Mind the Gap

Episode 90 of Mind the Gap is a pause rather than a conclusion.

Looking back through the archive, Michael listens again to the ideas, questions, certainties and contradictions that have shaped the first ninety episodes. What has changed? What still holds true? And what can we learn from the gap between what we say matters and how we actually behave?

This episode is an invitation to revisit the archive, sit with the questions that have stayed with you, and notice what you may hear differently now.

Mind the Gap will return later in the year.

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You know the Dunning-Kruger effect. "The dumbest people are the most confident." Except that's not what the 1999 study actually found — and the correction most people haven't heard is stranger than the myth itself.

Michael Comyn traces the real finding, the statistical critique that's since called the famous graph into question, and — instead of handing you a tidier myth to replace the old one — lands somewhere more honest: we know less about this than either the popular version or its takedown would have you believe. A confession as much as an episode.

Keywords/tags: Dunning-Kruger effect, cognitive bias, critical thinking, psychology myths, statistics, epistemic humility, self-assessment

"We're a family here." You've heard it, probably from someone who meant it warmly. This week, Michael Comyn takes the phrase more seriously than it usually gets taken — and asks the question nobody stops to ask first: which kind of family, exactly?

Because not every family is the good kind. Every office has its golden child, its black sheep, its uncle nobody sits near at Christmas. And even the good kind offers something no employer legally can, or should try to: love that isn't contingent on output. Drawing on years spent moving between organisations rather than living inside one, Michael asks what's really being borrowed when a workplace reaches for the warmest word in the language — and what it usually means when that word shows up loudest.

Gentle, a little mischievous, and not aimed at anyone who's ever said it sincerely.

Keywords/tags: workplace culture, organisational psychology, leadership language, company culture, employee relations, corporate cliché

The Space Shuttle Challenger disaster wasn't a surprise. Engineers had seen the same O-ring damage on earlier, successful flights — reviewed, discussed, waved through.

Nobody hid it. Something quieter had happened first: sociologist Diane Vaughan called it normalisation of deviance — the process by which a rule bent once, safely, quietly resets what "normal" looks like, until the next bend doesn't register as a bend at all.

Michael Comyn traces the same mechanism into a hospital corridor — how a routine scan becomes "stat" by drift rather than decision, how a diagnosis narrows without anyone deciding to skip a step — and asks the harder question underneath: how do you tell a bend worth making from one that's quietly rewriting your baseline?

Not every shortcut is a countdown to disaster. That's what makes this one hard to see coming.

Keywords/tags: normalisation of deviance, Diane Vaughan, Challenger disaster, patient safety, diagnostic error, organisational culture, quality improvement, decision-making

You already know the voice. This week, a different kind of gap — the one between the life you're living and the plot you never actually chose.

Michael Comyn draws on psychiatrist Eric Berne's idea of the life script — the unconscious plan for how things are supposed to go, written long before anyone had a vote in it — and lays out six shapes that plot commonly takes. Not a diagnosis. A mirror, held up long enough to notice which shape you flinch at.

Five episodes into Season 5, Michael turns from what we say to each other to the older question underneath it: who wrote the story you're currently running, and how far back?

For more on the space between intention and impact, Michael's book Mind the Gap is out now on Amazon. https://amzn.eu/d/irNfaHO