In this week’s Insider newsletter, managing editor Gretchen Gavett shares an early release article from the upcoming November-December 2026 issue of HBR on what psychology researcher
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Read more on Business management or related topics Collaboration and teams, Teams, AI and machine learning and Generative AI
In this week’s The Insider newsletter, managing editor Gretchen Gavett explores a common problem for leaders: your team is overloaded, but you can’t take on the extra work yourself.
Sometimes there’s just too much to do. In our Insider Insights surveys over the past year, HBR subscribers have consistently reported a common pain point: The sheer volume of work you and your teams are juggling. Whether the cause is AI, layoffs, a budget crisis, all of the above—or something else entirely—everything can feel futile when it’s impossible to make progress.
Read more on Collaboration and teams or related topics Teams, Leading teams, Digital transformation, Talent management, Employee retention, Management, AI and machine learning and Generative AI
Illustration by Alex Robbins
Imagine a photographer reviewing a concept image for an advertising campaign that the client has already approved. He notices a problem: The man in the image is wearing a baseball cap that casts his face in shadow, but his eyes are clearly lit, showing his intense stare into the camera. The photographer’s trained eye tells him immediately that that lighting is impossible. No real-world set up could produce it. The image had been created by a senior creative using gen AI, and the client had loved it. Now the production team has been tasked with recreating—with cameras and human actors—something that reality can’t match.