Welcome to The Spark, bringing you the world's best behavioral science. 

Here at Applied Scholar, we often find ourselves feeling a bit “negative” on the state of organizations and businesses when it comes to Talent and People topics. Why are organizations so bad at these things when there’s so much high-quality research out there?? 

Acknowledging this might be a bit dramatic, but it’s sort of like we’re in the historical age of medicine filled with bloodletting, leeching, and lobotomies. I actually don’t think that metaphor is too far off! Here we are, stuck with MBTI, poorly designed return-to-office mandates, rewards systems encouraging fraud, counterproductive unconscious bias training, and a whole bunch of authentic leadership mumbo-jumbo. Today, people sort of do whatever they want on People topics without any real notion of the impact they’re having - that sounds a heck of a lot like the age of bloodletting and leeches.

There’s another way to look at this - another perspective to take - and one that we’re trying to incorporate more into our thinking and writing: if things are so bad, it also means that we have a truly amazing opportunity to reshape Talent and People solutions. Speaking frankly, the bar right now for the quality of People solutions is low, very low. This really low bar means that for folks like us - practitioners with an interest in leveraging high-quality behavioral science - we have an opportunity. 

Of course, the work is hard, reshaping such a vast system will never be easy. But we’re in a unique and cool spot, one that is also potentially very good for our collective long-term career prospects. Simply put, if you can find ways to effectively incorporate high-quality research into this bullsh*t landscape in which we currently find ourselves (and prove that it works), there’s a lot to gain and a heck of a lot of impact to be made. We hope Applied Scholar can support you in creating those sorts of outcomes for yourself and others.

On the grand scale, alongside other organizations - like More Than Now and the Corporate Research Forum (check them out if you haven't yet!) - we also hope that Applied Scholar serves as a spark in the growing movement to reshape how we approach Talent and People topics. Maybe one day, one of these organizations will replace the outdated juggernauts like SHRM in terms of influence and scale (we can dream!).

Here’s to viewing the messy situation we’re in today with optimism, energy, and a desire to be distinctive in the People and Talent space. We’re thrilled to be here together with you!

FEATURED RESEARCH

Let's dig into the research.

Predicting Job Performance: There are few things we like more than high-quality research summaries that provide a balanced view on a relevant topic. And this is perfectly that, focused on the question: which selection (recruiting) factors predict future job performance? Huge kudos to the three authors who put this together. As we build out the Vault, we’ll be sure to make this a prominent resource when it comes to the research on selection and future performance.

Generational Differences (lack thereof!): There’s a lot of noise out there when it comes to generational differences. I can’t open LinkedIn without seeing truly awful infographics titled something like “here’s how to manage GenZ vs. Millennials vs. blah blah blah.” It sucks that sort of stuff is so prominent because it’s so wrong. Thankfully, there’s some really great research out there that cuts through the noise on this topic, and here is one of those. It uses a large dataset to analyze how age and context (and not generation!) influence work motivation. The one sentence summary (which we wish more people knew!) is: “The results suggest that the historical time period and an individual’s life course explain work motivation and work attitudes better than generational membership.” We’ll be adding this to the Vault as an enduring resource as well.

PERSPECTIVES TO SHARE

High-quality commentary from the world of applied behavioral science.

We love sharing interesting and insightful articles. Here are two we recently discovered and enjoyed.

Why are we suckers? We couldn’t resist sharing a fun article by one of our favorite professors on LinkedIn, Dr. Jay Van Bavel. It’s a short and precise summary of why people enjoy MBTI vs. higher quality assessments. And it shares a data point that I’ve always found interesting - what’s the impact of having a spouse with high conscientiousness? 

Do TED Talks promote poor management practices? I love this take. For serious practitioners, TED Talks kind of suck beyond their entertainment value. Each speaker is trying to convince you that their one idea is the most important thing in the world, which is the exact opposite of how we should go about leveraging behavioral science research. We want nuance, boundary conditions, and drawing connections with other research! TED Talks don’t offer that. It’s a decent hypothesis, that TED talks are making us collectively worse at Talent and People solutions.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST

Recent Podcast Appearance 

We're excited to share the link to a two-part podcast that one of our co-founders - Michael Snelgrove - recently recorded with The Learning+ Podcast. It’s a wide-ranging discussion on a host of topics related to applied behavioral science. Check it out!

• Episode 1: Spotify and Apple Podcasts
• Episode 2: Spotify and Apple Podcasts 

The Vault is currently free! 

The Vault is our attempt to do one thing really, really well - build a product and service that makes it easier for you to access, understand, and apply the world’s best behavioral science research. If this sounds interesting to you, you can preview and sign up for the Vault here. We’re currently in a beta test of the Vault and offering it for free.

Our Commitment to You 

As a reminder, our commitment with this newsletter is to provide you with high-quality insights on a regular, but not overwhelming, cadence. We’ll send out the Spark every 2-4 weeks and maybe add a major update about Applied Scholar a couple of times per year. That’s it. We will never spam you or take advantage of your trust. 

We hope you enjoyed the first Spark ever sent! See you next time!