Ignite Performance: How Behavioral Design Can Fix Broken Workplace Decisions with Siri Chilazi

Episode notes

Most workplaces don’t fail because people are malicious. They fail because their systems quietly tilt the table. Imagine a startup that hires brilliant people, moves fast, prides itself on meritocracy, and still ends up promoting the same profile over and over again. Not because anyone planned it that way. But because small, invisible design choices nudged decisions in predictable directions. This is the uncomfortable, data-backed reality Siri Chilazi has spent her career studying. Siri is a senior researcher at Harvard Kennedy School and co-author of Make Work Fair . Before academia, she worked in management consulting, where she saw something that felt off long before she had the language for it. Entry-level talent looked diverse. Leadership didn’t. The further up you went, the narrower the funnel became. This isn’t a story about bad actors. It’s a story about bad systems. Why good intentions don’t scale For decades, companies have tried to fix bias by fixing people. Trainings. Workshops. Awareness sessions. The logic sounds reasonable. If we teach people about bias, they’ll behave differently. The data says otherwise.