People & Culture Thinking Frameworks
Organizational psychology and people-operations frameworks from the researchers and practitioners who documented how teams actually build trust and perform, distilled into .md skill files for Claude, ChatGPT, and every LLM.
Building a team that performs under pressure and one that merely looks orderly on an org chart turn out to require different, documented disciplines, and the practitioners in this collection researched the difference directly. Amy Edmondson's decades of research on psychological safety showed that the highest-performing teams report more errors, not fewer, because they've built the safety to surface them early. Patty McCord and Laszlo Bock, running people operations at Netflix and Google respectively, replaced HR intuition with evidence-based practice and published the results. Kim Scott's radical candor argued that caring personally and challenging directly are not in tension, they're both required, and dropping either one produces a documented failure mode. Ed Catmull's Braintrust process at Pixar showed how to build structured peer critique with no reporting authority attached to the feedback, so the critique stays honest. This collection captures each practitioner's documented method as downloadable .md skill files for Claude, ChatGPT, and any LLM. Use them when a team has stopped surfacing problems early, when direct feedback keeps getting softened into uselessness, or when a culture deck says one thing and the incentive structure says another.
Want the long-form version? AI for Hiring Decisions: Where Claude and ChatGPT Actually Help · The AI Prompts That Make a Feedback Conversation Easier to Prepare
How people & cultures think
- Psychological safety: Amy Edmondson's documented finding that teams reporting more errors are often the higher-performing ones, because safety to surface a problem early is what actually prevents it from compounding
- Context, not control: Patty McCord's Netflix-documented case for managing adults with clear context about the business instead of layering on process built for the assumption that people need controlling
- Radical candor: Kim Scott's model of caring personally and challenging directly as two axes that both have to be present, dropping either one produces ruinous empathy or obnoxious aggression instead of useful feedback
- Braintrust critique: Ed Catmull's documented Pixar practice of structured peer feedback with no reporting authority attached, which keeps the critique honest instead of political
- Evidence-based people operations: Laszlo Bock's Google-documented case for treating hiring, promotion, and management decisions as testable hypotheses rather than intuition
Frameworks in this category
Amy Edmondson
Psychological Safety & the Fearless Organization
Patty McCord
Powerful & the Netflix Culture Deck
Laszlo Bock
Work Rules & Evidence-Based People Operations
Kim Scott
Radical Candor & Caring Personally
Patrick Lencioni
The Five Dysfunctions & Organizational Health
Ed Catmull
Creativity Inc & Candor at Pixar
Priya Parker
The Art of Gathering & Purpose Over Logistics
David Rock
SCARF & Your Brain at Work
When to use these frameworks
- Diagnosing why a team has stopped surfacing problems or errors until they've already compounded
- Structuring feedback so it stays honest instead of getting softened into uselessness
- Deciding whether a management practice is actually evidence-based or just inherited convention
- Building peer critique that doesn't carry the political weight of direct reporting authority
- Recognizing when a culture deck's stated values and the team's actual incentive structure have quietly diverged
Start here
Amy Edmondson
Psychological Safety & the Fearless Organization
Adjacent thinking
Frequently asked questions
Is this HR or employment-law advice?
No. These are thinking frameworks drawn from documented practice and research on how teams and organizations actually function, not legal or compliance guidance. Legal and employment-law questions belong with a qualified professional, not with a mental-models file.
Is psychological safety just another word for being nice to everyone?
No, and this is a common misreading of Edmondson's actual research. Psychological safety is specifically the safety to report an error, disagree, or ask a question without penalty, it produces more direct conflict and more visible mistakes, not less, because problems get surfaced instead of hidden.
Do these frameworks apply outside big tech companies?
The underlying research isn't specific to any company size or industry, even though McCord and Bock documented their versions at Netflix and Google specifically. The team dynamics involved, trust, feedback, safety to surface problems, show up in any organization with more than a couple of people in it.
Isn't radical candor just an excuse to be harsh?
That's the failure mode Scott's own framework explicitly warns against. Challenging directly without caring personally is what she calls obnoxious aggression, a documented misuse of the model, not the model itself. Both axes are required.
Can these frameworks replace an actual HR or people team?
No. They're mental models for thinking about team dynamics and culture, useful for a manager or founder reasoning through a specific situation, not a substitute for the operational and legal functions a people team or HR department actually performs.
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