Ludek’s Blog About People Analytics


Ludek's Blog About People Analytics

Luck, cutoffs, and the stories we tell about success

relative age effect
matthew effect
cumulative advantage
luck and merit
meritocracy
life outcomes
education

On relative age effects, cumulative advantage, and the narratives we build around merit.

Making abstract ideas digestible with knobs and sliders

teaching
genai
ai in education
cognitive biases
learning design
dunning-kruger effect

With the currently available GenAI tools, it’s really a golden age for teachers who like using interactive demonstrations of abstract ideas they’re trying to convey to their students.

Can flatter orgs undermine people management?

org design
span of control
leadership
people management
future of work

Flat orgs offer speed, but do they kill coaching? A causal look at how wide spans of control may impact people management quality - and how to bridge the gap with better design and/or AI.

Refactoring the "Garden of Forking Paths"

career transitions
constraints matter
probabilistic futures
still optimistic

An updated look at the popular "Forking Paths" image to reflect probability and the reality of closed doors.

Signal vs. Noise: Why we can’t yet identify effective nudges

nudge
meta-analysis
behavioral science
behavioral economics
research methods

Another evidence that nudges may not be as effective as often assumed.

Hidden DAG geometry of version control

data science
git
version control
causal inference
graph theory
systems thinking

Sharing a small learning of mine 🤓

When facial similarity meets Network Science

social psychology
similarity attraction
social network analysis
facial recognition
fun with data

A playful look at political lookalikes.

Loftus & Palmer 2.0: Replicating human bias in AI

generative ai
behavioral science
data science
prompt engineering
cognitive science

Replicating 1974 psychology with 2025 technology. I tested GPT-5.1 and GPT-4.1 using the Loftus & Palmer "car crash" paradigm to see if verb intensity biases speed estimation. Did the effect replicate? The short answer: Yes. The long answer: It’s a little bit more complicated.

How AI is reshaping HR-tech

workplace
ai
generative ai
agentic ai
worklytics

Tracing one concrete example of AI’s growing influence in HR-tech.

Do Insights Discovery ‘colors’ relate to self-reported skills?

insights discovery
skills
psychometrics
validity

A mini validity check from a curious data dive.

Making talk cheap: How GenAI may disrupt labor-market signalling

ai
generative ai
labor economics
future of work
job market

About a super interesting recent study by Silbert & Galdin (2025) - "Making Talk Cheap: Generative AI and Labor Market Signaling" - that examines how LLMs are altering the economics of hiring.

A graph approach to reporting structures: stop wrestling recursion

organizational analytics
graph analysis
python

About a cleaner, faster way to compute some org metrics.

Can a simple coin flip help you decide and avoid overanalyzing?

decision making
behavioral science
cognitive science

We all, at least occasionally, find ourselves stuck between two options - endlessly weighing the pros and cons, searching for additional information, or asking everyone around us for advice.

Getting (more) causal insights from employee survey data (without an RCT)

employee experience
survey data
causal inference
panel data
longitudinal research

While I was recently in the middle of processing our annual employee survey data, I started thinking about how to make the analysis results even more actionable and impactful.

Big consultancies in the skills semantic space

skills
skills taxonomy
consulting
embeddings

A quick experiment showing how transformer-based embeddings can reveal the semantic identity of major consulting firms within a skill taxonomy.

Testing my GenAI skepticism

agentic ai
data analysis
generative ai
data science

About my hands-on test of agentic AI in data analysis.

Conspiracy theories as a specific example of overfitting?

bayesian brain hypothesis
computational psychiatry
cognitive science
data science
conspiracy theories
anxiety

An interesting perspective on the nature of conspiracy theories, in the spirit of the book 'Algorithms to Live By' from Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths.

Agentic AI for visual data exploration

agentic ai
generative ai
corporate culture
employee experience
glassdoor

For those who might be interested, I'm sharing an output from my experimentation with agentic AI frameworks like LangChain and LangGraph in the context of data insights democratization.

Can genAI help people managers lead better?

leadership
leadership effectiveness
leadership judgement indicator
generative ai

Sharing results from testing genAI’s leadership judgment.

The hidden trade-offs in corporate culture?

corporate culture
psychometric network analysis
employee experience
glassdoor

Exploration of the CultureX data on corporate culture using psychometric network analysis.

Dimensional Traits vs. Personality Types

personality
big five
ipip
typology
clustering
dimensionality reduction
psychometrics

Sharing an interactive dataviz showing why cramming the complexity of personality into a few types just doesn’t work.

When to forgive, when to close the book

nerd rant
thinking out loud
p-values

A short rant-ish post about trust, mistakes, and knowing when to stop reading.

Big Five vs. HEXACO

personality
big five
hexaco
predictive validity
job performance
counterproductive work behavior

Is one of them actually better at predicting work behavior?

Want to maximize your impact as a leader?

leadership effectiveness
causal inference

Forget the CEO chair and become a sports coach or a politician in an autocracy instead 🙃