This is an archive episode, first broadcast in 2024 under the show's previous name. It carries a short synthetic announcer introduction; the conversation underneath it is untouched human audio.
Your team is not being difficult about AI. Their brains are doing exactly what brains are built to do.
Melina Palmer is a behavioural economist and the author of three books on decision-making. Her argument here is that most AI resistance is not an opinion about AI at all. It is a brain conserving effort, defending the status quo, and reacting to how the change was framed rather than to the change itself.
Recorded in July 2024, when the show carried a different name.
What this episode covers
- Thirty-five thousand decisions a day. The reason the brain defaults to whatever it did last time, and why "we're changing how you work" lands as a threat before it lands as information. Palmer's example is buying the same shirt in different colours: not indecision, but deliberately freeing up cognitive space for things that matter more.
- The "we need to talk" email. Palmer's own former boss sent one about something minor. She describes what it did to her for a full day, and how two more minutes of drafting would have removed all of it.
- Ask first, tell later. A better sequence for introducing AI to a team, and why the order changes the reception far more than the content does. She also covers what happens when the message comes from a technical leader rather than a manager, which is not what you would expect.
- The burnt popcorn test. Her rule of thumb for internal communications.
- The call centre study. What happened when staff were told to slow down rather than speed up, and why the result generalises well beyond call centres.
- Talking about job fears without making them worse. The hardest communication problem in any AI rollout, and her approach to it.
- When people just want to be told how to use it. Not everyone wants agency in a change, and Palmer is good on when to stop consulting and start instructing.
- Time pressure and cognitive bandwidth. Why a team already buried in meetings has no capacity left to absorb a new way of working, however good it is.
- Behavioural baking. Start with the box cake mix. Her framing for how much agency to give people at the start of a change.
- Three types of prompts - simple, conversational, structured - and running low-stakes AI competitions to get a team over the first hurdle.
- The email numbers. Half of all workplace email is misunderstood, and the cost of that in hours.
About the guest
Melina Palmer is a behavioural economist, the host of The Brainy Business podcast, and the author of three books: one on pricing, one on what your customer wants and cannot tell you, and one on what your employees need and cannot tell you. That third title is the one this conversation keeps circling, because an AI rollout is exactly the situation where people will not say what they actually think.
Find her at TheBrainyBusiness.com, on the socials as TheBrainyBiz, and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn.
Resources mentioned
- The Brainy Business - Palmer's podcast, and her books
- Framing and social proof - the two behavioural concepts doing most of the work in this episode
- Gamification - dopamine, streaks and prestige, and why it works on adults at work
Quotes
"My fight, flight, freeze is on high alert, and my brain is way too stressed to be able to hear what's there."
Melina Palmer, on receiving that email
"That time to be more thoughtful about the communication we're putting out into the world is so, so important."
Melina Palmer
Books - the Human-First AI Series
- Hello! I'm New Here
- An Absolute Beginner's Guide to AI
- Use AI, Stay Human
- The AI Pilot Handbook
- When AI Becomes Your Responsibility
Connect with Alastair on LinkedIn.