Behavioural Intelligence Is Having a Moment. Here's What Three HR Leaders Are Independently Saying.
Something interesting has been happening in HR thought leadership over the past few weeks. Three senior voices, writing independently, in different contexts, for different reasons, have converged on the same underlying idea: what people say, complete, or claim tells you almost nothing. What they actually do under real pressure tells you almost everything.
None of them were writing about hiring. But the argument applies directly to it.
"The question was whether it would save lives"
Sharon Sloane, President and CEO of WILL Interactive, spent years working with the U.S. Army on suicide prevention. The problem she describes in a recent piece for theHRDIRECTOR is blunt: organisations have spent decades measuring whether training happened, not whether it worked. Completion rates, seat time, certificates. Numbers that prove attendance and reveal almost nothing about behaviour.
Her alternative is simple to describe and hard to fake. Rather than asking someone whether a policy applies to them, a question nearly everyone answers correctly, you put them inside a realistic scenario and watch what they actually choose under pressure. That choice, she argues, tells you more than any knowledge check ever could.
She calls this shift "Behavioural Intelligence": understanding what people know, believe, and are likely to do, before risk becomes an incident.
"Trust is not a value. It is a system of behaviors."
Maryam Rezaei, writing separately about team culture, arrives at a strikingly similar place from a different direction. Her argument is that trust cannot be taught in a workshop, because trust was never a piece of knowledge to begin with. It's formed through repeated interaction, and specifically through how those interactions hold up when pressure appears.
Her observation lands hard: under pressure, people don't follow what they were told in a training room. They fall back on default behaviour. If that behaviour was never actually observed, practised, or understood, no amount of stated intention will predict how someone shows up when it matters.
"AI is brilliant at practice and useless at accountability"
The third piece, from Lisa Collinson, is ostensibly about AI in leadership development. Her core warning is that AI systems are built to agree with you, and agreement is the opposite of what actually develops a person. Growth requires friction, the thing said that you didn't want to hear, the blind spot named out loud.
Her practical distinction is the one worth keeping: AI is genuinely useful for low-stakes practice and rehearsal. It should never be mistaken for judgement, and it should never quietly become the thing making the call.
Why this matters for hiring specifically
Three different authors, three different professional contexts, arrived at the same structural insight without citing each other. That's worth paying attention to on its own. But it's especially worth noticing here, because hiring has exactly the same problem these three are describing, just further upstream.
A CV tells you what someone claims. An interview tells you how someone performs for forty minutes under artificial pressure, aimed specifically at being liked. Neither one is a scenario. Neither one is behaviour.
This is the same gap PRODICTA was built to close, not by asking candidates to describe their capability, but by observing it directly, in a realistic simulation of the actual role, then reporting exactly what was seen. No completion metric. No self-report. No AI standing in for judgement, our own Coach feature, for exactly the reason Collinson describes, is built to offer a different perspective, never to score or replace the reflection itself.
The behavioural intelligence shift these three are describing in training, culture, and leadership development is already happening. Hiring is next.
Sources: Sharon Sloane, "Behavioral Intelligence: Why Training Completion Doesn't Matter," theHRDIRECTOR. Maryam Rezaei, "Trust is a system of behaviors," theHRDIRECTOR. Lisa Collinson, "AI will tell your leaders exactly what they want to hear. That's the problem," theHRDIRECTOR.