A model for leaders
The five explicit systems
Every workplace is built on the Projection Fallacy: systems that work best for minds like the ones that designed them. Five of those systems decide who stays. In each one, the fix is the same. Make it explicit.
What each system looks like when it lives in someone’s head, what it looks like written down, and a check you can run in ten minutes.
Why these five
They follow the path every employee takes: getting in, taking part, choosing what to work on, delivering, and moving up. When one of them runs on unwritten rules, it works best for the people who already think like the ones who built it. Everyone else has to guess. The people who guess wrong most often are the ones who leave, and they are frequently the people who see problems first.
The Projection Fallacy shows up anywhere one kind of mind designs for everyone: classrooms, products, health care, government forms. At work, it shows up most in these five.
The model
Hiring
Getting in
“Feels like a fit.” Surprise questions reward fast talkers, and interviewers favor candidates who think the way they do.
Criteria written before the first interview. Candidates get the questions in advance, and everyone is scored against the same criteria.
Meetings
Taking part
Decided in the room by whoever thinks fastest out loud. The reasoning leaves with the people who were there.
The agenda goes out ahead so everyone can prepare. Decisions are recorded with the reasoning.
Priorities
Choosing the work
Absorbed over years. Newer people guess, and find out they guessed wrong.
Ranked out loud. When two requests collide, anyone can tell which one wins.
Reviews
Delivering
“Done” and “good” are known by feel. People learn the standard when the work comes back, or at review time.
“Done” is defined before the work starts, and everyone is reviewed against the same written expectations.
Promotion
Moving up
Decided by reputation, which favors the people who already fit.
Criteria written down, published, and applied the same way to everyone.
Supervisors run all five. When what they’re expected to do isn’t written down either, every system depends on which manager someone happens to get.
Why yours may not be as explicit as they feel
The rules are clear to the people who wrote them. That is the Projection Fallacy at work. A system can feel obvious to everyone who already understands it and still be invisible to the person who joined last spring. So the test isn’t whether something exists on paper somewhere.
A system is explicit when someone new can use it without asking.
Writing a rule down doesn’t make it fair, either. “Shows executive presence” is one person’s experience on paper. What writing it down does is put the rule where someone can ask what it means and who it was written for.
The check
Answer for your own team or company. Then ask someone hired in the last year the same five questions.
Answer all five to see where to start.
Answer for how things actually work, not how the policy reads.
Your answers stay on this page. Nothing is sent or saved.
Then the real test
- Ask two people hired in the last year the same five questions, without showing them your answers.
- Compare. Wherever you said “yes” and they said “no,” you’ve found the Projection Fallacy at work. The system is clear to you because you helped build it.
- Believe their answer. Start with the system where the gap is widest.
The research behind each system
None of the five is a new idea on its own. Each rests on decades of research. The Projection Fallacy explains why companies keep falling back to the implicit version.
Hiring
Structured interviews, with the same questions scored against the same criteria, came out as the strongest single predictor of job performance in a major 2022 review of hiring methods. Sackett, Zhang, Berry and Lievens, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2022
Meetings
Groups that generate ideas by open discussion produce fewer ideas, and less creative ones, than the same people working on their own. Sending the agenda ahead and collecting written input first is the practical answer. Mullen, Johnson and Salas, Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 1991
Priorities
A review of 60 years of research on workplace role stress found unclear roles the most damaging of the stressors studied for performance: people left guessing what deserves their attention do less of the job and less beyond it. Sawhney and colleagues, Journal of Vocational Behavior, 2026
Reviews
Specific goals consistently lead to higher performance than “do your best,” because a vague standard lets each person define good enough for themselves. Locke and Latham, American Psychologist, 2002
Promotion
Across 183 studies, people who see an organization’s procedures as consistent and fair show more trust and commitment, and less withdrawal. Colquitt and colleagues, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2001
New hires
Role clarity is one of the three signs that a new hire has adjusted, and adjustment carries the effect of onboarding through to performance, commitment and whether people stay. Bauer and colleagues, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2007
Sharing interview questions in advance comes from universal design for autistic candidates. When a University of Bath study made interview questions more explicit, autistic candidates improved most and the gap with other candidates narrowed, and non-autistic candidates improved too (Maras and colleagues, Autism, 2021). Participants asked for the questions in advance as well, and employers including John Lewis Partnership now publish theirs. Measuring which group leaves faster, before and after the change, is how a leadership team finds out whether the systems moved for them.
How you know it worked
Making systems explicit should change two numbers. The first is signal loss: whether people raise concerns, and whether those concerns reach a decision. The second is differential turnover: whether the group that was leaving faster than everyone else stops.
Both can be measured before and after. In a leadership team engagement, that measurement is the point.
Questions
Doesn’t writing everything down create bureaucracy?
Explicit doesn’t mean long. Promotion criteria can fit on half a page, and a priority ranking can be five lines. The goal is that a new person can use it without asking, and that usually takes less writing than people expect.
Is this about neurodivergent employees?
They often notice implicit systems first, because guessing at unwritten rules is harder for them. So do introverts, people working in a second language and anyone new. Explicit systems work better for almost everyone, including the people the unwritten rules already fit.
For a side-by-side of how neurotypical and autistic thinking differ, and where each tends to have the edge at work: Two architectures, two pages (PDF).
Won’t candidates just rehearse if they see the questions?
Yes, and that helps. Few jobs require answering a surprise question on the spot. A prepared answer to a real question about the work tells you more about how someone will do the job than a fast answer to a question they’ve never seen.
Why these five and not others?
Other systems matter. These five follow the path every employee takes, and together they decide who gets in, who gets heard, what counts as good work and who moves up.
Where does onboarding fit?
Onboarding is the first time someone meets all five systems at once. Within a few weeks a new hire finds out whether priorities are ranked, whether “done” is written down and whether anyone can say what it takes to move up. A good onboarding program helps, but it can only hand someone the rules that already exist. When the five systems are explicit, onboarding mostly takes care of itself. When they aren’t, a warmer welcome sends a capable person into the same guesswork.
Where do we start?
With the system where your answer and a new hire’s answer differ most. The check above will usually point to it in ten minutes.
By Peter Allen Mann, author of The Perception Revolution and The Projection Fallacy. See also what the Projection Fallacy is, the handoff and the labels that cost you your best people.