules of corporate communication and culture.

• Presenting without panic by honouring your high-processing depth.

• Managing your introverted, neuro-complex, or high-processing identity so you can navigate the office maze without losing your core essence.

My hope is that this space gives you the clarity to stop following a script that wasn’t written for you—and the tools to thrive on your own terms. You are not “difficult”; you are simply high-processing in a low-resolution world.

Rooting for you,
Sven

Subscribe now

Picture the aftermath of something that went wrong.

Not a catastrophe. Not a scandal. Just a project that didn’t land the way it was supposed to, or a meeting that went sideways, or a decision that produced consequences nobody had planned for. The ordinary, unglamorous kind of organisational failure that happens in every organisation, regularly, and is processed and filed and learned from — in theory — before everyone moves on.

In the days that follow, something interesting happens.

A narrative forms. Not through any deliberate process — nobody calls a meeting to decide what the official story will be. But somehow, through a series of corridor conversations and Slack threads and one-to-ones that you may or may not have been part of, a coherent account emerges: what happened, why it happened, who was responsible, what it means, and what should be different next time.

By the time the postmortem meeting arrives — if there is one — the story has largely already solidified. The meeting is less a truth-finding exercise than a ratification of the narrative that formed before anyone sat down.

And something about that narrative doesn’t quite match your experience of events.

Not dramatically. Not in a way you could easily challenge without sounding defensive, or paranoid, or like you’re relitigating something everyone else has already moved on from. Just — the story that’s now circulating isn’t quite the story you were in. Some things are missing. Some things are weighted differently. The causal chain runs in a direction that doesn’t quite map onto what you observed happening in real time.

You are not imagining it.

There is a name for the process that produced it.

Enter Karl Weick

Karl Weick is an organisational psychologist who spent the better part of his career at the University of Michigan, and one of the most original — and most consistently underread outside academic circles — thinkers in the field of organisational behaviour.

He spent decades investigating a question that sounds, on the surface, almost trivially simple: how do people in organisations figure out what’s going on?

His answer, developed across a body of work that is by turns rigorous, surprising, and occasionally a little vertiginous, is sensemaking. And once you understand what Weick means by it, you will never experience a postmortem meeting — or a strategy offsite, or a lessons-learned document, or really any organisational attempt to account for what just happened — in quite the same way again.

Weick’s core insight is this: organisations don’t simply discover reality; they actively construct what counts as it.

When something happens — especially something ambiguous, unexpected, or threatening — people don’t simply observe what occurred and report it accurately. They reach, often very quickly and largely unconsciously, for the most plausible story that makes the events hang together coherently. And then they act as if that story is what actually happened.

The operative word is plausible. Not accurate. Not true. Plausible.

Weick was explicit and deliberate about this distinction. Sensemaking, he argued, is not primarily a truth-seeking process. It is a coherence-seeking process. The goal is not the most accurate account of events. The goal is a story that reduces the uncertainty, aligns the group, and allows everyone to move forward with enough shared understanding to keep functioning.

This sounds reasonable until you ask the question Weick’s framework makes unavoidable.

Plausible to whom?

The politics hiding inside “what just happened”

Plausibility is not a neutral standard. It never was.

What counts as a plausible account of events depends — entirely, and consequentially — on who is doing the counting. On their position in the hierarchy, which shapes what they were able to observe and what was reported to them. On their existing relationships, which shape whose version of events they’re inclined to credit. On their narrative fluency — their ability to construct and communicate a coherent, emotionally legible story quickly and confidently. And on their access to the moments and channels where the story actually gets made.

That last one matters more than almost anything else.

The official organisational narrative does not form in the formal postmortem. It forms in the conversation between the senior leader and their trusted deputy on the way back from the meeting where things went wrong. It forms in the message sent at 6pm by the person who got there first with a frame. It forms in the corridor, in the coffee run, in the three-minute exchange that nobody minuted because it wasn’t a meeting.

By the time the postmortem convenes, the story has a first draft. The postmortem is, more often than not, the process by which that first draft gets edited into something that can be filed.

If you weren’t in the corridor, you weren’t in the first draft.

Narrative fluency and who benefits from it

Here is where Weick’s framework becomes, for many readers of this newsletter, uncomfortably recognisable.

Sensemaking rewards speed. The story that gets told first — confidently, coherently, by someone with the social position to have it heard — has an enormous structural advantage over the story that arrives later, more carefully, with more caveats and more complexity.

Sensemaking also rewards what I’ll call narrative smoothness: the ability to take a genuinely messy set of events and render them into a clean causal story with identifiable actors, legible motivations, and a clear lesson. The smoother the story, the more easily it travels. The more easily it travels, the more quickly it becomes the official account.

The problem — and it is a structural problem, not a personal failing — is that narrative fluency of this kind is unevenly distributed. And it is distributed in ways that correlate, with uncomfortable consistency, with existing hierarchies of status, confidence, and social centrality.

The person who is good at telling a confident, emotionally legible story about what happened has an enormous advantage in the sensemaking process — regardless of whether their story is the most accurate one.

The person who experienced the events more complexly — who noticed more, who is more reluctant to flatten the ambiguity into a tidy lesson, who wants to sit with what actually happened before committing to a narrative about it — tends to arrive at the story-forming moment a beat too late, with an account that’s too nuanced to travel easily through the channels where organisational narratives move.

This is not a communication problem; rather, it constitutes a structural disadvantage in a process that was never designed to reward complexity.

A particular word about neurodivergent professionals

I want to be specific here, because the Weick frame illuminates something I hear about constantly from readers and rarely see named clearly.

Neurodivergent professionals often process events differently from the neurotypical majority. More detail. More pattern recognition. A stronger awareness of what doesn’t fit the emerging story. A genuine difficulty — sometimes experienced as a moral difficulty, not just a stylistic one — with committing to a narrative that irons out the complexity before the complexity has been properly understood.

In a sensemaking process that rewards speed, smoothness, and narrative confidence, these are significant structural disadvantages.

Not because the ND account of events is less accurate. It is often more detailed, and in some cases more closely aligned with the actual sequence of events — more attentive to the actual sequence of events, more honest about the multiple factors that contributed, more resistant to the post-hoc rationalisation that passes for analysis in most lessons-learned exercises.

But accuracy, as Weick would remind us, was never quite the point. Plausibility was the point. And plausibility is a social judgment, made quickly, by people who are often not primarily asking what is the truest account of what happened but what is the most coherent story I can believe and repeat.

The ND professional who arrives at the postmortem with a careful, qualified, multi-causal account of events is not losing the sensemaking game because they’re wrong. They’re losing it because the game was never set up to reward that kind of thinking.

And the specific experience this produces — the sense that the official story of something you were directly involved in doesn’t reflect your experience of it, in ways you can’t easily challenge without sounding difficult or paranoid — is one of the most quietly demoralising features of organisational life for people who think this way.

You are not being gaslit. You are experiencing the output of a sensemaking process that systematically disadvantages certain cognitive styles, and then presents its results as simply what happened.

These are different problems. But understanding which one you’re dealing with matters enormously.

Getting written out of the story

Let me name the experience directly, because I think it deserves to be named rather than approached obliquely.

There is a specific kind of professional invisibility that comes not from being overlooked in the moment — not from the meeting that moved on without you, or the idea that got attributed to someone else — but from being written out of the narrative of events after the fact.

You were there. You saw what happened. You may have been one of the people most centrally involved. But the story that formed in the aftermath — the one that now circulates as the official account, the one that shaped what got learned and what got changed and who got credit or responsibility — doesn’t include your experience of it. Or includes a version of it that you don’t quite recognise.

This is disorienting in a way that’s hard to articulate without sounding like you’re making a bigger deal of it than it is. After all, organisations simplify. Narratives compress. Nobody’s full experience of any event makes it into the official account. That’s not gaslighting; that’s just how stories work.

But there is a difference between the inevitable compression of complexity and the systematic exclusion of certain kinds of complexity — the kind that comes from certain cognitive styles, certain positions in the hierarchy, certain ways of processing and communicating experience.

Weick’s framework doesn’t make this exclusion go away. But it does give it a name and a mechanism, which is the first step toward doing something about it.

What grounded confidence looks like here

Four things that I think actually help — as opposed to the advice that amounts to “be more assertive in meetings”, which mistakes the symptom for the disease.

Know that sensemaking is happening, and when.

The story forms early and socially, in the conversations before the formal process. If you’re not in those conversations, you’re not in the first draft of the narrative. This doesn’t mean you need to be everywhere, or to abandon the careful processing that is genuinely one of your strengths. It means being more deliberate about where you show up and when — and understanding that the corridor conversation after the difficult meeting is not optional small talk. It is, often, where the story gets made.

Develop your narrative fluency without flattening your account.

There is a difference between telling a simpler story than the one you experienced, and telling the most important parts of your story clearly and early. The latter is a skill — a translation practice, really — and it is worth building deliberately. Not because complexity doesn’t matter, but because a complex account that doesn’t travel is less useful than a clear account that does, and that can be complicated later when the ground has been prepared for it.

Document your own sensemaking.

Written accounts. Contemporaneous notes. Your own record of events as they unfolded, made at the time rather than reconstructed afterwards. These matter more than they might seem — not primarily for self-protection, though that’s not irrelevant, but for your own clarity. When the official story starts to diverge from your experience of events, having a contemporaneous record of what you actually observed is the difference between knowing you’re not imagining it and merely suspecting you’re not imagining it. That difference is significant.

Name the process, not just the outcome.

When you find yourself at odds with the official account, arguing about the facts is rarely the most productive move. The facts have already been absorbed into the narrative, and narratives are stickier than facts. What’s more productive — and considerably less likely to make you sound defensive — is naming the sensemaking process itself.

“I think we might have constructed slightly different stories about what happened here” is a different conversation from “that’s not what happened.” The first opens an inquiry. The second starts a dispute. And an inquiry into how the story formed is much more likely to surface your account than a dispute about whose account is correct.

Back to the postmortem

The lessons-learned document has been filed. The narrative has solidified. The story of what happened is now, for all practical purposes, what happened — because organisations run on shared stories, and the shared story is the one that got made.

Your experience of events is still your experience. It didn’t stop being real because it didn’t make it into the official account. But it’s sitting outside the narrative now, which means it’s sitting outside the learning, outside the accountability, outside the version of events that will shape what happens next time.

This is the cost of losing the sensemaking game. And it is, as this series has been trying to show, a game with structural rules that favour certain players — not because the rules were designed with malicious intent, but because they were never designed with your cognitive style in mind.

Weick’s gift — and it is a genuine gift, if an uncomfortable one — is the reminder that reality, in organisations, is always under construction. The question is not whether a story will form. A story will always form. The question is whether you understand the process well enough to be a more deliberate participant in it.

Not to control the narrative. That’s not the goal, and it’s not a realistic one.

But to make sure that the story that forms has, at minimum, had the chance to encounter your experience of events before it solidifies.

That’s not spin. You’re just showing up to the conversation before it’s over.

____________

Next in the series: Arlie Hochschild on emotional labour. The idea that managing your feelings as a workplace performance is not a personality trait or a personal struggle, but a structural condition with a name, a history, and consequences that fall unevenly on the people least equipped to absorb them. It’s the most personally felt framework of the series. And possibly the most useful.

If this resonated — and particularly if you’ve ever sat in a postmortem thinking “that’s not quite what happened” and said nothing — forward it to someone who’s had the same experience. They need to know the process has a name.

Share

Hey there,

If you’re new here, welcome to “Off-Script At Work”. This space exists for quiet, high-processing minds—the introverts, the neuro-complex, and the late-identified professionals who are brilliant at the “work”, but find the “corporate performance” exhausting.

I’m Sven. I’ve spent nearly two decades teaching communication science, but the insights I share here don’t come from a textbook. They come from my own late-diagnosed brain and the messy, hyper-focused process of deconstructing why the corporate “script” feels so alien to people like us.

I’m here to give you communication tools and nervous-system-aware strategies that respect your cognitive reality. We focus on:

• Decoding the unwritten rules of corporate communication and culture.

• Presenting without panic by honouring your high-processing depth.

• Managing your introverted, neuro-complex, or high-processing identity so
you can navigate the office maze without losing your core essence.

My hope is that this space gives you the clarity to stop following a script that wasn’t written for you—and the tools to thrive on your own terms. You are not “difficult”; you are simply high-processing in a low-resolution world.

Rooting for you,
Sven

Subscribe now

Picture the scene.

You have a reasonable request. Straightforward, even. You follow the correct procedure — fill in the form, copy the right people, use the subject line format specified in the internal policy document that took you forty minutes to locate on the intranet.

Three days pass. Nothing.

You follow up. You are told the request has been received and is being processed. You ask what ‘processed’ means in this context. The answer, when it arrives, tells you nothing except that the process is ongoing.

Another week. A response. The form was filled in incorrectly. Not the wrong information — the wrong form. There is, it turns out, a different form for this particular type of request. The difference between the two forms is not immediately legible to the naked eye.

You start again.

At some point — staring at the revised form, wondering whether you are, in fact, an intelligent adult — you will probably conclude that something has gone wrong. That the system is broken. That nobody designed this properly.

David Graeber would like a word with you about that.

The System Is Working Exactly as Intended

Graeber — the late anthropologist, activist, and author of Bullshit Jobs — spent a significant portion of his intellectual life thinking about bureaucracy. His 2015 book The Utopia of Rules, my personal favourite, is the most sustained version of that thinking, and its central argument is deeply uncomfortable: bureaucracy is not a system that has malfunctioned. It is a system that functions perfectly — just not for the people inside it.

The confusion, the opacity, the hours spent reformatting requests and resubmitting forms — none of this is accidental. It is the product of a system designed to serve those who control the rules of interpretation.

Here is the key insight: in any bureaucratic structure, there is always someone with the power to decide what counts as a correctly completed form, a properly submitted request, a legitimate grievance. That interpretive authority is not neutral. It flows upward. The person at the bottom of the hierarchy follows the rules. The person at the top decides what the rules mean.

Graeber calls this ‘structural violence’ — not violence in the dramatic sense, but in the quieter sense of a system that denies people the ability to respond to their own context. You cannot explain why your situation is different. You cannot ask the form to reconsider. The procedure is the procedure.

The system, in other words, is not broken. It is just not yours.

What Graeber Leaves Implicit

Graeber is brilliant on the politics. What he leaves slightly underexplored is the communicative mechanics — precisely how bureaucratic structures produce confusion at the level of everyday exchange.

This is where communication theory earns its keep.

Paul Watzlawick, one of the foundational figures in communication science, observed that you cannot not communicate. Every interaction carries both content and relationship information simultaneously — not just what is being said, but what the act of saying it implies about the relationship between the people involved.

Bureaucratic communication is specifically engineered to sever that second layer. Forms strip out context. Procedures make intention illegible. The language of compliance — ‘as per the policy’, ‘for the avoidance of doubt’, ‘subject to approval’ — performs procedural correctness while communicating, relationally, something quite different: that your particular situation does not warrant direct engagement.

Friedeman Schulz von Thun, another communication theorist whose work rarely makes it out of German-speaking academia but, in my opinion, absolutely should, described communication as operating on four simultaneous levels: factual content, self-revelation, relationship, and appeal. Bureaucratic communication is almost entirely evacuated of three of those four. What remains is the appearance of factual exchange, stripped of the human signals that would make it actually meaningful.

The result is that people find themselves communicating correctly — following all the right procedures — and being comprehensively misunderstood. Not because their message was unclear, but because the system is not designed to receive the kind of message they are trying to send.

Who Pays the Highest Price

Bureaucracy is exhausting for everyone. But it is not equally exhausting for everyone.

When a system depends on implicit rules, unstated expectations, and interpretive flexibility that flows only in one direction, the people who struggle most are those who rely on explicit, direct communication. Those who need to understand ‘why’ before they can engage with ‘how’. Those for whom the unspoken subtext is genuinely not accessible — not because they are less capable, but because they are processing the world through a different cognitive architecture.

For many neurodivergent professionals, bureaucratic environments are not merely frustrating. They are actively disorienting. The rules feel arbitrary because they often are. The expectations feel impossible to meet because they are never fully stated. The experience of doing everything right and still getting it wrong — every time, in every meeting, across every form and procedure — accumulates into something that starts to feel very much like a personal failing.

It is not. This is worth saying plainly.

Researchers working with the Double Empathy Problem — a framework developed by autistic scholar Damian Milton — have demonstrated that communication difficulties between autistic and non-autistic people are bidirectional. The assumption that the burden of adaptation falls entirely on one side is not supported by the evidence. Bureaucratic structures make the same unfounded assumption at scale: that the system is correct and the individual must adapt.

The cruelty of bureaucratic systems is not that they are vague. It is that they present themselves as precise while withholding the interpretive key. The form looks like a complete instruction. The procedure looks like the full story. Neither is. And the person who takes the explicit layer at face value — who assumes that following the stated rules is sufficient — will be wrong every time, in ways they are never quite told about directly.

The canary in the coal mine is the information, not the problem.

A Small, Genuine Exit

Graeber was not interested in offering easy solutions. Neither am I. Bureaucracy is not a problem you solve by communicating more skillfully, and anyone selling you that particular idea is probably also dreaming of selling you a course.

But there is something useful in understanding the structure, even when you cannot dismantle it.

The first shift is interpretive. When you understand that bureaucratic confusion is structural — that it is a feature, not a bug, that it serves a purpose which is not your purpose — you stop asking what is wrong with you. That is not a small thing. The experience of persistent misunderstanding in organisational settings is genuinely corrosive, partly because it tends to locate the problem in the individual rather than the system. Graeber’s analysis gives you somewhere else to put it.

The second shift is strategic. If you know that interpretive authority flows upward, you can start to think about where you have legitimate access to that authority — and use it more deliberately. This is less about gaming the system than about understanding where your communication actually has traction, and concentrating your clarity there.

The third shift is relational. The people who share your frustration with the fog are often the people worth talking to directly — outside the procedures, in plain language, about what is actually going on. Bureaucracy atomises. The small, precise act of naming what you are both experiencing can be quietly subversive in the best sense.

None of this dismantles the system. Graeber was honest about that, sometimes bleakly so. But there is a particular kind of confidence that comes from understanding the game you are playing — not performed certainty, not extroverted assertiveness, but grounded self-knowledge. The kind that lets you stop taking the fog personally.

That is not nothing. In environments designed to make you doubt yourself, it might be exactly enough.

—

David Graeber died in 2020. He would, I think, have been deeply sceptical of any essay that ended on a note of cautious optimism about working within systems he spent his career arguing should not exist. Fair enough. Consider this less a resolution than a temporary orientation — a way of holding your ground until something better becomes possible.

The form is still the wrong form. But at least now you know why.

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Hey there,

If you’re new here, welcome to “Off-Script At Work”. This space exists for quiet, high-processing minds—the introverts, the neuro-complex, and the late-identified professionals who are brilliant at the “work”, but find the “corporate performance” exhausting.

I’m Sven. I’ve spent nearly two decades teaching communication science, but the insights I share here don’t come from a textbook. They come from my own late-diagnosed brain and the messy, hyper-focused process of deconstructing why the corporate “script” feels so alien to people like us.

I’m here to give you communication tools and nervous-system-aware strategies that respect your cognitive reality. We focus on:

• Decoding the unwritten rules of corporate communication and culture.

• Presenting without panic by honouring your high-processing depth.

• Managing your introverted, neuro-complex, or high-processing identity so
you can navigate the office maze without losing your core essence.

My hope is that this space gives you the clarity to stop following a script that wasn’t written for you—and the tools to thrive on your own terms. You are not “difficult”; you are simply high-processing in a low-resolution world.

Rooting for you,
Sven

Subscribe now

This is the first session of the Off-Script Reading book club, and I want to start with a brief word about why we’re reading this particular book — and why now.

Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense (aka The Magic of Original Thinking in a World of Mind-Numbing Conformity; depending on the issue) by Rory Sutherland is not a conventional business book. It doesn’t offer a framework you can put in a slide deck, a five-step model you can implement on Monday, or a tidy argument that resolves itself by the final chapter. What it offers instead is something rarer and, I’d argue, more useful: a sustained case for thinking differently about why people do what they do.

Sutherland’s central claim is that human behaviour is driven far less by rational calculation than modern organisations, economists, and policy-makers tend to assume — and that this gap between how people actually behave and how we model them is not a problem to be corrected but a territory to be explored. The most effective solutions, he argues, often look wrong before they work. They succeed not because they are logical but because they are psycho-logical — operating on the unconscious associations, perceptual shortcuts, and emotional signals that actually drive decisions.

Red Bull should have failed. The Uber map shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. And yet.

What makes Alchemy particularly interesting for this community is a thread that runs through the book without ever quite being named directly. Sutherland repeatedly argues that breakthroughs come from intuition, lateral association, pattern recognition, playfulness, and the willingness to ask questions that sound foolish in serious rooms. These are not exotic cognitive techniques. For many of us — particularly those of us who have spent years being told that our thinking style is too tangential, too associative, too something — they are simply how our minds naturally move.

Alchemy doesn’t frame itself as a neurodivergent book. But it makes a powerful case that the cognitive styles most frequently pathologised in institutional settings are precisely the ones that produce the ideas institutions most need. That felt worth reading together.

How the book club works

Each session I’ll share reading notes covering a chapter or section of the book. The notes summarise the key arguments, offer some editorial commentary, and include a neurodivergent reading of the material — a brief reflection on where Sutherland’s argument speaks directly, if sometimes accidentally, to how many of us experience thinking, work, and communication differently.

At the end of each set of notes you’ll find a handful of discussion questions. These are not rhetorical. I’m genuinely curious what you think, and the comments are the place to take the conversation further. There are no right answers here — only more interesting ones.

Today’s notes cover the Foreword and Introduction. They set up the book’s central argument and establish the terrain we’ll be exploring for the rest of the semester.

Let’s begin.

The Foreword:
Challenging Coca-Cola

The obvious solution is usually the wrong one.

Imagine you are tasked with creating a drink to rival Coca-Cola. The rational playbook writes itself: make it cheaper, make it taste better, get it onto more shelves. These are sensible, defensible, spreadsheet-friendly answers. They are also, Sutherland observes, almost entirely useless as a guide to what actually works. Red Bull is the rejoinder to every MBA instinct in the room — expensive, acquired taste at best, packaged in a can deliberately smaller than its competitors. By every conventional metric, it should have failed. It didn’t.

Red Bull succeeded not despite its strangeness, but because of it.
The premium price signals potency. The unusual taste suggests that something chemical and serious is happening. The small can implies concentration rather than value. None of this is logical. All of it is psycho-logical — operating on the unconscious associations and perceptual shortcuts that actually drive human behaviour. Red Bull didn’t win by being better. It won by being legible in a completely different register.

This is what the book means by alchemy.

The Foreword is doing something modest but important: it argues that the most effective solutions in business and branding frequently succeed precisely because they defy the rational logic that most organisations use to evaluate ideas.

If your filter for good ideas is the spreadsheet, you will systematically reject the ones most likely to work. Sutherland’s project, from the first page, is to argue for a different filter — one that takes human psychology seriously as the terrain on which products, brands, and behaviours actually live or die.

The Introduction:
Cracking the (Human) Code

One of the reasons Alchemy unsettles people at first is that Rory Sutherland opens with a claim that sounds almost irresponsible:

Human beings are not nearly as rational as modern business, economics, and policy-making assume.

And he doesn’t present this as a flaw to be corrected. He presents it as a source of possibility.

That matters because most systems — organisations, education, marketing, even self-help culture — are built around the assumption that people make decisions logically and consistently. Sutherland argues that this leaves enormous amounts of human behaviour unexplained.

Or ignored.

The Introduction essentially sets up the central tension of the whole book:

• Logic seeks certainty, efficiency, predictability.

• Human beings seek meaning, emotion, status, belonging, story, reassurance, novelty, symbolism — often all at once.

And these are not always the same thing.

Key Ideas From the Introduction

1. Psychological value matters as much as “objective” value

One of Sutherland’s recurring themes is that perception is not separate from reality in human decision-making. Two things can be functionally identical and still feel completely different.

A classic example: people often prefer a slightly slower train journey with Wi-Fi (or with supermodels serving free champagne, as he cheekily says in a TED talk) over a faster one without it. Rationally, this makes little sense — if you assume that transportation is purely about getting from A to B as quickly as possible. But psychologically, the experience changes entirely.

This is one of the book’s central provocations: the meaning attached to an experience changes the experience itself.

That sounds obvious when phrased this way.

Yet many organisations still treat emotional and symbolic factors as secondary “soft” concerns rather than as core drivers of behaviour. Sutherland’s argument is that this is not just an oversight — it is an expensive one.

2. Rationality can become unimaginative

Sutherland repeatedly contrasts logical optimisation with creative problem-solving.

Logical thinking often asks:

• “What is the most efficient answer?”

Alchemy asks:

• “What changes the way people experience the situation?”

These are not always the same question, and the gap between them is where most of the interesting solutions live.

Sometimes the expensive engineering solution loses to the psychologically intelligent one.

This is where the book becomes especially interesting for communication, branding, leadership, and culture-building: People rarely respond only to facts.

They respond to framing, context, status, symbolism, emotion, ritual, identity, and expectation — and any approach that ignores this is working with an incomplete map.

3. “Irrational” does not mean random

A useful distinction:
Human behaviour may look irrational from the outside while still following emotional or social logic.

People do things for reasons that are:

• contextual

• symbolic

• relational

• emotional

• habitual

• identity-based

Sutherland’s point is not that logic is useless. His point is that logic alone explains less than rational systems would like to believe — and that the gap between what logic predicts and what people actually do is not a problem to be solved but a territory to be explored.

4. Modern institutions often distrust non-linear thinking

One thing that stood out to me re-reading the Introduction is how suspicious many professional environments are of ideas that cannot immediately justify themselves analytically.

Sutherland argues that breakthroughs often emerge from:

• intuition

• playfulness

• experimentation

• lateral association

• humour

• apparent nonsense

That overlaps strongly with forms of thinking that many neurodivergent people naturally default to: pattern recognition, associative leaps, unconventional framing, unexpected connections. These are not peripheral cognitive styles — they are precisely the modes of thinking Sutherland is arguing the world needs more of.

Ironically, these forms of thinking are frequently treated as distractions — right up until they produce something valuable nobody else saw coming.

Alchemy doesn’t frame this as a neurodivergent argument, but the implication is hard to miss: the thinking that gets pathologised in institutional settings is often the thinking that institutional settings most desperately need.

Questions for Discussion

(Pick as many as you like or have time for – or add your own; use the comment section for sharing your thoughts)

1. What’s an example of something that was objectively minor but psychologically
meaningful to you? (A service, product, interaction, ritual, design detail, tradition,
etc.)

2. Have you ever encountered a “logical” solution that completely ignored how people
actually behave? What happened?

3. Sutherland suggests that organisations often overvalue measurable outcomes and
undervalue psychological effects. Where do you see this most clearly?

4. What kinds of thinking were rewarded in your education or work environment?
Which kinds were discouraged?

5. Do you think “irrational” thinking is becoming more accepted — or less? Why?

A Thought To Carry Into The Next Session

One of the most important ideas in Alchemy is is deceptively simple:

Human beings do not experience reality directly.
We experience reality psychologically.

That sounds simple. But if you take it seriously, it changes how you think about communication, leadership, design, teaching, branding, and even relationships.

Next week we move further into Sutherland’s argument that many of the most effective solutions in life and business look absurd before they work.

Which may be a useful reminder for all of us.

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Picture a problem you’ve flagged before.

Not once. Several times. With evidence, with context, with a clearly articulated explanation of why this keeps happening and what would need to change to stop it happening again.

And each time, something got fixed. Sort of. A workaround was implemented. A process was tweaked. A meeting was held. People nodded. The problem subsided for a while.

And then it came back.

In a slightly different form, wearing a slightly different hat, but unmistakably the same problem — because the thing that kept producing it was never actually addressed.

You are starting to feel like Sisyphus with a laptop.

Here’s what I want to suggest: the boulder keeps rolling back down not because you’re pushing wrong, but because nobody will ask why you built on a slope in the first place.

That distinction — between fixing the error and questioning the assumption that created the error — is at the heart of one of the most important and most consistently ignored ideas in organisational theory.

And it has a name.

Enter Chris Argyris

Chris Argyris was a professor at Yale School of Management and Harvard Business School for the better part of four decades — one of the most influential organisational theorists of the twentieth century, and someone who spent his career documenting, with considerable precision, why organisations systematically fail to learn from their own experience.

His central contribution was a deceptively simple distinction: single-loop learning versus double-loop learning.

Argyris illustrated it with a thermostat.

A thermostat that turns the heating on when the room drops below twenty degrees is doing single-loop learning. It detects an error — room too cold — and corrects it. Job done. No further questions.

A thermostat capable of double-loop learning would do something more sophisticated and potentially uncomfortable: it would ask whether twenty degrees is actually the right target. Whether the room should be this temperature at all. Whether the whole heating strategy needs rethinking.

Single-loop: fix the error. Double-loop: question the assumption that produced the error.

Both are forms of learning. But only one of them is threatening to the people who set the thermostat.

And that, Argyris argued, is precisely why many organisations are structurally committed to single-loop thinking — not because their people are incapable of going deeper, but because going deeper is dangerous. Double-loop learning doesn’t just solve the problem. It interrogates the decisions, values, and assumptions of the people who created the conditions for the problem in the first place.

And those people are usually in charge.

Defensive routines — or, how organisations get very good at avoiding the obvious

Here is where Argyris’s work gets both more precise and more uncomfortable.

Organisations don’t just happen to stay in single-loop mode. They actively — if unconsciously — protect it. Argyris called the mechanisms that do this organisational defensive routines: the elaborate, largely unspoken systems that prevent double-loop questions from gaining any traction.

Defensive routines are not conspiracy. Nobody designs them. Nobody sits in a boardroom and says let’s make sure nobody ever questions our fundamental assumptions. They emerge organically from the collective human need to avoid embarrassment, protect established positions, and keep uncomfortable truths at a comfortable distance.

They operate through what Argyris called, with characteristic precision, skilled incompetence — people becoming extraordinarily practised at avoiding the conversations that would actually solve the problem. The avoidance is so fluent, so professionally executed, that it looks like normal organisational behaviour. It is normal organisational behaviour. That’s the problem.

The double-loop thinker — the one who keeps asking but why does this keep happening? — doesn’t just create friction in this environment. They actively threaten the defensive routine. The defensive routine exists precisely to prevent that question from surfacing. Which is why the double-loop thinker doesn’t get listened to. They get managed. Labelled. Sidelined. Described, in tones of genuine puzzlement, as brilliant but difficult.

Sound familiar?

A particular word about neurodivergent professionals — again

I keep coming back to this, because I keep hearing it from readers, and because the research keeps pointing in the same direction.

Neurodivergent professionals often have a genuinely hard time participating in organisational defensive routines. Not because they’re socially obtuse — though that’s a convenient story — but because the avoidance of the obvious is confusing to them in a way it isn’t to everyone else.

The elephant in the room isn’t a metaphor. It’s just the elephant. It’s large, it’s grey, it’s standing right there, and the meeting agenda has moved on to Q3 projections without acknowledging it. In many cases, this is not a communication failure on the part of the person who can see the elephant. It is a collective performance of selective attention that the defensive routine requires, and that neurotypical social conditioning makes feel natural.

For neurodivergent professionals, the performance doesn’t feel natural. It feels bizarre. And the social cost of not performing it — of saying, calmly and sincerely, I’m sorry, but there is an elephant — is real and cumulative.

This is not, to be clear, an argument that neurodivergent professionals are uniquely gifted double-loop thinkers while everyone else is trapped in single-loop mode. It’s more specific than that: the particular friction neurodivergent professionals experience in certain organisations is often the friction of someone who cannot easily participate in the defensive routine that keeps double-loop questions off the table.

The elephant-namer isn’t the problem.

The room that decided not to see the elephant is the problem.

The double-loop tax

I want to be honest about what it costs to think this way in a single-loop organisation, because the cost is real and it doesn’t help anyone to minimise it.

The double-loop thinker pays a reflexivity tax — in social capital, in political positioning, in the slow accumulation of being-perceived-as-difficult, and in the exhausting cognitive labour of constantly translating their thinking into formats the organisation can receive without feeling threatened.

That last one is particularly draining. It’s not enough to have the insight. You have to figure out how to introduce it at the right moment, in the right register, with the right amount of softening, to the right person, via the right channel — and even then, the defensive routine may simply route around it.

Over time, this tax compounds. Some double-loop thinkers learn to suppress the deeper question and adapt to single-loop norms. This is survivable but tends to produce a particular kind of professional hollowness — the feeling of going through motions in a system you’ve stopped believing in.

Others keep asking the double-loop question and absorb the ongoing social cost. This is also survivable but tends to produce a particular kind of exhaustion — the feeling of pushing against something that has no interest in moving.

Neither of these is a satisfying destination.

Which brings us to the practical question.

So what do you actually do?

I want to be clear about what this section is not. It is not a listicle. It is not “five steps to becoming a change agent”. It is not an invitation to become more palatable to a system that is working as designed.

It is, instead, four genuine reframes — drawn from Argyris’s framework — that I think make the situation navigable without requiring you to either pretend the problem doesn’t exist or exhaust yourself fighting it alone.

• Name the loop you’re in.

The most immediately useful thing Argyris’s framework offers is diagnostic clarity. When you’re in a conversation, a meeting, a strategic discussion — you can now ask: is this a single-loop conversation or a double-loop one? Is this a space where the deeper question is actually on the table, or is this a space where the task is to fix the symptom and move on?

This sounds simple. It changes everything. When you stop expecting single-loop conversations to produce double-loop outcomes, you stop experiencing the gap between those expectations and reality as a personal failure. You’re not failing to get your point across. You’re in a single-loop conversation. Those are different problems with different solutions.

• Pick your double-loop moments.

Not every meeting needs the deeper question. Not every conversation is ready for it. Strategic deployment of double-loop thinking — developing a feel for when the organisation has enough slack, enough trust, enough psychological safety to actually hear the question beneath the question — is a skill, and it is not a compromise.

There’s a version of this that is pure capitulation: never asking the double-loop question because it’s always inconvenient. That’s not what I’m describing. I’m describing the difference between a chess player who knows when to sacrifice a piece and one who refuses to sacrifice any pieces and loses the game. The double-loop question is too valuable to waste on rooms that have already decided not to hear it.

• Find your double-loop allies.

They exist in almost every organisation. The pockets of genuine reflection are real — the colleagues who also notice the elephant, the managers who actually want to know why the boulder keeps rolling back, the teams where the defensive routines are thinner or less entrenched.

Finding these people is not a nice-to-have. It is survival infrastructure. The double-loop thinker in a single-loop organisation needs somewhere to be fully cognitively present without paying the full reflexivity tax on every exchange. Those pockets are where you stay sane, stay sharp, and stay connected to the possibility that the deeper question might, eventually, land somewhere.

• Know what you’re actually dealing with.

This is the hardest one, and the most important.

If the defensive routines are total — if the single-loop commitment is structural, cultural, and non-negotiable — that is important information. Not about your communication style. Not about your fit, your attitude, or your ability to “manage up.” About the organisation.

Argyris’s framework gives you a way to make that assessment with clarity rather than self-blame. Some organisations are genuinely capable of double-loop learning and are simply not doing it yet. Others have organised themselves so completely around single-loop thinking that the defensive routines are load-bearing — the whole structure depends on the deeper question not being asked.

Knowing which one you’re in is the difference between a renovation project and a decision to find a different building.

Neither answer is wrong. But they are different answers, and they call for different responses.

Back to Sisyphus

The boulder keeps rolling back down.

Sisyphus is pushing it back up because that’s the job, and there’s a kind of nobility in that, and Albert Camus wrote beautifully about it, and we should probably leave Camus out of a management essay or we’ll be here all day.

But here is the thing about Sisyphus that the myth doesn’t quite capture: he is not the only person on the hill.

There are people at the bottom of the hill asking why the boulder keeps rolling back down. There are people questioning whether this is the right hill. There are people who have drawn a detailed map of the slope and are waiting for someone with authority to look at it.

These people are not Sisyphus. They are not tragic heroes condemned to repetition.

They are the ones who could solve the problem — if anyone would ask why it keeps happening.

You are not the problem.

The assumption that the slope is non-negotiable is the problem.

And some of us were never very good at treating obviously questionable assumptions as if they were settled facts.

Good.

Next in the series: Isabel Menzies Lyth and the idea that organisations structure themselves not primarily to get work done — but to manage the anxiety of their members.

Further reading:

Argyris, C. (1990). Overcoming organizational defenses: Facilitating organizational learning. Allyn and Bacon

Argyris, C. (1991). Teaching smart people how to learn. Harvard Business Review, 69(3), 99–109.

If this resonated, forward it to the person in your organisation who keeps asking the question nobody wants to answer. They need to know there’s a framework for what they’re experiencing — and that a Harvard professor spent forty years documenting it.

Hey there,

If you’re new here, welcome to “Off-Script At Work”. This space exists for quiet, high-processing minds—the introverts, the neuro-complex, and the late-identified professionals who are brilliant at the “work”, but find the “corporate performance” exhausting.

I’m Sven. I’ve spent nearly two decades teaching communication science, but the insights I share here don’t come from a textbook. They come from my own late-diagnosed brain and the messy, hyper-focused process of deconstructing why the corporate “script” feels so alien to people like us.

I’m here to give you communication tools and nervous-system-aware strategies that respect your cognitive reality. We focus on:

• Decoding the unwritten rules of corporate communication and culture.

• Presenting without panic by honouring your high-processing depth.

• Managing your introverted, neuro-complex, or high-processing identity so
you can navigate the office maze without losing your core essence.

My hope is that this space gives you the clarity to stop following a script that wasn’t written for you—and the tools to thrive on your own terms. You are not “difficult”; you are simply high-processing in a low-resolution world.

Rooting for you,
– Sven