3 lies we’re telling ourselves about work

There’s a lot of confusion shaping the modern workplace. Recently, we spoke with a senior leader at a global company who told us, “Everything looks right on paper—our strategy is solid, we have good talent, our growth is scaling, but something still feels off.” That “off” feeling is becoming more common. And it’s not because leaders aren’t trying hard enough. It’s because many of the assumptions guiding those decisions no longer reflect reality. Over 35 years of working within organizations and with a dataset of more than 1.5 million workplace data points, we have watched this same pattern repeat. The strategy is sound, and people are capable, and yet something is quietly breaking. Leaders are making decisions with confidence about talent, AI, and culture, but many of those decisions are based on assumptions that no longer hold. The result isn’t just misalignment. It’s something more subtle and more dangerous. We’re not just navigating change; we are navigating a distorted view of reality. And that distortion is showing up everywhere: in how we design organizations, interpret employee behavior, and respond to emerging technologies. If we don’t correct the lens, we risk building the future of work on outdated beliefs about how work actually works. Here are three of the most persistent myths and what’s really happening beneath them. Myth #1: Bigger is better For decades, scale has been synonymous with success. Bigger companies were assumed to offer more opportunity, more stability, more impact. And in many ways, they still can. But something has shifted. What scale often introduces, if left unattended, is distance. Distance from decision-making, from meaning, and from feeling like what you do matters. Gallup’s latest global workplace report found that only 20% of employees are engaged at work. That number doesn’t just reflect dissatisfaction; it reflects disconnection. And in many large organizations, that disconnection is structural, not accidental. This is what rese