Ignite Performance: How Behavioral Design Can Fix Broken Workplace Decisions with Siri Chilazi | Ep233

Most people think fairness at work is about good intentions. Siri Chilazi thinks that’s exactly why it keeps failing.

What if the real problem isn’t biased people, but biased systems quietly nudging smart people to make bad decisions, every single day?

Siri Chilazi is a senior researcher at Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program and co-author of Make Work Fair. Before academia, she trained as a management consultant and saw the gap firsthand, equal talent going in, wildly unequal outcomes coming out. Today, she studies how tiny design choices inside hiring, promotion, and performance systems quietly shape who wins, who stalls, and who never gets a fair shot.

In this episode, we go deep on why most DEI efforts miss the mark, why trainings feel good but change almost nothing, and how founders can design fairness into their companies without slowing down or sacrificing performance.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

00:01 Introduction and Siri Chilazi’s background

02:56 Early experiences with gender inequality

04:12 Lean In and the shift in public conversation

06:35 Why traditional DEI programs fail

07:01 Behavioral science vs changing hearts and minds

08:50 Embedded design vs programmatic approaches

11:23 The core thesis of Make Work Fair

14:41 Small interventions that change hiring outcomes

16:45 Meritocracy, bias, and what “qualified” really means

20:58 Where bias comes from and how early it forms

23:16 What startup founders can do differently from day one

26:27 Why structure beats informality in fast-growing teams

29:48 Measuring fairness, performance, and retention

33:11 Remote work, visibility, and promotion bias

36:02 AI, automation, and the next wave of fairness risks

39:48 The future of DEI and what actually works

41:50 Open research questions and experimentation

44:00 Rapid-fire advice for founders and leaders

Siri makes a contrarian but deeply pragmatic case, fairness isn’t about lifting some people up at the expense of others. It’s about fixing broken decision systems so talent actually has a chance to show up.

The twist is that once you see work this way, fairness stops feeling moralistic or political. It starts to look like good product design.

Pull quotes:

“Bias doesn’t live in people’s hearts, it lives in systems we stopped questioning.”

“If you want high performance, fairness isn’t optional, it’s the infrastructure.”

Siri began her career noticing unfairness as a child, then rediscovered it in the data as an adult. Today, she’s helping leaders stop arguing about intent and start redesigning the machine.

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